The Leader Factor (LeaderFactor)

Today's episode is the final part of our four-part series on the change management principle, behave until you believe. This is our final episode in the series, and it's on challenger safety in practice. Tim and Junior will discuss why innovation requires deviation, why an environment of high challenger safety is not the default, and they'll give you practical behaviors for you to put challenger safety into practice. If you like this episode, go ahead and listen to the rest of the series. As always, this episode's show notes can be found at leaderfactor.com/podcast.

(04:51) Creating a more innovative culture doesn't come from pushing behavior through compliance. Punishment-based accountability does not seem to get the job done over the long haul. There's a cost to compliance if it's punishment-based. The accountability mechanism is important because it depends on what else you want. If you just want pure compliance, great, press people into compliance, that's fine, but what are you losing? You're losing innovation.

(09:44) What's at stake when you challenge the status quo, what do people worry about? They worry about social status, political status, their career advancement and their upward mobility. You're risking your job. You might be risking your career in some cases. It may be that you do something that could be seen as this black mark that follows you around forever. These categories of personal risk illustrate the nature of vulnerability associated with stage four challenger safety. If you're asking people to challenge the status quo, you have to keep these risks in mind.

(20:23) Less than 10% of teams have challenger safety. To achieve and maintain stage four challenger safety is the supreme test of a leader. To create an atmosphere where people feel free and able to challenge the status quo without fear of retaliation or repercussions.

(25:50) Weigh in last. If you have an authority position in a room and you weigh in first on whatever the issue is, you anchor your team with bias. You are softly censoring your team and the presumption is that the discussion is over because you possess positional power and you've registered your point of view. Next time, weigh in last. Mirror the team and summarize the discussion to that point the way that you would if you're talking one-on-one. When you can do this right, you're acknowledging everyone's opinion, but you're also consolidating the information so that it's actionable and you can continue the conversation in a productive way.

(32:20) Respond constructively to dissent and bad news. If you respond poorly to dissent and bad news, you inject fear and you break the feedback loop. One of the best things that you can do in a crisis is to ratchet up the transparency and confront the truth head on. Don't try to dismiss things. Don't try to spin things. Don't try to hide things. Just confront it. Square up to the truth and deal with it.

(42:48) Reward shots on goal. "If you're not taking shots, you're not going to score. It's simple math." - Lionel Messi. Become good at identifying what your shots on goal are. A shot on goal might be just a comment or an idea. If it's in the right direction, it's on goal, reward that. If you want something to happen more, reward it.

Important Links
The 4 Stages Behavioral Guide

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 create an environment where vulnerability is rewarded, not punished, and where your teams can consistently execute and innovate.

Episode Chapters:
01:24 - Episode Start
04:50 - 10 Business Outcomes of Psychological Safety
14:05 - The Moral Argument
18:21 - The Performance Argument
31:10 - The Consequences of Low Psychological Safety

✅ Download the resources/slides from the episode: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/what-non-hr-execs-need-to-know-about-psychological-safety

In this episode, Tim and Junior will discuss the catastrophic consequences of a "nice" culture. The intention behind cultivating a nice culture is often genuine. Leaders believe they are doing a good thing that will motivate people and create inclusion. However, it often has the opposite effect, resulting in a lack of honest communication, intellectual bravery, innovation, and accountability.

(11:01) We want to be polite, courteous, and kind, but still be willing to confront hard truths. "Nice gets dangerous very quickly, Junior, because people will say, 'Well, I don't want to hurt your feelings.' Okay, that could sometimes be the motivation, but more often it's that I'm actually trying to protect myself. So now in the room, we have shifted from playing offense to playing defense."

(26:20) Niceness over time creates inertia in the organization. "The organization loses its ability to act preemptively because we're preoccupied with being nice. So, we can't address issues in a timely manner. We don't have, as I said, the tolerance for candor. And so, we wait, procrastinate, and fail to act. Meanwhile, a problem or a threat or a danger grows and compounds. Pretty soon, we have a crisis."

(40:04) How do we combat the consequences of a "nice" culture? To combat a "nice" culture, you have to be willing to do these four things: 1) clarify expectations and performance standards, 2) publicly challenge the status quo, even if you helped create it, 3) provide air cover for people who speak up, and 4) confront performance problems immediately.

Important Links
The Hazards of a “Nice” Company Culture - HBR Article
Why Some Leaders are Afraid of Psychological Safety - Podcast
Diagnose the Levels of Inclusion and Innovation in Your Organization

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 it is.

On this week's episode of The Leader Factor, hosts Tim and Junior share the top 7 misconceptions of psychological safety and what to do about them.

Episode Chapters
(00:45) Start
(03:53) Psychological safety isn't a shield from accountability.
(05:06) Psychological safety isn't niceness. 
(06:30) Psychological safety isn't coddling. 
(07:55) Psychological safety isn't consensus decision-making. 
(09:45) Psychological safety isn't unearned autonomy. 
(13:28) Psychological safety isn't political correctness.
(14:30) Psychological safety isn't rhetorical reassurance.  
(16:26) Identifying The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

For the full learning experience, watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2cr1E4neXGI
Or download the episode resources: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/7-things-psychological-safety-is-not

In this episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior explain the 5 Functions of Leadership, originally created to provide a job description for a CEO. When you're an executive leader, nothing is your job and everything is your job. Delegated authority is hard to find success in, but this episode will help you better understand how to be effective in any leadership role.

Function 1: Vision & Strategy (07:26)

Vision and strategy represent the direction of an organization. Inherent in the leader’s role is the commission to give the organization sight by painting a portrait of the future and inspiring others toward it. The essence of strategy is the deliberate reduction of alternatives to determine how value will be created. To achieve the vision, leaders need to apply strategy principles to achieve competitive advantage.

Reflection Question: How are YOU doing painting the vision?

Function 2: Alignment & Execution (19:56)

To align an organization is to load-balance and pace the organization, and then cognitively and emotionally prepare people to achieve the vision and execute the strategy based on specific goals. Through alignment and execution, leaders convert vision into plans and plans into concrete activity. They merge priorities, plans, incentives, expectations, and measures to get desired results.

The 5 Alignment Questions

1. What are your concerns? Don’t ask people if they have concerns—of course they do. So let’s get them on the table and discuss them.
2. In your view, why are we doing this? You need to check understanding, which you can only do if your people explain where you’re going and why, back to you. They need to teach it back.
3. How do you see your role in this? This allows people to see themselves in context and personalize the direction they’ve been given.
4. What support do you need? Again, it requires the individual to think more carefully through the personal implications of what they’re being asked to do.
5. And finally, how committed are you to support this direction? This last question assesses the level of commitment; it ties a bow on the whole thing.

Reflection Question: Are you prioritizing until it hurts?

Function 3: Change & Innovation (31:22)

By definition, leaders have a contradictory role. On the one hand, they need to preserve the status quo to create value today. They also have to disturb the status quo to create value tomorrow. Organizations change for three reasons: 1) to achieve higher value, 2) to achieve lower costs, or 3) to ensure compliance with legal, regulatory, and safety requirements. Businesses need change and innovation because competitive advantage isn't promised, it's perishable.  It’s the leader’s role to initiate change and innovation in order to gain, maintain, or reclaim competitive advantage.

Reflection Question: Is my communication as a leader more discovery- or advocacy-based?

Function 4: Talent Acquisition & Development (38:17)

The fourth function is to acquire and develop human capital. Given the transitory nature of competitive advantage, the true source of sustainable competitive advantage is ultimately people. They are the source of ideas and action—the two assets most responsible for organizational performance. Senior leaders must be deeply committed to and engaged in acquiring and developing talent. They are in large measure defined not only by what they do but also by who they leave behind in the leadership pipeline. Leaders who develop a climate of psychological safety and cultivate a high tolerance for candor engage and retain their people at much higher levels than the competition.

Reflection Question: Do you have top talent leaving? Why?

Function 5: Values & Culture (45:46)

Values are the primary ingredient in any culture. Research confirms what we now call the culture formation hypothesis–the modeling behavior of leaders is the central factor in culture formation. Leaders either show the way or get in the way. This central question now becomes: Culture by design or by default? Because intellectual diversity alone produces nothing, a leader’s most important job– second only to setting strategy–is to act in the role of a social architect and nourish a culture in which professed values become de facto values.

Reflection Question: Am I modeling the culture I want to have? What am I doing to create it?

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 - Start
00:40 - How common is toxicity in the workplace?
04:07 - Toxicity is a spectrum of influence.
11:48 - The definition of a toxic leader.
13:55 - Identifying two types of toxic leaders.
17:57 - Two organizational failure patterns.
23:26 - Intervention strategies for both types of toxic leaders.

✅ Download the resources/slides from the episode: 
https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/what-to-do-with-a-toxic-leader

Or watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/18zfabFNKBo

How do you create a deeply inclusive environment? (1:15) Tim explains that there's a process and a sequence, and it starts with a focus on your values and beliefs. Once you lay the foundation, you can focus on behaviors and skills, then policies and procedures. In essence, you need to advocate for humanity over human characteristics. 

What are junk theories of superiority? (8:00) To create deeply inclusive cultures, we have to eliminate biases and preferences towards certain characteristics, which ultimately create exclusion. 

The four stages of psychological safety build inclusive cultures (10:33). As a function of respect and permission, the foundation of psychological safety is inclusion. We want to know that we belong. 

Inclusion is a human right (20:45). You shouldn't need to think about it. It's a safety that isn't earned, it's owed. 

How to create a culturally flat organization (27:15). Regardless of position, title, or authority, you should be allowed to contribute, participate, and create value. 

This week we're kicking off a new series on emotional intelligence. Our approach to EQ is different. There’s the mainstream idea of EQ, and then there’s ours and this episode will give you an inside look into how you can make EQ practical and actionable for the individuals and teams you work with. 

• Emotional Navigation [0:06:00]: Tim delves into the core concepts of emotional intelligence, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness and self-management in personal development and leadership.

• Emotional Intelligence and Relationships(0:18:00): The conversation shifts to social awareness and relationship management, highlighting how emotional intelligence enables us to understand and influence the emotions of others effectively.

• The Six Competency Model (0:24:30): Tim and Junior discuss the six competency model of EQindex™, which includes a comprehensive range of skills that underpin strong emotional intelligence and its application in leadership.

• EQindex™ Snapshot (0:31:35): They touch on the EQindex™ assessment tool, describing its efficiency in providing a concise and accurate picture of an individual's emotional intelligence in just 15 minutes.

• EQindex™ Evolution (0:37:22): The episode wraps up with exciting news about the upcoming release of the EQindex™

Join the waitlist for EQindex™ public launch: https://www.leaderfactor.com/eqindex

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCijFFN7t5w

Download the episode resources: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/how-to-build-the-4-stages-of-psychological-safety

In this episode of Culture by Design, we're entering the second half of our Leading with Character and Competence series with a discussion on the first cornerstone of competence, learning. Tim and Junior discuss what it means to be an agile self­-directed learner, why it's important to learn at or above the speed of change, and how to keep yourself competitive and relevant in an increasingly fast-­paced, changing environment.

Character vs. Competence (0:01:21). If character is the infrastructure, competence is the superstructure. Tim and Junior introduce the next four episodes of this series, all of which will focus on how listeners can develop and improve their levels of competence.

The perishability of knowledge (0:05:08). We live in a different world than it was just a couple of years ago. Things are changing quickly, and the perishability of knowledge and information are accelerating. Tim and Junior discuss how the linear nature of a career has been disrupted.

The desire for stability and job security (0:13:13). Through a story about union negotiation, Tim illustrates the human need for stability, and how our concept of stability has changed over time. We're no longer looking for a role that'll last us decades, we're looking for one that'll grow with us.

The three types of learning (0:15:00). There are three types of learning: permanent, continuous, and agile. Permanent learning is based on permanent qualification, continuous learning is ongoing qualification, and agile learning is rapid, collaborative, self-­directed learning at the moment of need.

Formal vs. informal learning (0:22:03). Eventually, we graduate from opportunities and environments where we learn formally. This means we have to be proactive in creating and seeking out places and times to learn informally. Junior shares four self-reflection questions to help listeners assess their current impact on their learning.

Encouraging learning in leadership (0:24:17). If you're a leader, people are watching you. They're watching how you interact with others, how you perform, and how you learn. If you can lead by example, you'll increase the learning agility of your team because you're creating that prevailing norm on your team.

Reading for curation and pattern recognition (0:39:30). Tim and Junior share their advice on how to maximize what you read, plus a small discussion on Tim's most recent Harvard Business Review article, How to Read a Business Book.

Links
How to Read a Business Book (HBR)

During this week’s episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior dissect the two kinds of leaders who shy away from psychological safety: those who feed on title and status, and those who try to hide their incompetence. They encourage healthy introspection as a tool to avoid becoming one of those leaders yourself. Are you a business leader looking to introduce psychological safety into your organization? Crack yourself open with this enlightening episode.

What is psychological safety? What’s the dilemma? (1:15) Despite the transformative benefits of psychological safety, it puts insecure, mediocre, and poor leaders to the test. It becomes a leveling device that redistributes influence. For leaders who feed on title and status, it threatens their positional power. For those lacking in competence, it threatens their exposure.

Leaders who feed on title and status (9:50). Tim and Junior reference Ralph Linton and differentiate between ascribed and achieved status in the workplace. 

Do you encourage constructive dissent? (22:30) Tim and Junior talk about dissent and how healthy leaders welcome it, while unhealthy ones avoid it. 

Leaders who try to hide their incompetence (28:30). Incompetent leaders try to blend into the hierarchy they belong to. While hierarchies aren’t inherently bad, they’re also not all created equal. Tim and Junior talk about the advantages and liabilities of power hierarchies.

Who gets to participate, and who gets to decide? (37:30) Decision-making rights? Not everyone has them, and that’s on purpose. But participation rights? Everyone should have them. Why?

Imposter syndrome and psychological safety (41:00). Tim and Junior discuss when you should let self-awareness ignite change, and when you should realize that you’re not going to be perfect all the time. 

Related Links:

Why Some Leaders Are Afraid of Psychological Safety Article

How Psychological Safety Cures Imposter Syndrome

The Complete Guide to Psychological Safety

This is our first LeaderFactor Single Point Lesson. These 10-minute episodes are packed with practical learning on a single topic. These episodes will be published in addition to our regular full-length episodes every Monday.

Today's lesson:
You will grow based on what you demand of yourself.

Key Points:
As humans, it is natural for us to seek comfort and equilibrium, but equilibrium leads to mediocrity. In the end, mediocrity will deny you the opportunity to discover who you really are and who you can become. What's the answer? Demand more of yourself. Don’t wait for your environment to demand more of you because it might not. Embrace discomfort (but not to your panic zone) and recognize that there has never been a time of significant progression that wasn't characterized by discomfort.

Today's key action:
Write down an area of your life that's falling or has fallen into equilibrium in which you should demand more of yourself. Then go and do whatever might be appropriate to improve

This special year in review episode of Culture by Design features hosts Tim and Junior interviewing members of the LeaderFactor team. They get unique perspectives on psychological safety trends and insights from 2023 based on interactions with clients. Guests include Jillian (Marketing), Ryan (Technology), Kelsea (Sales), and Alex (Client Success).

