The Safety Effect: Empower Yourself. Support Your Team. Inspire Your Organization.

Let me start of by saying that I wholeheartedly believe that psychological safety is one of the largest contributing factors to people’s happiness (at work and in more social situations), and that I know from experience that it’s a topic I have a lot to learn on still. So I eagerly started reading this book by a practitioner, but sadly it was not a great learning experience for me.

The author has undoubtedly helped improve the psychological safety of many teams at Google, and heck… I could easily have been part of one of David’s trainings myself during my 9+ years at Google. But somehow this book was not very helpful to me. David cuts too many of his own experiences at Google short before explaining in detail what happened and how the feeling of psychological safety in the team was improved.

By halfway though it started feeling repetitious: here’s why psychological safety is important, here’s more research on it, I’ve helped so many teams improve their psychological safety, you should do this too, here’s a question you should ask yourself. It just remained too shallow and I constantly had the feeling that stories were left unfinished, never telling me what specifically that team (or David?) had done to help themselves.

The three stars is rounding up, for I truly do feel the topic is important, but this book was just not helpful for me.