Walk Your Talk

Leaders want their teams to be innovative, collaborative, and high performing. Employees cannot achieve these goals without a supportive work culture. In most settings, psychological safety is the cultural cornerstone for an organization to reach its potential.

Walk Your Talk: Making Sense of Leadership introduces you to the most up-to-date research in this area, but what makes it unique is the lens through which it is written. Early in his career, managers groomed Ted McKinney to be an authoritative, command-and-control leader. Those behaviors invariably led to toxic work environments. As a scholar, he wanted to understand these dysfunctional environments better. More importantly, as a leader, he wanted to know how to change them.

Dr. McKinney provides an evidence-based model for fostering psychologically safe work cultures and cultivating employee well-being. You will learn to capitalize on relationships between leadership behaviors, employee sensemaking, work culture, and organizational success. Compelling case studies help readers unpack what works, what doesn’t, and why. Walk Your Talk chronicles the stories, studies, and experiences that led to Ted’s paradigm shift from viewing employees as adversaries to embracing them as allies.