Enhancing Team Innovation and Productivity

What makes some teams, some companies, more innovative than others? What makes some teams more productive than others? What makes some teams win more often than others? What makes some teams more engaging than others? In the world that I inhabit, so I'm an organizational psychologist by training, I'm a recovering academic, I was a full-time business school professor for the better part of a decade, and in the world that I exist in, We have really two answers historically to those questions. You probably thought of these answers a little bit as well. The first answer we have to this question is usually where most, it's actually where most people go, thinking about what makes teams more successful than others. Most teams go to talent, right? Do they go to this idea, okay, we just get more talented people, right? We can have a better team. We get more, we get star players. right? Pick your sport. There is a team whose entire strategy, right, is to blow out the budget and acquire as many star players as possible. And then pick your sport. That team loses more often than not to other teams. It's a little confusing, isn't it? And it turns out there's a reason for that in research. The reason is that talent isn't portable. It's not portable the way we think it is. It turns out from a wealth of research in a variety of different industries, when you take a star player. and you pick them up and you move them to another team, what happens more often than not is that the performance of that star player diminishes. We've seen that in whatever your favorite sport is, right? But it turns out the performance of their teammates diminishes as well. And in a corporate setting, the performance and the valuation of the entire company diminishes as well. Talent isn't portable. Because talent and turning talent into performance actually depends incredibly on the team that somebody is on. Performance is a team sport. And by the way, if I may, if I could be so bold, even if talent were portable, it's not exactly available right now, right? It doesn't really feel like it's easily acquirable anyway, even if it was. So this is a losing strategy on two levels in terms of trying to get our team into a high-performing team. The other strategy that gets talked about in my world far too often is probably this one. If talent isn't portable, then we turn our attention to... Team building, right? We go to team building and so we decide, okay, let's let's get all our people together for a team building activity. We're gonna go do a ropes course, right? Or a trust fall. Nobody's behind me, I have nobody I can trust. Or we're gonna get everybody together, okay? We're gonna take a personality test. You ever done this, right? We're gonna take a personality test and we're gonna find out that that Bob is this letter or series of letters and Sarah is this color. My personality, by the way, my Myers-Briggs type is NSFW. Some of you will get that later. We find out that this person's Enneagram is, you know, nine wing pie. I don't even understand, right? And then we all feel good. We have a great discussion about differences. And then nothing changes. You ever been in that situation? I mean, it's weird, right? Because we know what it's been like to work on a team where everything clicked, where everything was high performing. We all have an experience of working for the best team ever. Some of us had experience hasn't even been in our career. Maybe it was like your collegiate life, or maybe it was a sports team you were on in high school, right? My collegiate life was a little bit different. In fact, I have it in my will that when I die, the six members from my senior thesis team are going to be the pallbearers in my funeral because I need them to let me down one more time. Some of us have that experience, and then we try and replicate it either through talent or through team building, and we're like, what is it? it's going on? Why can't we make this team that we currently have feel like that best team that we were ever on? Well, the team building thing, it turns out, it can work some of the time. And some of you that gave me that little like stink eye when I said it doesn't work, this is for you. What we know from a myriad of research is that different team building activities, things that take people off site and bring them through shared experiences or discussions about personality differences, et cetera, those things can work if. they manage to change the habits and norms and behaviors of the team when you get back to the day-to-day work. Another way to think about that is this team building isn't an activity it's a habit it's a series of norms it's a habits of behavior that our teams exhibit and it turns out we actually already have a word for habits and norms and teams of paper we already have a word for that these two talked about it earlier we call that word culture So today I'm going to talk to you about John's three, no, they're not John's, but they're pretty good. We have a word for it, it's culture. And so today what I want to talk to you about is what the research says about a culture of a high-performing team. Because it turns out they're all actually pretty similar. That when you look at high-performing teams across a variety of... of industries, in sporting endeavors, and in private endeavors, in military, and even in nonprofit and government work, when you look at teams that outperform their peers, they all have a culture that looks kind of the same. And that culture... Culture is marked by three elements, three cultural dimensions, three cultural personalities. Thank you for taking a picture. It's just a triangle though. There are better slides you can take a picture of later, but it's a good triangle. I got it. I didn't need a graphic designer. I made that triangle myself. So cultures on high performing teams are marked by three elements, a sense of common understanding, a sense of psychological safety, and a sense of pro-social purpose. The members of the team have these three things going on in their norms of behavior, in their mentality, in their approach to work. Common understanding, psychological safety, pro-social purpose. Now you know why I told you earlier I'm a business school professor. Those are really academic sounding terms, aren't they? So what I want to do in the time that we have together is I want to define those terms for each one. I want to tell you why they're so important and then I want to do what most professors don't do. I want to give you some practical applications that you can do today or tomorrow. You know what, actually I'll tell you what, Monday, I'll give all of you the weekend off. When you get done with these, when you get over the hangover from the party, etc., find something to change out of from that plaid, and then we'll get to work on building these. So I want to do that. Does that work for you? All right, so let's start with this. Common understanding. What is common understanding? Well, this is an academic term for it. This is the extent to which team members have a commonly held perspective on the team's expertise, assigned tasks, context, preferences. yeah, this is a definitional slide. This is actually a good one to take a picture of, so that's cool. What does this mean? Well, this is a term that was sort of modified from a body of research by a brilliant woman named Martine Haas. And Martine Haas studied teams in a variety of different formats, and she came up with this idea of common understanding or shared understanding. We might think of this as two elements, not just one. So common understanding on the first part of it, teams expertise, assigned tasks, context, we might call this clarity. I know what my role is. I know what your role is and I know how our roles fit together. I have an understanding of my roles, my responsibilities, but also yours. I have an understanding of what the deliverables are. I understand the NAT chart. I got it all down, right? I know how all of the pieces fit together. That's clarity. But what Martine Haas found was that that was only half the picture. The other half is this context and preferences piece that we might call, if that's clarity, we might call this empathy, that I understand more. about you than just what your job description is and whether or not you're doing it or not. I understand who you are as a human. I understand your background. I understand your strengths and weaknesses. Empathy is I think what we're trying to get at with these little personality tests and those sort of things, but it can become deeper than that and you usually don't have to pay a lot of money to testing companies, which is like double win, right? We might call it empathy. You know, think about this just in the context and preferences piece, just in the empathy piece, right? Different people have different preferences. You don't have to have like the think about the very first time you got a work-related email address. For some of you, you know that was like, we can't even say how long ago, right? For some of you, I don't know, maybe that was like a week ago. You don't have to have one for very long before you realize that different people use this tool differently, don't they? They have different preferences about how to use it. Some people, some people are what we might call email novelists. You know the types? Four or five paragraphs long. long. They remember how to construct a five-paragraph essay from 10th grade, right? So they've got a thesis statement at the top, and then they've got three supporting points, and then a conclusion, right? And then other people, they're not novelists. They're more like email poets. They write in haiku. Sounds good. You know what I'm talking about? The people whose signature line is longer than the emails they compose, and some of them are really vague. You ever gotten that email? Maybe you sent this email of like, we need to... to talk. What does that even mean? Is there a problem? Am I getting promoted? Am I getting fired? How do I respond to that? And then if you have an understanding of people's preferences, though, you know either, okay, they're the haiku person, I don't want to read too much into this, they're just doing it from their phone, etc. And then you understand the novelist. And let's just do another one for you. Some people don't exactly adhere to the standard rules of... Email of like let's email during work hours, right? Some of those are the late night email. Any late night emailers in the room, just you want to self-identify, confess, right? That can be a problem unless your team has a sense of common understanding. And they know that like, oh yeah, that's just, that's what works for them. They don't like sleep or something. They're a vampire. So that works for, and like the good kind of vampire too, like from Twilight. So we know that that's their thing and I won't feel personal about it. But if I don't know, if I don't have, you self-identified in your. you're on the front row. That's the only reason I'm picking on you. So you made the choice twice. I figure it's safe. If they don't, then they look at him and they go, oh, what a jerk, right? Oh, now I like, now you wait, or if you catch it late at night, if not, you wake up first thing in the morning and you check your phone and you're like, oh my gosh, now I have to respond to the email novel before I can even get on, get to work. But if I have an understanding of that's just the way you are, no problem, right? So if we build this sense of empathy and this sense of common understanding, we can collaborate a whole lot better on a team. When I think about the importance of common understanding and the. the research behind it. One of my favorite examples of common understanding is this guy. You may or may not recognize him because there's a floating bubble in his face, but this is Chris Hatfield, Canadian astronaut Chris Hatfield. If I move the bubble and you make out the mustache, you might recognize him from his famous lip syncs of David Bowie. I did tell you there would be lip syncing. I warned you. You might recognize him from his viral Facebook videos and things like that. He was probably the first astronaut on the International Space Station. Station who became an actual celebrity. But he's a celebrity inside the space community as well, inside NASA and the Canadian Space Agency and even the Russian Space Agency. He's known as one of the most successful commanders of an International Space Station mission