Why I Wrote Leading Beyond Fear

I didn’t set out to write a leadership book. I set-out to write a psychological safety field guide. In-fact, that was the working title.

But then it evolved and I accomplished both goals. A leadership field guide built around essential elements - creating not just psychological safety - but the ability to adapt, innovate, and grow through the ambient uncertainty we all experience.

I knew I didn’t want to publish the book myself. So, like I so often do, I went for it. I tapped into my network, reached out to Wiley Publishing and they made me an offer. 

Writing a book is no small task. How much should be personal? How much should be academic, what should make the cut? What should hit the cutting room floor? 

I can say with confidence and experience now that being published by one of the biggest and most prestigious business and academic publishing houses in the world turns up the pressure. This was something I always wanted. But, to actually follow through with such a monumental task required a deeper motivation.

So, why did I write it at all? What was the underlying motivation?

For years, I’ve been part of conversations about culture, performance, psychological safety, and leadership. The last decade has been entirely focused on conversations with other practitioners, culture architects inside organizations, and leaders to face the challenges of how to build high-performing environments that didn’t undermine our humanity. 

We would identify the tensions within organizations, talk about different frameworks, different approaches, different theories, neuroscience, conversational intelligence, decision-making, philosophy, etc. etc. etc. Everything was on the table if we could make the workplace a better place and still achieve meaningful and worthwhile outcomes. Psychological safety has been, and for the visible future, will remain at the center of those conversations.

Everyone agreed it mattered.

The research has been out there for a long time. There are a lot of strategies and practices that help build learning organizations and high performing teams. But, when it comes to building psychological safety - and high performance - I could never find a resource that really closed that gap. They were focused on strategies that built performance but missed the human element. Or they focused on the human side of leadership but not on performance.  

Over time, that gap started to bother me.

So, I wrote the book I wish I had in my hands as a leader. The book I wish I could hand to the other practitioners and the culture architects we work with around the globe.

With this motivation in my mind, it created and helped me answer a couple of questions. 

First, how much of my personal story should I add? In spite of the inevitable vulnerability hangover that would come after - the amount of personal story is entirely dependent on the value I felt it would offer the reader. It might sound like an obvious answer but that is easier said than done. So, where it was helpful it’s personal - where it’s not, I’ve left it out. 

When the goal is service, you serve with your whole self.

Next would be to answer how much theory to include - I knew the book would be practical - but how much theory was necessary?

There is a lot of psychological safety research, and there are several books. Some of them are exceptional - like The Fearless Organization by Amy C. Edmondson - which provides the rational background and actionable insight. Insight that I, and many others, have based our earliest interventions on. 

Yet, there was an opportunity still in the area of practice. I wanted to offer a book that could be a field guide. So, rather than being focused solely on the theory or the inter-personal aspect of building psychological safety, I wanted to go further. 

As a theoretical thinker with a natural preference to identify patterns, build logical frameworks, and analyze ideas to understand "why" things happen - I enjoyed mixing that with my preference for experiential learning and application. 

So the book covers the spectrum.

Enough theory to provide a launch point for readers and perhaps even a little philosophy at times. But quickly, and most critically it moves towards practical ways to address mindset and internal roadblocks, essential leadership skills like negotiation, delegation, inquiry and discernment. It moves into inter-personal situations like 1:1 meetings and creating accountability. There are practices for improving day to day leadership like having better meetings and improving the quality of conversations, decision making, dialogue and  scaling leadership influence. And essentially, it offers tactics to successfully scale psychological safety in particular within an organization.

There’s more of course - you can’t put everything in one book - but this book provides the foundation. It’s all oriented towards building psychological safety, adaptability, growth and high-performance.

I wrote Leading Beyond Fear because I wanted to make the work of leadership feel tangible. Practical. Usable in the next meeting, not just a discussion in a workshop.

I don’t expect this book to solve everything. But, like I’ve done most of my life.

After hearing all the talk, I decided to act.

Leadership doesn’t fail because people don’t care. It fails when leaders aren’t offered the skills or opportunities to practice better leadership. It fails when fear quietly shapes behavior and no one addresses it directly.

This book is my attempt to address it directly.

Neil Pretty

CEO | Co-Founder | Author Leading Beyond Fear