Psychological Safety: The Real Employee Engagement Handbook

Psychological Safety: The Real Employee Engagement Handbook D E N I S E M C C L E N N E N & TA R A C O LV I N

Tari is so conflicted: she finally landed her “dream job” on a team that she

has long wanted to be a part of but she’s thinking she might have to walk away from it. The work is meaningful and important, but sheesh - it is a lot. It feels like there is so much to learn, so many things to keep track of and she doesn’t have a minute to breathe and catch up. The hardest part for Tari isn’t so much that she doesn’t feel confident that she can do the work, it’s that there is so much to know and everyone is just so busy. How do you ask people that clearly have so much on their plates to stop and answer simple questions? How do you admit to these smart, competent people that you don’t yet know what you’re doing? And now she’s starting to get some pressure from her boss to catch up. Tari is starting to think that the risk of failing in this role might not be worth it.

Gideon looked at himself in the mirror as he was shaving before work

and thought “Another day. Why am I doing this?”. It’s not that there is really anything wrong with his job. It’s just not that interesting anymore. In the ten years he’s been there, not much has changed. Same Monday morning meeting. Same people talking and same people staying quiet. What’s even more soul-killing: the same problems create the same old discussions among the same group of people. People are nice enough. In fact, everyone seems to go out of their way to make sure that there isn’t tension or disagreement. “Why am I so unhappy?” he wonders.

Maria is so proud of her team. They are some of the most dedicated

people she could imagine assembling. They are smart, experienced, passionate and gutsy. And yet she’s constantly on edge. Over and over, she has watched her team do amazing things to bring a project near to completion only to have it stalled because someone above them all in the company pecking order won’t give an approval, or doesn’t show up to a meeting or decides to “go in a different direction”. Challenge her boss? or her boss’s boss? No way. The golden rule at the top of this company is that challenge only goes down - never up.

Jay is the COO at a mid-sized company. He knows the company is full of

smart and talented people who are working hard to get their jobs done. But for some reason, the company has continued to miss most of their big goals for three straight years. Turnover numbers keep increasing, while their overall employee satisfaction scores are on a downward trend again this year. Jay has been losing a lot of sleep lately. He knows that the organization needs something - he just can’t figure out what it is. Tari, Gideon, Maria and Jay have different circumstances and different challenges, but they have one thing in common. They are each bumping up against barriers to what they truly want because they are missing the key ingredient to high performance:

Psychological Safety

Lack of psychological safety is a recipe for disaster: It breeds fear, risk aversion, groupthink, and low engagement, and ultimately leads to low performance and terrible results. Aga Bajer

Psychological Safety: What is it?

Let’s just start by saying the term “psychological safety” is a bit problematic. It evokes images of therapists and kumbaya circles. The term itself can feel clinical or formal and a little off-putting. That’s unfortunate because it’s actually one of the most impactful components of our everyday lives. It’s the constant backdrop of our human experiences, whether we call it by that name or not. Simply put, psychological safety is a state in which we can freely act, doing things that we need or want to do, without fear of some sort of harm getting in the way. You could say that it is the thing that ultimately controls how almost every human interaction unfolds. In personal relationships, it’s the often invisible, but powerful enabler of true trust and connection. In the workplace, it will make or break engagement, performance and retention.

A little background In 1999, Harvard professor and researcher Amy Edmondson conducted a study looking at mistakes made in health care. She and her team were initially shocked when the data suggested that the highest performing teams had the highest incidence rates for mistakes. After looking more closely, they realized that it wasn’t that those teams weren’t making more mistakes, they were reporting more mistakes. The less effective teams were actually making as many or more, but they were covering them up. A deeper dive revealed the source of this behavior to be what we now call “psychological safety”. Edmondson defines it as:

The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

Since Dr. Edmondson’s initial study, research continues to show that psychological safety is the single most important element of the performance of a team. In fact, a study conducted by Google called Project Aristotle found that psychological safety is the number one predictor of a high-performing team and its effect size was larger than the next four factors combined.

Common Misconceptions: Psychological Safety IS being able to Give and receive feedback Raise issues and concerns Disagree Ask for clarification Ask difficult questions Ask for help Offer solutions to problems Admit errors

Psychological Safety is NOT Making everyone happy Being touchy-feely An excuse to whine or criticize Everyone agreeing about everything An absence of conflict Going easy on everyone Making everything comfortable

A useful metaphor Weather matters, doesn’t it? The conditions in which you undertake an activity have a huge impact on what you do and how you feel while you’re doing it.