ever. People line up to want to be in missions that are led by Chris, back when he was leading them. And one of the reasons for that is he understood the power of pairing clarity with empathy. It wasn't just making sure roles and responsibilities. NASA has tons of checklists and all sorts of things. There's all sorts of role clarity stuff to do. But he wanted to make sure he understood the people he'd be living in a tin can circling the earth once every 90 minutes. He wanted to make sure he understood those people. And Chris, like on one mission, Chris was leading a team of five, including himself, two Americans, two Russians, and himself. So think about this for a second from like just a pure empathy and differences standpoint. We have five people living in a tin can circling the earth every 90 minutes. Two of them are Russian, two of them are American, one of them is Canadian. There's three different cultures going on. We have Russian culture, American culture, and Canadian culture, which is like American culture but nicer. We have three... The Canadians identify themselves. Thank you. We have three different languages being spoken, right? Because we have Russian, we have English, and then we have American. We have all sorts of these differences. The Americans identify themselves. All right. And Chris knew we had to build that sense of empathy. So we went above and beyond. He actually moved in with the Russian cosmonauts for a time, learned to speak Russian, drank a whole lot of vodka, moved in with the Americans, learned how to speak American, drank a whole lot of, I don't know, Coca-Cola. whatever, Budweiser, I don't know. More importantly, he wanted the team to have a sense of empathy with each other, and so he had them talk about their differences, their preferences. He actually even had them, he went so far, for example, as to role play how they would respond in different scenarios if disasters happened, including one time where they role played how they would support each other if one of the members of their mission had lost a member of their close personal family while they were in space. Which actually happened. One of the astronauts lost a close family member and the only four people he had to support him through that to help him grieve were the astronauts that Chris had prepared. So that's what I mean when I say common understanding is more than just making sure people know how to do their job. It's making sure they know how their job fits into everybody else's job and making sure they understand the people behind those jobs. You're probably not going to space. Maybe you're working with Russians, maybe you're working with Canadians. Hopefully you're not working with the United States. not working with Americans. I'm an American. I can make that joke. But you still need to build this sense of common understanding. So how do we do it? Here's a couple different ideas for you on how we can build that sense of common understanding. Number one is what I like to call huddles. If you've had any familiarity with the world of agile software development, you might recognize what I'm about to say as a scrum. But scrum is a rugby term, and I have no idea how that game works. I thought baseball was hard enough to follow. Then I tried to follow rugby. No offense to the Aussies. So in a huddle, the idea... a scrum in a daily stand-up in Agile is that every single day when a coding team is working together, they would meet very briefly in the morning and they would answer three questions for each other. Not reporting to the boss, but to each other, three questions. What did I work on yesterday? What did I complete? What am I focused on today? And what's blocking my progress? And I love the simplicity of those questions. And on the majority... Teams and organizations that I work with I encourage them to adopt some other rhythm It doesn't have to be daily doesn't even have to be a meeting Imagine just a simple email or a simple check-in every Monday where everybody reports. Okay. Here's where I am on all projects Here's what I did last week last week. Here's what I'm focused on this week week. It's that third question that's brilliant though, isn't it? Here's what's blocking my progress. One of the biggest complaints I hear from leaders is that they feel like they don't actually lead a team a lot of times. They feel like they just supervise seven people or 500 people's individual problems and just manage individual people. And they all come to me for their problems and I have the weight of the world on my shoulder, right? We didn't know that entrepreneur was also being like Atlas, right? I have to figure all of that out. Well, one of the best ways we can do that, one of the best ways we can counteract that, get the team feeling like a team again, is to help them work out loud. And the easiest way to work out loud is to actually be broadcasting when you need help, when people on your team need help. But let's be honest, we don't like to ask for help, do we? And I'm talking to more than just the Americans here. we don't like to ask for help because we feel like maybe it's admitting we're failing. Maybe it's admitting we're struggling. How often do we go, you know what, I'll figure it out. I don't need to ask for help yet. I'll figure it out. And then three weeks later, we finally fall apart and realize, okay, I need some help. But it would have been a whole lot cheaper and faster to give you help back downstream, wouldn't it? And so a question like what's blocking my progress coaxes people in to talking about the potential struggles that they're facing without admitting, I need help, I'm failing, et cetera. It's like a trick question. It's beautiful. What's blocking my progress? So that's a huddle. You can do the frequency that you want. You can do the medium of communication you want. But think about those three questions. What did I just complete? What am I focused on next? And what's blocking my progress as a way to get the teams that you lead to check in with each other and work out loud? Number two is one of my favorite words, probably the favorite word I'll say this entire talk. It's fika. It's a Swedish word. It translates as to have coffee. But if you've ever been to Sweden, if you know anyone from Sweden, if you've ever been invited to fika, you know that fika is a word that you can use to describe something. is there's going to be three, so you can take a picture when we get to three. I love your enthusiasm, though. Thank you. Fika is a Swedish word. It means to have coffee, but it's a deeper ritual than just have coffee. There are documentaries about the social connection that happens during fika. If you ever get to the bottom of Netflix, which I have because I travel a lot, you'll find those documentaries. And most organizations that I've worked with, especially over the last two years, that have been crippling with hybrid and things like that, like that have been doing some version of FICA, getting people together for a one-on-one meeting, maybe once a week with a random person on their team or in a different team in the organization, just to have a non-work conversation, to get to know each other, to connect a bit better. Some teams don't do it FICA one-on-one, but they take advantage of buffer times, unstructured times, the time before the meeting when everybody's filing in, and they make sure to seed that with questions that help people tell a little bit more of their story. When we do that, we find we have certain things in common with each other. We build those bonds. I would- I was in an elevator earlier today with a gentleman who was skipping my keynote to go swimming. I hope he got done swimming. Where are you? There you are. From Philadelphia. We bonded over being from Delaware. Yeah, you can give him a round of applause. It's fine. He went swimming. Good work. Wish I could get a round of applause for going swimming. We bonded over the fact that we grew up in the same area, right? That happens, but it only happens in those unstructured times. And one of the weirdest things, I don't know if you felt this way, in the last two years, we've had way too many meetings. Am I right? And here's the weird thing. Because we have so many of them, we're doing them efficiently. And when it comes to common understanding, that can actually be a problem because we're not taking the time to get to know each other the way we used to when we didn't have another meeting to run off to. So maybe it's not a structured coffee talk type of thing. Maybe it's just taking advantage, lingering a bit longer, and having those conversations. One of the other rituals I do with a lot of teams or I encourage them to do, especially at the start of a team meeting, like let's say you do your huddle and you do it every Monday. Start with what we call an energy check. Just a quick check. the table, hey, on a scale of one to five, what's your energy level like this week? Is it a five? Awesome. Are you lying? Is it a two? What can we do to help get it up to, maybe not to a five, but what could we do to help? Just checking in. Because you know, people bring more than just their brain to work, don't they? They bring a lot of their personal life. This whole idea of a work life balance thing is ridiculous because it posits this idea that we could separate out these two spheres of our life, and we can't. We bring that stuff with us, right? Anyone that's ever gotten a phone call from your school because your kid has a fever or in the last two years because your kid was next to a kid who had a fever and then got a Q-tip jammed up your nose and now you've got a week at home watching the kid. You know that work and life interact. And so an energy check, just a simple, hey, what's going on in your life? How's everybody's energy level doing this week? One through five. Anything that's a two or below, just ask. What can we do to help? What can we do to support you? If they don't want to share, that's fine. What they need to know from you, if you're in a leadership role. Is that you're there for them and you care and you're available. All right, so huddles, Vika, energy deck, that's all we've got. So for common understanding. You already got it? Okay, cool. Let's talk about the next one in the triangle. Let's talk about psychological safety. This is a term, this is the one academic term you might have heard already before. Psychological safety. The extent to which team members feel safe to express themselves and to take risks, to speak up when they disagree, to try crazy things and even if they don't work, not feel like it'll reflect poorly on them. Psychological safety is a fascinating concept first discovered by... or first really proven by a brilliant researcher named Amy Edmondson. Amy Edmondson was actually studying hospitals and studying nurses and charge nurses as leaders on hospital wards and found something really interesting, which is in the hospital she was studying, all of the best charge nurses, the leaders of the nursing teams, all of the best ones had higher rates of reported accidents than the poor leaders, which is a little weird, right? If you're a good leader, you're supposed to have less accidents, right? Like we're trying to have less screw-ups when we're going through something on the production line, right? So more reported accidents. ones, that's a little weird. It wasn't until she started doing qualitative interviews with people that she found out that that word reported is carrying a whole lot of weight. In other words, on the teams where people felt safe to report that they messed up, they did so. And on the teams where people feared their leader, they didn't. And besides the massively unethical thing about hiding medical mistakes, it's only on the safe teams that people have the ability to learn and to develop and to grow. Right? So psychological safety, hugely important not only for making our people feel a safe to bring their whole selves to work, et cetera, but important for learning as a team and continuously improving as a team as well. I think about psychological safety, and one of my favorite stories of psychological safety is the story of Alan Mulally and the way that Alan Mulally was tapped to turn around the Ford Motor Company in the mid-2000s. Alan was one of the first CEOs of Ford, not named Ford. And when he was brought in, he was brought in from Boeing, and he was charged with turning the company around. The company was on pace to lose $17 billion, according to the annual report. for that year before