“It’s funny to do a project on team effectiveness while working on a team, because we get to test everything we’re learning as we go along. What I’ve realized is that as long as everyone feels like they can talk and we’re really demonstrating that we want to hear each other, you feel like everyone’s got your back.”
Over the last two decades, the American workplace has become much more team focused. The average worker today might belong to a sales team, as well as a group of unit managers, a special team planning future products, and the team overseeing the holiday party. Executives belong to groups that oversee compensation and strategy and hiring and firing and approving HR policies and figuring out how to cut costs. These teams might meet every day in person or correspond via email or telecommute from all over the world. Teams are important. Within companies and conglomerates, government agencies and schools, teams are now the fundamental unit of self-organization.
And the unwritten rules that make teams succeed or fail, it turns out, are the same from place to place. The way investment bankers coordinate their efforts might seem different from how orthopedic nurses divvy up tasks. And the specific norms, in those different settings, will likely vary. But one thing will remain true if those teams work well: In both places, the groups will feel a sense of psychological safety. They will succeed because teammates feel they can trust each other, and that honest discussion can occur without fear of retribution. Their members will have roughly equal voices. Teammates will show they are sensitive to one another’s emotions and needs.
In general, the route to establishing psychological safety begins with the team’s leader. So if you are leading a team—be it a group of coworkers or a sports team, a church gathering, or your family dinner table—think about what message your choices send. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you modeling listening? Are you demonstrating a sensitivity to what people think and feel, or are you letting decisive leadership be an excuse for not paying as close attention as you should?
There are always good reasons for choosing behaviors that undermine psychological safety. It is often more efficient to cut off debate, to make a quick decision, to listen to whoever knows the most and ask others to hold their tongues. But a team will become an amplification of its internal culture, for better or worse. Study after study shows that while psychological safety might be less efficient in the short run, it’s more productive over time.
If motivation comes from giving individuals a greater sense of control, then psychological safety is the caveat we must remember when individuals come together in a group. Establishing control requires more than just seizing self-determination. Being a subversive works, unless you’re leading a team.
When people come together in a group, sometimes we need to give control to others. That’s ultimately what team norms are: individuals willingly giving a measure of control to their teammates. But that works only when people feel like they can trust one another. It only succeeds when we feel psychologically safe.
As a team leader, then, it’s important to give people control. Some team leaders at Google make checkmarks next to people’s names each time they speak, and won’t end a meeting until those checks are all roughly equivalent. And as a team member, we share control by demonstrating that we are genuinely listening—by repeating what someone just said, by responding to their comments, by showing we care by reacting when someone seems upset or flustered, rather than acting as if nothing is wrong. When we defer to others’ judgment, when we vocally treat others’ concerns as our own, we give control to the group and psychological safety takes hold.
“The thing I love most is when I see a sketch performed and the actors are really killing it onstage, and the sketch’s writers are high-fiving each other by the monitor, and whoever is waiting in the wings is laughing, and there’s another team already figuring how to make the characters funnier next time,” Lorne Michaels told me.
“When I see the entire team drawing some kind of inspiration from the same thing, I know everything is working,” he said. “At that moment, the whole team is rooting for each other, and each person feels like the star.”
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*1 Project Oxygen found that a good manager (1) is a good coach; (2) empowers and does not micromanage; (3) expresses interest and concern in subordinates’ success and well-being; (4) is results oriented; (5) listens and shares information; (6) helps with career development; (7) has a clear vision and strategy; (8) has key technical skills.
*2 The correct answers for these photos can be found in the notes on this page.
FOCUS
Cognitive Tunneling, Air France Flight 447, and the Power of Mental Models
When they finally found the wreckage, it was clear that few of the victims had realized disaster was near even as it struck. There was no evidence of passengers’ last-minute buckling of seatbelts or frenzied raising of food trays. Oxygen masks were firmly encased in ceiling panels. A submarine probing the wreckage at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean found a whole row of seats upright in the sand, as if waiting to fly again.
It had taken almost two years to find the plane’s data recorders and everyone hoped that once they were retrieved, the cause of the accident would become clear at last. Initially, however, the recorders offered few clues. None of the plane’s computers had malfunctioned, according to the data. There was no indication of mechanical failure or electrical glitch. It wasn’t until investigators listened to the cockpit voice recordings that they began to understand. This Airbus—one of the largest and most sophisticated aircraft ever built, a plane designed to be an error-proof model of automation—was at the bottom of the ocean not because of a defect in machinery, but because of a failure of attention.
Twenty-three months earlier, on May 31, 2009, the night sky was clear as Air France Flight 447 pulled away from the gate in Rio de Janeiro with 228 people on board, bound for Paris. In the cabin were honeymooners and a former conductor for the Washington National Opera, a well-known arms control activist, and an eleven-year-old boy headed to boarding school. One of the plane’s pilots had brought his wife to Rio so they could enjoy a three-day layover at the Copacabana Beach. Now she was in the back of the massive aircraft, while he and two colleagues were in the cockpit, flying them home.
As the plane began its ascent, there were a few radioed exchanges with air traffic control, the standard chatter that accompanies any takeoff. Four minutes after lifting from the runway, the pilot in the right seat—the junior position—activated the autopilot. For the next ten and a half hours, if all went according to plan, the plane would essentially fly itself.