For example, think about the experience of driving. When conditions are good, you are free to go as fast as (legally) possible, you can relax and enjoy the ride (maybe even with the music blaring and the windows down!) and don’t have barriers to doing your best driving. When the conditions are lousy, everything changes. Maybe you’re driving through a bad storm or road construction or on icy roads. You might respond to the conditions by adjusting your speed or tightening your grip on the steering wheel. You might drive more defensively or cautiously. You might even start getting mad at the other drivers. Instead of pleasure and ease, driving through poor conditions can be dangerous, stressful or maddening.

Everything we do has context. Psychological Safety is a fancy term for our interpretation of the context, or conditions, in which we operate. When it’s high, we can be our very best. When it’s low, we hold back, slow down or even stop. You know the tasks you do (the content of your work) are important. And they are.

Context, though? It will win every time.

When the brain senses potential reward of any kind, it turns on the green light and tells you to GO.

The traffic light in your brain Your brain is constantly scanning your environment, using all of your senses to interpret your current situation and guide your responses to it. Think of it like an internal traffic light. When the brain senses potential reward of any kind (anything pleasurable, positive or safe - like a compliment on how good your idea was or a thank you for your hard work), it turns on the green light and tells you to GO. When a potential threat is detected (anything that might be negative, unpleasant or unsafe - even something as subtle as the look on someone’s face), you get a red light and move to AVOID the threat and/or protect yourself. If the potential threat feels moderate or unsure, the internal yellow light tells you to slow down and be cautious. It’s important to know that this is all a function of sensemaking. Your brain uses everything it knows and has experienced to make sense of the data it’s getting and sends you the appropriate signal. Your interpretation of your exact environment is specific to the situation, unique to you and done so quickly you are rarely aware that it’s happening.

So what does this look like in your real life?

Say you’re having a conversation with your boss and you disagree with something they’ve said. Do you say something? Or imagine that you have to decide how much risk you will take in trying to solve a sticky problem. Do you try your idea and risk it failing? Maybe you are in a large meeting and the facilitator asks a question you think you know the answer to. Do you raise your hand? It’s easy to observe behaviors like staying silent, being overly cautious or “keeping your head down” and respond with annoyance or criticism. It starts to make more sense when you think about how we humans are designed. As we’ve mentioned, your brain’s most important job is to help you avoid harm. And by the way - it doesn’t differentiate between physical harm and psychological harm. Unfortunately, in its attempt to protect you, the traffic light in your head often leads you to behaviors that get in the way of you bringing your very best to your work (or life).

It’s not cheap The biggest mistake organizations and leaders make is dismissing psychological safety as a “nice to have”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let’s begin with productivity. Our brains are designed to help us notice and avoid all kinds of danger. When alerted to a lack of safety, energy is diverted away from the parts of our brain that do things like problem solving or focus on tasks. Research shows that it takes an average of twenty minutes to recover and get your brain fully “online” again every time it gets triggered by a potential threat. When the work environment creates anxiety, fear or avoidance, you can be sure that people are losing hours of productivity every day, even when they look busy. What are some of the other costs of low psychological safety? They’re everywhere. Time spent in “the meeting after the meeting” because people don’t feel safe speaking up in meetings. Lost opportunities and stagnation when people get too careful and don’t take the right risks. Hiring and training new people to replace the ones flowing out the back door because no one will address bullying or incivility. Projects that fail because no one speaks up about the red flags along the way. We are convinced: low psychological safety is the most significant hidden cost to the bottom line of any organization.

What is it costing your organization to look the other way?

Oh, and another thing... All Psych Safety is NOT alike One of the complexities of understanding psychological safety is that it isn’t one static thing, like you either have it or you don’t. It’s a bit more nuanced than that. Let’s go back to our “Weather” metaphor a minute. Those conditions are never created by just one thing. There are multiple dimensions that impact conditions like temperature, light, wind, precipitation, other drivers on the road. One might have more of an impact than others, or they might all be factors. In the same way, there are different dimensions of psychological safety. Amy Edmondson has identified four core dimensions in a team environment that make the biggest difference: Open Conversation, Helpfulness, Diversity/Inclusion and Attitudes toward Risk/Failure. Each one of these dimensions stands on their own, and when combined create an overall sense of psychological safety for a whole group.