5 Key Moments

• Interest in psychological safety continues to grow exponentially based on search volume (0:04:21)
• Audiences want both a business case and practical guidance on implementing psychological safety (0:04:21)
• Individual contributors feel most vulnerable about expressing disagreement compared to managers (0:24:55)
• Successful organizations measure psychological safety as a baseline and track progress over time (0:37:58)
• Consistent effort over an appropriate time horizon is key for cultural transformation (0:58:56)

Important Links

• LeaderFactor Psychological Safety Behavioral Guide: https://leaderfactor.com/guide
• LeaderFactor Complete Guide to Psychological Safety: https://leaderfactor.com/resources/complete-guide-to-psychological-safety
• LeaderFactor Ladder of Vulnerability: https://leaderfactor.com/ladder

We're talking about interview questions this week. Why? Because poor interview protocols are dangerous and inefficient. They decrease your chances of finding the right person to join your team. During the episode, Tim and Junior highlight the limitations of traditional interviews and give you 10 unique interview questions to help you improve your 3D interviewing skills. Some of these questions are kind of unconventional. But the concepts should help you create a more engaging and effective interview experience that will land you hires that you love.

Takeaways

• Traditional interview questions are often cliché and fail to elicit meaningful responses.
• Asking real and thought-provoking questions can lead to more authentic and insightful conversations.
• The interview process should focus on critical thinking, self-awareness, and the ability to reflect on past experiences.
• It is important to continually refine the interview process to create a more engaging and effective experience.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Importance of Interview Questions

01:23 Improving the Interview Process

06:24 The Limitations of Traditional Interviews

08:11 The Concept of 2D vs 3D Interviewing

09:08 The Impact of Personal Life on Work Life

10:31 The Importance of References

11:30 The Challenge of Resume Accuracy

14:03 The Problem with Rote Interview Questions

15:01 Question 1: What are you better at than anyone else within a mile of this room?

18:39 Question 3: What don't you know that you wish you knew?

21:07 Question 4: How would your enemies describe you?

21:36 Question 5: How far away is the future?

23:03 Question 6: You're the president of the country and you get impeached. Why?

23:31 Question 7: What's something that you know for sure?

24:00 Question 8: Tell me about the last time you spent your own money to learn something new

36:24 Question 9: What's the first thing a team member would complain about when working with you?

41:13 Question 10: What character in a popular film or book are you most like?

51:40 Continually Refining the Interview Process

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 differentiated value in the marketplace. This shift has reshaped consumer expectations and holds profound implications for leadership in today's experience-driven world.

The problem? Many 21st-century leaders still use agrarian, industrial, and service leadership methods in this experience economy. As a result, organizations are bleeding talent, stifling innovation, and galloping toward commoditization and extinction.

For the full learning experience, watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe9YbYl3C-4

Or download the episode resources: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/the-experience-leader

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 diversifying one's identity can help build resilience.
• Harnessing the power of positive emotions, such as hope and optimism, can aid in resilience.
• Developing effective and varied coping mechanisms, including sleep, food, and exercise, is crucial for resilience.
• Adopting a growth mindset and seeking strong social support are important strategies for building resilience.

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction

(01:02) Understanding Resilience

(06:32) Resilience in Ecosystems

(10:16) Types of Disturbance

(13:01) Disturbance and Adaptation

(18:51) Path 2: Positive Response to Disturbance

(19:20) Resilience as a Learnable Process

(20:17) Strategy 1: Spread Out

(25:27) Strategy 2: Harness the Power of Positive Emotions

(35:39) Strategy 3: Develop Effective and Varied Coping Mechanisms

(42:34) Strategy 4: Adopt a Growth Mindset

(44:59) Strategy 5: Seek Strong Social Support

(48:11) Conclusion

There’s a power dynamic in every room. If you’re the CEO and you’re in the room, you control that dynamic. Positional power is consolidated in your hands, and what you say and do can draw people out or make them recoil with anxiety and fear. In this weeks episode Tim and Junior discuss 10 ways CEO's can create higher levels of psychological safety in the room.

(11:48) Hierarchies often create inequality and that inequality can foster some of those negative outcomes. Leaders should strive for cultural flatness. Cultural flatness is a condition or an environment where people as they're interacting they become agnostic to title and position and authority and therefore they're able to debate issues on their merits. The best ideas in the room win rather than the hierarchies in the room.

(21:58) As the CEO you can re-distribute the power dynamic in the room. Two concrete examples are 1) by delegating the conducting of the meeting and 2) by not sitting at the head of the table. You've got to disrupt the power dynamic by avoiding the head of the table and sitting next to someone different.

(35:35) Rewarding challenges to the status will bring more psychological safety to the room. The premise of this recommendation to stimulate inquiry before advocacy. It's not enough to ask for feedback you have to respond positively to feedback and buffer strong personalities to encourage everyone's participation.

Important Links:
HBR - How a CEO Can Create Psychological Safety in the Room
The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety Behavioral Guide
Why Some Leaders are Afraid of Psychological Safety

Today's lesson:
Urgency is a Catalyst, Seldom A Sustainer

Key Points:
Urgency is good, but only in doses. If we rely consistently on urgency, what do we get? Stress, poor decision-making, and decreased creativity. Urgency has a short shelf-life, it relies heavily on emotion and that emotion dissipates, so in the long run you should rely on vision and discipline to keep you going over a long period of time.

Today's key action:
Here it is: Keep your sustainability/urgency ratio higher than 3:1. For every 1 week that’s absolutely crazy, you need 3 that aren’t. For every piece of messaging you give to your team about pushing harder, send 3 that are about pace, intention, and sustainability.

What do you do if you want to bring psychological safety to your organization, but don't find yourself in a position of authority? Or if you do have some authority, how do you approach the topic of psychological safety with your teams and others who are not as familiar with the concept? In this weeks episode Tim and Junior will help you gain a better understanding of change management and cultural transformation.

(02:26) What is the current state of adoption for psychological safety? At a practitioner level it's only been in the last five years or so that the term has achieved any meaningful level of traction. We are still early in the adoption curve. "If you look at the trend lines, though, we are on hockey stick trajectory, in terms of category growth and attention and search traffic and investment, and all of these other metrics that are really good indicators as to where this is going."

(16:44) Is psychological safety a passing fad? How does it stack up against employee engagement? Where does it fit in to other DEI initiatives? It is not a passing fad. Why? Because "we now have this mounting body of empirical research that shows that psychological safety is related to a variety of critical outcomes". Psychological safety is related to key outcomes like employee engagement, retention, inclusion, innovation, and employee wellness.

(32:09) How to get buy-off from leaders using the value equation. Some leaders are "not thrilled" about the term psychological safety others need to see a stronger connection to their key outcomes. It's your job to understand the stakeholders you are working with and to present psychological safety in a way that resonates with them. See our links to previous series on "What's driving demand for psychological safety?".

(40:13) Don't muscle or smuggle change. The two classic failure patterns of organizational change management are muscling (trying to force it through) and smuggling (try to minimize it or do it covertly). "You've gotta square up to the reality of what a change initiative requires and what adoption requires."

Important Links
What Psychological Safety Is Not - Podcast
What Psychological Safety is Not - Post
What Psychological Safety is Not - Webinar

What's Driving Demand for Psychological Safety Series
Pt. 1 What's Driving the Demand for Psychological Safety?
Pt. 2 Exclusion and Social Injustice
Pt. 3 Competitiveness and Innovation
Pt. 4 The Impact of Psychological Safety on Engagement and Retention
Pt. 5 How Mental Health and Wellness is Driving Demand for Psychological Safety

Today's episode is part two of our four-part series on the Change Management Principle, Behave Until You Believe. These episodes are focused on the practical application of each of the four stages of psychological safety and focus on the key principles and behaviors that will help you foster an environment of high psychological safety. This week, Tim and Junior talk about what learner safety is, the two domains of learning, why learning is error-driven, and their top 3 picks from the 4 Stages Behavioral Guide as actions we can take to “Behave Until we Believe” in Stage 2 Learner Safety.

What is learner safety? (03:26) As the second stage of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, learner safety is crucial to ensuring that innovation can  flourish in an organization. In this stage, fear is detached from mistakes, and mistakes are rewarded as part of the learning process.

Learning is error-driven (04:29) In order to learn, we can’t always be right. If our environment only rewards correct answers, the expectation will always be perfection, and learning will never be prioritized. 

The two domains of learning (12:27) Learner safety encompasses creating a culture of rewarded vulnerability across 2 domains: Formal and informal. As we get older, we lose opportunities for formal learning and rely on creating our own informal learning experiences. The goal in these experiences? Create learning agility.

Behavior 1: Share What You’re Learning (21:47) If nobody knows that learning consistently is encouraged and accepted, they won't want to appear ignorant. Model learning behavior as the first-mover. By acknowledging your ignorance you’re making it safe for them to acknowledge theirs.

Behavior 2: Take Notes (31:48) Your mind is not a steel trap. Taking notes is a physical manifestation of your intent to learn, retain, and improve. 

Behavior 3: Identify and Share What You Unlearn (38:57) If knowledge is learning things, wisdom is unlearning things. People and organizations have to let go of what worked before but doesn’t work now, and of what we thought was true, but isn’t.

Important Links
The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety Behavioral Guide

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 influence and is not dependent on positional power.
• Leadership is an invitation that is inevitable if one's aim is to become better and make a positive impact.
• Declining leadership invitations can lead to missed opportunities for growth and influence.
• Subject matter expertise and leadership are not mutually exclusive; both can be developed and leveraged together.
• Imposter syndrome should not prevent one from accepting leadership invitations.
• Accepting leadership invitations helps avoid stagnation and apathy. Rejecting leadership invitations can lead to long-term consequences and a cycle of apathy and helplessness.
• Literature teaches us about the human condition and the importance of striving for something greater than food, drink, and contentment.
• The law of least effort and human biases can influence our decision-making and lead to inertia and mediocrity.
• Accepting leadership invitations requires a balance between self-interest and altruism.
• Successful failures, where we learn and grow from failed outcomes, are an important part of accepting leadership invitations.
• Choosing leadership over comfort and contentment is the ultimate call to adventure.

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction

(00:44) Defining Leadership

(04:11 )Leadership as an Invitation

(05:11) Leadership as the Inevitable End

(06:26) Personal Examples of Leadership Invitations

(11:42) Consequences of Declining Leadership Invitations

(14:22) The Temptation to Decline Leadership Invitations

(20:15) Imposter Syndrome and Leadership

(22:42) Avoiding Stagnation and Apathy

(24:18) The Consequences of Rejecting Leadership Invitations

(28:03) The Law of Least Effort and Human Biases

(30:46) The Negative Implications of Contentment

(36:06) Accepting Leadership Invitations: Recognize, Say Yes, and Try

(41:01) Successful Failures: Learning and Growing from Failed Outcomes

(47:31) Choosing Leadership Over Comfort and Contentment

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. Leaders who coach their people all the way to box nine end up with a team of full thinking partners who are highly skilled, think critically, and take ownership of their roles. They’re encouraging outcome-oriented, future-focused employees who thrive in autonomy and accountability.

For the full learning experience, watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Uwf4uMvsavs

Download the resources from the episode: www.leaderfactor.com/resources/micro-coaching-and-accountability

Layoffs are not just big business decisions. They are profoundly personal for both the individuals who are affected directly and those who remain after them. The goal of this episode is to explore how organizations can navigate through these difficult decisions and prioritize people and culture. If you haven't been affected by a layoff yet, chances are you'll eventually find yourself affected by one. You may avoid one, or maybe even run one. In any of those cases, today's discussion will help you.

Episode Links and Resources
-Layoffs That Don’t Break Your Company
-Workers Feel Survivor’s Guilt as Pandemic Continues and Layoffs Deepen
-6 Strategies to Curb the Impact of Survivor's Guilt in the Workplace
-Roaring Out of Recession
-Changes in the Work Environment for Creativity during Downsizing
-No Security: A Meta-analysis and Review of Job Insecurity and its Consequences
-The Paradox Of Layoffs: Engagement Drops When You Need It Most
-Tech layoffs in 2023 are already one-third of last year’s number and it’s only January

AI is changing the workplace faster than ever, and L&D leaders have a first-mover obligation to introduce AI effectively. In this episode, we explore why waiting for organizational adoption is a mistake, how fear stifles innovation, and three practical steps for navigating AI in leadership.

📥 Get the AI Adoption Guide for L&D Leaders: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/navigating-leadership-in-the-ai-era-3-things-l-d-leaders-should-do

📖 Timestamps:
01:11 - Introduction: Why AI is a leadership challenge, not just a tech issue
02:45 - "What Can AI Do?" vs. "What Can I Do With AI?"
04:18 - "Our Technical Teams Are On It"—Why AI can’t be limited to IT
07:13 - The Risk of Being Left Behind: Lessons from past technological shifts
11:40 - AI Won’t Replace You, But Someone Using AI Will
13:30 - The Fear Factor: Why organizations hesitate to adopt AI
19:11 - Why Enterprise Adoption Is Slow—But Personal Adoption Can Be Fast
23:00 - Step 1: Set the conditions for AI adoption in your organization
27:11 - Step 2: Move first—how leaders can model AI integration
31:23 - Step 3: Make the introduction—helping teams navigate AI confidently
35:37 - AI as a Productivity Multiplier: The Real-World Impact
38:00 - Conclusion: Why L&D leaders must take action now

👉 Download the full guide for a deeper dive:  https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/navigating-leadership-in-the-ai-era-3-things-l-d-leaders-should-do

🔔 Subscribe for more leadership insights: https://www.youtube.com/@LeaderFactor?sub_confirmation=1

💡Bring our training to your organization:
https://www.leaderfactor.com/forms/strategy-call

Connect with us:
⭐ Join our newsletter: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources#subscribe
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In this episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior sit down to talk about leading through uncertainty. The content from this episode comes from Dr. Clark’s most recent Harvard Business Review publication, an article entitled What Employees Need from Leaders in Uncertain Times. In the episode, they explore the impact of uncertainty on individuals and organizations and share four practical strategies for effectively leading teams through uncertain times.

Takeaways

• Uncertainty is a constant in life and can have both negative and positive impacts.
• Creating thick trust is essential for effective leadership during uncertain times.
• Inoculating with vision helps motivate and guide individuals and teams through uncertainty.
• Increasing honesty and transparency builds trust and fosters a positive work environment.
• Seeing uncertainty as an opportunity allows leaders to explore new possibilities and stay competitive.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

03:10 The Impact of Uncertainty

11:06 Perception of Uncertainty

19:57 Creating Thick Trust

27:11 Inoculating with Vision

35:17 Increasing Honesty and Transparency

39:46 Seeing Uncertainty as Opportunity

50:25 Conclusion

Important Links
HBR Article

Leadership is not an ethereal concept. It’s not as cinematic as you might think. It is about one simple and profoundly human thing--Influence. In this episode Tim and Junior breakdown 10 misleading leadership theories and how to avoid them. It's a straightforward and practical episode focused on core leadership lessons we can all learn from.

(13:32) Leadership is not about charisma. Just because you have a personal magnetism, dash, and style it doesn't make you a leader. Charisma can be deceptive and superficial. Don't let charisma be the only qualification for leadership.

(15:50) Leadership is not about eloquence. Eloquence, like charisma, can be deceiving. The question is "see what's behind them, what lies underneath those traits, because if what lies beneath is high quality, it's high character, it's good ethics, it's all of those things, then absolutely, add charisma to the pile, add eloquence."

(22:03) Leadership is not about power. Your position, title, and authority cannot be proxy for leadership. "This is a diagnostic question that anyone can ask, and that is when you're looking at leaders, ask the question, "Is there fear around them? Do they produce fear? Do they use fear? Are they cultivating fear?" Fear is symptomatic of poor leadership.