he was brought in. And one of the things Alan was committed to was building a culture of psychological safety where people could actually admit what was going wrong so that we could actually try and fix it. And he lived that candor himself. In fact, on his very first day, he did a press conference. Like a lot of publicly traded companies, they trot you out in front of a little podium and they said, you're supposed to talk about how you're gonna raise the share price. And one of the reporters in the back of the room asked him a question towards the end of the press conference. He said, hey, Mr. Malala, just out of curiosity, what kind of car do you drive? Now, if you're the CEO of Ford, what are you supposed to answer? You know what Alan said? I drive a Lexus. It's the finest car on the market. Now, unbeknownst to all those reporters, so did all of the other executives. They just hid it. What Alan was saying is I drive the finest car on the market. I aspire to get our company there, but we're not there yet. And we have to be honest about that. One of the other things... did is he had the senior leadership team meet every Thursday morning for what he called a business process review and in a business process review he would have each of the senior leaders of different divisions talk about where they were that week what they just completed what they were focused on next and any things that were blocking their process progress. Okay, if that sounds like a huddle to you, it's because it's exactly like a huddle. That's where I got the idea. And what Alan actually asked them to do was color code their slides in their report. So on the what's blocking my progress. Green would mean nothing. I'm good. Everything's fine. Yellow would mean I got some problems. We have a little bit of an idea of how to solve it. So we're okay. And red would mean I'm clueless. And on the first, he told them all of this ahead of time. He went into the first business process review. And this is what he saw. a sea of green lights. Everything's fine. We're good. Keep in mind, we're going to lose $17 billion, but everything's fine. For eight weeks, it went on like this. Eight weeks, Alan had to sit there and be like, we're going to lose seven. And you're telling me everything's fine? Surely something's going on that this room can help solve. It wasn't until week nine that one executive decided to take a risk. Mark Fields, who was in charge of production, some of the production in Canada had a problem in production. They didn't figure out how to solve it on the production line, so they were having to solve it afterwards, having individual mechanics go in and fix it, and that was causing massive backlogs. They didn't know how to solve it. So he took a risk, and he changed his color to red, and he presented the real problem. And in a culture of fear that Ford was before Allen came in, you can imagine what happened. In a culture where people just lie and put green lights on there, you can imagine what everybody did. They took a good look at Mark because... because it was the last time they were ever gonna see him. What Alan did was a little bit different. Alan said, this is great. Tell us more about your problem. Maybe we can figure it out by the end of the day. And they got everybody together and they came up with a plan to kind of test it and get at least a workable plan for how we can fix the problem. And as they were leaving, of course, everybody took their last. Last look at Mark. Because they knew he was going to be gone. But the next week, he wasn't gone. In fact, his position at the table had moved. He was sitting right next to Alan. Which is really just a statement. What I want is more of this. I want more of that honesty. So what happened after the week after they saw Mark not only fired, but brought next to Alan? Here's what the slides look like. A sea of colors, right? We can finally be honest about what's going on. We can finally fix our problems. Maybe we can turn things around. And turn things around they did. During the Great Recession, when the other two big automakers in the United States took bailout money. Ford did not. They kept moving. They kept improving. They kept moving. They kept improving. Kept committed to psychological safety. When Alan Mulally retired, they had moved from losing $17 billion a year to a $7 billion surplus. And when Alan resigned as CEO, he made a recommendation to the board about who should follow him. Do you know who he recommended? He recommended Mark Fields, first person who took that risk. Okay, you might not be tasked with turning around a $17 billion company. You might have a not have a bunch of liars who are trying to CYA on your team, but I sense in your facial expressions that you're thinking, yeah, we could do a little bit more to grow our sense of psychological safety. So here's a couple ideas for you. The first is treat conflict as collaboration, especially if you're in a leadership role and people speak up and they disagree with you. It can feel personal, right? Or even if you're not in a leadership role, when you submit your idea and somebody else is like, no, I don't think that can work, it can feel like they're kind of attacking you, right? Like we treat ideas we treat them like babies. They're our baby, right? And nobody ever calls a baby ugly, even though some babies are ugly. Nobody ever calls a baby ugly. You don't say that. You just know it needs time to grow and nurture, develop. Or you say, oh, he looks just like his father. Well, however you respond, right? We don't call that. We know that. So when people push back on our idea, it can feel like they're calling our baby ugly. But we need that mindset shift. And no, they're not. What they're actually saying is I see something you don't. I have a different perspective. I have a different background. I have a different perspective. I have a different I have a different set of knowledge, skills, and abilities, and that gives me a different viewpoint on this problem, and I have another idea, and I'm seeking to collaborate with you. So we need to be a little more honest about that. Treat conflict as collaboration when it happens. The next element we could do, that we need to try, I think a whole lot more often, and Jesse's talk really spoke to this, remember? Five new ideas in a session, most of them don't work out, like live pinata night or flatulence fun night, most of them don't work out. We ought to be celebrating failures a bit more, and what I mean here is we need to be more honest about this. when I say celebrate failures is not congratulations. You were totally incompetent. You screwed up the entire production. We lost a hundred thousand dollars and six months working on the project. Here's a trophy. That's not what I mean. Unless you lead a bunch of millennials and then it might work. Oh, that's terrible. That's awful. I can't believe I said that. I am a millennial too. Isn't that bad? Isn't that making it worse? I'm that borderline. Like we don't, nobody knows whether I'm, I'm gen X or millennial, right? So not only do I want people to tell me that I'm super special. but I also want to be left alone. Right? All the Gen Xers in the room get that. I see you all in the back. I got you. What I mean when I say celebrate failure is that in every failure, there's an opportunity to learn. That was one of the lessons that Jesse pulled in today. I actually learned this not from business, not from organizational psychology later. I learned this from 16 years practicing this really esoteric martial art called Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Anybody ever, or anybody watch the UFC last weekend? Okay, a couple of you. When they are done boxing and they fall down and they hug each other, that's... Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Like I said, really esoteric. But we have a saying in that martial art. It exists in a couple other martial arts too. Our saying is that when you're in competition, if you have the spirit of a martial artist, you never actually lose. Your only two options are win or learn. If you're too arrogant to pull a lesson from your loss, then maybe you really did lose. But most of us have something we can learn from it. So we have a win or learn mentality. But in order to have a real lesson out of it, we need transparency on the team to talk about what my role was. You know what? I made the assumption. that we would be able to get this paper in and supply chain, I really underestimated supply chain issues. Maybe I, I don't know, maybe I overestimated them and as a result I told the client a crazy deliverable time and they went somewhere else because they had a better idea of it, right? All of us make these assumptions every day. We make decisions every day that are based on assumptions. Sometimes they don't work out. We end up losing, we end up messing up. But it's only when we're willing to share, here's the assumption I made, here's how it was different from reality, that we could learn, okay, what systems can we put in place to make sure that we have better assumptions next time. That is what we should celebrate. If you want to hand out a trophy, that's great too, but that's what we should celebrate, that transparency behind the failure that lets us learn. The last idea around psychological safety I have for you is to encourage dissent. Encourage dissent. What do I mean by that? Especially if you're in a leadership role, I mean, oh, she got it. There's three now. There's three for each one, so whenever you see three, you can take a picture. Love it. What do I mean when I say encourage dissent? Most of us... if we're in a leadership role, most of us don't do a good enough job opening the floor for that dissent or disagreement. If I'm just being totally honest. We think we do. We're in a meeting, we're bringing all the heads together, and maybe at the very end we say stuff like, okay, sounds like we're all headed towards consensus, but anybody, questions, concerns, clarifications? You ever gotten that little rhyme, questions, concerns, clarifications? You ever been on the receiving end of that rhyme? We think it's like opening the door for dissent, but you know what it's more like? Questions, concerns, clarifications? It's more like when you're at a wedding and the officiant towards the end says, if anyone Questions, concerns, or clarifications. You know you're not supposed to say anything, unless you're in a soap opera, and you were supposed to be dead for the last two seasons. But we do that, right? Or we do the email novel, and then at the very end we write, thoughts? What I mean by encourage dissent is open that floor a bit more and tell people what I am looking for is disagreement here. I told you I was a full-time business school professor. This is where I learned this lesson. I learned a lot about MBAs in my time there. And, well, actually, most of it I can't share. But I learned a lot about MBAs. And one of the things I learned is that MBAs express dissent in the form of a question. There's like a power distance. They don't feel comfortable just outright saying, you know, you're full of crap. So they ask a question. Are you full of crap? crap? No, it's not that simple. But they ask a question. And I wasn't doing a good enough job creating space for questions. I would lecture for 55 minutes in a 60-minute session. And then at the very end, I'd go, okay, as everyone's packing up their bags, I go, okay, any questions? And of course, there would be no questions. And then people would come to my office afterwards and ask me all sorts of questions. Because there were always questions. I just wasn't creating enough psychological safety in the classroom. So I flipped it. I changed my lecture so I'd always be done in about 45 minutes. So they knew. no, we're not packing up yet. There's still 15 minutes left of class. And I would say, okay, we've talked about this theory and this theory and this theory. I made a lot of rabbit jokes. I told you when you're supposed to take notes and take pictures of slides and when you're not. I do all sorts of crazy stuff like that and I speak a little too fast. Sometimes I make jokes that don't land. Sometimes they do and then it distracts the whole class. So I know I was probably unclear about something we talked about today or I know I probably sped too fast through a concept about something we talked about today. So what questions do you have? for me. You see the difference? Any questions versus what questions do you have for me? And then I