Dimensions of Psychological Safety Open Conversation is how freely and candidly team members can talk with one another. This includes discussing hard topics, voicing disagreement and offering new ideas. Helpfulness is the degree to which people can ask for help from others, are willing to help others and how well the group “teams”. Diversity/Inclusion measures how safe people feel to be their true, full selves and how differences are handled. Attitudes toward Risk/Failure includes how easily people can acknowledge and discuss mistakes and how “risk tolerance” is established.

Based on the work of Dr. Amy Edmondson

How Psychological Safety Grows Wouldn’t it be great if you could just hang a poster on the wall and make everything better? Because humans are complex beings, growing the conditions in which those humans can do important things together is complex, too. Like most everything else, psychological safety tends to grow in stages and layers, taking time to reach maturity. It might be helpful to think about how a tree grows by adding new layers (rings) to itself each year. Psychological safety seems to grow in a similar way. Each ring stands on its own, while also transcending and including the rings that came before it.

The center of it all is Belonging. Humans are designed for connection. We want to know and be known by others. When a new person joins a group, their brain both consciously and unconsciously begins to sniff out the hidden rules. How does one fit in here? Can I be myself or do I need to adjust and conform? What would get me kicked off this island? Our innate needs to be liked, respected, included and trusted guide our behaviors. A bigger ring is Learning safety. Like belonging, us humans are also designed to learn. This layer forms the conditions we need to take risks, talk about our mistakes, say “I don’t know”, and ask questions. What will happen to me if I fail? What if people figure out that I don’t know it all already? Can I experiment? Can I try something new that I’m not perfect at yet? Another ring is Influencing safety. Beyond just being accepted for who we are, people want to have a voice and to make an impact. This layer creates the conditions in which people can fully offer a unique perspective, disagree with others, and bring new ideas. Can ideas or leadership emerge from anywhere in the organization or does the pecking order always rule? The ultimate form of psychological safety is the safety needed for Transforming. Growth, development, change and innovation require going into unknown, unfamiliar territory. It also requires letting go of things no longer needed. These are risky behaviors. Can I challenge the status quo here? Can I change my mind or my perspective? Can I create change? Can my values or priorities shift? Can we stop doing things that we don’t need to do anymore – even if they still work or we like doing them? You may not need every ring of psych safety for every situation. But to innovate, solve new problems, and be a resilient, agile organization, you’ll need all four rings.

Yours, Mine and Ours Another aspect of complexity when it comes to creating the conditions we want is that psychological safety is both individual and collective. Because psychological safety is a perception, it is highly individualized. In any given situation (like your Monday morning meeting), every person in the room may feel a different level of safety related to the exact same input. That individual perception is an alchemy of multiple ingredients:

Experience. Your brain uses your past experiences to make sense of the present.

Observation. Your brain never stops taking in and interpreting what

others say, what they do, what gets punished or rewarded, how stories are told.

Your own wiring. You have spent your entire life making sense of

the world in a certain way. You have your own unique temperament, personality, biases, needs and motivations. What feels like harm to you may not feel the same to others. © 2023 Thought Design. All rights reserved.

Going back to the weather metaphor, driving through icy conditions might scare the daylights out of you or it may feel like no big deal. How you perceive risk in that situation will be a combination of the experiences you’ve had driving on ice (have you ever had an accident?), what you are noticing about what is happening around you (are other cars sliding off the road?) and who you are (are you a natural driver?).

As much as psychological safety is an individual perception, there is also a collective experience. Because humans tend to mirror and respond to one another’s behaviors, groups create a center of gravity when it comes to a cultural level of psychological safety. You know how every group has its own set of “hidden rules”? These are the things that aren’t officially posted anywhere but everyone seems to know, like who can speak up in a meeting or what happens if you don’t hit your deadline.

They might be hidden, but they sure are powerful.

Let’s talk about the hard stuff We can’t really sugarcoat this. There is often a good reason for people to get protective and cautious. People in workplaces do, in fact, often behave in ways that create anxious environments. Whether these behaviors are intentional or not, the impact is always the same: psychological safety spirals downward and people react by retaliating, disengaging or leaving. Here are some big ones to watch out for.

