At a glance
Teamwork isn’t easy. Building a high performance team culture takes work and achieving this elite level of performance requires a high degree of psychological safety – the shared belief by team members that they can take risks, express their concerns and speak up without negative consequences. This is a skill we apply in acute trauma resuscitations every day.
We worked with executives and leaders from BioRender, a Toronto-based technology company, to help them build their skills for creating psychological safety among teams, delivering high quality feedback and pre-brief/de-briefs for big decisions.
The Challenge
Like any rapidly growing organization, their focus was building great products. However, they understood that getting to the next level meant investing in their teams to equip them with elite level team skills.
BioRender came to us to work with them to learn, practice and apply the necessary skills to make their teams elite.
What We Did
We led a comprehensive, Elite Teams course emphasizing high-performance teamwork strategies borrowed from the challenging environments where effective teamwork can be the difference between life and death.
Through hands-on, practical exercises we introduced:
- Tactics for highly effective pre-briefings and de-briefings
- A structured 3 x 3 feedback framework
- Multiple methods to increase psychological safety within executive and leadership teams – focusing on humility, gratitude and normalizing learning from failure
- Red-teams and pre-mortems as essential exercise to foster resilient and proactive project planning
The Impact
The transformation was immediate and impactful.
- Highly rated: The 32 participants all highly rated the course (4.7/5).
- Highly recommended: 100% of participants agreed they would recommend the course to colleagues and/or others in the industry.
- Powerful change: The company’s leadership saw the benefit of embedding psychological safety and red teams as a core value, formally revising their values to reflect this commitment.
- Direct results: This shift has empowered BioRender’s teams to communicate openly, enhancing project outcomes and establishing a culture that prioritizes learning, collaboration and psychological safety.