was comfortable waiting the 15, 30 seconds it took for people to realize I was serious. When I got out of business school and went back into the business world, I did the exact same thing. Instead of questions, concerns, clarifications, it was, okay, you know what? It sounds like we're all headed down this avenue, but I want to check in just before we do. Because I have my own knowledge, skills, and abilities. I have my own background. I have my own experiences, which means I have my own biases, which means I have my own blind spots. So what am I missing? Can you help me find what I'm missing? And immediately we would get a much more robust discussion than we would when I would just say questions, concerns, clarifications. That's what I mean when I say encourage dissent. Okay, so we've talked about common understanding and psychological safety. We have one last one for you, one last dictionary definition, the sense of pro-social purpose. What is this all about? Pro-social purpose. This is the extent to which team members feel that they're making a contribution towards work that benefits others. You know, I like to think about this. If I could get a little mean here for a second. We've heard a lot in the last. 10 years about the importance of having purpose, a mission statement, a strong answer to the question why. We're told we need to write a compelling why, a compelling mission statement. Maybe we need to start with that. We need to start with why, right? We're told that. And the truth is what most people want from their work isn't an answer to the question why. It's an answer to the question who. As in who do we serve? I want to feel like I'm actually making a difference in someone's life. And in order to do that, I need to know who we're doing any of this stuff for. You saw it in Jesse's speech today, this theme of of fans first. I know who I'm doing this for. I'm not here to win a baseball game. I'm here to entertain a group of fans who come from a variety of different backgrounds and have a lot of different stuff going on in their life and wear their respite from it. Feels different, doesn't it? We know about this research, actually, from the research of, well, a couple different researchers, Amy Rosnesky and Jane Dutton around job crafting, Adam Grant, Justin Berg. I'm just dropping names to prove that I was a business school professor, by the way. One of my favorite studies of all of this is a study done on university college. call centers that call for donations. Have you ever gotten one of these? If you graduated from like a big state school, you probably got one of these calls. You know the ones I'm talking about. They call you usually at night. I don't know how they get your cell phone, but they get your cell phone and they tell you about all the exciting things going on on campus. So would you like to donate a thousand dollars to the new student union? No. Would you like to donate five hundred dollars to the new stadium and put it on a brick on the walkway up? No. Okay, would you like to donate, I got this one, this is a real one one time, would you like to donate a thousand dollars to the new Would you like to donate $20.08 to commemorate the year of your graduation? What was funny about that, too, is it was like grad school. I didn't even attend, like, on campus most of the time. But to commemorate the year of your, it's weird, right? You've gotten these calls. These people are persistent. It's like all the annoyance of a telemarketer mixed with the persistence of, like, Sam I Am from Green Eggs and Ham, right? They just keep asking, With a fox, would you like to donate in a box? Would you like to donate on a train in the rain? Would you like to donate in a mouse with a house? Kid, I'm just trying to pay off my student loans. And then we can talk about donating, okay? Think about the person on the other end of that phone call though. That's got to be a sucky job, right? Call jerks like me get told no often. It turns out it is. The turnover rate in a job like that, by the way, is 400%. That means every year, the people who are hired for that job, everybody in the entire call center quits three times a year. And you thought you had problems, right? So one research study... sought to convey this sense of pro-social purpose. And what they started to do was they took one group and they had them during breaks. They had them meet with a scholarship recipient from the university. Another group just kind of got a break because it's science. You're supposed to have a control group. But this group got a break, five-minute break, got to meet with a kid who got a scholarship. And as a result, they could go to that university, got to hear what they were studying and the difference that that scholarship made. And then they followed the two different groups for a period of a month. And at the end of the month, what they found was the group that actually got to meet the who. the group that got to meet who, dramatically outperformed the other group. They made twice as many calls. They were on the phone for twice as long. Their donations went from an average of $400 to an average of $2,000 a week. I mean, it's impossible to overstate how dramatic that effect is because they knew their who, right? We saw the same thing in the professional world. There's a fascinating story of a turnaround of an industry that's kind of traditional, kind of tied up. kind of boring, kind of struggles with recruiting. Does this sound familiar? This one's actually accounting. Apologies to the accountants. It's this company KPMG. A couple years ago, they launched this thing they called the We Shape History campaign. And at first, it looked like a standard corporate propaganda campaign. Kind of cool. We told stories about how KPMG was involved in the recovery efforts of 9-11. They even went back throughout history. They told stories about how KPMG was the company that certified the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. managed the logistics for the Lend-Lease Act during World War II, which brought the United States in to support the Allies. They told stories, but then they did something crazy cool. They did something really bold and also brilliant. They asked their people for their stories. At the time, KPMG in the United States had 27,000 employees, and they launched what they called the 10,000 Stories Challenge. So do the math. They have low expectations here. 10,000 Stories Challenge. What they said was, you tell us. us your story. How does the work that you do shape history? How does the work that you do matter? They even created an app where people could actually make their own versions of the poster. And they were shooting for 10,000 stories in a year. And the stories started rolling in a whole lot faster than they thought. They got stories like this. They got stories like, I help farmers grow because I support the farm credit system that keeps family farms in business. I know I look like an auditor, but that's what I actually do. Thank you. I help families grow. I stop cybercrime because I'm involved in the forensic accounting units that's managing accounts and making sure that people aren't victims of identity theft. Do you feel the difference? This isn't just what we've done in the past. This is what you specifically do. And here's what I think is absolutely amazing. At the end of this campaign, which they cut short after six months, because instead of 10,000 stories, they got 42,000 stories in six months. Twenty seconds. 47,000 people, 42,000 stories, right? So some people did the assignment twice. They got 42,000 versions of the answer to the question, who benefits from the work that we do? And then they did their annual employee engagement survey. And here's what I think is fascinating. They slipped the question in and they asked, hey, did your manager participate? Did your direct team leader actually talk about purpose? In blue, you see the team, the responses on the engagement survey from the teams that said, yes, my manager regularly communicates purpose. In gray, you see the ones that said, that said no they don't. In some cases it's a 30 point difference. We have 80% of employees surveyed whose manager talks about purpose saying, I feel the work that I do makes an impact. It's down to less than 40% for the managers that don't. The lesson here is that it's not about what you say from the top, it's about what the people who interact on teams every day say about who benefits from the work that we do, who we serve, and why it matters. The lesson here is that people want to do work that matters. and they want to work for leaders, team leaders, who tell them that they matter. So we've got companies of all sizes in this room, and what's amazing about this is this works at just about every level, so long as the person that's actually circling people up is telling them. Who? Who do we serve? Who is served by the work that we do? All right, you might not be able to do this whole propaganda. You could probably make some pretty cool posters, though, I'm just being honest. But you might not be able to do that. But here's a couple things you could do. Think about the ways we could rework tasks. Are there people whose entire job does not bring them into contact with anyone who is served by the work that we do? They don't interact with customers or stakeholders or anything. They're behind the scenes. They're just on the floor. They're just doing that. Is there something we could add to their job that lets them? them see that benefit a bit more. Even if it's not a customer, even if it's just letting them know how the work they do fits into the puzzle and serve somebody else inside the organization, an internal customer, could be a strong answer to the question, who? If you can't do that, is there a way we could bring them in? Is there a way we could, on a quarterly basis, bring in some of our best customers, just talk about what they do and how we help support them so that everybody gets to see how we help people who is served by the work that we do? And as we're doing all of this, make sure we're all... also sharing progress. Make sure we're sharing progress about where we're going as an organization. Make sure we're sharing progress about how we're helping improve that company. There's a whole wealth of motivational research that supports the idea that people want to be a part of something that's moving forward, that's making progress, that progress is a powerful human motivator, especially if it's progress towards work that serves other people. So can we share progress onto that? If we do that, we'll build that sense of pro-social purpose. And along with common understanding and psychological... safety will build those cultural elements I was telling you. It's not John's three, it's my three. Common understanding, psychological safety, and pro-social purpose. But here's what's amazing. What we find about team culture is that the sum of these is greater than just the parts. That there's a synergy that happens when you start to build all three. When you start to build the sense of common understanding and pro-social purpose, you start to attract better people. You start to get the best people because they want to do work that matters. They want to work for a team that understands them and tells them they matter. So you start to get better people. You start to solve some of those recruiting errors because you can say, this isn't just what we do, this is who we do it for and why it matters. So you get the best people. When you build common understanding and you build psychological safety, you get their best ideas because they feel safe to communicate them, even if they sound crazy. And they know how their work fits in, so they know how their idea is going to be received. So you get the best ideas from your people. And when you build psychological safety and you build pro-social purpose together, you get those same people's best effort because they know why it matters. they're doing, who they're doing their work for, and they feel free, they feel like they have a sense of it. And if you haven't figured it out, this is the triangle you can take a picture of, because this is the complete one. When you build common understanding, psychological safety, and pro-social purpose, you get a team that's better than just those three elements. You get a team that's better than the one you had before. You might even say you get your best team ever, or at least the best one you've ever led. Thank you all so much for having me.