Bullying. There is so much that can go in this bucket: inappropriate use of

power, gaslighting, harassment, targeting. There has been a lot of research on the price organizations pay for tolerating the “brilliant jerk”. One of the fastest ways to raise psychological safety in an anxious culture is to have a zero tolerance policy around every form of bullying - especially in leaders.

Incivility. There is a higher price to rudeness in the workplace than people

realize. “That’s just how he is” doesn’t cut it. Treating people with respect, kindness and curiosity is critical to creating Belonging Safety - the foundation of all forms of psychological safety.

Exclusion. Politics, siloing, factioning, favoritism… humans are social

creatures and are always creating in-groups and out-groups. When we aren’t intentional about how the right forms of inclusion are created, safety plummets.

Power. This is another can of worms. The distribution and perception of

power has enormous power when it comes to the psychological safety of a group. Who has it? How is it used? Do the right people have the right kinds of power? When you have people that abuse power, hoard power, or even act powerless by not taking power that should be theirs, the whole system suffers. While low psychological safety isn’t exclusively created by these behaviors, if things like this are going on it will always ignite a chain reaction of other behaviors that will create a system that is anxious, apathetic, or worse.

The Sneaky Things That Get In Our Way How does low psychological safety happen? Most people show up for work with good intentions and don’t see themselves as the cause of those eggshells everyone is walking on. If you’ve ever been to a team building event, you may have participated in an activity called Helium Stick. If you haven’t, let me paint the picture for you. Participants are lined up next to one another and instructed to hold their hands at waist height with index fingers pointed out. A long stick is laid on the line of fingers. The goal is to collectively lower the stick to the floor without any single finger losing contact with the stick. The one rule is that if any one person loses contact with the stick, the whole group has to start over.

Seems easy, right? What actually happens is that the stick begins floating upward, in exactly the wrong and unintended direction. No one is trying to raise the stick. Everyone is actually trying to make sure that they aren’t the one to lose contact with the stick, so they exert just a bit more pressure on it than they need to. Instead of collectively lowering their fingers, the group finds themselves actually raising them. It happens fast, and typically, so does the blaming and irritation that follows.

Creating psychological safety in a group can be much like that. Many of the barriers to psychological safety aren’t as obvious as blatant bad behaviors like yelling, punishing or bullying. They are often more subtle, and even rooted in good intentions. While not a comprehensive list, these are a few of the sneakiest barriers to Psychological Safety:

Assumptions. It’s amazing how fast we create stories about things.

Humans are notoriously prone to creating assumptions, accepting them as fact and moving straight to action based on those assumptions.

Underdeveloped Skills. Creating psychological safety isn’t just about

being sensitive and careful. In fact, the most psychologically safe teams are the ones that do some of the hardest things really well, like giving candid feedback, having productive conflict, developing innovative solutions to old problems, or creating “intelligent failure”. Building mature psychological safety requires a lot of skill in things that are often referred to as soft skills, but are actually harder than most of the technical skills we give most of our attention to.

Busyness. This is a tricky one. Of course we want people to be focused

on their work. The busier people are, though, the less they tend to be tuned into what is happening for other people. When people get stressed, they get more reactive. How many times have you inadvertently offended or hurt someone because you were in a hurry or just not paying attention?

Niceness. This one can be even trickier. When we fear disappointing or

offending others, we can get too careful with important things like voicing our opinions, risking failure, exchanging feedback, or creating change. Environments that are too comfortable are usually less productive. An often overlooked truth is that safety and comfort are not the same thing.

A tale of two teams Team one: The sales team of XY Corp walks on eggshells much of the time. As a team of high achievers, everyone knows that asking the wrong question, messing around with the status quo or not hitting your numbers could lead to very unpleasant (and often embarrassing) repercussions. Toxic conflict, shameand-blame, and cutthroat tactics are the norm.

Team two: The sales team of JK Corp walks on eggshells much of the time. A team of high achievers, they have enormous affection and respect for one another. Being nice, protecting one another’s feelings and not rocking the boat are strongly valued. Not wanting to let anyone down, especially their leader, the team avoids disagreeing with one another (even when they really do), waits until things are perfect before executing and stays quiet in meetings.

