This article is part 2 of a 4-part series on creating a strong and effective team and organizational culture
Part 1: “It’s the culture, stupid”
Part 2: The Quest for the perfect team begins!
Part 3: Learning to Fly
Part 4: Coaching for Good
The Quest for the perfect team begins!
It was 2012 when Google embarked on an amazingly ambitious journey, gathering psychologists, sociologists and statisticians to look into hundreds of research papers dating as far as the 1950’s to find an answer to one pressing question: “How can we create the perfect team?”, they called it “project Aristotle”.
But after months of work, collecting, arranging, and then rearranging the data there was no clear answer.
However way they looked at the information it made no sense, team that seemed perfect on paper, great people, great leadership, great project were found to fail, while other teams with less talent or ability succeeded.
What was that magic ingredient that was creating these successful teams and destroying unsuccessful ones?
It took them over a year to realize that it was the team’s culture that was driving the team’s success more than any other factor.
But, as they soon realized this was only the first step, as different successful teams had different “cultures”, so what part of the culture is the key to the team’s success?
It took some more digging and research before they finally realized that the teams that had “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking”1 were the ones that had the highest “collective intelligence” and were more successful in their assignments.
In order to explain this phenomenon, they used the term “Psychological Safety” a term coined by researcher Amy Edmondson. Edmondson published a ground breaking paper demonstration that groups with Psychological Safety have “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up, [where the] team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”1
But Psychological Safety is not merely limited to high-tech Silicon Valley companies like Google.
In 1998 Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson conducted 165 interviews on 16 different operating teams in different hospitals in the US2. The teams were all learning a new procedure that would allow minimal damage and quick recovery for cardiac patient and Edmondson was eager to find out which team would be more successful in learning and improving the new procedure.
As Edmondson writes in her research “Across all 16 teams, [they] reported being amazed by the extent of change the technology required. The difficulty they encountered was more behavioral than technical. As one anesthesiologist reported, ‘There is nothing radically new in the technological components’; yet, as an anesthesiologist in another hospital explained, the new process changed patterns of communication between different disciplines in the team”
When Edmondson looked at the results, she saw that there were 2 very clearly defined groups: either you belonged to a group that was highly successful or to a group that was very low on success. But what was causing these very distinct 2 groups?
The data was clear: Surgical team led by well recognized and very experienced surgical leaders and teams were outperformed by inexperienced leaders and teams when the inexperienced teams had higher levels of psychological safety. In fact, even though the more experienced team had done more procedures, their performance plateaued while the psychologically-safe teams continued to improve over time.
Surprisingly, the surgeons’ status and experience or the amount of support the team received from the hospital was not one of the factors for success. Instead the winning factor was creating a shared purpose with clear coaching by the team member to all team members to speak up when they see a problem during the procedure.
Here are some quotes from the successful teams:
[Surgeon]: “[it is a] paradigm shift in how we do surgery…the whole model of surgeons barking orders down from on high is gone. There is a whole new a wave of interaction…the ability of the surgeon to allow himself to become a partner, not a dictator, is critical”
[Nurse]:“We all have to share the knowledge. For example, in the last case, we needed to insert a guide-wire, and I grabbed the wrong wire and I did not recognize it at first. And my circulating nurse said, ‘Sue, you grabbed the wrong wire.’ This shows how much the different roles do not matter. We all have to know about everything. You have to work as a team.”3
But the effects of Psychological Safety did not end there. Members of the Psychological-safe teams were not only more successful in their task, but they also showed higher levels of work satisfaction. Here are some of the quotes from Edmondson’s study3. For example, compare this quote by a nurse from a unsuccessful team:
“If I see a [the procedure] on the list [for tomorrow] I think ‘Oh! Do we really have to do it? Just get me a fresh blade so I can slash my wrists right now.’”
To another nurse, preparing from the same procedure in a Psychological-Safe team:
“Every time we are going to do [the procedure] I feel like I’ve been enlightened. I can see these patients doing so well…. It is such a rewarding experience. I am so grateful I was picked.”
While many leaders focus on leadership skills and capabilities, clear vision and focus, our task as coaches and leaders is to also emphasize the importance as well as the major benefits of building Psychological Safety in our coachees’ teams.
In order to help your coachees build a psychological-safe team, you can help them:
- Create an openness by first sharing their vulnerabilities with their team – once a leader has shared their vulnerability it is much easier for other team members to follow suit.
- Use opportunities when mistakes have been made and emotions such as anger, frustration and fear are exposed to demonstrate (by actions rather than words) that the team culture is a safe one.
- Remember that team member will always observe your actions and will remember (and act accordingly to) the one time you failed to demonstrate a safe culture, rather than the 10 times you did not. Similarly to raising kids, a clear, repetitive and consistent assurance of safety is a must. If you have failed, use the opportunity to create even more safety by sharing your own mistakes openly with your team.
- Take a (real) interest in your team members – show them you care and that their opinion matters.
- Create a feedback loop that focuses on learning as opposed to finger pointing.
What are your thought and experiences with coaching for psychological safety? I encourage you to share them with me below in the remarks.
References:
1: Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. In Source: Administrative Science Quarterly (Vol. 44, Issue 2).
2: Edmondson, A. C. (2003). Speaking up in the operating room: How team leaders promote learning in interdisciplinary action teams. In Journal of Management Studies (Vol. 40, Issue 6, pp. 1419–1452). Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
3: Coyle, D. (2018). The culture code: The secrets of highly successful groups. Bantam.
Go to part 3: Learning to Fly