What makes some teams, some companies, more innovative than others? What makes some teams more productive than others? What makes some teams win more often than others?

What makes some teams more engaging than others? In the world that I inhabit, so I'm an organizational psychologist by training, I'm a recovering academic, I was a full-time business school professor for the better part of a decade, and in the world that I exist in, We have really two answers historically to those questions. You probably thought of these answers a little bit as well.

The first answer we have to this question is usually where most, it's actually where most people go, thinking about what makes teams more successful than others. Most teams go to talent, right? Do they go to this idea, okay, we just get more talented people, right? We can have a better team. We get more, we get star players.

right? Pick your sport. There is a team whose entire strategy, right, is to blow out the budget and acquire as many star players as possible.

And then pick your sport. That team loses more often than not to other teams. It's a little confusing, isn't it? And it turns out there's a reason for that in research. The reason is that talent isn't portable.

It's not portable the way we think it is. It turns out from a wealth of research in a variety of different industries, when you take a star player. and you pick them up and you move them to another team, what happens more often than not is that the performance of that star player diminishes. We've seen that in whatever your favorite sport is, right?

But it turns out the performance of their teammates diminishes as well. And in a corporate setting, the performance and the valuation of the entire company diminishes as well. Talent isn't portable. Because talent and turning talent into performance actually depends incredibly on the team that somebody is on. Performance is a team sport.

And by the way, if I may, if I could be so bold, even if talent were portable, it's not exactly available right now, right? It doesn't really feel like it's easily acquirable anyway, even if it was. So this is a losing strategy on two levels in terms of trying to get our team into a high-performing team. The other strategy that gets talked about in my world far too often is probably this one. If talent isn't portable, then we turn our attention to...

Team building, right? We go to team building and so we decide, okay, let's let's get all our people together for a team building activity. We're gonna go do a ropes course, right? Or a trust fall. Nobody's behind me, I have nobody I can trust.

Or we're gonna get everybody together, okay? We're gonna take a personality test. You ever done this, right? We're gonna take a personality test and we're gonna find out that that Bob is this letter or series of letters and Sarah is this color.

My personality, by the way, my Myers-Briggs type is NSFW. Some of you will get that later. We find out that this person's Enneagram is, you know, nine wing pie. I don't even understand, right?

And then we all feel good. We have a great discussion about differences. And then nothing changes. You ever been in that situation? I mean, it's weird, right?

