Good teamwork is the heart of successful business. But what is a good team? Many teams are riven by dysfunctionality, poor leadership, groupthink, and in-fighting. Research across 180 teams and 37,000 employees at Google has identified the core component of high-performance teams - psychological safety. This is a collaborative, customer-focused and civil environment in which creativity, critical thought and cognitive flexibility can flourish. But drop the smallest amount of toxicity into the team and everything can quickly becomes poisonous and low-performance. Informed by years of cutting-edge management research and decades of practical experience in organisational transformation, this Masterclass explains how to deliver a high-performance, psychologically safe environment and how to quickly identify and eliminate the various toxic processes, behaviours and people that destroy the core of a great business.

1.
Mastering skills that build
Psychological Safety
and drive stellar
Team Performance
Teamwork Masterclass
Photo: Beyond Magazine
Claydon & Dobbin //
Organisational Misbehaviourists

2. “Psychological Safety is by far and away the most
important team dynamic, it underpins everything else.”
Claydon & Dobbin //
Organisational Misbehaviourists
Good teamwork is the heart of
successful organisation. But what
makes a good team? Many teams are
riven by dysfunctionality, poor
leadership, groupthink, and in-
fighting. Research across 37,000
employees at Google identified the
key requirement of high-performance
teams: psychological safety.
Psychological safety fosters a
collaborative and civil environment in
which creativity, critical thought and
cognitive flexibility can flourish.
But introduce the smallest amount of
toxicity and teamwork can rapidly
deteriorate.
Informed by years of cutting-edge
research and decades of practical
experience, this Masterclass explains
how to create a high-performance,
psychologically safe environment and
how to identify and eliminate the
various toxic processes, behaviours
and personalities that can poison the
social fabric and destroy the potential
of great organisations.
Result of Google’s two year study of 180 teams across
37,000 employees into what makes a “dream team”

3. Psychological Safety in teams is built through the
everyday practices and behaviours of its members.
Our Masterclass takes a “soil and seed”
approach. In humans, some people who
get cancer see it spread so fast that
saving them is almost impossible. For
others, the cancer’s spread is slow and
easily treatable. The nature of the
“soil” or the physiology of the body
enables or disables the speed at which
the poison spreads.
So it is for organisations. In some
companies, toxic behaviours spread
rapidly, infecting the company from top
to bottom, with predictably terrible
bottom-line results or social reputation
costs. In others, they are isolated and
cut away quickly and relatively
painlessly. Our Masterclass helps you
develop a soil that disables the spread
of toxicity and find ways to eliminate its
poison at the source.
We use storytelling, videos, group
exercises and a heavy dose of humour
to deliver knowledge and skills that
participants will able to apply
immediately and drive stellar
team performance.
Claydon & Dobbin //
Organisational Misbehaviourists

4. PROGRAM
Claydon & Dobbin //
Organisational Misbehaviourists
• Psychological Safety is not for Wimps
• Be that Kind of person
• Everyday Civility
• Dependable Candour
• Diagnosing Toxicity
• Dicks & Dickheads
• Confronting Terrorism

5. Psychological Safety is not for Wimps
How psychological safety drives high performance teams
and why it is absolutely not about Kumbaya circles.
Fear, anxiety, a desire to belong and to find
purpose — these are central characteristics of
the modern human. At work, this manifests
through weak impression management
(Wimp). People do not want to appear
ignorant, so they ask no questions; don’t want
to appear incompetent, so they admit no
mistakes; don’t want to appear intrusive,
so they offer no ideas; don’t want to appear
negative, so they don’t challenge the status quo.
These inactions cause performance and
productivity problems. Errors and mistakes
escalate into disaster, with significant bottom
line and social reputation impacts. Pent up fear
and frustration results in toxicity, bullying and
mental anguish at work and at home.
Confronting this is tough but necessary.
People must be psychologically safe to produce
the creativity, critical thought and cognitive
flexibility necessary to high performing teams.
In this opening session, we unpack the research
and data informing psychological safety for high
performance teamwork in an accessible and
entertaining manner.
Claydon & Dobbin //
Organisational Misbehaviourists

6. Be that Kind of Person
An exploration into the courageous heart of kindness.
Most companies have diversity programmes.
They focus on differences, which, ironically,
often cause division rather than collaborative
acceptance. We take a different approach.
Drawing from Brene Brown’s world-leading
research on courage and vulnerability, we
examine what makes us human. We all share
the same fears and worries about belonging and
purpose. We just have different tactics towards
achieving them.
Being creative, critical and cognitively flexible
takes great courage. Helping others to do the
same takes great kindness. By examining what
it means to be kind to yourself and kind to
others in the pursuit of courage, this interactive
session opens the door to psychological safety.
Claydon & Dobbin //
Organisational Misbehaviourists

