This book is the first practical, hands-on guide that shows how leaders can build psychological safety in their organizations, creating an environment where employees feel included, fully engaged, and encouraged to contribute their best efforts and ideas. Fear has a profoundly negative impact on engagement, learning efficacy, productivity, and innovation, but until now there has been a lack of practical information on how to make employees feel safe about speaking up and contributing. Timothy Clark, a social scientist and an organizational consultant, provides a framework to move people through successive stages of psychological safety. The first stage is member safety-the team accepts you and grants you shared identity. Learner safety, the second stage, indicates that you feel safe to ask questions, experiment, and even make mistakes. Next is the third stage of contributor safety, where you feel comfortable participating as an active and full-fledged member of the team. Finally, the fourth stage of challenger safety allows you to take on the status quo without repercussion, reprisal, or the risk of tarnishing your personal standing and reputation. This is a blueprint for how any leader can build positive, supportive, and encouraging cultures in any setting.

Conquer the most essential adaptation to the knowledge economy The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for teams and organizations who are serious about success in the modern economy. With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent—but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of “fitting in” and “going along” spells doom in the knowledge economy. Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule or intimidate. Not every idea is good, and yes there are stupid questions, and yes dissent can slow things down, but talking through these things is an essential part of the creative process. People must be allowed to voice half-finished thoughts, ask questions from left field, and brainstorm out loud; it creates a culture in which a minor flub or momentary lapse is no big deal, and where actual mistakes are owned and corrected, and where the next left-field idea could be the next big thing. This book explores this culture of psychological safety, and provides a blueprint for bringing it to life. The road is sometimes bumpy, but succinct and informative scenario-based explanations provide a clear path forward to constant learning and healthy innovation. Explore the link between psychological safety and high performance Create a culture where it’s “safe” to express ideas, ask questions, and admit mistakes Nurture the level of engagement and candor required in today’s knowledge economy Follow a step-by-step framework for establishing psychological safety in your team or organization Shed the “yes-men” approach and step into real performance. Fertilize creativity, clarify goals, achieve accountability, redefine leadership, and much more. The Fearless Organization helps you bring about this most critical transformation.

Both scientific and industry research suggest that paying close attention to psychological safety has tangible benefits, not just to personal health and well-being, but to workplace productivity and performance. In 2015 Google released the findings of some compelling research known as 'The Aristotle Project'. In its quest to build the perfect team, Google assessed the factors common to their high-performing teams. They were shocked to find it was not the background, the experience, or the education of the team members that determined the team's success, but whether psychological safety was present within the team. Most of us understand the importance of physical safety. We protect ourselves and those around us, and know what physical interactions are socially acceptable, helpful, or harmful. Psychological safety, however, is a new frontier. Only now are we beginning to understand its importance and impact, thanks to recent advancements in neuroscience. For example, research shows that a 'hit' to our psychological safety can have a deeper and longer-lasting impact than a 'hit' to our physical selves. In fact, social rejection has the same impact on the brain as a punch to the face. Over time, the pain associated with a physical attack is difficult or impossible to recall. The memory of social rejection, however, even many years after the fact, can elicit the same strength of emotion as it did at the time of the event. When we experience an attack to our psychological safety, our brain is triggered into a stress response. Our cognitive abilities are compromised. Our higher, logical brain, the one responsible for thinking, creativity, decision-making, and self-control, goes off-line. In this derailed stress state we can find it difficult to concentrate, make decisions, or control our emotions. In a psychologically safe climate, people are not afraid to express themselves; they feel accepted and respected. This openness creates a fertile environment for thinking, creativity, innovation, and growth, and leads to more collaborative relationships and an overall improvement in individual and team productivity. So how do you identify and manage the triggers that threaten your psychological safety and hijack your brain? Based on the latest neuroscience research, the S.A.F.E.T.Y. model describes some of the most important social motivators of human behavior. Learn how to implement it in your life and your workplace, to reap the benefits of increased productivity and personal well-being. This revolutionary book offers actionable solutions to key questions that may be holding you (and your team) back from fulfilling your potential: Why am I so anxious and stressed? Why do I continue to do things I don't want to do? Why do I care so much about what others think of me? Why do I self-sabotage? And the most vital question of all: Why can't I change?

You cannot improve your organization's safety performance to enviable levels without addressing human behavior and attitude effectively. The only comprehensive reference on the psychology of the human dynamics of safety, The Psychology of Safety Handbook shows you how to apply psychology to improve safety and health in your organization. Dr. Geller

New breakthrough thinking in organizational learning, leadership, and change Continuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increasingly, by flexible team-like entities. The pace of change and the fluidity of most work structures means that it's not really about creating effective teams anymore, but instead about leading effective teaming. Teaming shows that organizations learn when the flexible, fluid collaborations they encompass are able to learn. The problem is teams, and other dynamic groups, don't learn naturally. Edmondson outlines the factors that prevent them from doing so, such as interpersonal fear, irrational beliefs about failure, groupthink, problematic power dynamics, and information hoarding. With Teaming, leaders can shape these factors by encouraging reflection, creating psychological safety, and overcoming defensive interpersonal dynamics that inhibit the sharing of ideas. Further, they can use practical management strategies to help organizations realize the benefits inherent in both success and failure. Presents a clear explanation of practical management concepts for increasing learning capability for business results Introduces a framework that clarifies how learning processes must be altered for different kinds of work Explains how Collaborative Learning works, and gives tips for how to do it well Includes case-study research on Intermountain healthcare, Prudential, GM, Toyota, IDEO, the IRS, and both Cincinnati and Minneapolis Children's Hospitals, among others Based on years of research, this book shows how leaders can make organizational learning happen by building teams that learn.

The hope is the reader will experience the psychological safety to create fearless and inclusive relationships in all their life settings. The pathways to psychological safety are outlined throughout the book with a focus on parents, teachers, managers and leaders, who are the architects of the relationships they create with significant others.

Extreme Teaming provides new insights into the world of increasingly complex, cross industry projects. Amy Edmondson and Jean-Francois Harvey show vividly through their international cases how the complex demands of collaboration impact on management and revolutionize our understanding of teams.