Caution isn’t excellence; it’s drag. Retros won’t fix fear. Cut risk at the source, and your team stops tiptoeing and starts sprinting. I’m going to assume your team is holding regular retrospectives to learn from mistakes and successes. One major source of potential improvement that often goes unnoticed is recognizing fear and combating it.

The Blind Spot

Even teams that regularly retrospect and consider how things were executed tend to focus on what was there. You can see when something took longer than anticipated, or discuss an outage. Those are in your face and become easy areas to draw action items from and improve (at least, I hope you’ve got this down).

In order to make teams improve faster, I encourage them to have a checklist of questions to consider during retros to make them view things from a different perspective. One of those questions is about evaluating whether we did things at a certain pace due to fear, risks, or anxiety. And if so, is that something we can improve upon? Naturally, you’d cross a tightrope much faster knowing there was a safety net under you.

Real Examples

Some of you readers are probably already gushing with ideas with this “prompt” of the article. I helped you see another aspect of your professional improvement, and you immediately started seeing opportunities. However, my experience tells me some people benefit from real examples. Let’s go over some, and not all are purely about technical improvements!

Easy rollbacks with reliable backups are a great example of something many know they “should” do, but delay months in setting it up. Knowing that big features can be easily undone in case you missed something means you’ll deploy much sooner. For the majority of cases, the extra time you’d spend evaluating it would be wasted (I’m assuming you don’t regularly want to deploy things riddled with bugs). Thus, the safety net would allow you to move faster.

Similarly, feature flags are extremely useful in allowing teams to work on multiple changes simultaneously without stepping on each other’s toes. It means you can have something live for your peers to review or for stakeholders to test safely.

In non-technical areas, we have things like coaching effectively. Many first-time leaders are afraid of providing feedback because they aren’t sure about what might happen. Safety nets here include having a system for providing feedback regularly (as described in the free ebook you can get by signing up below). Another improvement is about having clarity in the company about role definitions and growth opportunities, making it much easier for leaders to handle people’s wishes. Otherwise, some leaders avoid these conversations entirely, fearing what someone might ask of them.

One last example is about hiring. I’ve seen too many companies where making a bad hire becomes a permanent burden. These are companies that would rather do anything but admit the mistake and let a person go. For these issues and similar ones, your hiring managers would benefit from a safety net that makes it possible for them to correct their mistakes.

Another good safety net would be investing in yourself to have better skills as a leader. Check out my free upcoming livestream below!