Conversations That Build Trust

Psychological safety, cognitive fitness, and emotional intelligence for high-performing teams.

Most managers were promoted for what they delivered, not for how they listen. So the hardest parts of the job arrive without training: the feedback conversation that goes sideways, the team member who stops raising problems, the meeting where everyone agrees and nothing changes. This six-session series gives managers the communication skills that make those conversations go differently, and gives teams the conditions where candor is worth the risk.

Ask about bringing this to your team

The fundamental problem addressed

When people don't feel safe speaking up, the cost shows up as mistakes caught late, ideas that never surface, and turnover among exactly the people you most wanted to keep. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety, among the most well-replicated findings in organizational behavior, connects it directly to team learning and performance, provided high standards are held alongside safety rather than lowered.

Who it's for

Managers and supervisors who lead a team directly
Organizations investing in leadership development, not one-off workshops
Teams where people have stopped bringing problems forward, or never started
Leaders who want practical skill-building rather than theory

Best suited to intact teams or manager cohorts within the same organization, where participants can practice on the relationships they actually have.

What participants learn

By the end of the series, participants can:

Sharpen focus and executive function under pressure. Strengthen the attention skills that hold up in high-stress situations, not just in calm ones.
Listen in a way that builds psychological safety. Use PACE (Pause, Acknowledge, Clarify, Empower) to listen past their own reactivity and into what someone actually means.
Give and receive feedback that builds accountability without shame. Hold high standards without the defensiveness that makes standards unenforceable.
Sustain performance and reduce burnout. Practice self-compassion and growth-minded accountability, so responsibility for mistakes doesn't require self-punishment first.
Leave with a plan, not a binder. Consolidate the series into a 90-day individualized development plan built around specific, observable behaviors.

Format

Six live virtual sessions
120 minutes each · up to 20 participants per cohort

Session arc:

Listening — PACE (Pause, Acknowledge, Clarify, Empower), presence, and reflective listening
Attention and regulation — noticing reactivity, building the pause
Compassion and standards — self-compassion, compassion for others, and why both serve performance
Receiving feedback — the four-step response, and what it makes possible
Giving feedback — inquiry first, specific affirmation, observation versus interpretation
Integration — consolidating the series into a 90-day individualized development plan focused on specific, observable behaviors

Sessions are live and interactive, with practice in small groups. Between sessions, participants apply one skill to a real conversation and bring what happened back to the cohort.

Extended practice is built into each session, sized to the skill rather than to a clock.

Mindful Communication for Trust and Psychological Safety

(2-session series)

Not every team has the capacity for a six-session commitment. A two-part version covers the foundation:

Two live virtual workshops · 90–120 minutes each · up to 25 participants

Workshop 1 — Mindful listening: the foundation of trust. How listening habits build or erode psychological safety, a mindfulness technique for sustaining open attention, and a framework for reflective listening.
Workshop 2 — Receiving Feedback Well: Turning Input into Growth. Building the confidence and clarity to take in feedback without shutting down or getting defensive, and to separate what's useful in the feedback from how it was delivered.

This works well as a starting point for organizations, or as a standalone for teams who need the essentials.

The evidence behind it

The program is built on findings labeled by strength, drawn from several intersecting bodies of research:

Well-replicated: attention training protects focus and working memory during high-demand periods (Jha; Goleman & Davidson). Psychological safety helps teams surface and learn from errors faster, provided high standards are held alongside safety (Edmondson). Self-compassion is associated with lower burnout, faster recovery from setbacks, and greater willingness to take responsibility for mistakes rather than avoid them (Neff; Germer).
Well-replicated, with a practical caveat: emotional intelligence competencies are trainable, and research shows gains hold over years when paired with an individualized development plan (Goleman & Cherniss; Goleman & Boyatzis), which is why Session 6 is built around exactly that kind of plan rather than a general wrap-up.

What the program does not do is overclaim. There are widely circulated statistics in this field that don't survive scrutiny, and they aren't used here.

Bring this to your team

Every engagement is scoped to the organization. Cohort size, session timing, and emphasis are set in conversation. Tell us a bit about your team and what's prompting the interest, and we'll take it from there.