The Complete Guide to Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is at the heart of the human experience. This free ebook walks through what psychological safety actually is and why it matters for the people you lead. Download it to ground yourself in the foundation before you start building it on your team.

What’s inside

Fifty-two pages that take you from definition to practice — this is our most complete introduction to psychological safety.

• A working definition: psychological safety as a culture of rewarded vulnerability, and the neuroscience of why punished vulnerability triggers a fear response instead of a performance response.
• The history of the field, from Kierkegaard and Maslow through Amy Edmondson, Google’s Project Aristotle, and Dr. Timothy R. Clark’s 4 Stages framework.
• The Ladder of Vulnerability: data from 834 organizations ranking 20 common workplace behaviors by how risky they feel to the people doing them.
• The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™ in depth — inclusion, learner, contributor, and challenger safety — with what each stage looks like when your team has it, what it looks like when they don’t, and questions to test yourself.
• A 12-question self-assessment of the most common breaches of psychological safety, plus 7 things psychological safety is not.
• Playbooks by role: how to make the case as an early adopter, the L.I.V.E. model for rewarding vulnerability on teams, 5 steps for managers, and 10 ways CEOs create psychological safety.
• What to do with a toxic leader — the difference between actively toxic and passively complicit, and why only one of them is usually coachable.