Because we know what it's been like to work on a team where everything clicked, where everything was high performing. We all have an experience of working for the best team ever. Some of us had experience hasn't even been in our career.

Maybe it was like your collegiate life, or maybe it was a sports team you were on in high school, right? My collegiate life was a little bit different. In fact, I have it in my will that when I die, the six members from my senior thesis team are going to be the pallbearers in my funeral because I need them to let me down one more time. Some of us have that experience, and then we try and replicate it either through talent or through team building, and we're like, what is it? it's going on?

Why can't we make this team that we currently have feel like that best team that we were ever on? Well, the team building thing, it turns out, it can work some of the time. And some of you that gave me that little like stink eye when I said it doesn't work, this is for you. What we know from a myriad of research is that different team building activities, things that take people off site and bring them through shared experiences or discussions about personality differences, et cetera, those things can work if. they manage to change the habits and norms and behaviors of the team when you get back to the day-to-day work.

Another way to think about that is this team building isn't an activity it's a habit it's a series of norms it's a habits of behavior that our teams exhibit and it turns out we actually already have a word for habits and norms and teams of paper we already have a word for that these two talked about it earlier we call that word culture So today I'm going to talk to you about John's three, no, they're not John's, but they're pretty good. We have a word for it, it's culture. And so today what I want to talk to you about is what the research says about a culture of a high-performing team.

Because it turns out they're all actually pretty similar. That when you look at high-performing teams across a variety of... of industries, in sporting endeavors, and in private endeavors, in military, and even in nonprofit and government work, when you look at teams that outperform their peers, they all have a culture that looks kind of the same.

And that culture... Culture is marked by three elements, three cultural dimensions, three cultural personalities. Thank you for taking a picture. It's just a triangle though. There are better slides you can take a picture of later, but it's a good triangle.

I got it. I didn't need a graphic designer. I made that triangle myself.

So cultures on high performing teams are marked by three elements, a sense of common understanding, a sense of psychological safety, and a sense of pro-social purpose. The members of the team have these three things going on in their norms of behavior, in their mentality, in their approach to work. Common understanding, psychological safety, pro-social purpose.

Now you know why I told you earlier I'm a business school professor. Those are really academic sounding terms, aren't they? So what I want to do in the time that we have together is I want to define those terms for each one. I want to tell you why they're so important and then I want to do what most professors don't do. I want to give you some practical applications that you can do today or tomorrow.

You know what, actually I'll tell you what, Monday, I'll give all of you the weekend off. When you get done with these, when you get over the hangover from the party, etc., find something to change out of from that plaid, and then we'll get to work on building these. So I want to do that.

Does that work for you? All right, so let's start with this. Common understanding. What is common understanding? Well, this is an academic term for it.

This is the extent to which team members have a commonly held perspective on the team's expertise, assigned tasks, context, preferences. yeah, this is a definitional slide. This is actually a good one to take a picture of, so that's cool. What does this mean?

Well, this is a term that was sort of modified from a body of research by a brilliant woman named Martine Haas. And Martine Haas studied teams in a variety of different formats, and she came up with this idea of common understanding or shared understanding. We might think of this as two elements, not just one. So common understanding on the first part of it, teams expertise, assigned tasks, context, we might call this clarity.

I know what my role is. I know what your role is and I know how our roles fit together. I have an understanding of my roles, my responsibilities, but also yours.

I have an understanding of what the deliverables are. I understand the NAT chart. I got it all down, right?

I know how all of the pieces fit together. That's clarity. But what Martine Haas found was that that was only half the picture. The other half is this context and preferences piece that we might call, if that's clarity, we might call this empathy, that I understand more.

about you than just what your job description is and whether or not you're doing it or not. I understand who you are as a human. I understand your background.

I understand your strengths and weaknesses. Empathy is I think what we're trying to get at with these little personality tests and those sort of things, but it can become deeper than that and you usually don't have to pay a lot of money to testing companies, which is like double win, right? We might call it empathy. You know, think about this just in the context and preferences piece, just in the empathy piece, right? Different people have different preferences.

You don't have to have like the think about the very first time you got a work-related email address. For some of you, you know that was like, we can't even say how long ago, right? For some of you, I don't know, maybe that was like a week ago.

You don't have to have one for very long before you realize that different people use this tool differently, don't they? They have different preferences about how to use it. Some people, some people are what we might call email novelists.

You know the types? Four or five paragraphs long. long.

They remember how to construct a five-paragraph essay from 10th grade, right? So they've got a thesis statement at the top, and then they've got three supporting points, and then a conclusion, right? And then other people, they're not novelists. They're more like email poets. They write in haiku.

Sounds good. You know what I'm talking about? The people whose signature line is longer than the emails they compose, and some of them are really vague. You ever gotten that email? Maybe you sent this email of like, we need to...

to talk. What does that even mean? Is there a problem?

Am I getting promoted? Am I getting fired? How do I respond to that? And then if you have an understanding of people's preferences, though, you know either, okay, they're the haiku person, I don't want to read too much into this, they're just doing it from their phone, etc. And then you understand the novelist.

And let's just do another one for you. Some people don't exactly adhere to the standard rules of... Email of like let's email during work hours, right? Some of those are the late night email. Any late night emailers in the room, just you want to self-identify, confess, right?

That can be a problem unless your team has a sense of common understanding. And they know that like, oh yeah, that's just, that's what works for them. They don't like sleep or something.

They're a vampire. So that works for, and like the good kind of vampire too, like from Twilight. So we know that that's their thing and I won't feel personal about it. But if I don't know, if I don't have, you self-identified in your. you're on the front row.

That's the only reason I'm picking on you. So you made the choice twice. I figure it's safe. If they don't, then they look at him and they go, oh, what a jerk, right? Oh, now I like, now you wait, or if you catch it late at night, if not, you wake up first thing in the morning and you check your phone and you're like, oh my gosh, now I have to respond to the email novel before I can even get on, get to work.

But if I have an understanding of that's just the way you are, no problem, right? So if we build this sense of empathy and this sense of common understanding, we can collaborate a whole lot better on a team. When I think about the importance of common understanding and the. the research behind it. One of my favorite examples of common understanding is this guy.

You may or may not recognize him because there's a floating bubble in his face, but this is Chris Hatfield, Canadian astronaut Chris Hatfield. If I move the bubble and you make out the mustache, you might recognize him from his famous lip syncs of David Bowie. I did tell you there would be lip syncing.

I warned you. You might recognize him from his viral Facebook videos and things like that. He was probably the first astronaut on the International Space Station.

Station who became an actual celebrity. But he's a celebrity inside the space community as well, inside NASA and the Canadian Space Agency and even the Russian Space Agency. He's known as one of the most successful commanders of an International Space Station mission ever.

People line up to want to be in missions that are led by Chris, back when he was leading them. And one of the reasons for that is he understood the power of pairing clarity with empathy. It wasn't just making sure roles and responsibilities. NASA has tons of checklists and all sorts of things. There's all sorts of role clarity stuff to do.

But he wanted to make sure he understood the people he'd be living in a tin can circling the earth once every 90 minutes. He wanted to make sure he understood those people. And Chris, like on one mission, Chris was leading a team of five, including himself, two Americans, two Russians, and himself.

So think about this for a second from like just a pure empathy and differences standpoint. We have five people living in a tin can circling the earth every 90 minutes. Two of them are Russian, two of them are American, one of them is Canadian. There's three different cultures going on.

We have Russian culture, American culture, and Canadian culture, which is like American culture but nicer. We have three... The Canadians identify themselves.

Thank you. We have three different languages being spoken, right? Because we have Russian, we have English, and then we have American. We have all sorts of these differences. The Americans identify themselves.

