Our primal, animal instincts were developed at a time when there could be a tiger hiding behind the bushes. Such instincts stopped serving us when humans transitioned into a settled, agricultural life.
Today, our fight-or-flight instincts do more harm than good. In knowledge economy the results of our work are not physical tangible products but intangible concepts, abstractions and graphs deep in our minds. Our ability to elicit these from each other, make visible what is normally invisible in our minds, relies on creating a psychologically safe space, shared sense of purpose and community among the people involved.
To that end, there are some excellent pieces of advice in the book Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg(link1, link2). In the past, I’ve found practical advice on leadership behaviours from Jordan Belfort (on whom the movie Wolf of Wall Street was based).
More recently, I became aware of a book on building Rapport which deals with starting conversations by building trust and safety, tackling the “How you say something” of the conversations before considering “what you are going to say”.
Below Water Level 