#172: Build Better Teams

Dear Friends

A few weeks ago, I opened The New Yorker to read about a trash-eating sea monster that had appeared in the Hudson.

The monster was the WasteShark, an unmanned craft that gobbles our rubbish from urban waterways. In other words, neither monster nor shark but angel.

I loved the story not only because of less polluted waters, but because Richard Hardiman, the CEO of RanMarine, the company that birthed the WasteShark, is a South African.

Witnessing Africans transforming the world always makes me happy.

/ strategy

Last week’s letter on unlocking love at work resonated with many of you, so we continue the theme – build better teams – this week.

Our first stop is an experiment conducted at Sandoz, a Novartis division to improve levels of psychological safety.

The results were published as Proven Tactics for Improving Teams’ Psychological Safety in the MIT Sloan Management Review.

The researchers (Chris Rider, Antoine Ferrère, Zsófia Belovai, Maria Guadalupe, and Florian Englmaier) ran an experiment that included more than 1,000 teams comprising over 7,000 individuals across the world.

The study had three experimental groups – “The first was a control group of managers who were notified that the company was conducting a study on meeting habits but were given few other details. The second and third groups were treatment groups, where managers received emails encouraging them to hold regular one-on-one meetings with team members and to focus on psychological safety using one of two different mechanisms”.

In the first group, managers were encouraged to treat people as individuals, using one-on-one meetings as an opportunity to explore what was important to them and where they needed support.

Remember the four magic questions in last week’s letter?

The second group of managers were guided to help their teams prioritize efforts by removing blockers to their work.

The design was simple.

Over 6 weeks, each group of managers received an email giving them guidance on how to proceed.

The results are staggering.

Compared with the control group, the teams that received individual attention increased psychological safety by 12%; perceptions of career development and progress improved by 21%, and their perceptions of managers as role models improved by 15%.

All from paying attention to the person in front of you.

It comes as no surprise that the improvements went up to 19% for teams in the lower bands of psychological safety scores.

You can have a big impact on a team quite quickly and teams’ cultures can be shifted through intentional leadership.

Interestingly, for teams that already had higher levels of psychological safety, removing blockers was the more effective approach for taking that safety to the next level.

In other words – as we know – people are dynamic and grow. As they feel safer, they look for ways to have more impact and so helping them have that impact makes them feel safer. And on and on…

We could summarise it as ‘see me’ and ‘help me get sh#$ done’.

The researchers put it a touch more elegantly, “the experiment made no explicit reference to psychological safety, and managers were not encouraged to talk about it. Rather, simply focusing on the behaviors that need to change may be sufficient…”

It is a conversation I often have with clients – the greatest impact comes not from ideas about good leadership but from grounding it in specific behaviours that are repeatedly consistently at scale across organisations.

Culture changes through action.

You can read more about psychological safety in this collection of letters.

The second stop on our build better teams’ journey, is INSEAD assistant professor, Sujin Jang’s research on how to best unlock the creativity of culturally diverse teams.

She found that teams are considerably more creative when they have one or more members who act as cultural brokers.

She describes these brokers as “team members who have relatively more multicultural experience than others and who act as a bridge between their monocultural teammates” and says that it doesn’t make a difference whether their experience maps onto the cultures of the group (cultural insiders) or if they have multicultural experiences from other cultures (cultural outsiders). It is the fact of their lived diverse experience that makes them effective brokers, helping to bridge conversations in the team.

The cultural insiders boosted creativity by fostering ideas that integrated elements from the group’s culture.

The cultural outsiders did so by eliciting contributions from all members of the team.
Both are invaluable.

Again, it speaks to today’s theme. Building better teams is best done by grounding them in specific behaviours and processes.

Theory gives context and direction. Intentional action creates change.

// self

Today’s self is self-serving – it’s about the benefits of coaching but I think you’ll find it interesting.

In July, Bartleby – The Economist’s column on management and the world of work – explored whether executive coaching is useful.

They observe that executives find it difficult to create safe places where they can process the challenges that they confront in their roles, that they often need a place where they can process their thoughts and gain input and inspiration, but those spaces are hard to find.

A skilled coach can provide that, particularly if – like Jang’s cultural brokers – they have lived executive life.

Bartleby notes that a coach can shift “the angle of the problem, which is not easy to do unaided for most clients themselves, many of whom operate on autopilot at work and elsewhere” and at worst you get to spend time with a “well-meaning, and typically intelligent, interlocutor, who can help consolidate common sense”.

In my coaching experience, both are powerful.

A fresh perspective on a seemingly unsolvable problem and the consolidation of disparate, unexplored thoughts into a coherent picture can both unlock new possibilities.

Of course, I liked it.

/// soul

I leave you with this thought from poet and novelist Ocean Vuong, “We often tell our students, ‘The future is in your hands.’ But I think the future is actually in your mouth. You have to articulate the world you want to live in, first.”

Express the future, find the behaviours that enliven it and the people that will support it.

All the best

Karl

PS: I’m a coach and advisor. You can learn more about my practice here. If this letter intrigued you and you’d like to work with me, reach out and let’s have a conversation.

PPS: The University of Johannesburg’s Prize for Creative Writing shortlist was announced this week. I told you about finalist Sue Nyathi’s An Angel’s Demise here and C.A. Davids’ How To Be A Revolutionary here. Davids’ is one of the most ambitious books I have read in the last year, and she executes with elegance.