The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety by Timothy Clark

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation is quite unlike most non-fiction books I’ve read in recent memory. Its author, Dr. Timothy Clark, is the founder and CEO of LeaderFactor. This consulting and training organization provides Dr. Clark with a forum for wielding his considerable talents in the areas of innovation, senior leadership development, and psychological safety. His book is an unusually personal look at these subjects, but Clark buttresses his personal insights with a clear academic understanding of what individuals need at their deepest levels. It is a thoughtful and probing book reflecting why he is an in-demand advisor and coach who has trained the senior teams of some of the world’s largest organizations and businesses.

MORE ABOUT LEADER FACTOR: https://www.leaderfactor.com/

He doesn’t immediately begin the book delineating his methodology. Instead, Clark opens the work relating his first experiences with psychological safety chronicling his time after graduating from Oxford University and working in the steel industry. It is there, in key ways, Clark first saw how psychological safety wielded such a heavy effect on professionals. Staff often felt cowed by professional pecking orders, afraid to speak up and, as such, diluted their potential to offer the organization the maximum value of their talents. Innovation takes true flight when individuals feel empowered to offer their insights and points of view. 

When the book begins in earnest, Clark reveals himself to be quite the systematic yet approachable author. He breaks the book down into four chapters, examining each stage, and conclusion. Punctuating each of these four stages and the conclusion with self-reflecting questions and brief passages about concepts interspersed into the text is one of the book’s strengths. Clark always asks readers to stop for a moment and take account of their journey through considering the issues at hand. He likewise adds numerous literary and philosophical references drawn from some of the leading figures in history as a way of clarifying his points. It is a powerful weaving certain to affect any interested reader. 

His terminology never tests the reader’s capacity for understanding. There’s an immense intelligence fueling his writing and thought process, but I believe Clark never bogs the reader down in dense academic writing. Clark’s prose is conversational throughout the course of the book and his continued personal touch, all the way through the end, as a spellbinding effect. The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety is never a book where you feel the author talking down to you or sermonizing. It always has the feel of a writer who wants to provide something helping and lasting to his subject. 

AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Stages-Psychological-Safety-Inclusion-Innovation/dp/1523087684

The conclusion is a note-perfect ending for the book. Clark has an urgent need for us to recognize our common humanity and, by doing so, encourage organizational and professional success. The only thing in this work I can see some people balking at are the numerous inclusions of Key Questions and Key Concepts which some may see as repetition. I doubt few will however. Instead, I believe many readers will find Timothy Clark’s The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation an important text on one of the key issues in any professional or organizational workplace.

Nicole Killian