(26:31) Leadership is not about seniority. The passage of time "does not translate into greater experience, knowledge, expertise, competency, all of those things."

(29:57) Leadership is not about scale. You are not by virtue of the fact that you're working on some important scalable issue, then by extension and by affiliation and by association a great leader.

(32:08) Leadership is not about popularity. "The danger, I think, as leaders is when we're aiming at popularity." Oscar Wilde said, "Popularity is the penalty of success." Popularity can insulate you from critique. "You enter an echo chamber."

(35:29) Leadership is not about fame. "You can see how people get to this point of thinking that popularity is synonymous with leadership. "Oh, this person has a massive following, right? They must be able to lead." That's certainly not true."

(37:47) Leadership is not about winning. We do want our leaders to be competent but, "if you're framing leadership is about winning, then that's a zero-sum adversarial frame. You can do better than that."

(39:32) Leadership is about wealth. We cannot judge someones ability to lead simply by the number of zero's in their bank account. Wealth is not a proxy for leadership.

(42:38) Leadership is not about education. Simply having a degree or credential doesn't make one a leader. We do want highly competent people in leadership positions. However, gaining competence alone does not endow you with the ability to lead.

Some people possess all of these things and are not leaders. Others possess none of these things and are. These 10 things only point to the possibility of leadership, but make no promises.

Important Links
Leading with Character and Competence - Book
10 Things Leadership is Not - Download

Psychological Safety Podcast Series
Stage One: Inclusion Safety
Stage Two: Learner Safety
Stage Three: Contributor Safety
Stage Four: Challenger Safety
Overview: What is Psychological Safety
Bonus: What Psychological Safety is Not

Psychological safety is the key to creating a safer workplace where employees can bring up concerns and problems before they become disasters. This week Tim and Junior explore the link between psychological safety and physical safety for organizations where lives are on the line.

(02:24) Tim shares a personal experience about his time managing the Geneva Steel Plant.
Safety protocols were not followed and a critical accident happened. The life of a worker was lost.

(11:26) The Duty of Care and the fundamental hazard categories.
In 1788 British Parliament passed The Chimney Sweepers Act which established a legal and a moral obligation to keep each other safe in the workplace. Frameworks have evolved around this duty and we've identified four fundamental hazard categories. They are chemical, biological, ergonomic and physical. We've used that framework for more than 200 years to make the workplace a safer place by identifying and removing hazards in these four categories.

(28:36) Passive observation vs active participation.
When we engage in an activity we do so on a spectrum of passive observation to active participation. During activities where safety is at risk passive observation enhances that risk. Passive observation is more likely to occur in environments with low levels of psychological safety.

(36:18) Toyota production lines and the andon cord.
Toyota's introduction of the andon cord is a great example of what it means to "stop the line". The andon cord enabled anyone on the production line regardless of position, title, or authority, to stop the line by pulling the cord. The main concern for Toyota was quality assurance. We can apply this same concept to safety. Anyone on the job, regardless of position, title, or authority should be given the power to "stop the line" at any moment and not be punished for it.

Important Links
Ebook - Breaking the Chain of Command: Achieving Physical Safety through Psychological Safety
Webinar - Breaking the Chain of Command: Improving Physical Safety through Psychological Safety

This series is based on Timothy R. Clark’s book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation. 

You can purchase your copy here: https://www.amazon.com/Stages-Psychological-Safety-Inclusion-Innovation-ebook/dp/B07Y3ZJ8B2/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+four+stages+of+psychological&qid=1585587097&sr=8-1

Or download a free excerpt here:

https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/the-4-stages-book-excerpt

What are The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety? (3:00) Tim and Junior give an overview of the concept as a universal pattern that spans all cultures, demographics, and needs. 

The social exchange for inclusion safety (15:45). Every stage is reciprocal, but inclusion safety is different: to qualify for inclusion safety all you have to be is human and harmless. 

Inclusion in the context of diversity and equity (22:40). In the DEI space, inclusion sits very closely with diversity and equity. But what do their relationships look like?

Inclusion safety and behavioral families (00:00). Inclusion safety behaviors exist in behavioral families, some of which are asking, greeting, and validating. Junior shares his personal experiences as a dishwasher. 

Interaction is not connection (37:23). Oftentimes, we assume that just because we’re interacting with another human that that’s an automatic connection. Tim and Junior discuss why that’s not the case. 

Bonding vs. bridging (41:10). Our natural affinities induce bonding behaviors: it’s easy to connect with these people. But when we don’t have natural affinity we need to engage in bridging behaviors.

Inclusion is a prerequisite for innovation (47:15). While it’s probably uncomfortable, the dividends of inclusion are worth it. 

Today Tim and Junior sit down to discuss Tim’s recent Harvard Business Review article titled “Don’t Let Hierarchy Stifle Innovation.” There are a lot of concepts that Tim wasn’t able to include in his article that are discussed today, including how to improve our interactions, how to unleash bottom-up innovation and the role that hierarchy plays in innovation and execution. 

You can read the HBR article here: https://hbr.org/2022/08/dont-let-hierarchy-stifle-innovation

About the article (1:30). Junior introduces the first line of the article as the theme of this podcast. Tim shares what motivated him to write the article in the first place. 

Innovation, hierarchy, and division one football (7:30). Tim shares an analogy from his college football days that explains how extra layers in a hierarchy makes things complicated.

Whose job is it anyway? (11:15) Tim claims that it’s the senior leadership’s responsibility. They have to enlist the rest of the organization, but innovation is embedded in every role. Do we teach our managers how to manage innovation? 

Interactions have an element of quality (15:25). Being at the top of this spectrum of quality means that fear, anxiety, inhibition don’t get in the way. Is it free-flowing? Energetic Candid? 

Sustainable competitive advantage (21:15). Tim and Junior discuss what innovation does for an organization and why it pays dividends in the long run. 

A culture of rewarded vulnerability (30:30). If participation rights aren’t enforced from day one and in the day-to-day, innovation and change won’t happen. You can’t fake the quality of interaction for more than a couple of hours. 

Innovation is unknown (37:00). This will usually cause some angst, a little bit of “I don’t know” and that discomfort is part of how you’ll know that you’re in exploratory inquiry. 

Normalizing constructive dissent (42:15). Tim and Junior break this down: what is dissent? And what do they mean by constructive?

How empathy regulates discovery (50:40). Empathy means “I will try to understand with compassion and curiosity how you arrived at your conclusions from these data.” Tim explains why empathy is crucial to the innovation process.

Original Air Date: November 21, 2022

The culture dilemma (00:45). Many organizations tell us that they want to improve their culture, but often don’t know where to start. What does an unhealthy culture look like? What symptoms need to be identified and treated?

The definition of culture (02:30). Culture is the way we interact. It exists anywhere where there are humans. Parts of it are visible, while other parts of culture, not so much.  

How does culture work? (16:00) You don’t fix a culture at the top of an organization, but you can influence it at the team level. Teams need to improve their interactions by modeling and rewarding the vulnerabilities of their colleagues. 

What’s the solution? (31:00) If you want good culture, you need high levels of psychological safety. Psychological safety solves for culture at the level of interaction. 

Building great culture is a process (50:00). Just like fostering trust takes a certain level of consistency over time, psychological safety is delicate and dynamic. It requires consistent effort and deliberate action in order to build and maintain.

The Complete Guide to Psychological Safety

The Ladder of Vulnerability

The 4 Stages Behavior Guide

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 coach. Those who rely on directive, one-sided interactions to manage their people will breed dependency and learned helplessness. Those who use inquiry-based conversation in their management will create facilitated self-discovery. Effective leaders use both ends of the spectrum. Where on the continuum do you fall?

For the full learning experience, watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4jOPXTMT8M

Download the resources from the episode: www.leaderfactor.com/resources/micro-coaching-and-accountability

In this week's episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior explain The Ladder of Vulnerability. We all experience vulnerability at work differently, and you have a ladder of vulnerability that's unique to you. This episode, and the online resources available to accompany it, will make it easier for you to talk about vulnerability at work. With these tools, you can change the conversation around vulnerability by providing a more practical, data-driven approach.

Human interaction is a vulnerable activity. (02:25) If you’re interacting with other humans, you’re at risk of harm or loss. But the same exposure that brings the possibilities of rejection, ridicule, and embarrassment also brings the possibilities of connection and fulfillment. 

Not all vulnerability is equal. (17:01) Tim and Junior explain The Ladder of Vulnerability self-assessment, where, applying an 11-point scale, LeaderFactor surveyed over 3000 people from over 800 organizations throughout the world to measure the relative risk associated with the 20 selected behaviors.

Leaders don't adequately understand vulnerability. (41:42) In order to encourage vulnerability in the workplace, leaders have to both model it and reward it with those they work with. 

The LIVE Model (43:25). Tim and Junior discuss the four steps to rewarding vulnerability: 

1. Look
2. Identify
3. Validate
4. Encourage

Links:
Take The Ladder of Vulnerability Self-Assessment
Download the free guide

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 lives
04:10 - The biggest organizational fear statistics and data
08:00 - Fear is a natural biological response, what happens when we trigger it?
13:24 -  Types of organizational fear and how to spot them
22:36 - Fear breaks the feedback loop
30:57 - Practical Strategy #1: Monitor your emotional response to dissent and bad news.
35:51 - Practical Strategy #2: Give updates when there are no updates.
40:42 - Practical Strategy #3: Provide air cover in exchange for candor.

✅ Download the resources/slides from the episode: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/overcoming-organizational-fear-in-3-practical-steps

Or watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/amgKr7dvbk0?si=zv92Jh2O1t18gMo4

In today's episode, we're continuing our Leading with Character & Competence series with a discussion about integrity. Integrity is the first cornerstone of character and is about being honest, trustworthy, and reliable. It's about doing the right thing even when it's difficult. Integrity is key to building trust and credibility, which are essential for effective leadership. 

(0:01:27) Integrity is the first cornerstone of character. Tim and Junior use some famous quotes and concepts to define integrity. It's basic honesty. It's consistency and uprightness. It's squaring up to who you are and what you believe. It's adhering to strong moral values even or especially in the face of challenges.

(0:08:43) Are you for sale? Tim tells a story that he mentions in his book, The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, and explains that without integrity, business ethics go out the window.

(0:17:44) Ethical dilemmas and moral muscle memory. How do you build a moral muscle memory even if bribery or temptation come into play? Tim and Junior share childhood and personal examples of integrity (or the lack thereof) in their own lives. 

(0:28:05) The pressure of the disproportionate misfortune. How does Jean Valjean from Les Miserables play into the concept of integrity? Junior shares his philosophy on why some situations make it more difficult to make ethical decisions than others.

(0:34:27) What could integrity cost you? Often this conversation about integrity happens at a pretty surface level, and you think about it just out of principle. But what happens when you really weigh the cost of it all?

(0:44:05) Recommendation: Take responsibility. You're responsible for your values, your attitudes, your beliefs, your desires, your actions, your influence, and the consequences of all of those things. You can't detach those. You have to take responsibility for all of those things. But how do you do it?

(0:51:19) The steel plant and the walkabout. Tim shares a story from his days as plant manager at Geneva Steel where he learned that people are governed from the inside out, through their own restraints, through their own accountability.

Important Links
Leading with Character and Competence 

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 influence are broken from the get-go.

In this episode of The Leader Factor, Tim and Junior share The Spectrum of Influence framework, discuss influence's two failure patterns, and share 5 tactical behaviors to improve your social regard as a leader.

For the full learning experience, watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uu6FLZtc4gE
Or download the episode resources: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/do-you-actually-care-about-your-team

In this episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior talk about courage as a leadership trait. Courage is a characteristic you need if you want to take risks, innovate, and progress. It's the biggest difference between managers and leaders. This episode is full of practical advice on developing courage, including embracing reality, deep listening, and aiming high. 

(0:02:38) Management vs. Leadership, what’s the difference? The risk profile of leadership as an applied discipline is quite a bit different than the risk profile of management. Why is leadership higher risk? Because leaders venture farther into the unknown than managers do. And it takes courage to explore, to disrupt, and to create.

(0:15:29) What is your leadership-to-management ratio? As disciplines, leadership and management complement and yet compete with each other. They’re interdependent but not interchangeable. They represent different roles, but not different people.

(0:28:54) Creativity requires courage. If innovation is about deviation and disrupting the status quo, then creativity is part of that process. But luckily, courage, like creativity, is a learnable skill. 

(0:35:11) Tim and Junior share four ways to increase courage. (1) Listen, (2) change before it becomes obvious, (3) embrace reality, (4) aim high. 

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 Start
06:11 - Failure Pattern 1: Lack of Executive Buy-In
11:46 - Failure Pattern 2: Grassroots Approach
19:23 - Failure Pattern 3: A-La-Carte or Opt-In Programs
22:51 - Failure Pattern 4: Build vs. Buy Miscalculation 
27:26 - Failure Pattern 5: Poor Content Choice
31:11 - Failure Pattern 6: No Follow-Through

Download the resources from the episode: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/6-pitfalls-of-large-scale-psychological-safety-initiatives

At LeaderFactor, we view leadership as an applied discipline. It’s a learnable skill. It’s something that you can improve with good information and a lot of effort. Leadership is a factor in every decision and every outcome. Character and competence are two big pieces of leadership that will frame everything that follows.

(0:07:04) Character is your core. Your core refers to the way that you govern yourself from the inside out. You’re making decisions and you’re choosing to influence people toward worthy goals and worthy ends. If we treat leadership as an applied discipline, character separates good leaders from great ones.

(0:15:06) Leaders are paid for their judgment, productivity, and collaboration. Judgment is a combination of integrity and knowledge. Productivity is a combination of discipline and skill. Collaboration is a combination of humility and communication.

(0:25:36) Dissonance between the institution and the individual. Often, it’s a collision between personal incentive and an organizational incentive or a personal interest and an organizational interest.

(​​0:30:48) Competence is your crust. This is on top of the core of character. It’s your technical skill, expertise, talents, and aptitudes. If we want to improve our influence there are two levers: who we are and what we do.

(0:39:08) Dangerous leaders with low character and high competence. How can you avoid dangerous hires that are fueled by charisma? Tim and Junior explain how to protect yourself against these kinds of hires with low character.

(0:41:43) The three traits of great leaders. Tim and Junior explain how self-awareness, continuous learning, and authenticity help leaders maximize their influence in their organizations.

This episode is part five in our five part series on "What's Driving Demand for Psychological Safety". When individuals feel psychologically safe at work, they are more likely to report positive mental health outcomes such as increased job satisfaction, higher levels of well-being, and lower levels of stress and burnout.

(05:20) What is mental health? Mental health includes our emotional, psychological and social well-being. It affects how we think and feel and act, and it also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make healthy choices. Previously organizations looked at individuals as "units of production" and only recently are we finally beginning to recognize individuals humanity.

(13:56) Employers have a duty of care towards their employees. This is certainly the case for employee physical safety. How far does this duty of care reach? Does it encompass mental health? Ask yourself, "Do you bear some level of responsibility for the mental health and well-being of the people you employ, the people you associate with, and look even more broadly in association, just any social collective." The answer is yes, you do bear some of the responsibility.

(20:34) More than 264 million people of all ages suffer from depression worldwide according to World Health Organization. 76% of US workers in 2021 survey reported at least one symptom of a mental health condition, including anxiety and depression, which is an increase of 17% from just two years ago. According to the American Psychological Association, stress levels in the United States have been steadily increasing over the past decade, with almost two-thirds of Americans reporting that their stress levels have increased in the past year. Mental health and wellness is a growing category that deserves deliberate attention.

