In this episode, we break down what non-HR executives need to understand about the critical role of psychological safety in building high-performing, innovative teams. For HR and L&D leaders, this conversation is essential to influencing executive buy-in and driving culture by design. Discover how psychological safety impacts 10 key business outcomes—like customer experience, employee engagement, and innovation—and why it’s more than just an HR initiative. Learn actionable strategies to...

70% of change management programs fail to meet their objectives, and cultural change programs have even higher mortality rates. Psychological safety initiatives aren’t immune to this phenomenon.  Luckily, the failure patterns aren’t mysterious. In this episode, organizational anthropologist and executive leadership coach Timothy R. Clark shares the 6 failure pitfalls of large-scale cultural initiatives, how to spot them, and what to do about them. Episode Chapters:01:19 - Episode Start06:11 -...

Fear is the biggest inhibitor of organizational success. Join us as we explore 3 practical strategies for dismantling fear-based barriers, fostering a culture of psychological safety, and driving transformative change. Episode Chapters:02:08 - Fear is part of our everyday lives04:10 - The biggest organizational fear statistics and data08:00 - Fear is a natural biological response, what happens when we trigger it?13:24 -  Types of organizational fear and how to spot them22:36 - Fear breaks the...

When Google set out to discover what makes a high-performing team in 2012, researchers expected to uncover a set of individual demographics, characteristics, or personality traits that made each team great. What they realized, however, was that it was the interactions of a team that determined its effectiveness. But while Google's Project Aristotle made the critical link between psychological safety and high performance, their research did little to teach leaders how to foster psychological...

If you want to implement a psychological safety initiative in your organization, you'll need to explain what psychological safety isn't. Why? Because your culture won't change unless it's built on a shared understanding. Psychological safety isn’t artificial niceness or a lack of accountability. Unless you clarify, stakeholders might think it’s a gimmick or dismiss it because of the baggage of the implied definition of the term. They'll need to know what psychological safety isn’t, along with...

What are the HR best practices when it comes to toxic leadership? Should you coach the leaders? Or should you fire them? When it comes to toxicity, organizations often wait too long to get involved. Learn how to identify the symptoms of poor leadership and intervention strategies to preserve and protect your teams' cultural health. Episode Chapters:00:00 - Start00:40 - How common is toxicity in the workplace?04:07 - Toxicity is a spectrum of influence.11:48 - The definition of a toxic...

Psychological safety is a cultural initiative that was made to be measured. It’s the best indicator of cultural health in your organization. Let’s talk about how to measure it effectively.  Every effective psychological safety assessment has these 5 things: (1) A valid, quantitative instrument.(2) Space for qualitative feedback.(3) Org-wide reports, team-level data.(4) Demographic data capability.(5) Built-in forward momentum.  Learn more about PSindex™:...

Your career, business, and closest relationships are only as good as your emotional intelligence. And your ability to improve your EQ is only as good as your ability to measure it. Every effective EQ assessment has 5 things: (1) a valid, qualitative instrument, (2) multi-rater feedback, (3) real accountability mechanisms, (4) consideration of internal/external motivation, and (5) built-in forward momentum. In this episode of The Leader Factor, hosts Tim and Junior dive into an EQindex™...

Psychological safety is the collective emotional intelligence of a team. This relationship between emotional intelligence and psychological safety is the anatomy of culture in an organization, and both should be at the foundation of all development efforts.  In this episode, hosts Tim and Junior share what they’ve learned after years of programming and sequencing both psychological safety and emotional intelligence training in major organizations worldwide, and how you can improve both at the...

As leaders, we need to develop the type of intent necessary to have healthy influence. We need to ask ourselves the question: Do I actually care about my team? And if so, is that evident in my behavior, values, and interactions?  If we don't account for the fundamental beliefs a person has about themselves and others, we can easily promote, support, and encourage leaders with manipulative tendencies. Emotional intelligence frameworks that can’t account for the motivation and intent side of...

Humans in the workplace engage in millions of daily interactions. Some are effective, and some, well, aren’t. Your emotional intelligence (EQ) determines your ability to interact effectively with other humans. It’s your delivery system through which you share your knowledge, experience, and skills with others. If your delivery system is broken or inefficient, your influence won’t translate or make the right impact. This means that to achieve high performance, you don’t just need great...

