Hi there,
Did you know that fail stands for First Attempt In Learning?
Just kidding!
But if it did, that would make an epic fail an epic first attempt in learning. 😆
⚡ Supercharge of the Week
What does failure look like in your cross-functional teams?
Often, it’s hidden. Ignored. Buried.
Why?
For so many reasons – from societal attitudes to a lack of psychological safety at work.
“When we fail, we worry that we’ll be punished and we feel ashamed, so we try to avoid failure at all costs.”
Failure can feel deeply personal – whether at home or at work. Almost one third of adults admit to a fear of failure. (If this sounds like you, BetterUp offers great insights and strategies to handle fear of failure.)
Remote Octopus recommends celebrating project failure and building in intentional team reflection opportunities to drive cross-functional learning and collaboration forward.
Google led an incredible research project a few years ago which discovered that psychological safety is the foundation of an effective team. Recognizing & celebrating failure is a cornerstone for cultivating and modeling psychological safety on your team.
Celebrating failure is about recognizing the failure and modeling the excitement for a learning opportunity. Leverage we language, and ensure any project celebrations are kept distinct from processing the team’s learnings.
Example in Action
Misha has been pushing Project STAR forward for 6 months… and the project was just delivered two months late.
Misha in Slack: Congratulations to the team on delivering Project STAR! An incredible experience collaborating with everyone. As we know, the project was delivered two months later than expected which creates an exciting learning opportunity for us to supercharge our collaboration in future projects. There were definitely some bumps that we felt along the way! I’m going to pull all of us together to process our learnings in a team retro next week. In the meantime, feel free to reach out with any questions.
Notice what we didn’t say?
We didn’t say: Misha’s Project STAR was delivered two months late. Let’s come together as a team to figure out what Misha did wrong.
We didn’t say: Misha FINALLY delivered Project STAR. It’s so late! We need to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Hard no.
When celebrating failure together, ensure the entire team is on board and no key contributors are being singled out. Avoid tagging anyone in Slack or mentioning names on any team calls. The failure should be owned by the team collectively and learned from as a team collectively.
The only true failure is only a failure to learn. Easier said than done.
Did your cross-functional project recently fail?
Remember to conduct a retrospective to process your learnings and move forward quickly together! Check out The Retro Playbook to get started.
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