(26:38) ISO, The International standards Organizations Standard 405-003 is a new standard that recognizes that employers are responsible for protecting not just the physical health of their employees but the psycho-social health as well. This means managing psychosocial risks, which are defined in that regulation as risks related to how work is organized. Not risks related to the work itself but also risks related to how work is organized.

(39:31) Psychological safety and a positive workplace culture can help to reduce the stigma associated with mental health making it more likely that individuals will seek the support they need. When individuals feel psychologically safe at work, they are more likely to report positive mental health outcomes such as increased job satisfaction, higher levels of well-being, and lower levels of stress and burnout.

Important Links
World Health Organization - Mental health: strengthening our response.
Current Priorities of the U.S. Surgeon General - Workplace Well-Being
Employee Retention Statistics And Insights 2022
2021 Employee Wellbeing Mindset Study
NYT - The Rising Tide of Global Sadness
World Health Organization - Depression
Australian Bureau of Statistics - National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing
National Institute of Mental Health - Mental Illness
American Psychological Associate - Stress in America
Mental Health Commission of Canada - National Standard

Today's lesson:
The 21st century requires Mission-type or mission-command orders

Key Points:
Mission-type orders include a clear statement of the superior commander's intent and state each unit's tasks in terms of operational effects to be achieved rather than specific commands. A mission-type order only works when your junior officers have the capability to do the job, including the critical and strategic thinking capability. If they don’t, the mission-type order is more dangerous than a static “command order.” The whole concept rests on the ability of the junior leaders to interpret and respond to changing conditions. Let’s understand that a mission-type order is a very different form of delegation. You are mandating the outcome and delegating the tactics. 

Today's key action:
Next time you assign a task, consider “Mission-type Orders”. Describe the what, delegate the how.

What if the stability you’re working so hard to protect is actually what’s holding your team back? In this episode, we explore the Stability-Stress Paradox — the idea that too much comfort can quietly stall innovation, weaken resilience, and prevent growth. If you want your team to not just survive adversity, but bounce forward because of it, this conversation is for you.

Download the guide here: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/the-resilient-team-playbook-5-steps-for-managers

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, ability, and effort, as the most helpful definition a leader can adopt on their leadership journey.

Takeaways

• Intelligence is not fixed and can be improved through effort and learning.
• Our conception of intelligence affects our goal choice and the intensity of our efforts.
• Adopting a growth mindset and seeing intelligence as malleable can lead to greater achievement.
• Rejecting limiting beliefs and embracing a more expansive view of intelligence is crucial for personal and professional growth.
• Intelligence is the intersection of motivation, ability, and effort.

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction and Objectives

(03:01) Redefining Intelligence

(14:47) Intelligence as a Multi-Dimensional Concept

(36:14) Increasing Intelligence Through Effort

(46:55) Rejecting Limiting Beliefs and Embracing a Useful Definition of Intelligence

(49:28) Conclusion and Call to Action

In this episode, Tim and Junior conclude their series on emotional intelligence (EQ) by discussing practical ways to improve it. They explain that EQ is a learnable skill that requires deliberate practice focused on improving behaviors. The key is consistently gathering feedback, monitoring your progress, and making incremental improvements over time.

5 Key Takeaways with Timestamps

1. EQ is a learnable skill, not a fixed trait (0:02:46) - Unlike IQ which is relatively stable, EQ can be improved significantly through effort and practice over time.
2. Willingness and self-awareness are key to improvement (0:17:35) - You have to be willing to see your deficiencies clearly and put in the hard work to change your behavior.
3. Motivation comes from within (0:30:18) - No one can give you motivation, you have to find it in yourself by considering the costs of not improving.
4. You have to change your behavior (0:38:00) - You can't just think your way to better EQ, you have to deliberately practice new behaviors.
5. It's an ongoing cycle (0:49:13) - Continuously self-monitor, gather feedback, improve your behaviors, and repeat. EQ improves incrementally with consistency.

Important Links

• Show Notes: leaderfactor.com/podcast
• EQ Index Self-Assessment: https://www.leaderfactor.com/eqindex
• Feedback and Episode Requests: info@leaderfactor.com

Tim and Junior continue their Leadership Journey series by diving into part two on leading teams. They discuss the challenges leaders face when transitioning from individual contributor to managing others.

0:02:15 - Transitioning from independent contributor to leading a team requires a fundamental shift in mindset and skills. It's often under supported by organizations.

0:08:50 - The team is the basic unit of performance for solving complex problems, not the individual. Adopting a team mindset is critical.

0:13:06 - Promoted leaders can struggle with the loss of their technical identity and skills which defined them previously.

0:19:52 - Building trust enables teams to accomplish more together. The components of trust are integrity, mutual respect, competence, communication and initiative.

0:36:35 - Effective coaching is not telling. It's collaborative, leverages strengths and transfers ownership and critical thinking.

Links

Part 1 of the Leadership Journey Series
EQindex™ Live Event

Today Tim and Junior will be discussing coaching and accountability. These are two of the most important tactical levers a leader has and they always go together. If we do these things well, we’ll be able to effectively transfer two things to our people: 1) Critical thinking and 2) Ownership. In this conversation, Tim and Junior will reference the coaching and accountability matrix created by Dr. Clark which we have included below.

(01:52) Coaching and accountability are connected. "You can't really separate them. They don't come apart. If you think about what coaching is, coaching is really about a cycle of delegation and then holding someone accountable through the process and then coming back and reporting. It's about that ongoing journey. So coaching cannot be separated from accountability."

(09:41) The pattern of our communication will dictate the quality of our coaching. What is your ask to tell ratio? "What's your pattern of communication? Are you telling people what to do all the time? Are you asking questions? What is your ratio?

(17:55) What are the three levels of accountability and how do they play into our coaching conversations? What level of accountability do the highest performers operate at? When we are coaching, can we help others move up to higher levels of accountability?

(28:12) Introducing the coaching and accountability matrix. This diagram serves as a powerful diagnostic tool for leaders, coaches, and managers. Whatever the position, stewards can look at the people for whom they have responsibility and assess their mode of performance based on the two dimensions: coaching and accountability.

(39:09) Where do you fit on the coaching and accountability matrix? What level of accountability do you operate at? Use this matrix not only in your coaching situations but as a measure of your own performance.

Important Links
The Coaching and Accountability Matrix

Tim and Junior define contributor safety (01:00). Contributor safety satisfies our fundamental human need to create value. It's the perfect blend of autonomy and accountability, freedom and guidance.

The social exchange of contributor safety (5:00). When we create contributor safety for others, we empower them with autonomy, guidance, and encouragement in exchange for effort and results.

Why do we hate being micromanaged? (9:15). Tim and Junior explain why micromanagement gets on almost everybody's nerves and why we crave autonomy and freedom.

A leaders contribution vs. an individual's contribution (14:35). Leaders have to be willing to let go of the reins of execution and find fulfillment and value in innovation. 

The Micromanager vs. the Absentee Landlord (19:45). Micromanagers don't know when to stop offering guidance and trust their employees to do their job. Absentee Landlords aren't willing to offer guidance and direction while expecting perfect outcomes.

Contributor safety introspection questions (23:40). Junior asks a series of questions and asks listeners to crack themselves open and figure out where they fall short in the world of contributor safety.

Discovery and advocacy (27:25). But when you’re willing to ask more than you tell, you transfer those core critical thinking skills to your team instead of keeping them all for yourself. Letting go of the reins means that you transfer not only the execution aspects of the job, but also the fulfilling parts of the work at hand: outcomes, success, discovery, and deliverables can be transferred too.

Tolkien's contributions to contributor safety (39:35). Tim shares a quote from famous writer J. R. R. Tolkien.

How coaching affects contributor safety (41:00). Microcoaching and accountability are fundamental skills that any leader has to acquire in order to be successful in dynamic business environments.

The three levels of accountability (44:10). In any team, individuals may work under three different levels of accountability–task, process, and outcome. Those who work at task-level accountability need to be walked through every aspect of the job. Once a team member shows that they can complete tasks sufficiently, they graduate to process-level accountability: tasks can be strung together in a predictable, consistent process and they will still know what to do. The third level of accountability is where good employees can become influential innovators: outcome-level accountability. Here how we get our work done, how we accomplish our tasks, and how we manage projects and processes don’t matter so much. It’s all about the outcome. 

In this episode of Culture by Design, we're talking about building a culture where employees feel free to speak up. This episode comes to you from an article Tim published recently on HBR with the same title. You can't just speak a speak-up culture into existence. Doing so in the absence of psychological safety is actually an abdication of leadership and an admission of failure. Tim and Junior talk about the four separations presented in Tim's article that create the conditions to give all employees a voice and motivate them to use it. They are: (1) separate worth from worthiness, (2) separate loyalty from agreement, (3) separate status from opinion, and (4) separate permission from adoption.

What's the opposite of psychological safety and speak-up cultures? (03:11) Rhetorical reassurance in the absence of true psychological safety is an abdication of leadership and an admission of failure.

Why do we want speak-up cultures? (10:21) Tim and Junior explain how speak-up cultures improve safety and compliance, improve decision-making, and increase innovation. 

Why are speak-up cultures hard to create? (11:57) Speaking up is a highly vulnerable behavior. We gathered 50,000 data points on people's experiences with vulnerability at work. Tim and Junior explain the significance of the data in the context of challenging the status quo.

Separate worth from worthiness (17:36) Worth is based on your intrinsic inherent worth as a human being. Tim and Junior explain why speaking up is not a matter of worth, and how separating worth from worthiness helps us create a foundation of inclusion.

Separate loyalty from agreement (28:39) When loyalty becomes contingent on agreement, it produces manipulated conformity, which isn’t loyalty at all. True loyalty, which refers to genuine concern for and dedication to the best interests of an institution and its people, must not only allow, but encourage, independent thought.

Separate status from opinion (34:53) Smart people don’t make a smart team unless they can harness their collective intelligence. We harness collective intelligence by inviting and processing dissent. How do you do this? Teach and model the art of disagreement (both how to disagree and how to be disagreed with).

Separate permission from adoption (43:29) Some people mistakenly believe that to be heard is to be heeded. Of course, in organizations, this is not possible. The organization can’t say yes to everyone. It has to constantly make tradeoff decisions in the allocation of its resources. Remove the misconception that permission to speak up somehow translates into an obligation to adopt the suggestion. And, in the absence of adoption, emphasize recognition.

Important Links:
HBR Article: Building a Culture Where Employees Feel Free to Speak-Up
The Ladder of Vulnerability Data

In this week's episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior dive into the penultimate episode of their series, Leading With Character and Competence, with a discussion on judgment. If decisions are the primary output of any leader, then improving decision-making is a crucial part of becoming a better leader. The two define and frame the concept, and then share practical ways to improve judgment as a learnable skill. 

Judgment diagnostic questions (04:45). Tim asks listeners a few questions to gauge where they're at with their judgment abilities. The first one? Would you say that you're a good decision-maker? 

Judgment, systems thinking, and searchlight intelligence (14:16). Junior brings up analysis paralysis and the components of good judgment, including good information.

Tackling adaptive challenges with good judgment (27:54). The faster you can identify adaptive challenges, the better your judgment will be. What are the opportunities, threats, and crises facing your organization?

Judgment and delegation (46:47). Do you use your judgment to multiply force and accelerate the development of people around you? Can you resist the arrogance and overconfidence that comes with success?

Today's lesson:
Proximity Prevents Hostility

Key Points:
"There’s a lot of hatred, prejudice, discrimination, and contention between and among people who don’t really even know each other. Humans tend to fear difference, especially at a distance." -James Baldwin 1963 “Many of our society's greatest problems are created by people who don’t feel seen and heard.” -David Brooks “Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction” --Alain de Botton 

Today's key action:
Here it is: Spend time in the same physical space as someone with different bumper stickers than you and make a concerted effort to understand their perspective by asking questions.

In today's episode Tim and Junior define culture and explain the three levels at which it lives. They explain the most important level of culture: the micro-culture & the single most important variable for influencing psychological safety on a team. Today's conversations includes a peek into some of our survey data that’s brand new coming out of LeaderFactor’s Psychological Safety Survey Tools.

(02:06) What is culture? In short, culture is the way we interact. Culture is in and around us. Fish have water and humans have culture.

(04:26) How does culture form? Tim and Junior discuss the three levels of culture. 1) A pattern of thought or behavior in an individual is a habit. 2) A pattern of thought or behavior in an individual is a habit. 3) A collection of norms in an organization is a culture.

(08:21) What is a sub-culture or micro-culture? A sub-culture is a smaller, distinct group within a larger society that shares unique beliefs, values, practices, norms, and behaviors that set them apart from the dominant or mainstream culture. These subcultures can form based on various factors, such as shared interests, hobbies, profession, ethnicity, religion, generation, or geographical location. In an organization there are many micro-cultures.

(15:13) What does the data say? Team assignment is by far a more powerful variable in understanding variants, in understanding the nature of the culture and the nature of the experience that you'll have.

(25:05) Team leaders have the single biggest influence on culture formation. Leaders are the cultural bottleneck for positive the experiences of their team members. The leader has the single biggest influence on the micro-culture of the team. This is more important than any single demographic variable.

(32:58) How do we build better leaders through cultural accountability? "We have these, these KPIs, we have these numbers. And what is that? It's almost all going to be technical. Having that layer of cultural accountability becomes very important, which is why it's a big reason we measure psychological safety, we have quantifiable evidence of how we're doing in cultural accountability."

(38:49) Culture by design or by default?  "If you're gonna try and go affect the opinion, the prevailing norms at the top of an organization, you better come with some data, and we've seen this over and over again. We won't go to the top of an institution and attempt to do this without some data, it's important that you can back up what you're saying."

(45:13) Cultural accountability can help you in your planning. "We're starting to see this more and more in organizations where they are incorporating psychological safety as a selection criterion for promotion to management"

Important Links
The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™ Survey

In this episode Tim and Junior discuss the seven misconceptions surrounding psychological safety. Some organizations and some leaders dismiss psychological safety because they believe that it means a whole host of things, that it doesn't mean. So they dismiss it and they ignore it. When helping leaders understand the topic of psychological safety, defining what psychological safety is not can be just as helpful as defining what it is.

(03:19) What is psychological safety? Psychological safety is a culture of rewarded vulnerability. It is an applied discipline that requires effort and a high bar to create this kind of culture. Individuals and teams progress through four successive stages of psychological safety.

(10:06) Psychological safety is not "niceness". Tim wrote an article featured in Harvard Business Review titled, "The Hazards of a Nice Company Culture". Sometimes a thin layer of niceness is spread over a thick layer of fear. We're not saying, don't be warm, hospitable, or caring. When we are collegial to a fault, what happens? We create false harmony and false compassion. A barracuda may smile at you, but don’t pet it. Niceness without pure intent is counterfeit. It still induces fear and mistrust.

(26:03) Psychological safety is not consensus decision making. Yes, psychological safety should do much to neutralize the power differential created by hierarchy, titles, and position, but I’ve seen employees who believed that their organization’s emphasis on psychological safety invested them with veto power. Psychological safety should give you voice, but it does not change decision making authority.

(42:13) Psychological safety is not rhetorical reassurance. Some leaders try to enact psychological safety with words. They mistakenly believe they can decree it into existence by simply saying, “Psychological safety is a priority for our organization. Please speak up. Give us your honest feedback and candid input. It’s now safe.” Just making a declaration won’t make it so.

