Every great journey begins with a question—the kind that tugs at your soul and refuses to let go.
For our team, that question has always been: What creates environments where people feel safe enough to step into more of themselves?
Since our founding in 2006, Round Table Companies has been on a quest to answer this question. What began as a book publishing company evolved into an obsession with psychological safety and human transformation.
The Authors Who Showed Us the Way
Our story begins with our authors—CEOs, thought leaders, and visionaries who trusted us with their most precious assets: their stories. We created safe spaces where they could risk authenticity to find the voice inside of them that longed to be freed. Book by book, we witnessed a pattern emerge: when people feel psychologically safe, their creativity and courage blossom into beauty.
These authors taught us something profound: the moment someone feels deeply seen and heard is the moment something new becomes possible. We saw it happen in our book coaching sessions. We witnessed it throughout the editing process. We celebrated it when their books were published.
We honor those who have trusted us with their stories over the years. They not only allowed us to guide their narratives—they unknowingly helped us discover our own path forward. Each book became both an end and a beginning, a completed project that opened new questions about human potential and connection.
The Beautiful Business: An Actionable Manifesto to Create an Unignorable Business with Love at the Core
Steven Morris
Present Company: Cultivating Cultures of High Performance in Teams and Organizations
Timothy Dukes and Michael Landers
The ABCs of Conscious Capitalism for KIDs: Create a Business, Make Money, Change the World
Laura Hall
Bridging from Storytelling to Cultural Transformation
By 2014, our understanding of psychological safety had deepened. We began exploring how the same principles that unlocked authentic expression in authors could transform organizational cultures.
We began our decade-long training at the Stagen Leadership Academy, while simultaneously committing to years of transformational study at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland. This intense education in both psychology and leadership science was consistently expressed through our integral involvement with Conscious Capitalism from 2014 through 2022, where we combined artistry and influence to deepen the psychological safety of the conferences.
Over these years of continual study and practice, we pulled our learnings into our day-to-day work and came to see people as brilliantly unique individuals existing within complex, interconnected systems.
Our question evolved:
Could the vulnerability that makes great books possible be the key to making great organizations possible?
We expanded our services to include vulnerability art installations, documentary films, core values work, and business storytelling—creating immersive experiences that fostered the depth of connection that unlocked people’s potentials.
Specifically, our art installations—walls where people’s anonymous vulnerabilities were turned into stunning art—became a catalyst in our study of psychological safety. Through those walls—erected for Fortune 500 companies and conferences—and our Vulnerability is Sexy card game, we uncovered the three agreements for psychological safety that must be present for profound trust to emerge. And we learned that through these three agreements, people’s relationships to themselves could transform, paving the way for their relationships with others to transform as well.
The Pivot to Deeper Purpose
The global disruption of 2020 became our next catalyst for an inevitable change. Organizations everywhere were asking questions we’d been exploring for years: How do we foster connection in a disconnected world? How do we build trust across distance? How do we create cultures where people can be fully human?
This convergence of crisis and capability led to our pivot toward organizational culture transformation. Our decades of experience creating spaces for deeper vulnerability, trust, and psychological safety became the foundation for our next chapter and what would emerge as our CARES initiatives, leadership and team training courses, and transformational experiences.
Field Testing Our Approach
Our theoretical understanding needed real-world validation. In 2020, we partnered with PCI in Dallas, Texas, and trained 250 of their inside sales agents in psychological safety by guiding them through ever-deepening vulnerability with one another. Two years into our work with PCI, our training had supported a new $30 million line of revenue at the same time PCI was named by Fortune as one of the top 100 companies to work for nationally.
Then in 2023, we began our partnership with Kirk Zehnder and Earnest Machine, an industrial distribution solutions company located in Cleveland, Ohio. Our founder, Corey, stepped in as Earnest’s fractional chief culture officer, and we began the work of deepening psychological safety at Earnest. The high adopters of our offerings across the company, today, make up the majority of the management team, now in year two of their transformational journey. One we are proud to still be guiding as we offer our programs and courses to other companies.
What we continue to learn reinforces our deepest belief: psychological safety isn’t just nice to have—it’s essential for organizational performance and human development.
For teams to move toward productive conflict, they must let go of artificial harmony. For genuine curiosity to emerge, judgment must be set aside. For profound connection to become inevitable, people have to peek out from behind the mask of isolation.
And the driver for that movement? It’s care. Caring for people creates measurable results.
Where We Stand Today
Today, at Round Table Companies, we build cultures where trust runs so deep that teams can navigate complexity with grace and courage. Our approach honors the messiness of being human while providing practical tools for dynamic growth.
We’ve learned that workplaces don’t have to choose between people and performance. When we create psychological safety, we get both. When people feel cared for, they simply perform better.
Our journey from book publisher to culture catalyst wasn’t a straight line. It was a series of discoveries, each building on the last, guided by a persistent question:
What helps people feel safe enough to bring more of themselves to work?
The authors we worked with taught us to listen deeply. The psychology we studied taught us to see systemically. The leadership methodologies we trained in taught us to catalyze potential. And the organizations we’ve partnered with have taught us to implement practically.
Now the journey continues, as we carry forth the wisdom of storytelling into the complex terrain of organizational transformation—always remembering that at the heart of every great culture is the courage to be authentically, imperfectly human together.
Join Our Journey
Whether you’re a beloved friend of RTC, past client, book buyer, witness to our previous work, or you’re a leader of an organization being introduced to us for the first time, we invite you to join us on this journey of continual discovery. Together, we can create spaces where vulnerability becomes strength, where trust enables greatness, and where human connection drives extraordinary results.
The story continues. And like all great hero’s journeys, it’s about transformation—not just of books or companies, but of the human heart.
Want to see what we offer?
We love helping people and organizations become more human.