All right. And Chris knew we had to build that sense of empathy. So we went above and beyond. He actually moved in with the Russian cosmonauts for a time, learned to speak Russian, drank a whole lot of vodka, moved in with the Americans, learned how to speak American, drank a whole lot of, I don't know, Coca-Cola. whatever, Budweiser, I don't know.

More importantly, he wanted the team to have a sense of empathy with each other, and so he had them talk about their differences, their preferences. He actually even had them, he went so far, for example, as to role play how they would respond in different scenarios if disasters happened, including one time where they role played how they would support each other if one of the members of their mission had lost a member of their close personal family while they were in space. Which actually happened.

One of the astronauts lost a close family member and the only four people he had to support him through that to help him grieve were the astronauts that Chris had prepared. So that's what I mean when I say common understanding is more than just making sure people know how to do their job. It's making sure they know how their job fits into everybody else's job and making sure they understand the people behind those jobs.

You're probably not going to space. Maybe you're working with Russians, maybe you're working with Canadians. Hopefully you're not working with the United States.

not working with Americans. I'm an American. I can make that joke. But you still need to build this sense of common understanding.

So how do we do it? Here's a couple different ideas for you on how we can build that sense of common understanding. Number one is what I like to call huddles.

If you've had any familiarity with the world of agile software development, you might recognize what I'm about to say as a scrum. But scrum is a rugby term, and I have no idea how that game works. I thought baseball was hard enough to follow. Then I tried to follow rugby. No offense to the Aussies.

So in a huddle, the idea... a scrum in a daily stand-up in Agile is that every single day when a coding team is working together, they would meet very briefly in the morning and they would answer three questions for each other. Not reporting to the boss, but to each other, three questions.

What did I work on yesterday? What did I complete? What am I focused on today? And what's blocking my progress? And I love the simplicity of those questions.

And on the majority... Teams and organizations that I work with I encourage them to adopt some other rhythm It doesn't have to be daily doesn't even have to be a meeting Imagine just a simple email or a simple check-in every Monday where everybody reports. Okay. Here's where I am on all projects Here's what I did last week last week. Here's what I'm focused on this week week.

It's that third question that's brilliant though, isn't it? Here's what's blocking my progress. One of the biggest complaints I hear from leaders is that they feel like they don't actually lead a team a lot of times.

They feel like they just supervise seven people or 500 people's individual problems and just manage individual people. And they all come to me for their problems and I have the weight of the world on my shoulder, right? We didn't know that entrepreneur was also being like Atlas, right?

I have to figure all of that out. Well, one of the best ways we can do that, one of the best ways we can counteract that, get the team feeling like a team again, is to help them work out loud. And the easiest way to work out loud is to actually be broadcasting when you need help, when people on your team need help. But let's be honest, we don't like to ask for help, do we?

And I'm talking to more than just the Americans here. we don't like to ask for help because we feel like maybe it's admitting we're failing. Maybe it's admitting we're struggling. How often do we go, you know what, I'll figure it out. I don't need to ask for help yet.

I'll figure it out. And then three weeks later, we finally fall apart and realize, okay, I need some help. But it would have been a whole lot cheaper and faster to give you help back downstream, wouldn't it? And so a question like what's blocking my progress coaxes people in to talking about the potential struggles that they're facing without admitting, I need help, I'm failing, et cetera.

It's like a trick question. It's beautiful. What's blocking my progress? So that's a huddle.

You can do the frequency that you want. You can do the medium of communication you want. But think about those three questions.

What did I just complete? What am I focused on next? And what's blocking my progress as a way to get the teams that you lead to check in with each other and work out loud?

Number two is one of my favorite words, probably the favorite word I'll say this entire talk. It's fika. It's a Swedish word.

It translates as to have coffee. But if you've ever been to Sweden, if you know anyone from Sweden, if you've ever been invited to fika, you know that fika is a word that you can use to describe something. is there's going to be three, so you can take a picture when we get to three. I love your enthusiasm, though.

Thank you. Fika is a Swedish word. It means to have coffee, but it's a deeper ritual than just have coffee.

There are documentaries about the social connection that happens during fika. If you ever get to the bottom of Netflix, which I have because I travel a lot, you'll find those documentaries. And most organizations that I've worked with, especially over the last two years, that have been crippling with hybrid and things like that, like that have been doing some version of FICA, getting people together for a one-on-one meeting, maybe once a week with a random person on their team or in a different team in the organization, just to have a non-work conversation, to get to know each other, to connect a bit better. Some teams don't do it FICA one-on-one, but they take advantage of buffer times, unstructured times, the time before the meeting when everybody's filing in, and they make sure to seed that with questions that help people tell a little bit more of their story. When we do that, we find we have certain things in common with each other.

We build those bonds. I would- I was in an elevator earlier today with a gentleman who was skipping my keynote to go swimming. I hope he got done swimming. Where are you?

There you are. From Philadelphia. We bonded over being from Delaware.

Yeah, you can give him a round of applause. It's fine. He went swimming.

Good work. Wish I could get a round of applause for going swimming. We bonded over the fact that we grew up in the same area, right? That happens, but it only happens in those unstructured times.

And one of the weirdest things, I don't know if you felt this way, in the last two years, we've had way too many meetings. Am I right? And here's the weird thing.

Because we have so many of them, we're doing them efficiently. And when it comes to common understanding, that can actually be a problem because we're not taking the time to get to know each other the way we used to when we didn't have another meeting to run off to. So maybe it's not a structured coffee talk type of thing.

Maybe it's just taking advantage, lingering a bit longer, and having those conversations. One of the other rituals I do with a lot of teams or I encourage them to do, especially at the start of a team meeting, like let's say you do your huddle and you do it every Monday. Start with what we call an energy check. Just a quick check. the table, hey, on a scale of one to five, what's your energy level like this week?

Is it a five? Awesome. Are you lying?

Is it a two? What can we do to help get it up to, maybe not to a five, but what could we do to help? Just checking in.

Because you know, people bring more than just their brain to work, don't they? They bring a lot of their personal life. This whole idea of a work life balance thing is ridiculous because it posits this idea that we could separate out these two spheres of our life, and we can't. We bring that stuff with us, right?

Anyone that's ever gotten a phone call from your school because your kid has a fever or in the last two years because your kid was next to a kid who had a fever and then got a Q-tip jammed up your nose and now you've got a week at home watching the kid. You know that work and life interact. And so an energy check, just a simple, hey, what's going on in your life?

How's everybody's energy level doing this week? One through five. Anything that's a two or below, just ask.

What can we do to help? What can we do to support you? If they don't want to share, that's fine. What they need to know from you, if you're in a leadership role.

Is that you're there for them and you care and you're available. All right, so huddles, Vika, energy deck, that's all we've got. So for common understanding. You already got it? Okay, cool.

Let's talk about the next one in the triangle. Let's talk about psychological safety. This is a term, this is the one academic term you might have heard already before. Psychological safety. The extent to which team members feel safe to express themselves and to take risks, to speak up when they disagree, to try crazy things and even if they don't work, not feel like it'll reflect poorly on them.

Psychological safety is a fascinating concept first discovered by... or first really proven by a brilliant researcher named Amy Edmondson. Amy Edmondson was actually studying hospitals and studying nurses and charge nurses as leaders on hospital wards and found something really interesting, which is in the hospital she was studying, all of the best charge nurses, the leaders of the nursing teams, all of the best ones had higher rates of reported accidents than the poor leaders, which is a little weird, right? If you're a good leader, you're supposed to have less accidents, right?

Like we're trying to have less screw-ups when we're going through something on the production line, right? So more reported accidents. ones, that's a little weird. It wasn't until she started doing qualitative interviews with people that she found out that that word reported is carrying a whole lot of weight.

In other words, on the teams where people felt safe to report that they messed up, they did so. And on the teams where people feared their leader, they didn't. And besides the massively unethical thing about hiding medical mistakes, it's only on the safe teams that people have the ability to learn and to develop and to grow.