Important Links
HBR - The Hazards of a “Nice” Company Culture
What Psychological Safety is Not
The Complete Guide to Psychological Safety
What is Psychological Safety - Podcast Episode
What is Psychological Safety - Website

What is challenger safety? (1:12) Challenger safety is the fourth and final stage of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety. Do you feel like you can be candid about change? Challenger safety satisfies the basic human need to make things better.

What does challenger safety look like across industries? (4:00) Whether you’re an executive at an up-and-coming startup in Silicon Valley, a nurse in a state hospital, or a tenured professor at a prestigious university, every job needs challenger safety.

What’s the social exchange for this stage? (8:00) When we create challenger safety, we give air cover (protection) in exchange for candor. Tim and Junior discuss why we should value candor in the workplace. After all, what’s the point of bleached, sanitized feedback?

What happens when organizations try to hide their lack of challenger safety? (16:00) Silence is expensive. When teams claim they have a speak-up culture, but do everything in their power to keep their teams quiet, their ruse quickly becomes obvious. Eventually, the candor will come out.

How do we avoid echo chambers? (20:00) If all a leader wants in a meeting is validation that they already have the best ideas, they should have a meeting with themself. Tim and Junior explain that avoiding the dangerous traps of groupthink involves harvesting the power of candid feedback.

Where does the word innovation come from? (22:00) Junior and Tim are surprised to learn that the Latin root of the word “innovate” means to renew or alter. 

What is pride of authorship? (27:00) It’s exactly what it sounds like: the sense of ownership that someone feels over their idea, solution, comment, or deliverable. It suffocates feedback and encourages echo chambers. 

Is innovation an engagement issue or a culture issue? (34:00) As the precursor to employee engagement, psychological safety creates a culture of rewarded vulnerability that allows innovation to happen.

How do I neutralize the power difference of hierarchies? (40:45) Hierarchy can easily stifle innovation. When superiority and hierarchy dominate your company culture you definitely won’t innovate.

What’s the difference between social and intellectual friction? (46:30) In these moments of collision, a leader’s task is to simultaneously increase intellectual friction and decrease social friction. High intellectual friction lets your team harness creative abrasion and constructive dissent and arrive at real innovation. 

What happens if you fail to have challenger safety? (53:40) You’ll want to hear it straight from Tim and Junior themselves. Listen to the end to find out.

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

The Psychological Safety Behavioral Guide

LeaderFactor Note #26
HBR Article: Don’t Let Hierarchy Stifle Innovation

Podcast: Don’t Let Hierarchy Stifle Innovation

Or learn more at leaderfactor.com

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 bruised learner is a cognitively impaired learner. An emotionally empowered learner is a cognitively enabled learner. The choice is yours: What kind of risk will you entertain in your culture? The risk of learning, or the risk of not learning? 

Listen in as hosts Tim and Junior discuss how to build Stage 2: Learner Safety individually, on a team, and in an organization.

For the full learning experience, watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bND6XuFrEVQ

Download the episode resources: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/how-to-build-the-4-stages-of-psychological-safety

In today's episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior discuss a question brought up in a recent Harvard Business Review article, which is, can you have too much psychological safety? The article suggested that excessive amounts of psychological safety could undermine accountability and performance. Tim and Junior share their perspective, pushing back on some of the misconceptions about what psychological safety really is and what it really means.

Defining psychological safety (01:35) Most of the debate around the question of whether you can have too much psychological safety stems around your definition of the term. Tim and Junior share theirs: Psychological safety is an environment of rewarded vulnerability that considers four stages and categories of behavior, we have inclusion, learning, contribution, and challenging.

The leader's role in creating psychological safety (14:03) Most environments create accountability by necessity. For industries in highly regulated environments, it's the leader's job to define culturally and operationally the upper control limit, the lower control limit, and the center line. Everybody needs to understand the tolerances, constraints, regulations, and limitations and work within that.

Psychological safety does not imply rogue behavior (34:10) Even though psychological safety gives employees permission to innovate and challenge the status quo, this doesn't mean that people are free to ignore policy and procedure to do what they want when they want. Oftentimes, we're talking about incremental and derivative innovation, looking for a 1% improvement, and making marginal gains.

Important Links
HBR: Can Workplaces Have Too Much Psychological Safety?
The Complete Guide to Psychological Safety

This episode is part four in our five part series on "What's Causing Demand for Psychological Safety." Tim and Junior dive into the data behind the great resignation and the link between workplace culture and employee retention. 

(04:30) Before employee engagement there was employee satisfaction. We learned that employee satisfaction was not the right measurement. You can have satisfied employees that are not productive so we graduated from employee satisfaction to employee engagement.

(07:41) Recent data suggests that only 32% of the workforce is considered engaged while 52% are "just showing up" and 16% are "actively disengaged". These numbers feed into the employee turnover.

(15:24) Not all turnover is bad. There are cases where a certain amount of turnover is healthy. You don't want disengaged and unproductive employees to stay if they are not a good fit and they are not contributing. What we are hoping to avoid are the regrettable losses.

(26:37) The Work Institute Report shared that 40% of employee turnover occurs within the employee's first year with the organization. Retaining and engaging our top talent is becoming a bigger and bigger challenge.

(35:48) "52% of voluntarily exiting employees, say their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job." Gathering this feedback in an exit interview is too late. We need to be proactive in retaining our top talent.

(45:44) Just as we have seen a graduation from employee satisfaction to employee engagement we are beginning to see a graduation on to psychological safety. Psychological safety is the lead measure for employee engagement and can help leaders be proactive in resolving cultural issues.

Important Links

• Psychological Safety Stay Interview Guide
• This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics - Table 4. Quits levels and rates by industry and region, seasonally adjusted.
• Deconstructing the Great Resignation
• EY Global Survey Data
• The great executive - employee disconnect
• Work Institute 2020 Retention Report
• State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report
• Glassdoor’s Diversity and Inclusion Workplace Survey
• SHRM Global Culture Research Report 2022

The 4 Stages Team Survey
Your engagement survey isn’t telling you the whole story about your company culture.  Find out how your culture is really doing and how to improve it by measuring psychological safety.

https://www.leaderfactor.com/psychological-safety-survey

Tim and Junior talk about the two primary failure patterns in leadership, incompetence and corruption. Effective leaders are leaders with high competence and high moral character. A deficiency in one or the other leaves us susceptible to poor choices, values, and influence on our leadership journey. As part of the episode, our host outlined four different types of leaders. Are you the apprentice, the accomplice, the villain, or the hero?

Takeaways

• Leadership failures often fall into two categories: incompetence and corruption.
• Character and competence are both essential for effective leadership.
• Influence can be positive or negative, depending on the combination of character and competence.
• The relationship between incompetence and corruption can lead to a downward spiral in leadership and life. Leadership can be categorized into four quadrants: the apprentice, the accomplice, the villain, and the hero.
• Developing both character and competence is essential to becoming a hero leader.
• Plotting your current and future positions on the leadership field helps identify the gap and create tension for growth.
• Closing the gap requires a fearless examination of personal leadership pathology and a commitment to change.

Timestamps

Introduction (00:00)

The Two Failure Patterns: Incompetence and Corruption (00:35)

The Two Axes: Character and Competence (03:01)

Character and Competence: The Intersection (04:17)

Building Influence through Competence and Character (06:18)

Influence Can Be Positive or Negative (08:00)

The Relationship Between Incompetence and Corruption (16:11)

The Four Character Types: Apprentice (25:42)

The Accomplice (29:13)

The Villain (31:19)

The Hero (34:27)

Plotting Your Position (40:18)

Closing the Gap (46:53)

Final Thoughts (58:13)

How do you create a team culture where people actually speak up — even when it’s uncomfortable? In this episode, we explore the power of constructive dissent and how it fuels innovation, better decisions, and stronger teams. Learn the 4-step process for productive disagreement, why leaders often struggle with dissent, and how to turn conflict into your team’s secret weapon.

Harvard Business Review Article: https://hbr.org/2025/02/how-constructive-dissent-can-unlock-your-teams-innovation

The culture dilemma (00:45). Many organizations tell us that they want to improve their culture, but often don’t know where to start. What does an unhealthy culture look like? What symptoms need to be identified and treated?

The definition of culture (02:30). Culture is the way we interact. It exists anywhere where there are humans. Parts of it are visible, while other parts of culture, not so much.  

How does culture work? (16:00) You don’t fix a culture at the top of an organization, but you can influence it at the team level. Teams need to improve their interactions by modeling and rewarding the vulnerabilities of their colleagues. 

What’s the solution? (31:00) If you want good culture, you need high levels of psychological safety. Psychological safety solves for culture at the level of interaction. 

Building great culture is a process (50:00). Just like fostering trust takes a certain level of consistency over time, psychological safety is delicate and dynamic. It requires consistent effort and deliberate action in order to build and maintain.

The Complete Guide to Psychological Safety

The Ladder of Vulnerability

The 4 Stages Behavior Guide

Stage 2 Learner Safety is is part two in our four part series based on Timothy R. Clark’s book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation. In this episode Timothy R. Clark and Junior Clark answer key questions around how to create a culture where there is both encouragement to learn and engagement in the learning process.

What is Learner Safety? (2:10)
Learner safety satisfies our basic need to learn and grow. We all engage in the learning process and in that process we engage in acts of vulnerability related to learning. A culture of learner safety means those acts of vulnerability are rewarded. Learner safety always precedes contribution and contributor safety.

What is the social exchange? (6:00)
The social exchange is "encouragement to learn in exchange for engaging in the learning process". Who goes first, the team or the individual contributor in the learning process. The leader and the team have a first mover responsibility to provide the encouragement to learn. You can't assume individuals show up ready to learn. The leader sets conditions and sets the tone and it cannot be delegated. We will never grow out of our need to have encouragement to learn. There will always be some trepidation in the learning process.

The organization has an imperative to drive "learning agility". (13:43)
Learning agility means you are learning at or above the rate of change. Without learning agility your organization will slowly become obsolete. Organizations are always becoming obsolete it's just a matter of the rate of the burn.

Examples of punished learner safety. (16:51)
Learning is both intellectual and emotional. When someone shuts down our learning process we don't forget. Instances of punished learning vulnerability have lasting effects, they trigger our self-censoring instinct, and shut down the learning process. When you take punished vulnerability to learning public it becomes a nuclear weapon.

How do you balance performance with mistakes? (26:23)
How do you make mistakes allowable as fuel for learning but eliminate mistakes when the stakes are high? The key is creating a place and a time where we have room to make mistake and having clear boundaries between the execution and innovation environments. There is a difference between being on the operating table and practicing on a dummy. First define the boundaries. 

A leader/teacher's job is to transfer critical thinking and accountability. (34:38)
In order to help transfer critical thinking to the learner you must ask questions. The three types of questions are the what, why, and how questions. Part of the answer of creating learner safety is to move away from didactic questions to questions that transfer critical thinking. Learner safety is not soft or enabling but it does require good faith and intent without ulterior motives.

High learner safety is correlated with innovation. (45:45)
One of the jobs of the leader is to oil the gears of collaboration. If individual contributors have high levels of learner safety they are more likely to explore new ideas, discover new solutions, and innovate faster than the rate of change. 

What is the role of the individual in learning process? (49:37)
You are primarily responsible for your own learning and develop. You cannot rely on your organization. It is your job to become an aggressive self-directed learner. If the organization can help you, that's great. Sometimes you will have more support and sometimes you will have less. You have to take responsibility. Without aggressive learning you have "retired while on the job".

Important Links from This Episode.

• Purchase a copy of "The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety" on Amazon.
• Download a free excerpt of the book.
• Stage 1 Inclusion Safety Podcast Episode
• What is Psychological Safety?
• The 4 Stages Behavior Guide (Learner Safety Behaviors)

There is something in your management style that is limiting your team and ultimately your organization. How do you spot the symptoms of coaching derailers, such as communication issues, emotional reactivity, and micromanagement? In this episode, we give you the tools to spot the symptoms and actionable tips to close your coaching gaps and change your coaching style.

Episode Chapters
1:34 - Introduction to Coaching Derailers
3:54 - The Role of Self-Awareness in Coaching
6:44 - The Two Levers of Leadership: Modeling and Coaching
9:04 - Understanding Coaching Derailers
13:49 - Behavioral Symptoms of Coaching Derailers
18:24 - The Consequences of Poor Coaching Skills
21:44 - Practical Strategies for Communication Issues
26:04 - Managing Emotional Reactivity
30:14 - Fostering Engagement and Focus
34:44 - Encouraging Autonomy Through Inquiry
38:04 - Closing Thoughts and Takeaways

✅ Download the resources/slides from the episode: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/the-4-coaching-derailers-that-are-ruining-your-career

🎬 Watch our most recent videos: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6sIjV1NQzDb0VPdIFsCGTt5s0GOEBF1M&si=H8dH2HNobRkhvsM5

🔎 Learn more about our globally proven frameworks: 
https://www.leaderfactor.com/

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Connect with us:
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Psychological safety has been found to be the number one variable in team performance, and in recent episodes we've discussed the most important variable for psychological safety was the leader of the team. As a manager, as a leader of people, you either lead the way or you get in the way. Much of what dictates whether you're leading the way or getting in the way is the way in which you integrate or don't integrate psychological safety into your work.

In this episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior discuss exactly how to incorporate psychological safety as a manager, and will introduce you to some tools that'll help you along the way.

What makes a manager good or bad? Effective or ineffective? (02:56) Our ability to manage and to lead depends on how well we interact with others. McKinsey has found that only 15% of managers create a psychologically safe work environment. This is the biggest and most chronic deficiency in all of leadership.

Most managers have not been trained to lead. Why? (12:48) Leadership as an investment activity isn’t profitable short-term. Leading teams and businesses requires much more than technical competence, it requires cultural competence, at the heart of which lies psychological safety.

How do you implement psychological safety on your team? (27:47) When sharing the concept of psychological safety with your team you need to define the term, set clear expectations, enforce those expectations, live those expectations yourself, and reward vulnerability.

Important Links:
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/five-fifty-is-it-safe
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothyclark/2021/06/21/what-psychological-safety-is-not/?sh=72511fc66452
The Ladder of Vulnerability

In this episode, we're continuing our Leading with Character and Competence series with a discussion on the second cornerstone of competence, change. Previous episodes in this series have been on the four cornerstones of character, which in case you missed them, are integrity, humility, accountability, and courage. In order to become an effective leader and become what we would truly consider competent, you have to become skilled at adapting to change yourself and leading others through change. Tim and Junior talk about facing change as an individual and as a leader, as well as the two failure patterns that organizations face when running change initiatives. 

What is change? (0:03:15) Change always requires the performance of additional work and the absorption of additional stress. It's a gateway competency in the 21st century. Sometimes we choose it, and sometimes it chooses us. 

What is resilience? (0:09:38) In order to become an effective leader and become what we would truly consider competent, you have to become skilled at adapting to change yourself and leading others through change. And in order to manage change at the individual level, we have to be resilient. 

Tackling organizational change (0:23:51) Tim and Junior discuss the two domains of change, personal and organizational. They explain the cocktail of confidence, adaptability, and optimism. 

Applying confidence, optimism, and gratitude (0:28:56) How do these three apply to relationships, renewal, learning, contribution, achievement, and purpose?

Two change failure patterns (0:40:35) You can't muscle or smuggle change. When we smuggle, we try to hide the fact that we're changing from people, to bring it into the organization and conceal it, cover it up, bring it in as a covert action, minimize it. When we muscle change, we use formal authority and positional power to force change. Neither yield promising results. 

