As a leader have you ever wondered why people behave the way they do, why they don’t perform when they should and why it takes so long to get things done?
Safe Leadership will explain why all this happens and will give you the insight (neuron science in laymen’s terms!), the knowledge (real life stories) and tools to help you become a psychologically safe leader with an ability to identify early, members in your team that are likely to underperform and take the steps needed to ensure that never happens.
Our brains are wired for our survival in a harsh but simple life style, only concerned with our safety in the moment. In a life that is relatively safe but very complex, this wiring can often work against us as the brain navigates us through our modern day threats such as to-do-lists or confrontational work colleagues.
Our brain rewards us for taking action that aids our survival. It has 4 hormones that reward us by making us feel great. We all have different levels of these hormones and our behaviour reflects the hormones we get the highest dose of. Leaders who understand the function of the hormones and recognise the associated behaviours can leverage this to get more from their teams.
One of our reward hormones brings us together as a team and has us working well together. Unfortunately the same reward hormone can have us working against our team mates and drive silos and office politics if left unchecked. Leaders who understand how this can happen and how their own actions impact the outcome are equipped to avoid office politics forever.
If stress is left unchecked and our teams start suffering from chronic (long term) stress, their personalities will slowly change towards their negative selves. Learn what these personalities are, how to recognise them and most importantly how to turn them back to their positive selves.
Left unchecked stress will lead to emotional fatigue and burnout. Here we investigate the science behind burnout and the 6 elements that push us towards burnout and look to equip our leaders with methods to minimise their impact. On the other end of the spectrum we look at what it means to drive engagement in our teams and the factors required for this to happen.
Our brains are wired NOT to be diverse, our primal brain will automatically distrust anyone that is not like us even though our cognitive brain says its ok. Here we look at the approach of "inclusivity" over diversity and why that is easier for us to process and accept and will get us far greater cohesiveness and performance.
We are wired to survive now, in the present and we will do so even if that decision may harm us in the future. This is the reason why so many leaders say "we never saw it coming", they didn't, and the reason they didn't is because their team thought the bad news was not something they wanted to risk sharing with their leader. Learn why this phenomena happens and how as a leader you can overcome it.
Brings together everything in the book into the 5 key areas that leaders need to get right to create that safe environment for all of their team to contribute their ideas and criticisms free of ridicule and persecution. Only when leaders embrace all of the practices of Safe Leadership will they be able to fully leverage the collective intelligence that lies within their organisation.