In December, I joined a panel during NVISIA’s 2020 Virtual Tech Showcase discussing how to create and maintain “safe-to-fail” work environments. The panelists were:
- Jennifer Drangstveit, CUNA Mutual’s Senior IT Manager
- Adam Karl, VP of Development at Zywave
- Amber Field (me!), Director of Software Development at Singlewire Software
- Paul Barth, VP of Information Technology at AIG as our moderator
I had a great time chatting with Jennifer, Adam, and Paul! We spoke about a variety of techniques for creating a psychologically safe environment at work. This included how managers can contribute and what specific practices we’ve tried in the past. For example, I talked about how we created a safe-to-fail environment at Capital One Labs, where it was our job to fail early and often. We used a quarterly pitch process coupled with a self-selection event that allowed teams whose pitches failed to find a new team.
We also talked about what you can do in a remote environment to foster that same feeling of psychological safety.
Check out the full webinar here.