7. Everyday Civility
What ought civility look like in your organisation?
Much influential popular thought suggests that
a great culture is the answer to all behavioural
problems. That all bullying and toxicity will
dissolve once it is in place. But is it?
Human cultures have never been kind to
creativity, critical thought and cognitive
flexibility. Those who challenge its norms are
ostracised and exiled — the scapegoats for all
the culture’s problems.
A civilisation, in contrast, enables diversity and
its associated benefits through civil rules.
Different perspectives coexist side-by-side in
harmonious celebration of a greater purpose.
But what might that look like in your
organisation? In this session, we examine and
identify a set of civil rules to help govern
psychologically safe behaviours.
Claydon & Dobbin //
Organisational Misbehaviourists

8. Dependable Candour
Good teamwork depends on radical candour.
Are you up for it?
Kindness and civility are all well and good. A bit
Kumbaya, though. In many workshops, the
touchy-feely nature of such fluffy positivity
clashes against hard-nosed business realities.
And so they should. They are just the path
leading to the environment we have to deliver.
One of dependable, radical candour.
If you don’t understand, you must question.
If you have made a mistake, you must admit it.
If you have an idea, you must offer it. If the
solution seems inadequate, you must critique it.
Drawing on the work of Ray Dalio and Adam
Grant, this session injects the complex
problems of modern teamwork back into the
Masterclass and examines how a
psychologically safe environment produces a
wealth of useful potential solutions.
Claydon & Dobbin //
Organisational Misbehaviourists

9. Dicks & Dickheads
A review of 2,500 years of behavioural research,
in language that we can all understand.
Why, despite all our best intentions, do toxic
people appear and stupid decisions get made?
This is one of the oldest questions in human
history, debated from the civil forum in Socratic
Athens to the neuroscientific research labs of
the 21st Century. But it is often accompanied by
glassy-eyed stares. Alazons and eirons, ethicism
and authenticity, EQ and SQ, the limbic
system, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex
— they hinder rather than help understanding.
We do the opposite. By stripping back
discussions to commonplace language —
dickish behaviours (from fiddling with your
phone during a meeting to signify boredom to
full-blown pyschopathy) and dickheadedness
(enforcing a stupid decision through aggressive
behaviours to save face) — we illustrate how
toxic behaviours have accompanied human
organisation throughout history and why they
continue to require constant attention in
today’s organisations.
Claydon & Dobbin //
Organisational Misbehaviourists

10. Diagnosing Toxicity
A brief introduction to Narcissism, Machiavellianism, Sadism,
Psychopathy and other interesting personality types.
Are you worried you might be a dick or a
dickhead? Don’t be. We all have narcissistic,
Machiavellian, and psychopathic traits. Without
them, we wouldn’t be human. We require them
to survive and thrive in our everyday working
world. The key is managing them so they don’t
become dysfunctional.
Once you hear about these Dark Triad traits,
you’ll tend to look outwards to label people
who possess them instead of evaluating your
own performance in context.
In this session, we examine how we cope with
these dark traits through telling heroic stories
about our actions. We look at why we must
become reflective to prevent these stories from
delivering dysfunction and injecting toxicity
into the kind and civil candour of the high
performing team.
Claydon & Dobbin //
Organisational Misbehaviourists

11. Confronting Terrorism
What happens when “organisational terrorism” arrises?
It needs to be dealt with. Urgently!
Despite all the above knowledge, your
organisation is still vulnerable to the lone
“terrorist”, who can sow seeds of discourse
through poisonous toxicity. You have created a
soil that prevents it spreading quickly, but
you’ll still need to cut out the cancerous growth
as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Our last session provides you with a set of tools
to identify such people and prevent them from
causing chaos.
Claydon & Dobbin //
Organisational Misbehaviourists

12. 30 years leading technology-driven
transformation. Entrepreneur. Social
Ecologist. MBA Mentor. “We are
living in a time of unprecedented
change and technological innovation.
Organisations that fail to adapt will
die. In times of great uncertainty,
agility and collaboration are
essential. Mastering collaboration
is the single most important job
to be done. It simply can’t wait.”
John DobbinDr. Richard Claydon
Globally recognised thought leader
on modern organisational life and how
original thought emerges in relentlessly
changing, highly uncertain and often
toxic environments. “Growth of
knowledge expands the field of
ignorance, so with each step towards
the horizon new unknown lands
appear. We know the journey has no
clear destination — and yet we
persevere in the travel.”
The Organisational Misbehaviourists

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Claydon & Dobbin //
Organisational Misbehaviourists

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