Are you paying attention to the rate at which your skills as a leader are being commoditized? In this episode of The Leader Factor, hosts Tim and Junior put a new spin on Joseph Pine's 1998 article, The Experience Economy. They draw parallels between an economy's differentiation and commoditization cycle and how a leader's skills can become commoditized over time. As commoditization eats away at old forms of differentiation, organizations are being forced to find new ways to provide...

Can you be candid about change at work? Challenger safety satisfies the basic human need to make things better. It allows us to feel safe to challenge the status quo without retaliation or the risk of damaging our personal standing or reputation. As the highest level of psychological safety, it matches the increased vulnerability and personal risk associated with challenging the status quo.  Listen in as hosts Tim and Junior discuss how to build Stage 4: Challenger Safety individually, within...

Can you create value for your team? Contributor safety satisfies the basic human need to make a difference and offer meaningful contributions. When we create contributor safety for others, we empower them with autonomy, guidance, and encouragement in exchange for effort and results.  Listen in as hosts Tim and Junior discuss how to build Stage 3: Contributor Safety individually, within a team, and throughout an organization. For the full learning experience, watch the episode on YouTube:...

We can either cultivate or crush, nurture or neglect, stimulate or stifle learner safety, the second stage of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety. When we have learner safety we feel safe as we ask questions, give and receive feedback, experiment, and admit when we don’t know. As the highest form of enterprise risk management, learner safety opens the door to innovation. Leaders committed to safeguarding learner safety know that learning is the source of competitive advantage. An emotionally...

This episode is the first in a four-part series on How to Build The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety. Listen in as hosts Junior and Timothy R. Clark, author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety book, share in-depth insights into the thinking behind the 4 Stages framework. The episode covers the history behind psychological safety as a concept, what psychological safety is not, where vulnerability fits into the equation, and how to activate the power of diversity through inclusion. As...

In this final episode of the Micro-coaching and Accountability series, Tim and Junior take the previous two frameworks, The Coaching Continuum and The Three Levels of Accountability, and put them together into the ultimate diagnostic tool for leaders. Think of this matrix as a model to operationalize coaching on a dynamic team. Your objective? To move the individuals you work with up and to the right. To transfer critical thinking and ownership and increase their capacity through coaching....

Accountability means being answerable for performance. The scope and levels to which we are held accountable vary based on role, willingness, skill, and need. But we can all agree that organizations function based on shared accountability. This means that as teams increase their capacity for accountability, organizational function will also increase. So how do we become accountable to the unenforceable, ourselves? Here’s another diagnostic tool that you can use to determine where your people...

In this first episode of a 3-part series on Micro-coaching and Accountability, Tim and Junior introduce us to The Coaching Continuum, a framework that can be used to identify coaching patterns in leaders. It runs from “Tell” on one side to “Ask” on the other.  A leader has one primary objective: To expand the capabilities of the people they lead by increasing their ownership and critical thinking skills. There are two levers that a leader can pull to do this. They can model, or they can...

This week, we're talking about intelligence. Most people have a view of intelligence that's not just wrong, but damaging. Our conception of intelligence affects our goal choice and the intensity of our efforts. It affects how we perceive ourselves and our potential. In the episode, Tim and Junior discuss how intelligence is more like athleticism. They emphasize the importance of adopting a growth mindset and choose Carol Dweck's definition of intelligence, the intersection of motivation,...

This week, Tim and Junior outline the resilience cycle, which, similar to patterns we see in ecology, consists of disturbance, adaptation, and recovery. They share 5 practical ways to become more resilient as a leader, including spreading out, leaning on positive emotions, developing effective coping mechanisms, adopting a growth mindset, and seeking strong social support. Takeaways Resilience is a learnable process that involves responding to and adapting to challenges.Spreading out and...

This week, our hosts navigate through an extensive amount of research literature to come to some conclusions on self-esteem and how to approach it. When we rely on external factors to determine our self-esteem, we open ourselves up to dangerous perspectives. This kind of contingent self-esteem can lead to chronic insecurity in leaders, which gets in the way of their ability to lead effectively and can have detrimental effects on individuals and organizations. In the episode, Tim and Junior...

Have you ever thought about leadership as an invitation? If your goal is to improve and make a positive impact, then leadership will be an inevitable part of your journey. The job to be done, then, is to recognize and accept the invitations that come your way. These could be invitations to grow, help others, or even sometimes, to fail. Tim and Junior make one thing clear, choosing leadership over comfort and contentment is the ultimate call to adventure. Takeaways Leadership is about healthy...