The Leader Factor

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 capabili...

Your career, business, and closest relationships are only as good as your emotional intelligence. And your ability to improve your EQ is only as good as your ability to measure it. Every effective EQ assessment has 5 things: (1) a valid, qualitative instrument, (2) multi-rater feedback, (3) real accountability mechanisms, (4) consideration of internal/external motivation, and (5) built-in forward...

Psychological safety is the collective emotional intelligence of a team. This relationship between emotional intelligence and psychological safety is the anatomy of culture in an organization, and both should be at the foundation of all development efforts.  In this episode, hosts Tim and Junior share what they’ve learned after years of programming and sequencing both psychological safety and emot...

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 tendenci...

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...

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 o...

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.  Liste...

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...

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 safe...

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 vulnerabili...

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 ri...

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 unenforc...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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 strateg...

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 subt...

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 inte...

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...

In the final installment of our Leadership Journey series, we delve into the intricacies of Leading the Business with Dr. Tim Clark and Junior. This episode uncovers the transition leaders must undergo from tactical to strategic thinking, focusing on optimizing the whole while preparing for the future.  Key Points & Timestamps: Transitioning to Strategic Thinking (03:03) Moving from a tactical...