In this episode of Culture by Design, we're finishing up our Character and Competence series with the final episode. And if you've been with us each week, thank you. This has been an impactful few weeks where we've discussed topics including integrity, humility, accountability, courage, learning, change, judgment, and finally today, we cover the fourth cornerstone of competence, vision. Tim and Junior will discuss, vision is to see what does not exist, to see what others cannot see, and to see potential and possibility in yourself, in others, and in the organization. 

What is vision? (03:16) Vision is another differentiator between leaders and managers, and great leaders have two kinds of vision for two units of performance: the individual and the organization. But vision isn't made up of dreams, you have to take note of your wanting/willing ratio.

‍

Vision helps you survive (17:24) Inevitably, disaster will strike. Vision helps pull us through when we face uncertainty. Uncertainty paired with the vision that can pull us forward and create some mobilization.

‍

Vision precedes creativity (20:37) Tim and Junior explain that vision begins the creative process. Creating a vision is creating a conception of the future and defining a goal. Leaders need to enable independence in their people before they can enable creativity.

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Creating a vision (32:01) Our hosts delve into how to create, simplify, communicate, embody, and endure your vision. 

In this episode, Tim and Junior discuss how high-performing teams are formed and maintained. The quality of an organization is a reflection of the quality of its teams, and high-performing teams have patterns. Although there are many patterns, Tim and Junior will focus on a core four in this episode, including how high-performing teams (1) connect, how they (2) improve their skills, how they (3) view transparency and autonomy and how they (4) continuously seek innovation.

The benefits of improving your teams' performance (01:43) Remember, individuals rarely accomplish extraordinary feats alone. The quality of an organization is a reflection of the quality of its teams. As you improve your teams, you’ll get two things: Leverage and scale. You'll be able to multiply the force, scope, and magnitude of your organizational efforts.

How do high-performing teams connect? (13:55) High performing teams know each other. If your team doesn’t know each other, it’s not a high performing team, or at least it won’t be for very long, or when things get hard. Tim and Junior share the story of Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and why a 3-day offsite was one of the most important things he has done as a CEO.

How do high-performing teams improve their skills? (26:33) High performing teams are constantly growing. When teams acknowledge that the knowledge they have today is not enough, they open themselves up to development. 

How do high-performing teams view transparency and autonomy? (38:10) High performing teams are focused on achievement based on transparent, meaningful metrics. Tim and Junior talk about Google's Project Aristotle and how they discovered that psychological safety is the #1 indicator of high-performance. 

How do high-performing teams chase innovation? (50:44) High performing teams believe in continuous improvement. They're proud but never satisfied. At the end of the day, challenger safety not just as challenging the organization, but challenging ourselves to do better and be better. 

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 work currently, and where they want to be. The 3 Levels of Accountability illustrate the relationship between autonomy and accountability and help us set our sights on the ultimate goal: Outcome-level accountability.

For the full learning experience, watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jMBu1jgo8vE

Download the resources from the episode: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/micro-coaching-and-accountability

Today's lesson:
Beware the Tyranny of Your Expertise

Key Points:
Expertise is a double edged sword. On one side, it’s knowledge, it's useful, and it’s leverage. On the other side, you can become insulated and you can lose touch with context. "The danger of the expert is that he often becomes a prisoner of his own expertise." -Peter Drucker. There is no field of knowledge that is static or complete. Nothing is in a state of true equilibrium, so if you don’t move with the unfolding of knowledge in your field of expertise, you become increasingly obsolete and irrelevant. 

Today's key action:
Next time you feel like you’re 100% confident in the answer, assume you’re missing something.

Today, Tim and Junior kickoff a three-part series on the leadership journey: Leading yourself, leading the team, and leading the business. Today's episode is focused on leading yourself. Tim and Junior emphasize taking personal accountability and ownership of your own development. You'll hear insights on cultivating wellness, self-awareness, and a growth mindset. Tim and Junior also share their personal learning habits from consuming quality information across multiple mediums to embracing curiosity.

Why LeaderFactor? (03:11) Tim shares the meaning behind LeaderFactor's name and founding. Leadership is the ultimate applied discipline, it's the factor that affects every aspect of your business.

Leadership and personal accountability (06:45) Without personal accountability, nothing happens. As an inside-out discipline, the demands you make of yourself will reflect the demands you make on your business.

The nature of contribution (14:21) Tim and Junior share Paul Thompson and Gene Dalton's four levels of contribution. They explain how to move through these levels as you work to better lead yourself. To do so, you must own your own development.

How's your coachability? (29:14) Tim and Junior share the two things that everyone needs to improve to become better at leading themselves. The first is willingness, and the second is self-awareness.

Personal learning patterns (43:34) Listen to our hosts share their learning patterns, some of the things they do personally to learn and develop their skills.

Episode Links
The Future of EQ Webinar

In today's episode, Tim and Junior will continue our series on emotional intelligence. If you joined us last week for our kickoff of this series, you'll know that we answered the question, what is emotional intelligence? We shared our unique definition of emotional intelligence, which is the ability to interact effectively with other people. Today, we'll continue the discussion by answering the question, why is emotional intelligence central to competitive advantage? Be sure to check the show notes for links to all relevant resources related to this episode, including a link to learn about EQ Index, our proprietary EQ assessment that we will be making publicly available for individuals and teams early next year.

EQindex Assessment

In today's episode, Tim and Junior dive into the world of cross-cultural communication and explore the importance of understanding cultural differences. From nonverbal communication to attitudes towards conflict and time orientation, they examine how cultural dimensions impact our behavior and interactions with others. Join them for an episode full of practical tips for developing intercultural competence and improving your effectiveness in a globalized world.

(0:01:27) Introduction. Over 70% of failed international ventures are due to cultural differences. Cultural misunderstandings, we'll talk about those today, can cost companies millions of dollars, and they can damage relationships with partners and customers around the world.

(0:14:25) Defining cultural differences. The way that we view cultural differences is often geographic, our awareness of that needs to be not just at the level of geography, but at the level of person-to-person. 

(0:20:09) Some cultural variables to consider. The effectiveness of our approach to culture will be dictated in some measure by the awareness of these differences that we've talked about and how those differences impact our behavior and strategy. Are your people used to communicating directly or indirectly? Do they value individualism or collectivism? How do they view hierarchy? What is their time orientation? How do they use nonverbal communication? What’s their attitude towards conflict?

(0:37:55) Localization and globalization examples. Why won’t you find the same McDonald's menu in every country? 

(0:42:52) Geert Hofstede and power distance. Tim and Junior share a cultural dimensions theory based on a series of surveys that were done in the '70s and '80s at IBM.

(0:47:32) Power distance and psychological safety. Cultures with low power distance that emphasize equality, individual rights, and autonomy create an environment more conducive to developing Stage 4: Challenger Safety.

(0:51:20) Overcoming bias on global teams. Tim and Junior discuss how to create Stage 1: Inclusion Safety and frame humanity above human characteristics.

(1:04:13) Developing interpersonal or intercultural competence. This is how you improve your teams on a practical level.

Here at LeaderFactor, we're all about helping our clients take the theories behind psychological safety and culture and turn them into actual practice inside their organizations. Our goal is to make our content and frameworks as actual as possible, and that's what this episode is all about. We've taken some recent favorite practical moments from Tim and Junior and compiled them together. We'll have three segments from a few different episodes, each ranging from 10-15 minutes. 

Emotional regulation is one of the most critical leadership skills—but also one of the hardest to master. In this episode, Tim and Junior break down how leaders can stay composed in the face of dissent and bad news, why emotional responses shape workplace culture, and practical strategies to strengthen self-regulation.

Key Takeaways: 
✔️ Why dissent and bad news are leadership landmines 
✔️ How unregulated emotions lead to toxic cultures 
✔️ Strategies to handle tough conversations with confidence 
✔️ Creating psychological safety in your team 
✔️ The power of pausing before reacting

📥 Download the resources/slides from the episode: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/emotional-regulation-for-leaders-your-6-step-guide

Episode Chapters: 
00:00 – Intro: Why Emotional Regulation is Critical 
02:50 – The Leadership Challenges of Dissent & Bad News 
07:30 – The Hidden Cost of Poor Emotional Responses 
12:15 – How Leaders Can Reframe Dissent as Opportunity 
16:40 – Handling Bad News Without Panic or Frustration 
21:05 – Creating Psychological Safety in Your Organization 
25:30 – The Agreeableness Bias & Why Leaders Must Invite Dissent 
30:10 – The Importance of Avoiding Backchannel Complaints 
35:45 – Practical Strategies to Regulate Emotions in High-Stakes Moments 
40:20 – Closing Thoughts & Leadership Takeaways

🎬 Watch our most recent videos: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6sIjV1NQzDb0VPdIFsCGTt5s0GOEBF1M&si=H8dH2HNobRkhvsM5

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Connect with us:
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⭐ Find us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/leaderfactor

Today's lesson:
Leaders Get Paid for Judgment

Key Points:
Judgment is the correct application of your expertise but just because you’re an expert doesn’t mean you have good judgment. Quality judgment is a skill that must be developed. Not everyone is born with it. We can think about the decision making process the same way we think about physical production. If the quality of your raw materials and your inputs is poor, then your outputs will be poor.

Today's key action:
Identify an area of your professional life that you feel would benefit from some deliberate, aggressive, self-directed learning. And then book a 20 minute slot on your calendar within the next two days to do some intentional learning.

In this episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior discuss the importance of psychological safety in healthcare. They highlight the significant issue of medical errors in the industry and propose creating a culture of rewarded vulnerability to overcome the fear of speaking up. They also discuss the barriers to psychological safety in healthcare and the ultimate impact of psychological safety, which is to improve patient outcomes and reduce preventable medical errors, ultimately saving lives.

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety offer strategies for measuring and improving the fear of speaking up at all levels of the organization. By prioritizing psychological safety, healthcare leaders can create a better work environment and improve the quality of care for patients.

Important Links and References

World Health Organization. (2017). Global Priorities for Patient Safety Research. Retrieved from https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/258881/WHO-IER-PSP-2017.11-eng.pdf?sequence=1

Institute of Medicine. (1999). To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Retrieved from https://www.nap.edu/catalog/9728/to-err-is-human-building-a-safer-health-system

Achieving Physical Safety Through Psychological Safety

https://www.leaderfactor.com/podcast/achieving-physical-safety-through-psychological-safety

Magill SS, Edwards JR, Bamberg W, et al. Multistate point-prevalence survey of health care-associated infections. N Engl J Med. 2014;370(13):1198-1208. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa1306801

Allegranzi, B., Bagheri Nejad, S., Combescure, C., Graafmans, W., Attar, H., Donaldson, L., & Pittet, D. (2011). Burden of endemic health-care-associated infection in developing countries: systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet, 377(9761), 228-241. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61458-4

Zimlichman E, Henderson D, Tamir O, et al. Health care-associated infections: a meta-analysis of costs and financial impact on the US health care system. JAMA Intern Med. 2013;173(22):2039-2046. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.9763

Today's lesson:
Adversity is an Opportunity for Beauty

Key Points:
There’s tremendous incentive to make things as easy as possible but adversity is a constant. "The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen." -Elisabeth Kubler Ross

Today's key action:
Take five minutes and ask yourself, name 3 people you consider to be beautiful people. Not in looks but in character. Why those three names? What characterizes their experience? Have they had easy lives?

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™: https://www.leaderfactor.com/psychological-safety-survey
Watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1ZM5ymESJ9g
Or download the episode resources: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/measuring-ps-what-most-l-d-leaders-dont-realize

This weeks episode is part three in our five part series on "What's Driving Demand for Psychological Safety". Tim and Junior discuss why the need for innovation sparking demand for psychological safety and how innovation is just as much cultural as it is technical.

(01:11) How do you win in a competitive landscape? In short, you can win one of two ways differentiation (product, market, model, operations) or you can win on price. Both of these require innovation.

(05:48) Whose job is innovation? There is a myth that innovation lives at the top of the organization with a select few individuals who meet around a big long table and decide the future of the organization. That is an old mindset that is handed down from the industrial revolution. In reality, it's much different than that. Innovation is the responsibility of everyone.

(14:21) Innovation is a cultural competence. Innovation is just as much part of an organization's cultural competence as it is an organization's technical competence. Some may think about innovation and they think about tools, they think about infrastructure, they think about new technology, new software, whereas they don't spend as much time thinking about the culture of the organization and all of the enabling factors that must be in place in order for the organization to accept any deviations from the status quo (innovation).

(26:36) Most innovation comes from creating marginal gains not big breakthroughs. There are fundamental disruptive or major innovations, but most of it's incremental, most of its derivative, we're talking about marginal gains, we're talking about the 1%, we're talking about these little things that we can get better at.

(31:31) Extending challenger safety and the removing personal risk from challenging the status quo can enhance the speed of innovation. Without it you will be defensive and fail to innovate at or above the speed of change in the market.

Important Links
Don't Let Hierarchy Stifle Innovation Podcast
The Intersection Between Diversity, Inclusion, and Innovation
Don't Let Hierarchy Stifle Innovation Article
5 Steps to Create Innovation with Your Team
Stage 4 Challenger Safety Podcast
Stage 4 Challenger Safety Article
Surfing the Boundaries of Chaos and Innovation with Professor James Evans Podcast

In today's episode, we're continuing our leadership series on leading with character and competence with a discussion on the second cornerstone of character: humility. Humility is a performance accelerator; it allows you to develop, grow, and progress faster. It's the culminating stage of a leader's emotional and psychological development, and it's also one of the most difficult character traits to cultivate. This is a unique episode that will leave you with insights on humility that you haven't considered, which you can use to improve your leadership today.

(04:27) What is humility? Tim and Junior describe the behaviors of humble leaders and define humility. "Humility is the unresented acknowledgement of two things: number one, you need other people's help, and number two, you don't know everything. It puts you in a different frame of mind, a different attitude, a different emotional state."

(08:26) Humility is a performance accelerator. "The problem with hubris is that you become your own obstacle, you get in your own way, and with humility, you're able to move on, learn from the experiences that you're having, and go forward unencumbered, unrestrained."

(17:31) Humility is an acknowledgment of the truth. "Humility is simply an acknowledgement of the truth of things, and the truth is we are all dependent, and we do need each other. So an attitude of humility is really appropriate in human interactions as we think about how we need each other and how we should help each other. If you live life and you're hoarding, trying to hoard recognition, praise, honor, and credit, it diminishes others."

(25:19) To achieve humility, we must overcome insecurity without using junk theories of superiority. "One of the distinguishing characteristics of those who have humility is that they stare right into their imperfections and weaknesses. They acknowledge them, they know what they are, and paradoxically, that is actually what enables them to stand with so much confidence. Because they're not worried about being found out, there's not something that they're trying to hide, that they're self-conscious about and worried that people are going to discover."

(35:36) Leaders can think about their inquiry vs. advocacy ratio to overcome personal hubris. "If we're just stuck in advocacy mode, then we're not getting the feedback, and the reality that we're looking at may be distorted."

(41:00) Humble leaders are kind and demanding at the same time. "These are humble, very effective leaders that have evolved as leaders to a world-class level. They delegate more with the understanding that people grow only when they leave their comfort zones and travel to their outer limits. They realize that stretching, because they put a lot of stretch in the goals they give people, is both painful but also exhilarating. And that's the only place where people can build new capacity."

(51:13) To gain humility, you must develop a high tolerance for candor. "Ask yourself, on a scale from 1 to 10, what is your tolerance for candor?"

