Participatory Leadership and Developing a Culture of Psychological Safety

Participatory leadership is presented as a move away from the industrial hierarchical triangle toward a more circular way of working where people share power, collaborate, and make room for autonomy, transparency, and consent-based decisions. Takavadii connects this to practical habits such as check-ins, check-outs, facilitation in meetings, and self-directed learning.

He also says psychological safety is not declared from the top. It grows through everyday practices that help people speak up, bring ideas, and develop culture from within the organization. He widens the idea of value to include wellbeing, people, and planet, and points to the Inner Development Goals as a way to shape what teams measure and how they work.

Reading notes

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• Participatory leadership is described as changing workplace leadership from a hierarchical triangle to a more circular form where everybody is equal.
• The shift in role for a team lead is framed as moving from individual contribution to responsibility for delivery, team capacity, team alignment, organizational goals, and client objectives.
• Listening skills and practices that let teams be liberated are presented as central to leadership.
• Percolab uses small micro-practices, including the Listen For game and seven domains of practice from Going Horizontal.
• The seven domains mentioned are autonomy, purpose, meetings, transparency, decision making, learning and development, and related practices.
• Meetings are described as facilitated or hosted rather than chaired, and anyone can bring a topic and host that part of the meeting.
• Decision making is described as consent-based through Generative Decision-Making, using the question of whether something is good enough for now and safe enough to try.
• Psychological safety is said to come from small practices, not from a top-down declaration.
• Takavadii says organizations need to unlearn some inherited practices and rebuild capacity inside the organization with accessible tools.
• He says many people withhold knowledge because they do not feel safe bringing ideas or suggestions.
• At Percolab, work includes conscious economic conversations, choosing projects, and reviewing contributions at the end of a project.
• The Inner Development Goals are grouped into being, thinking, relating, collaborating, and acting.
• The acting group includes courage, creativity, optimism, and perseverance.
• Takavadii argues that software engineers should expand the definition of value to include people, planet, wellbeing, and marginalized people.
• He suggests that reviews could include the question of whether someone would work with the same team again.