ICF Québec - English Coaches Breakfast

Lieu	Virtual Platform

Titre de l'activité / Title of the activity

Psychological Safety: How It Develops & What It Means for Our Work -
A two-part conversation – Part 1

Animateur/Speaker: Dr. Laurie J. Leo

Laurie Leo, MBA and BS - Accounting and Computer Science, is the founder of Laurie Leo Advisory, where she works with senior leaders, their teams, and boards. Her practice spans both the generative work of strengthening culture, shaping strategy and navigating challenging situations, such as change, disruption, critical decisions, leadership transitions, and the hard conversations. Laurie is committed to fostering psychological safety with her clients and to helping them do the same in their organizations. 

She is certified in Gallup CliftonStrengths, Everything DiSC, Wiley’s Five Behaviors, the Fearless Organization Scan, and has completed training in Structural Dynamics (a framework for the dynamics of face-to-face communication). She also holds a Certificate in Leadership Coaching from Leadership Learning Collaborative, and a Certificate in Strategic Leadership from Washington University in St. Louis.


DESCRIPTION: Psychological safety — a construct long-explored in empirical research — has entered the leadership landscape, as a term often described and understood inconsistently. Moreover, despite vast research about factors that typically foster psychological safety, significant research gaps exist related to the psychological safety needs of leaders and how psychological safety actually develops.

Laurie’s dissertation research addressed those two gaps to create a theory of how safety is constructed for senior leaders. In this two-part conversation, Session 1 highlights her research and findings. Session 2 offers a guided conversation about how to create value for your coaching/consulting clients based on this research.

Session 1 — What the research revealed

• A brief description of the study and how it was conducted
• What psychological safety is — and what it is not
• The theoretical model that emerged from the data
• How crisis conditions influence leaders’ perceptions of safety
• Human development threads running through the findings: the interplay between individuals and their context, identity formation, personal agency, and growth that happens through adversity.

We will close by looking ahead to Session 2 and choosing the questions you most want to discuss.