The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human

Want practical steps for increasing psychological safety at work? Get this book.
This book is so full of down-to-earth, practical steps that you will be deceived by its relative pocket size. There are five “plays” with five “moves” in each, for a total of 25 simple (but maybe not easy) tips you can use right away after finishing the book. It took me about two hours (I think) to read through the book.My favorite line is “Understand and communicate that failure is a source of valuable data”, followed by the research insight that both men and women interrupt women more frequently.Sprinkled throughout the book are short stories that illustrate the ideas with real life experience. Each “play” comes with recommended additional reading references as well.If I were to recommend a “wine pairing” (ok, triplet) for this book, it would be “Lead Without Blame” by Larsen/Broderick and “The Coaching Habit” (or “The Advice Trap”) by Bungay Stanier.I love this book and highly recommend you get a copy (and then do stuff)!

Ready for a plan?
The Psychological Safety Playbook by Karolin Helbig and Minette Norman is a hands on guide to creating a culture of trust and safety in organizations. It is more important than ever for leaders to foster innovation, trust, and learning for team members. This is realized through factors like trust, psychological safety, inclusion, being vulnerable and other factors. Today allowing people to speak freely, take risks to improve work and teams, and collaborate are what is needed in business.The authors explain what psychological safety is and why is it crucial. Leaders need to model the behaviors they want to see in their teams including areas where most leaders neglect. These include admitting mistakes, openly addressing diversity, receiving difficult feedback, and making people belong.The book is fun, colorful and I love the format. The information is very practical and straight to the point. We are given some practical tools like the Safety Check-in, the Feedback Wrap and a Learning Review. Moreover, there are fun stories from companies such as Google, Etsy and the Navy to illustrate how to implement these helpful tools.This book is perfect for coaches, managers, human resource leaders and employees who want to bring change and make a difference. It’s a book to keep handy because it is a systematic guide for using the strategies mentioned in the book.

Thoughtful and actionable leadership playbook
This is a wonderful playbook full of practical and actionable wisdom and techniques for many of today’s leadership challenges. It can be read front to back, or a section can be reviewed to help with a current situation. My favorite, however, is to flip open to a random lesson of the day; mine happening to be the relatable topic of ‘What stories am I telling myself?’ This playbook is the successful merging of two powerful and empathetic minds and, void of big words and jargon, is very easy to consume—especially with the help of numerous illustrations. Plus it’s also an easy-to-carry size for one’s backpack.

Simple, powerful, and practical book!
This book incorporated a lot of useful techniques to create a productive, open, and engaging environment for all individuals in the workplace. It is a quick read yet instills many relatable examples and situations that you’ll encounter in the workplace, regardless of what industry you work in. I loved that it focuses on the fact that you do not have to be a people manager or “leader” to incorporate these techniques. If everyone read this book and applied it to their relationships and workplace environments, we could really see a shift in workplace culture!

This playbook consists of 25 timeless principles every (project-)leader should be aware of.Following these principles has helped me – leading teams across various locations and cultures – to gain a muchdeeper understanding on my own attitude and behaviors and how they may affect team happiness,productivity and thereby any team-driven project success.These insights made me a also become much more conscious on how I function as a human and howmy own behaviors affect all other relevant areas of my life.The playbook inspired me to apply sometimes only minor changes in my own attitude and behaviorswhich then contributed to a much higher velocity score in agile projects, better products and increating a team culture that is defined by trust and respect.As they say: Effective leadership requires you to lead yourself effectively in the first place. This startswith being more self-aware of your own attitude and the corresponding actions.This playbook does not only teach you how to become more aware on yourself – it ensures, that youwill become a true master in the art of efficient communication.A key prerequisite for any successful project.You will in addition experience that once these principles are applied, your team proactively startsthe communication with you and helps you to come up with solutions to almost every obstaclerather than looking for more problems why things might not work.Beyond that you will be equipped with a guide that helps you to deal with difficult emotions, reducestress and being way more flexible in dealing with obstacles and difficulties. (Which won’t be difficultanymore once you gained a new perspective on them.)Well deserved 5-Star rating – can be read in a day + you have a bullet-proof implementation systemat your side!

This book unveils a serious problem that most organizations have every day: we have plenty of toxic leaders that create a work climate where no person feels safe to share a concern or challenge a decision.While the book cover says “Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human”, it is a recommended reading for leaders as well as individual contributors in an organization: it will help these people to quickly gauge the “psychological safety index” of their team or workplace and eventually raise the red-flag.