There are a lot of ways to create bad weather

Growing the Rings Here’s the golden question: how do we create the conditions we know we want and need? Let’s start here – What do you need? If you don’t know, here is a little quiz that might make it more clear: Imagine your team performing at the highest possible level. What does that look like? Imagine what they are accomplishing, what they are doing, what they are feeling and what the energy feels like.

Describe it here:

Now think about these questions: How important is it that the people on the team feel like they are a valued member of the team? How important is it that team members can be vulnerable – revealing who they really are? How important is it that people can be vulnerable and open about their flaws, shortcomings and mistakes? How important is it that people say what they really mean, like saying no when they mean no instead of going along? How important is it that people are certain that others have their back? How important is it that people bring bold, new ideas? How important is it that people can challenge one another’s thinking? Your answers to these questions should begin to give you some clarity about the dimensions and depth of the psychological safety that is required for your team to perform at its best. Knowing specifically what you need is a critical, and often overloaded step. So, how do you grow Psychological Safety?

The answer, as is often the case, is “it depends”. Depending on what you need, what your starting place is, what the dynamics and history of the team are and how committed everyone is, you may choose to focus on tweaking a few specific things or you may need to create a full scope of strategies to move the needle in the right direction.

Let’s Get This Party Started It’s hard to know where to start, isn’t it? First the hard news: you can’t just hire and fire your way to psychological safety. Yes, being mindful of culture fit is a critical part of a hiring process. And yes, saying goodbye to people that are committed to toxic behaviors is necessary. That said, one of the complexities of creating high levels of psychological safety is that it is a human process that is constantly evolving and shifting. Every conversation and every interaction, every day, is forming and changing psychological safety in some way for everyone. Developing the level of safety that is needed to get the work done isn’t something that happens in one meeting or because there is a great poster on the wall. It’s an “all-play” that is as much a part of everyone’s responsibility as the tasks they are assigned.

So. How can you begin to move the needle?

There are indeed some key strategies that will make a big difference. Create Awareness. You can’t change something you can’t see. Look

for it, talk about it and if you can, measure it. (We like to use the Fearless Organization Scan for this.) When Psychological Safety shifts from feeling like a weird term that no one understands to something that everyone values and talks openly about, amazing things can happen.

Develop the Right Thinking and Skill Sets. Let’s face it. Often,

the reason people aren’t doing the hard stuff is because they don’t know how. We aren’t all born with the skills to have sticky conversations, engage in conflict in productive, healthy ways or to navigate failure well. The investment in identifying and developing key mindsets and skills pays big dividends.

Change Small Habits. As we’ve mentioned, while sometimes there

can be one strong barrier to everyone’s psychological safety (like a leader who bullies people), more often it’s a matter of little things adding up to a lot. Changing small habits by experimenting with things like the way certain questions are asked, how you open or close meetings, even how you handle email, can all add up to big impact.

Make it a Leadership Focus. While creating psychological safety

truly is everyone’s job, leaders absolutely have an out-sized responsibility. Keeping an eye on the content of what is happening is critical, of course, but keeping the other eye on the context of how that work gets done is just as, or sometimes more important. Leaders should always have their finger on the pulse of the psychological safety of their teams, making sure it is plentiful for everyone.

Look at the System. Barriers to psychological safety don’t just come

from people. They can come from systems, too. Scrubbing your processes, communication and reporting structures, workflows and policies for hidden safety barriers can root out silent psych safety killers.

Work is hard. Taking the fear out of it doesn’t make all the problems go away or make everything easy, but it does power possibilities.

When the weather is right, amazing things can happen.

Fearless Organization Scan Anytown Community College

What are the questions you have for this team?

Run Some Experiments Give out some “Unique Contribution Awards” like Craziest Idea or Most Spectacular Failure or New Skill Learned. Celebrate when someone shares something they learned or something they got wrong. Run a “Pre-Mortem” to challenge your team in thinking through how your new idea/ project/task might go wrong. Learn how to run a Pre-Mortem here: https://www. atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/pre-mortem Ask a different person the same feedback question every day. Example: What is one thing you see me doing that is getting in my own way? Create a team Failure Wall! See examples here: https://www.dnb.com/perspectives/ small-business/failure-wall-encouraging-culture-success.html Ask, “What do you think about that?” 5 times each day. Establish a new set of ground rules for meetings to ensure everyone’s voice can be heard and ideas are explored as robustly as possible. If you are someone who speaks up a lot during meetings today, limit yourself to a specific number of comments during a meeting. Use pennies or paper clips to keep track. Hold space for healthy conflict. After you share an idea, proposal, or opinion, say to the group: “Let’s hear some dissent.” or “Who is willing to play devil’s advocate here?” or “How might this idea be wrong?” Ask questions that challenge the status quo. Examples might be: What assumptions are we making this decision on? How might we be wrong? How would our customer answer this question? What would we do if we were 10x bolder?