(54:45) Tim and Junior share additional characteristics of humble leaders. "They don't need to hear themselves talk, so they don't clamor for airtime. They stop telling the world how smart they are. They don't subscribe to the leader as an expert model in which the leader is the repository of all knowledge. They value the appreciation and recognition of their peers when it's meaningful, but it's not a requirement. They have learned that leadership often requires that we go for long periods and long distances without reward or recognition, that we toil in obscurity, and that due credit might come, but it might not. Final-stage leaders learn to fuel their efforts through intrinsic rewards. They learn that achievement carries its own compensation."

Important Links
Leading with Character and Competence

This week, Tim and Junior are talking about the importance of doing the little things for a long time. Why? Because leaders sweat the small stuff. They know that over time, focusing on the little things plays a key part in sustaining goals, maintaining a sense of control, building momentum, and recognizing improvement.

Takeaways

• The compound effect of doing little things for a long time can have a significant impact on personal and professional success.
• Small actions and habits are controllable and sustainable, leading to gradual improvement and building momentum.
• Focusing on the little things allows for progress over perfection and generates more evidence of success.
• Taking responsibility for one's current position and evaluating performance daily are key ways  to achieving meaningful results. Focus on daily performance and the power of a 24-hour cycle.
• Evaluate pursuit and achievement over different timeframes, such as 24 hours and 24 months.
• Embrace suspense and milestones as part of the journey towards achieving goals.
• Prioritize renewal and recharging to maintain motivation and energy.
• Don't seek external recognition; find satisfaction in the quality of your inputs.
• Embrace anonymity and silence as opportunities for growth and development.
• Find magic in the mundane by appreciating the small, daily actions that contribute to long-term success.

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction and Surprise

(01:37) The Importance of Little Things

(05:01) Control and the Little Things

(06:09) The Compound Effect in Personal and Professional Life

(09:56) Examples of Doing Little Things for a Long Time

(13:46) The Benefits of Small Actions

(16:13) Progress Over Perfection

(24:15) Perception of Behavior and Motivation

(29:26) Taking Responsibility for Your Position

(32:29) Evaluating Performance on a Daily Basis

(34:48) The Power of a 24-Hour Cycle

(37:08) Evaluating Pursuit and Achievement

(39:37) Dealing with Suspense and Milestones

(43:22) Renewal and Recharging

(45:12) Don't Look for Recognition

(49:25) Finding Satisfaction in the Quality of Inputs

(50:02) The Value of Anonymity and Silence

(53:42) Looking for Magic in the Mundane

The majority of CEOs don't know how to create maximum organizational leverage through the transfer of autonomy to their people. Without autonomy, teams feel suffocated. Without accountability, they fall apart. How do you find the right balance?

In this episode, hosts Tim and Junior unveil the 4 biggest leadership mistakes that destroy accountability, detail how to gradually transfer autonomy without losing control, and share practical steps to ensure that teams own their work and deliver results.

📥 Download the slides from the episode: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/4-steps-to-mastering-the-autonomy-accountability-balance

1:20 - Introduction: Why Autonomy and Accountability Matter
3:00 - The Leadership Struggle: Too Much or Too Little Autonomy
5:45 - Why Most Leaders Get Accountability Wrong
8:10 - The Real Definition of Being "In Charge"
10:30 - The Critical Role of Organizational Leverage
13:15 - Common Leadership Failure Patterns
16:00 - Granting Autonomy Too Early: The Risk
19:30 - Blurry Accountability Lines: A Recipe for Confusion
22:10 - Running to the Rescue: Why Leaders Need to Stop Fixing Everything
25:40 - Taking Undue Credit: The Silent Team Killer
28:20 - The Key to a High-Performing Team: Autonomy with Guidance
31:00 - How to Match Accountability with Competence
34:30 - Moving from Task to Process to Outcome Accountability
37:15 - Practical Strategies for Leaders to Get This Right

🎬 Watch our most recent videos: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6sIjV1NQzDb0VPdIFsCGTt5s0GOEBF1M&si=H8dH2HNobRkhvsM5

🔎 Learn more about our globally proven frameworks: 
https://www.leaderfactor.com/

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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 suggest three ways to develop a healthier sense of self-worth and tell us which definition of self-esteem they think works best.

Takeaways

• Self-esteem is a complex concept that encompasses self-competence and self-liking.
• Contingent self-esteem is dependent on external factors and can be detrimental to well-being.
• The measurement of self-esteem can be assessed using scales such as the Rosenberg self-esteem scale.
• Contingent self-esteem can impact decision-making, relationships, and emotional health.
• The influence of social media has led to the emergence of image-based contingent self-esteem.
• Contingent self-esteem is linked to vulnerability to negative emotions such as depression and anxiety. Beware the dangers of contingent self-esteem and the negative impact it can have on personal well-being and leadership effectiveness.
• Personal experiences can shape one's self-esteem, and it is important to recognize and challenge negative influences.
• Contingent self-esteem can lead to chronic insecurity in leaders, hindering their ability to lead effectively.
• Pathological self-esteem, characterized by narcissism and hubris, can have detrimental effects on individuals and organizations.
• Develop a healthier sense of self-worth by finding your intrinsic motivation, celebrating effort rather than outcomes, and promoting self-compassion.

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction and Overview

(00:50) The Complexity of Self-Esteem

(06:04) Measurement of Self-Esteem

(09:19) The Impact of Self-Esteem on Decision-Making and Well-Being

(12:07) Introduction to Contingent Self-Esteem

(16:37) The Destructive Nature of Contingent Self-Esteem

(21:23) The Influence of Social Media on Contingent Self-Esteem

(22:26) Assessment of Contingent Self-Esteem

(25:13) The Link Between Contingent Self-Esteem and Negative Emotions

(25:58) Beware the dangers of contingent self-esteem

(33:38) Contingent self-esteem and its negative effects on leadership

(43:39)Tactics for developing a healthier sense of self-worth

(47:35) Find your why

(49:00) Celebrate effort, not outcomes

(50:53) Promote a healthy dose of self-compassion

How are you measuring your organization's culture? In this episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior are discussing just that. This is a fantastic episode for individuals who really care about being cultural architects and being practitioners in their roles, not just theorists. Tim and Junior will dive into the fundamentals of culture, the different ways we measure culture today, and what metrics give you the most actionable and practical insights on how to improve your culture. 

What is culture? (01:28) Culture can be segmented into material and non-material, visible and invisible parts. But at the end of the day it all comes down to how we interact. Tim and Junior explain that how you define culture influences how you attempt to measure it, which, of course, influences your dataset. 

How do most people measure culture? (11:01) Most organizations currently use a mix of employee surveys, focus groups, interviews, cultural audits, exit interviews, performance management tools and people analytics tools to measure what's going on in their organization. They're measuring things like employee satisfaction, engagement, teamwork, innovation, diversity, and turnover, not culture directly. Tim and Junior delve into these methods of measurement and why they are the lag measures of culture, not the lead measures. 

What does a healthy culture look like? (19:09) Healthy cultures are cultures of rewarded vulnerability. The health of our interaction is dependent upon how others respond to our acts of vulnerability, if they're rewarded, we're working in what's called a blue zone. But if they're punished, we end up working in a red zone.

How does LeaderFactor measure culture? (27:12) At LeaderFactor, we measure psychological safety as the lead indicator of culture. If a healthy culture is a culture of rewarded vulnerability, our ability to monitor and measure red and blue zones in organizations allows us to determine the levels of inclusion, learning, contribution, and candor on any team. 

Important Links
The 4 Stages Survey

In this week's episode of Culture by Design, Junior and Dr. Tim Clark discuss a daunting but important question: What do you do with a toxic leader? Too often, organizations will either do nothing or wait too long to react to evidence of harmful leadership. But toxic cultures can't and won't heal themselves. And the remedy largely depends on the kind of leader you're dealing with. Listen in as Tim and Junior explore the characteristics of toxic leaders, the consequences of toxic behavior, and the role of culture in creating, maintaining or preventing toxicity. You'll learn how to distinguish between an actively toxic and passively complicit leader, and discover how to hold your leaders culturally accountable for their behavior.

‍Takeaways

• Toxic leaders exist and can have a significant impact on organizations.
• Toxic leadership is often a result of insecurity and unmet human needs.
• Actively toxic leaders should be removed from the organization, while passively complicit leaders can be coached and held accountable.
• Tolerance for toxic behavior leads to the normalization of toxicity and can have long-term consequences for the organization.
• It is important to prioritize long-term thinking and hold leaders accountable for their behavior.
  ‍

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

04:11 Pathological Behavior and Consequences of Toxicity

10:26 Culture and Toxicity

17:02 Toxic Leadership and Unmet Human Needs

22:18 Identifying Actively Toxic and Passively Complicit Leaders

26:21 Passively Complicit Leaders

35:15 Actively Toxic Leaders

43:11 Long-Term Thinking and Tolerance for Toxicity

In this episode, Tim and Junior introduce five simple but powerful questions to align teams and get everyone on the same page. They explain why alignment is critical yet often neglected, review the high cost of misalignment, and provide a practical framework to drive shared understanding and commitment among team members.

5 Key Points

1. Alignment ensures strategies, goals, processes, and people are working together effectively (0:04:28). It is a matter of degree, not binary.
2. Misalignment compounds over time if unaddressed, risking failure (0:05:41). Assuming alignment without verifying is dangerous.
3. The 5 Alignment Questions framework verifies understanding, surfaces concerns, clarifies roles, anticipates needs, and checks commitment (0:25:37).
4. The questions invite participation through inquiry-based dialogue (0:27:29). Metrics alone don't ensure alignment.
5. Alignment requires continuous intervention as misalignment is the natural process (0:50:13). It must be maintained through regular cycles.

Links:

HBR Article: 5 Questions to Get Your Project Team on the Same Page
Show Notes: leaderfactor.com/podcast

This week, our hosts Tim and Junior are talking about the limitations of a traditional, four-competency emotional intelligence model. Why? Because LeaderFactor’s private emotional intelligence assessment, EQindex™, is now publicly available! This assessment, and its Leadership 360 version, is based on a 6 domain, 30 skill model that measures what we believe, what we know, and what we do as we interact with others. If you’re wanting to know what the future of emotional intelligence looks like in 2024, this would be the episode to listen to. As always, you can find important links from the episode, as well as transcripts and show notes, on our website at leaderfactor.com/podcast.

Key Takeaways:

• Emotional intelligence is the ability to interact effectively with others and is crucial in personal and professional settings.
• The traditional four competency model of EQ is limited and does not consider motivation and intent.
• The EQ Index model introduces the regard competencies to address this limitation.
• Beliefs influence awareness and perception, which in turn influence behavior.
• The dominant linear causal pathway in EQ is beliefs, awareness, and behavior.

Chapters:

01:35 Introduction to EQindex™

02:47 The Importance of the EQ Index Model

03:42 Defining Emotional Intelligence

04:13 Emotional Intelligence as a Delivery System

05:24 The Relationship Between EQ and Performance

07:06 The Limitations of the Traditional EQ Model

09:20 The Four Competency Model of EQ

12:11 The Need for the Regard Competencies

13:42 The Order of the EQ Domains

15:44 The Relationship Between Beliefs and Awareness

16:48 The Influence of Beliefs on Perception

18:12 The Dominant Linear Causal Pathway

34:13 Summary and Takeaways

Important Links:
EQindex™

In this episode Tim and Junior introduce the two leadership failure patterns found in The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™ model - paternalism and exploitation. This is a very practical episode for managers and leaders but applies to anyone working with other humans. Progressing through The 4 Stages of Psychological safety requires balancing a combination of respect and permission while avoiding these two failure patterns.

(03:11) Where did The 4 Stages of Psychological safety come from? While studying psychological safety Dr. Clark worked to identify how psychological safety is developed. During the research a pattern emerged, a sequence through four successive stages. Psychological safety isn't something you have or don't have. Every organization has a level of psychological safety it's a matter of degree.

(10:16) The failure pattern of exploitation. Exploitation is the combination of low respect and high permission. Simply put exploitation is " treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work." All organizations are exploitative to some degree. "Think about, not, do we have exploitation in our organization, but to what degree and in what forms do we have exploitation?"

(21:15) The failure pattern of paternalism. Paternalism is the combination of high respect and low permission. "I care about you, I value you, but please sit in the corner and don't touch anything." Paternalistic leaders are micromanagers and yet they're well-intentioned. If you want to overcome paternalism you need to learn how to transfer accountability and the critical thinking.

(36:53) These patterns exist on a spectrum. In some cases there are blatant acts of exploitation as well as intentional acts of paternalism. Our intentions and motivations matter. "We need to have some time for reflection, and we need to think about the way that we're interacting, and it goes back to what we said before, let's examine our motives and our intent, is it clean, is it pure?"

Important Links:
The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety - Book
What is Psychological Safety - Introducing The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety
The Complete Guide to Psychological Safety

Psychological Safety Podcast Series
Stage One: Inclusion Safety
Stage Two: Learner Safety
Stage Three: Contributor Safety
Stage Four: Challenger Safety
Overview: What is Psychological Safety
Bonus: What Psychological Safety is Not

Vulnerability and interaction are inseparable (03:00). The workplace is vulnerable because it’s full of humans.

Why does vulnerability matter? (08:30) There’s a spectrum of vulnerability and a spectrum of responses to vulnerability. You can reward it, punish it, or do something in between.

How do we create healthy company cultures? (11:30) If we want healthy cultures where inclusion and innovation are the standards, we must reward vulnerability.

What are red zones and blue zones? (13:15) Red zones are environments of punished vulnerability, and blue zones are environments of rewarded vulnerability.

Vulnerability occurs across the 4 stages of psychological safety (24:30). Tim and Junior share common acts of vulnerability found in inclusion, learner, contributor, and challenger safety. 

Vulnerability and inclusion safety (26:00). Inclusion safety satisfies the basic human need to be included, accepted, and belong. It means it’s not expensive to be yourself. 

Vulnerability and learner safety (43:00). Acts of vulnerability in Stage 2: Learner Safety relate to learning and the discovery process. Because learning is fraught with uncertainty and risk, every person brings some level of inhibition and anxiety to the learning process. 

Vulnerability and contributor safety (48:50). Acts of vulnerability in Stage 3: Contributor Safety relate to making a meaningful contribution and reflect a willingness to be held accountable for your performance.

Vulnerability and challenger safety (53:20). Acts of vulnerability in Stage 4: Challenger Safety relate to challenging the status quo and creating value in new and different ways through innovation. 

Links: 
The Ladder of Vulnerability webinar: https://www.leaderfactor.com/webinars/the-ladder-of-vulnerability
The Ladder of Vulnerability ebook: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/psychological-safety-ladder-of-vulnerability
The Complete Guide to Psychological Safety: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/what-is-psychological-safety
How to Connect with a Person Not Like You: https://www.leaderfactor.com/notes/how-to-connect-with-a-person-not-like-you

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 always, they also share 3 practical ways to create inclusion safety on your teams.

To see the slides and host annotations for the episode, watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/zDDBkfA0BFk

Or download the resources from the episode here: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/how-to-build-the-4-stages-of-psychological-safety

What's at stake? (0:00) If we do this well, we’ll create sanctuaries of inclusion and incubators of innovation. But if we do this poorly, we’ll be perpetually dissatisfied, we’ll create toxic cultures, and our organizations will suffer.

The current state of hiring, firing and promotion (9:00). Do most organizations make these decisions based on technical or cultural criteria? Tim and Junior talk about the process, outcome, and consequence of both.

