Breaking the fear

Kate shared that people are clever and smart but not doing things because they are scared and do what they are told. She asks people to write their success story. For the things they want to do they are writing things that they already do. The question is how do we break this fear. Want people to be outgoing, make mistakes. Role of manager is to protect them from the mistakes. We want ppl to feel safe I’m the work environment. Have you been able to break your fear? Ekaterina - Most useful was getting feedback from others. Without feedback from others can’t compare self to others. Got feedback from other colleagues which allowed to her to understand where she was. Kate shared some people depending on culture are super critical of themselves and have a lot of self doubt. How do you get ppl to share implicit knowledge? How do you break the fear of breaking your image? How do you break the fear of making mistakes? Jon shared that workplaces that have a blameless methodology and give examples shows the type of environment. Allows people to be more comfortable and take risks. In personal life, hard to take risks because of fear may not be good at it. Hard to get started. Some challenges are hard to do, hard to start. Melissa shared that the verbiage of Even Better If helps to frame feedback as a way to improve and not failure. Kate shared when giving feedback you can find something good. Start with something good to set up head properly. Use AND instead of BUT to frame. Team is used to being treated as individual contributors. Brook - find out what they are afraid of and if they should legitimately fear it. Lot of discussion of psychological safety and blameless culture. Very rarely is it tested. What do we observe and record when things do go wrong. Kate sees herself as an umbrella absorbing everything and translating it to her team, protecting from the bad. If they feel they have the right work life balance it makes them happier. Fear shuts down the neocortex and shuts down creative ability. Melissa asked if a certain amount of stress is productive? Kate - a managed amount First goal is to let ppl know what comfort zone is. Jon - makes sure everyone has time to talk. Easy to be a listener when the line is loud. Make sure everyone has the opportunity to speak. Ask questions to get them thinking on what we can improve. Yufei - Is it a recent thing? Melissa - have you been making the ask specific? Kate -no, more general Melissa suggested team norms. Team created, ask them to enforce within the tam with each other. This should not be coming from leaders, should be come from the team and how they want to work together. Kate is celebrating wins - everyone has come up with what they are working to and they have wins that are supporting each other. Getting them to start thinking as a team. Ekaterina - Every software has bugs but when she misses them she feels fear because that is her job. Helped by having retrospectives. Helped understand the team work on how they reacted. Being part of the team makes her feel better. Kate - Starting with quality at the beginning, not shifting to the end