By their very nature, experiments are designed for discovery and learning. Be sure to frame new ideas as experiments with a hypothesis and a process to analyze the outcomes: “What worked as expected and why?” “What failed and what are we learning?” “What is the next experiment we want to run?”

How We Help

Build Awareness

The Fearless Organization Scan Get an accurate benchmark. The Fearless Organization Scan was created by Amy Edmondson, the leading researcher in this space, to measure organizations’ levels of psychological safety. We love the tool because it’s:

Accurate. Inexpensive. Fast.

EXPLORE Request an assessment.

Reach out to us to start the conversation and request an assessment.

EXECUTE Survey your team.

We’ll schedule a planning session to address pre-survey goals, survey distribution, and post-survey debriefing. Then, we’ll execute our plan.

EVOLVE. Know where you stand.

Upon completion of the survey, you’ll receive a detailed analysis of the results. We’ll review them together in a workshop format with your team, ending with the creation of an action plan to address our findings.

Measure as often as you’d like to track improvement. Trusted by organizations around the world, the Fearless Organization Scan gives you tangible, measurable information to help you focus on what’s most important.

Focus on Leadership

Be an Empowered Leader You want to be a leader worthy of being followed. But if you’re like most (good) leaders, you know there’s room for improvement. Whether you figure a little professional development can’t hurt or are experiencing full-fledged imposter syndrome, we can help. This 16-session, in-person course (with optional add-on coaching) doesn’t just give you tools and skills to better manage your team. It helps you create a consistent environment where your team can function on a whole other level.

Psychological safety is the secret to our sauce. The Empowered Leader course is the only leadership training program in Michigan designed specifically to equip leaders with the skills they need to build empowered, psychologically safe teams and organizations. Great, but what’s psychological safety? Put simply, it’s the culture leaders create that makes it easier for their teams to get creative, share ideas, enter into difficult conversations, enjoy their work, and feel connected… not just as co-workers who put up with one another, but as humans on a collective mission. The Empowered Leader course takes key concepts like navigating conflict, creating a culture of feedback, and communication and flips them on their head to match the demands of today’s world and help leaders in creating a psychologically safe environment where everyone can do their best work every day. It provides new ways of thinking about employee performance issues and engagement as well as strategies to address them more effectively. Designed for flexibility, Empowered Leader is provided in two sets of 8-classes each (Empowered Leader I and Empowered Leader II). Each class is held at Thought Design from 9:00 to noon, two times per month and is recorded in the event that you need to miss a session. © 2023 Thought Design. All rights reserved.

Thinking & Skillsets

Workshops Communication Lab

Experiment with the tools and strategies you need to become a powerful communicator. In this course, we will give you the tools and strategies to identify patterns of communication that create frustration, catch miscommunication in the act, and minimize inefficiencies, conflict, and disconnection.

The Path to Resilience: A failure Workshop

In this interactive workshop, participants will explore their personal patterns of thinking and behaving before, during and after a “failure” experience, enabling them to remove barriers to learning, growth and innovation.

Productive Conflict

High performing teams know how to leverage “creative abrasion”, which gets people to their best thinking without destroying relationships and psychological safety. This interactive workshop provides participants new insights into this important skill and equips them to safely and confidently dare to disagree.

Get Unstuck

Get unstuck is a highly experiential workshop in which participants identify and focus on an improvement goal that is important to them and their success. Through guided exercises, reflection, peer feedback and experiments, participants are able to experience deeply personal - transformation, which can then be extended to others.

Rethinking Impostor Syndrome

This workshop will equip participants to overcome the limiting effects of impostor syndrome. Using real world challenges, participants will identify their own limiting patterns of thinking, making way for new patterns of thinking and actions that are rooted in a healthy confidence.

