The Importance of Team Dynamics
What really matters and sets apart high performing teams is how the group, including the leader interact with one another.
How they communicate determines where they feel safe to ask questions, volunteer ideas, criticise the status quo, challenge one another for accountability and make mistakes.
These team dynamics, otherwise known as psychological safety, have been proven by decades of research by Google, Gallup, and Harvard to be the primary driver of team performance.
Known as Project Aristotle, researchers set out to discover the secret of what makes an effective team at Google. A huge exercise running over 35 different statistical models on over 250 variables, the researchers found five key dynamics of effective teams.
Of the five, psychological safety was by far the most important.
Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety were less likely to leave Google, more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, brought in more revenue and were rated as effective twice as often by executives.
The idea of “team psychological safety” was introduced into the workplace by Amy Edmundson of Harvard. In her TEDx talk she offers three simple things individuals can do to foster team psychological safety:
Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem
Acknowledge your fallibility
Model curiosity and ask lots of questions
As Amy says, “Psychological safety at work takes effort. It’s not the norm. But it’s worth the effort. A culture of open candour, and the willingness and courage to speak up, is a strategic asset and can be developed in any company."
One of the most important things to keep in mind is that when an employee fails to speak up in a crucial moment it’s invisible. To be able to ‘see’ the invisible silence of team dynamics, in your workplace, you must measure them. Once you have the metrics, you know where to begin to build employee confidence, meaningful conversations, and team dynamics.
This is true whether that employee is on the frontline of customer service or sitting next to you in the executive boardroom. Not offering an idea cannot be seen, it’s hard to engage in real-time course correction.
Relying on your employees to be courageous, in the absence of effective team dynamics, shows a misunderstanding of human psychology, and is a bad business strategy. Most of us are not courageous in the moment when we feel at risk. And companies don’t explicitly recruit for courage in the face of bad behaviour from bosses or peers.
This also means that psychologically safe workplaces have a powerful advantage in competitive industries.
An interesting footnote to the Google research is some of the variables that were not significantly connected with team effectiveness at Google:
Colocation of teammates (whether you are sat in the same office)
Extroversion of team members
Individual performance of team members
Workload size
Team size
Seniority and Tenure