We started with some assumptions when we first built out product. Some proved to be fundamentally wrong, some were spot on, and most were half-right and helped guide us to improve. Being that I think of my readers here as a team, and that I’m a big believer in the power of sharing wrong turns and mistakes, I’ve often talked to you in this newsletter about some of these assumptions, including the appallingly misguided ones such as “the Psychological Safety of the team is the business of the team leader and they need to fix it for them” but I will admit I am doing a poor job of sharing the victories and presumptions we were absolutely right about and that’s perhaps valuable too.
One of the the ones that was semi-wrong was how close-knit and emotionally involved we presumed teams were. In particular project teams or teams that had been together a while. Of course we didn’t think brand new ones, or ad-hoc ones would have the luxury -but we did acknowledge some work on creating an instant emotional bond will be needed for teaming- but everyone else we thought, had a high degree of knowledge and care about each other.
This is tremendously important, because one of the right assumptions we made, was how we chose to redefine “engagement” as its true meaning and measure how well team members relate to each other emotionally, and how tight they are in lieu of a dry and frankly useless definition that most engagement tools give it.
We postulated that, if teams that have psychological safety describe their team as “family” and report a great degree of connection, that this hasn’t been only the effect of higher levels of PS but that it has predicated it and brought it about. In other words we believe in a virtuous circle – that they were psychologically safe -partly- because they were engaged with each other and emotionally invested in the team and the other way around.
So, when we chose what behaviours of the set we were researching we should measure in the software, this definition of Engagement was central and we included it as one of the components we check today alongside Courage, Openness, Learning, Flexibility and Resilience. That hypothesis and choice were correct and the link to Psychological Safety has since been validated by tens of teams that demonstrably increase their PS as soon as they work on Engagement.
Now here’s the kicker – we presumed this “work on Engagement” which clearly needed to happen and came about in the form of the workshops, exercises and hackathons detailed in the Plays of our software, needed to start post a certain level of closeness which we thought was fundamental and common to all teams we worked with.
If you recall, we created our Playbook by selecting the team actions that some teams had undertaken which showed direct results and including them in the software effectively crowdsourcing the work on the team dynamic of many successful, Psychologically Safe and high performing teams. And so in the software, the plays to increase Engagement were the “Empathy Hackathon”, the “Team Gratitude Check-in”, the “Team Relaunch” and even the much beloved “B!tch Fest” but it wasn’t till recently that we admitted that our initial presumption of the degree of closeness has caused us to be biased in selecting these and thusly resulted in a major gap.
This meant that every time a team would report they had had to take another meeting and ask some questions of each other they never had probed before because they would consistently fail to answer positively the questions in our software that asked how much they knew about each other’s private lives, we would dismiss it as hygiene and something that particular team should have already had. Or when they were reporting being so much more aware of each other’s feelings we’d simply translate it into higher levels of Empathy and EQ but never did any of these reports translate in our minds as a possible play. We simply assumed that people knowing each other’s kids’ names and ages in a team is the norm. Needless to say, that was wrong and once the penny dropped that we are missing a major trick, we did something about it.
Last week, a play to get get to know each other better, to increase true engagement by practically increasing the team’s emotional bond, was born. It’s called the “Team=Family Exercise” and all it does is guide and frame a conversation around basic information about each other that would have maybe eventually occurred in time if people became comfortable enough to shed the Impression Management where they fear being intrusive or looking unprofessional.
The ideal team would be able to have any team member answer these questions about each other like a team’s version of the Couples’ Game. They’d be that close, they’d know each other well enough. An easy enough litmus test, so if you think your team is close knit and has a high degree of engagement and Psychological Safety try that – have team members answer personal questions about someone else in the team. Take turns to test – do they know basic things about their family? Their background? Their likes and dislikes?
If not, the team can’t run fast.
Whatever 20-30 years of being in the corporate world have conditioned you to believe about “being professional” and not mixing your work and your private personas, the truth is, teams that have a strong emotional bond move mountains and teams that don’t, can’t.
The equation of this virtuous circle is simple – if the team is more emotionally invested in each other, that’s one of the elements that will increase the likelihood they will have higher Psychological Safety and therefore be more performant.
If you’re a client and see even the smallest dip in your Engagement use this play. If you get any new comers use it again. If anything major changes in the way the team is formed, go back to it.
If you’re not a client, come back tomorrow to this newsletter to see some of the questions we use in the “Team=Family” Play in our software and borrow some tips if you’re not a client so you can try it yourself. As ever, happy to teach you how to replicate a play “on paper” to try and crank up Psychological Safety “manually” but unfortunately, unless you work in a place smart enough to have kitted you with our software and given you the support of integrating it into your day-to-day work life, you won’t be able to see the effects of your work and the close emotional bond reflected in data.
Nonetheless as ever, *some* human work is better than *no* human work if we’re serious about having less HumanDebt™ so ask yourself today if you could name the kids of all your team members today.
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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve
Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at www.peoplenottech.com or reach out at contact@peoplenottech.com for a demo and let’s help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.