Psychological Safety and Team Building

The Challenge - A Boulder, CO cybersecurity company decided it was time to dive into the world of Psychological Safety, hoping to jazz up their workplace vibes. With their global wings spreading wide, they realized they needed a crash course in cultural awareness to ensure their customer experience wasn't as bland as unbuttered toast in an ever-diversifying market hungry for cybersecurity services.

The Grand Plan - We put on our detective hats and snooped around every nook and cranny of the company, from the human resources hideout to the concierge corner, the engineering enclave, the sales and marketing madhouse, and the executive management lair. We tossed around a bunch of ideas for our program, but in the end, the clock and the piggy bank had the final say. So, we picked the department that's always in the spotlight but not exactly a rainbow of diversity for a beginner’s crash course in awareness. Before diving in, we had our future trainees fill out a pre-class survey to see if they knew the difference between an inclusive workplace and a pineapple.

The Results - So, we whipped up some training material and sprinkled it with gamification magic over a 3-day learning extravaganza for 63 unsuspecting souls. During each of the 4-hour brain-boosting sessions, participants took the IAT concocted by Banaji and Greenwald. To their astonishment, they discovered biases lurking in their noggins and met the pesky "Mindbugs" that love to mess with our daily thoughts and impressions of others, both at work and beyond. Thanks to our gamification wizardry and role-playing antics, the material was served up in a way that was as non-threatening as a kitten with a bow tie, creating a cozy space for idea swapping and honest chit-chat. A post-seminar survey showed that all participants felt like awareness superheroes, and 85% vowed to tweak their interactions with co-workers they once saw as aliens. Participants began to realize that the road to embracing psychological safety is like a never-ending road trip with plenty of pit stops for learning and growth.