Leadership Academy — Week 3 Study Guide: Psychological Safety, Stakeholders, and SCOPE
A condensed summary of Week 3 for assessment prep — Project Aristotle, the Power/Interest grid, and the SCOPE framework.
Part of the Leadership Academy series — a condensed study guide ahead of the assessment. Full detail lives in Session 3.
The core idea — Google’s Project Aristotle: five factors predict team effectiveness, in order of importance: 1. Psychological Safety (can people take risks, disagree, admit mistakes without fear) · 2. Dependability · 3. Structure & Clarity · 4. Meaning · 5. Impact. Psychological safety is the foundation everything else sits on.
The framework — Power/Interest Grid: High Power/High Interest = manage closely. High Power/Low Interest = keep satisfied (careful — this quadrant is more dangerous than it looks; these stakeholders go quiet and then intervene late). Low Power/High Interest = keep informed. Low Power/Low Interest = monitor.
The framework — SCOPE (official version, use this one): set at the outset of any project or relationship, before anything can drift.
- Situation — what we’re doing and why, one or two sentences.
- Constraints — the real timeline/budget/resource/quality limits.
- Outputs — named deliverables, not activities.
- Process — how decisions get made, who approves.
- Expectations — ask the stakeholder what success looks like to them; don’t assume.
Rule: expectation management only counts before the gap opens. After, it’s incident response.
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