Powering Possibilities

Our Powering Possibilities program is designed to guide a team through the process of deeply understanding the dynamics and patterns that shape who they are and how they work. Using a combination of assessment tools, group learning experiences, discussion guides and reflection tools, our year-long process puts the power of creating the psychologically safe environment that everyone needs into the hands of the people who have the power to create it: the team itself.

Thinking & Skillsets

Crystal Clear: Communicating with Candor –

There is nothing more frustrating than walking away from a conversation that should have been productive and instead, feeling confused, unheard or hurt. Speaking with Candor isn’t just about “telling it like it is”. True candor takes skill and practice. Learn to recognize the patterns of communication that create confusion, frustration and hurt and practice communicating in the “radical candor” zone to increase clarity and build trust.

The Psychological Safety Toolbox

Creating a psychologically safe workplace takes intention, practice and skill. In these experiential workshops, you will explore some foundational tools for communicating and collaborating in ways that create the right conditions for people to do their best work. This workshop series includes four sessions: The Basics of Psychological Safety, Failing to Learn/ Learning to Fail, Cracking Open Communication, and Blowing Out the Barrier Intensive.

Radical Ownership

Nothing can create drama and upset in organizational (or home!) life like the issue of accountability. This workshop gives participants new insight into the true causes of these tensions, equipping them to see and change their own patterns and support a healthy culture of ownership. Learn ways to identify and articulate your “100%” responsibility, navigate tough conversations about responsibilities without drama, and create ownership through creating clean agreements.

The Power of Feedback

A healthy economy of feedback is the engine of learning and growth for a team. A constant exchange of clear, courageous requests and offerings of perspective accelerates performance, creates psychological safety and deepens connections. This workshop focuses on the skill sets needed to create a learning culture where people get the feedback they need, when they need it.

The Effective Team Toolbox

In modern organizations, the strength in which people work in teams has become paramount to group success. Learn 4 foundational tools to reduce drama and amplify engagement: Empowered Relationships, Four Simple Rules of Agreements, Gold Bars, and Navigating the Line.

*Workshops can be delivered in person or virtually

Look at the System

Offsite Strategic Planning to help you stay ahead of a constantly changing world Much has been written about psychological safety’s role in improving workplace wellness and even in helping stem the tide of the Great Resignation. But to weather uncertainty, organizations also need to make psychological safety a strategic priority, creating a culture where employees can comfortably raise concerns, contribute ideas, and share unique perspectives. Through the Strategic Thinking Lab experience, you’ll connect ideas for broader perspectives, embrace differences for insight, and address issues—both obvious and flying under the radar.

Unleash creative solutions that solve old problems.

Develop a 3-year plan that’s challenging and realistic.

Create collective clarity so everyone knows their roles.

Be intentionally agile so priorities can shift in a complex world.

More specifically, you’ll walk away with: • Your team’s unique Powerful Question that deepens thinking, challenges assumptions, and enlightens the strategic process. • Structured thinking tools that provide roadmaps for thinking, sensemaking, and participation to engage all voices. • A 90-day action plan that equips you to make progress towards your desired outcomes in the midst of a changing environment. • Rollout support that creates collective clarity, including a careful evaluation of current routines & patterns that could get in the way. • Tracking tools that provide a visual way to measure progress towards the goals outlined in your plan. • Quarterly follow-up meetings to reflect on the previous quarter and redefine priorities for the next. © 2023 Thought Design. All rights reserved.

Change Small Habits

Unleash your potential with

One-on-One Coaching True growth and transformation unfolds one small shift at a time. Leading a team through complex challenges like creating a healthy culture is hard (and often lonely) work. Having a trusted thought partner makes all the difference. Embark on a transformative journey with one-on-one coaching—an established and effective strategy designed to amplify your leadership skills and propel you toward your ultimate potential. A space to reflect, increase your self-awareness, and develop your thinking and skills, one-on-one coaching is tailored support to help you reach your specific goals. Get the tools and insights necessary to navigate the complexities of creating a psychologically safe environment for your team with confidence and purpose.

Our experienced coaches work with you to build great self and organizational awareness using the most relevant cutting edge tools available to accelerate the change and transformation you’re looking for at your pace - set the cadence that works for you virtually or face-to-face, for maximum flexibility for as long as you need - no lengthy contracts

Denise McClennen Thought Design denise@thought-design.com

Tara Colvin Thought Design tara@thought-design.com