The Secret to High Performing Teams

I recently heard Amy Edmondson, team guru and Harvard Business School professor, speak in a live webinar about her research on high-performing teams. She isolated the key ingredient that all high performing teams share. It’s the same ingredient that Google discovered when they surveyed all of their high-performing teams back in 2014.

Their discovery is simple, surprising, and profound. According to Edmondson, Google, and many researchers who ran similar studies after her, the key to team effectiveness is a type of trust called “psychological safety.”

Basically, the feeling that it’s safe to speak up. You trust your team enough to share your best thinking, regardless of your place in the hierarchy or the popularity of your opinion. Teams with psychological safety know they can contribute without fear of shame or retribution.

Why is that so vital? Because teams are the unit of learning in today’s organizations, says Edmondson, and in a fast-changing world, organizations need to be constantly learning to stay relevant.

Teams with psychological safety end up being high performing teams because they are more likely to identify problems and solve them, while teams that “know it all” may look askance at different approaches to the challenge and plunge ahead with sub-par solutions.

 It turns out that teams vary widely when it comes to psychological safety. Some teams have it, and some teams don’t. The good news is that you can actively increase the psychological safety on your team. Edmondson urges leaders to model the way. They can invite input, listen, and acknowledge the value of the contribution. You don’t have to act on it, but you do have to value it.

I was fascinated. I started taking furious notes. The high performing teams she described were clearly skilled at collaborative problem solving. They could clarify the right problems to solve. They could generate compelling ideas. They could develop savvy solutions and implement them.

Hey! That sounded familiar.

I conferred with a few FourSight experts after the webinar and put together specific ways you can use FourSight to increase psychological safety on your teams. Remember, psychological safety is not about everyone being nice. It’s about everyone feeling comfortable engaging in active debate, voicing a dissenting opinion, or pressure testing the status quo. In essence, it’s about elevating proactive problem solving.

3 ways to use FourSight to enhance psychological safety on teams.

In her talk, Edmonton was quite clear that psychological safety does not equate to psychological comfort. In fact, psychological safety is where every member of the team feels emboldened to share thinking that may push others out of their comfort zone (or area of high preference).

1. FourSight starts that process by giving people individual awareness. With one simple line graph, the FourSight Thinking Profile reveals your problem-solving comfort zones (areas of high preference) and your learning zones (areas of neutral or low preference). Once you recognize your own biases in the problem-solving process, you can manage your own resistance to areas of low preference. You realize your problem-solving instincts are not infallible and with tools and practice, you can deliberately build your problem-solving capacity.
   
   
2. FourSight naturally helps teams make psychological safety part of problem-solving by normalizing differences in approach and teaching people to welcome types of thinking that make them uncomfortable. Through the lens of FourSight, team members can recognize that “difficult” team members are often just trying to solve a different part of the challenge. We know that a healthy team climate requires active debate. So does psychological safety. FourSight helps people hear other approaches as a form of debate, not conflict. Conflict is about power. Debate is about problem solving.
   
   
3. If your team is stuck or overwhelmed by a challenge, instead of pointing fingers, FourSight teaches people to point to stages in the process where the work might not have been complete. The FourSight Framework can serve as a diagnostic tool to better understand the breakdown: Are we working on the right problem? Do we have enough ideas? Did we develop a clear plan of action? Did we stop short without implementing the plan? Failure and breakdown are a natural part of navigating the creative problem-solving process. But FourSight can reduce the downtime and the emotional impact by giving people a common language for problem solving and problem diagnosis.

I hope you’ll listen to the Amy Edmondson webinar. LIT Videobooks kindly allowed us to share it with you. Watch the recording here or listen to it as a podcast here.

Thanks Amy Edmondson and LIT Videobooks for a terrific webinar. And thanks to the FourSight gurus for identifying ways to make psychological safety a reality with a little help from FourSight.