What role does psychological safety play currently in the hiring, firing, and promotion of most organizations? (16:00) For most, it's a back seat role. If leaders aren't accounting for psychological safety, what are they looking for?

Technical competence isn't everything (19:40) Tim and Junior discuss the cultural and interpersonal components of hiring and why they should be considered in conjunction with technical skill and experience.

Psychological safety is at the heart of healthy culture (24:15). Tim gives listeners an overview of what psychological safety is and how it fits into the HR space.

The difference between cultural fit and cultural competence (29:30). Tim and Junior talk about why using the term "cultural fit" can be dangerous. Cultural competence, rather, has to do with your ability to contribute to a culture of psychological safety.

Firing and psychological safety (34:00). Tim and Junior make the claim that organizations aren't letting people go that should be let go because cultural competence is not a criterion for evaluation.

Promotion and psychological safety (44:45). Turns out, you get what you tolerate. What promotion criteria should we use to ensure that they will perpetuate healthy norms and build a vibrant culture?

Measure psychological safety on your team for free (59:45). Tim and Junior give listeners the chance to put this into practice with a totally free 4 Stages™ Team Survey license.

The Complete Guide to Psychological Safety

Hiring, Firing, and Promotion Webinar

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

LeaderFactor Note #12: 3 Most Deadly Hiring Mistakes

This episode is part two of our two-part mini-series on Psychological Safety in Personal Relationships. Tim and Junior will pick it up right where they left off and start by discussing contributor safety as it relates to our personal lives. They will continue with practical examples, and you’ll even get introduced to the LIVE model, an acronym to help you recognize and reward vulnerability around you. If you missed last week’s episode, you may consider starting there, because this conversation begins right where that one ends.

(0:01:00) Contributor safety–How do we improve? Junior starts the episode with a question: Do you grant others maximum autonomy to contribute in their own way as they demonstrate their ability to deliver results? The level of autonomy that people have should be appropriate to their role and to their performance.

(0:16:27) Challenger safety–How do we improve? Challenger safety is the culminating stage of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety. Junior asks the question: Do you consistently invite others to challenge the status quo in order to make things better?

(0:27:20) Your two choices: Change your behavior or change your belief about the behavior. Which is easier? Definitely the latter. But which has a profound impact on the cultures you participate in? Absolutely the former.

(0:33:02) The L.I.V.E. Model. Do you look for, identify, validate, and encourage acts of vulnerability in your everyday life? Tim and Junior explain that this is the mechanism for creating healthy, deep, and resilient relationships.

(0:39:19) Trust and psychological safety. You can’t trust someone who’s unpredictable, and you can’t trust someone’s reaction if it’s not predictable. The same is true for rewarding vulnerability. If you’re not 1000 percent sure that you’ll be met with warmth, you won’t engage in vulnerable ways.

Important Links
The L.I.V.E Model

In this episode of the podcast, Tim and Junior dive into the critical leadership skills of accountability and critical thinking. They discuss why these competencies are important for leaders and team members to develop, define what accountability and critical thinking mean, explain the vital interrelationship between accountability and critical thinking, and share thoughts on how we can effectively build these skills in ourselves while also transferring them to others. Tim and Junior emphasize that these are practical skill-building concepts that align with the four stages of psychological safety.

5 Key Points:

1. Accountability is being answerable for your behavior and actions (0:03:08). It's about taking ownership, being proactive and transparent, and being willing to learn from mistakes.
2. Critical thinking involves gathering and synthesizing information to inform your beliefs and behaviors (0:03:39). It's about evaluating information objectively to make sound judgments and decisions.
3. Accountability and critical thinking are interrelated - you need critical thinking to properly evaluate your performance and take full accountability (0:09:47).
4. As leaders, we must model accountability and critical thinking ourselves first before expecting it from others (0:34:13). We have to hold ourselves to high standards of performance and evaluation.
5. To transfer critical thinking, use open-ended questions, invite participation in solving problems, teach the inquiry process, and model critical thinking in your own work (0:25:51).

Links:

Show notes: https://www.leaderfactor.com/podcast

3 Levels of Accountability Episode: https://www.leaderfactor.com/podcast/the-coaching-and-accountability-matrix

In today's episode, we're kicking off a new four-part series on the Change Management Principle, Behave Until You Believe. These episodes are focused on the practical application of each of the four stages of psychological safety and focus on the key principles and behaviors that will help you foster an environment of high psychological safety. To kick off this series, Tim and Junior will talk about what it means to behave until you believe as a principle, then move into Stage 1, and behaviors and environments that foster inclusion safety, the difference between bonding and bridging, and give you specific, real ways to create an environment of inclusion.

The goal of transformation (03:36) If we aspire to transform ourselves and our organizations, we must be willing to change our behavior. Tim and Junior set the stage and explain why this cultural goal, as daunting as it is, is essential for organizational well-being and growth.

Why the traditional approach to transformation is broken (05:12) Tim and Junior present the traditional, linear approach to cultural transformation, which is achieved through three categories and five stages. Those stages are (1) awareness, (2) understanding, (3) appreciation, (4) belief, (5) behavior.

What does it mean to behave until you believe? (10:50) In order to achieve transformation both personally and professionally, you need awareness, but you should work on behavior simultaneously. As Richard Pascale once wrote: “People are more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking than think their way into a new way of acting.”

Increase inclusion through bridging, not just bonding (28:10) While it may be easier to bond with people who are similar to you, inclusion comes through bridging the gaps with people who aren't like you. Unless we close the distance, our relationships stay superficial and transactional. Tim and Junior share three ways to put this theory into practice.

Be the first mover and share your story (30:52) One of the best ways to close the gap between yourself and a colleague is to learn more about them, and one of the best ways to learn more about them is through asking them to share their story.

Ask twice as much as you tell (39:32) Each of us has a personal inquiry and advocacy ratio. Ask yourself: "Am I in inquiry mode right now, or am I in advocacy mode right now?"

Express gratitude and appreciation (44:30) Are you showing gratitude and appreciation not just for performance in a team setting, but for effort? And remember: Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone.

Important Links
Psychological Safety Behavioral Guide

How do you influence organizational change when you don't have budget authority or decision-making power? In this week's episode of The Leader Factor, hosts Tim and Junior outline the most effective way to introduce a cultural change initiative to an organization. The formula includes four steps: (1) Maximize the dream outcome for L&D leaders, (2) Maximize the perceived likelihood of achievement, (3) Minimize time delay, and (4) Minimize the effort and sacrifice involved in the initiative. 

Episode Chapters:
(01:20) - Episode Start
(02:13) - The Enterprise Barriers to Change Management
(04:25) - 5 Common Roadblocks to Cultural Change
(07:25) - The Dream Outcome for L&D Leaders
(11:25) - What’s the Perceived Likelihood of Achievement?
(14:15) - How to Minimize Time Delay
(21:35) - Understanding the Effort and Sacrifice Involved

Download the episode resources: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/influencing-up-how-to-effectively-change-organizational-culture

Watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Ix_f3hvcfbo

🎬 Watch our most recent videos: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6sIjV1NQzDb0VPdIFsCGTt5s0GOEBF1M&si=H8dH2HNobRkhvsM5

🔎 Learn more about our globally proven frameworks: 
https://www.leaderfactor.com/

💡Request a customized needs assessment and roadmap: https://www.leaderfactor.com/forms/strategy-call

🔵 Build Psychological Safety: https://www.leaderfactor.com/build-psychological-safety
🟢 Emotional Intelligence: https://www.leaderfactor.com/build-emotional-intelligence
🟠 Build Accountability: https://www.leaderfactor.com/build-accountability

Connect with us:
⭐ Join our newsletter: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources#subscribe
⭐ Find us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/leaderfactor

We can all agree that identifying potential leaders is a crucial part of organizational success. But too often, leaders are promoted purely for their technical ability. What would happen if organizations put equal weight on cultural competence in their promotion criteria? In this episode, we're talking about just that. Listen in as our hosts, Tim and Junior, discuss the question, what are the subtle signs that someone will make it in leadership?

Key Takeaways:

• Identifying potential leaders is crucial for the success of organizations.
• Five subtle signs that someone will make it in leadership include: washing the dishes, acknowledging silent contributors, spending their own money to learn, taking initiative, and admitting when they don't know something.
• These signs reflect qualities such as humility, initiative, and a commitment to personal and professional development.
• Leaders should prioritize learning, take ownership of their own development, and be willing to take action and make decisions.

Chapters

00:39 Identifying Potential Leaders

12:19 Subtle Sign #1: They Wash the Dishes, Take Out the Trash, and Refill the Paper Towels

21:17 Subtle Sign #2: They Acknowledge the Efforts of Silent Contributors

28:36 Subtle Sign #3: They Spend Their Own Money to Learn

33:37 Subtle Sign #4: They Kill the Snake When They See the Snake

39:27 Subtle Sign #5: They Say 'I Don't Know' When They Don't Know

47:11 Conclusion

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 a team, and throughout an organization.

For the full learning experience, watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WIx3wcvG-s

Download the episode resources: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/how-to-build-the-4-stages-of-psychological-safety

In this podcast Tim and Junior discuss the importance of bridging the gap between diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Diversity alone is not enough, and true progress comes from creating a culture of inclusion. To do that we must "cross the lines of natural affinity," or find common ground and build relationships with coworkers who may be different from ourselves.

DE&I spending is projected to reach 15.4 billion by 2026 (02:05). There are questions that come with increased spending such as, "Are these dollars effective? Are they working? Are we learning how to do this better than we have in the past?" The results are mixed at best.

You cannot command and control your way to diversity and inclusion (06:58). You cannot declare your way to an inclusive culture, and awareness campaigns are not enough. You'll need parallel tracks of awareness and behaviors to make a difference. The real question to answer is, "are you modeling inclusive behaviors day in and day out, or not?"

The importance of bonding and bridging (10:34). Bonding is creating connections with people like you or those inside your natural affinity groups. Bridging is connecting with people who are not like you or outside your natural affinity groups. To create inclusion you need both. Organizations can assist in the process with discussion guides.

Interaction is not connection (19:43). In order to form a genuine connection you must be willing to engage in inquiry with the other person and be willing to share yourself. The right intent combined with those two elements will help you move from interaction to connection.

Commit to practicing inclusive behavior (35:53). There are many opportunities for inclusive behavior. They usually fall into one of these seven categories. 1) Greeting, 2)Asking, 3) Listening, 4) Sharing, 5) Inviting, 6) Helping, and 7)Protecting. Chose one of these categories of behaviors to practice over the next week.

We need accountability to succeed (41:22). If we want to move through cycles of improvement we need to practice behaviors and reflect on how we've done.

Additional Resources
How to Bridge from Diversity to Inclusion: Helping Employees Cross the Lines of Natural Affinity
5 Ways to Create Inclusion Safety
Diversity is a Fact, Inclusion is a Choice
The 4 Stages Behavior Guide

Additional Resources
LeaderFactor.com/Resources

Agile beginnings and the Agile Manifesto (1:00). 20 years ago at Snowbird Mountain Resort, a group of tech industry leaders gathered together to change the bureaucratic waterfall method of software development, which at the time was linear, slow, and extremely rigid. The group wanted to develop a process that was fast, flexible, and dynamic. From there, Agile became a global movement.

Agile’s failure pattern (7:15). Most agile transformations end in false starts and most agile organizations are agile in name only. Why?

What is the biggest obstacle to a successful agile transformation? (14:27) Tim and Junior discuss the possible options: Is it skills? Tools? Processes? Training? Money? Or is culture king? 

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools (16:00). Even though this is the first of Agile’s four values, it often gets pushed to the side. Tim and Junior talk about why this is detrimental to the success of any organization.

Make psychological safety the center of Agile transformation (22:15). Once you frame Agile as cultural transformation, the way you approach it fundamentally changes. It’s a workstream that’s never completed. 

Evaluate your dialogic process post-sprint (38:20). Tim gives his suggestion as to what Agile implementation could look like with a foundation of psychological safety.

Mentioned Links

Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety Article

The Psychological Safety Behavioral Guide

Why Psychological Safety is Oxygen for the Agile Movement Webinar

In this week's episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior discuss The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety in a way you might not expect. Using social exchange theory, they'll do a deeper dive to add some color to The 4 Stages model and give you additional tools and frames to use when you look at psychological safety.

What is social exchange theory? (01:47) According to social exchange theory, people are motivated to engage in social exchanges that they perceive as beneficial. Tim and Junior discuss four key concepts related to social exchange theory: Costs, benefits, reciprocity, and power. 

What is psychological safety? (13:03) Psychological safety is a culture of rewarded vulnerability and lies at the heart of healthy social exchange. In order for a culture to be truly psychologically safe, the environment must provide something and then the participant must provide something. Tim and Junior explain that each stage within The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety has a social exchange. 

The social exchange for Stage One: Inclusion Safety (16:39) In stage one, we are given inclusion in exchange for lack of harm. Tim and Junior explain how this works and what the difference is between worth and worthiness.

The social exchange for Stage Two: Learner Safety (23:30) In stage two, we are given encouragement to learn in exchange for engagement in the learning process. Tim and Junior explain how this works and who has the first-mover obligation.

The social exchange for Stage Three: Contributor Safety (30:02) In stage three, we are given autonomy with guidance in exchange for results. Tim and Junior explain how this works and the ratio between autonomy and accountability.

The social exchange for Stage Four: Challenger Safety (38:15) In stage four, we are given air cover in exchange for candor. Tim and Junior explain how this works and how to protect our people in their most vulnerable state. 

The definition of psychological safety (2:00). Tim and Junior discuss how vulnerability plays into the definition of psychological safety and what it means to create a culture of rewarded vulnerability.

Defining culture is like squeezing Jell-O (6:05). If culture is human interaction, psychological safety gives us the terms of engagement to interact. 

It's impossible to not have any culture (11:45). Just like fish have water, humans have culture. You're in it, and it's in you. 

The history of psychological safety (13:20). Numerous social scientists and psychologists have contributed to the psychological safety space, and Tim and Junior synthesize their contributions to a timeline.

How did the four stages come about? (30:00) Tim explains how his professional career in the world of leadership and culture contributed to The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety framework.

What factors drive and contribute to the demand for psychological safety? (45:00) Mental health, social justice, and a variety of other social and cultural factors have played a hand in the demand, and Junior and Tim give us their take on the what and the why.

Resources available at leaderfactor.com/resources. 

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 technical skills (IQ), you need a great delivery system (EQ). Some organizations promote leaders and managers based on their technical skills alone. These leaders lack the interpersonal skills (EQ) they need to contribute effectively while contributing indirectly.

In this episode, hosts Tim and Junior discuss why leaders and managers are obligated to improve their interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence, and how to get started. If you're a manager and you're moving from direct to indirect contribution, if your primary job, purpose, and stewardship is to contribute indirectly through other people, then you have to improve your delivery system. There’s no other option.

For the full learning experience, watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/l77Og1MR_v8
Or download the episode resources: https://www.leaderfactor.com/resources/eq-your-delivery-system

Today's lesson:
Become an Agile, Self-directed Learner

Key Points:
The biggest barrier to learning today is not access, it’s motivation. Many individuals stop learning when they get out of school or they don’t have outside requirements, external expectations, or a structured learning environment. Many people stop learning even though it’s an innate need and desire. The solution? Make learning completely your responsibility and avoid learning welfare like the plague.

Today's key action:
Identify an area of your professional life that you feel would benefit from some deliberate, aggressive, self-directed learning. And then book a 20 minute slot on your calendar within the next two days to do some intentional learning.