Right? So psychological safety, hugely important not only for making our people feel a safe to bring their whole selves to work, et cetera, but important for learning as a team and continuously improving as a team as well. I think about psychological safety, and one of my favorite stories of psychological safety is the story of Alan Mulally and the way that Alan Mulally was tapped to turn around the Ford Motor Company in the mid-2000s. Alan was one of the first CEOs of Ford, not named Ford. And when he was brought in, he was brought in from Boeing, and he was charged with turning the company around.

The company was on pace to lose $17 billion, according to the annual report. for that year before he was brought in. And one of the things Alan was committed to was building a culture of psychological safety where people could actually admit what was going wrong so that we could actually try and fix it.

And he lived that candor himself. In fact, on his very first day, he did a press conference. Like a lot of publicly traded companies, they trot you out in front of a little podium and they said, you're supposed to talk about how you're gonna raise the share price. And one of the reporters in the back of the room asked him a question towards the end of the press conference.

He said, hey, Mr. Malala, just out of curiosity, what kind of car do you drive? Now, if you're the CEO of Ford, what are you supposed to answer? You know what Alan said?

I drive a Lexus. It's the finest car on the market. Now, unbeknownst to all those reporters, so did all of the other executives.

They just hid it. What Alan was saying is I drive the finest car on the market. I aspire to get our company there, but we're not there yet.

And we have to be honest about that. One of the other things... did is he had the senior leadership team meet every Thursday morning for what he called a business process review and in a business process review he would have each of the senior leaders of different divisions talk about where they were that week what they just completed what they were focused on next and any things that were blocking their process progress.

Okay, if that sounds like a huddle to you, it's because it's exactly like a huddle. That's where I got the idea. And what Alan actually asked them to do was color code their slides in their report.

So on the what's blocking my progress. Green would mean nothing. I'm good.

Everything's fine. Yellow would mean I got some problems. We have a little bit of an idea of how to solve it. So we're okay. And red would mean I'm clueless.

And on the first, he told them all of this ahead of time. He went into the first business process review. And this is what he saw. a sea of green lights.

Everything's fine. We're good. Keep in mind, we're going to lose $17 billion, but everything's fine.

For eight weeks, it went on like this. Eight weeks, Alan had to sit there and be like, we're going to lose seven. And you're telling me everything's fine?

Surely something's going on that this room can help solve. It wasn't until week nine that one executive decided to take a risk. Mark Fields, who was in charge of production, some of the production in Canada had a problem in production.

They didn't figure out how to solve it on the production line, so they were having to solve it afterwards, having individual mechanics go in and fix it, and that was causing massive backlogs. They didn't know how to solve it. So he took a risk, and he changed his color to red, and he presented the real problem.

And in a culture of fear that Ford was before Allen came in, you can imagine what happened. In a culture where people just lie and put green lights on there, you can imagine what everybody did. They took a good look at Mark because...

because it was the last time they were ever gonna see him. What Alan did was a little bit different. Alan said, this is great. Tell us more about your problem. Maybe we can figure it out by the end of the day.

And they got everybody together and they came up with a plan to kind of test it and get at least a workable plan for how we can fix the problem. And as they were leaving, of course, everybody took their last. Last look at Mark.

Because they knew he was going to be gone. But the next week, he wasn't gone. In fact, his position at the table had moved. He was sitting right next to Alan.

Which is really just a statement. What I want is more of this. I want more of that honesty. So what happened after the week after they saw Mark not only fired, but brought next to Alan? Here's what the slides look like.

A sea of colors, right? We can finally be honest about what's going on. We can finally fix our problems.

Maybe we can turn things around. And turn things around they did. During the Great Recession, when the other two big automakers in the United States took bailout money.

Ford did not. They kept moving. They kept improving. They kept moving.

They kept improving. Kept committed to psychological safety. When Alan Mulally retired, they had moved from losing $17 billion a year to a $7 billion surplus.

And when Alan resigned as CEO, he made a recommendation to the board about who should follow him. Do you know who he recommended? He recommended Mark Fields, first person who took that risk.

Okay, you might not be tasked with turning around a $17 billion company. You might have a not have a bunch of liars who are trying to CYA on your team, but I sense in your facial expressions that you're thinking, yeah, we could do a little bit more to grow our sense of psychological safety. So here's a couple ideas for you.

The first is treat conflict as collaboration, especially if you're in a leadership role and people speak up and they disagree with you. It can feel personal, right? Or even if you're not in a leadership role, when you submit your idea and somebody else is like, no, I don't think that can work, it can feel like they're kind of attacking you, right?

Like we treat ideas we treat them like babies. They're our baby, right? And nobody ever calls a baby ugly, even though some babies are ugly.

Nobody ever calls a baby ugly. You don't say that. You just know it needs time to grow and nurture, develop. Or you say, oh, he looks just like his father.

Well, however you respond, right? We don't call that. We know that. So when people push back on our idea, it can feel like they're calling our baby ugly.

But we need that mindset shift. And no, they're not. What they're actually saying is I see something you don't. I have a different perspective.

I have a different background. I have a different perspective. I have a different I have a different set of knowledge, skills, and abilities, and that gives me a different viewpoint on this problem, and I have another idea, and I'm seeking to collaborate with you. So we need to be a little more honest about that. Treat conflict as collaboration when it happens.

The next element we could do, that we need to try, I think a whole lot more often, and Jesse's talk really spoke to this, remember? Five new ideas in a session, most of them don't work out, like live pinata night or flatulence fun night, most of them don't work out. We ought to be celebrating failures a bit more, and what I mean here is we need to be more honest about this.

when I say celebrate failures is not congratulations. You were totally incompetent. You screwed up the entire production. We lost a hundred thousand dollars and six months working on the project. Here's a trophy.

That's not what I mean. Unless you lead a bunch of millennials and then it might work. Oh, that's terrible.

That's awful. I can't believe I said that. I am a millennial too. Isn't that bad?

Isn't that making it worse? I'm that borderline. Like we don't, nobody knows whether I'm, I'm gen X or millennial, right?

So not only do I want people to tell me that I'm super special. but I also want to be left alone. Right?

All the Gen Xers in the room get that. I see you all in the back. I got you. What I mean when I say celebrate failure is that in every failure, there's an opportunity to learn. That was one of the lessons that Jesse pulled in today.

I actually learned this not from business, not from organizational psychology later. I learned this from 16 years practicing this really esoteric martial art called Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Anybody ever, or anybody watch the UFC last weekend? Okay, a couple of you. When they are done boxing and they fall down and they hug each other, that's...

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Like I said, really esoteric. But we have a saying in that martial art.

It exists in a couple other martial arts too. Our saying is that when you're in competition, if you have the spirit of a martial artist, you never actually lose. Your only two options are win or learn.

If you're too arrogant to pull a lesson from your loss, then maybe you really did lose. But most of us have something we can learn from it. So we have a win or learn mentality.

But in order to have a real lesson out of it, we need transparency on the team to talk about what my role was. You know what? I made the assumption. that we would be able to get this paper in and supply chain, I really underestimated supply chain issues.

Maybe I, I don't know, maybe I overestimated them and as a result I told the client a crazy deliverable time and they went somewhere else because they had a better idea of it, right? All of us make these assumptions every day. We make decisions every day that are based on assumptions. Sometimes they don't work out. We end up losing, we end up messing up.

But it's only when we're willing to share, here's the assumption I made, here's how it was different from reality, that we could learn, okay, what systems can we put in place to make sure that we have better assumptions next time. That is what we should celebrate. If you want to hand out a trophy, that's great too, but that's what we should celebrate, that transparency behind the failure that lets us learn. The last idea around psychological safety I have for you is to encourage dissent.

Encourage dissent. What do I mean by that? Especially if you're in a leadership role, I mean, oh, she got it. There's three now.

There's three for each one, so whenever you see three, you can take a picture. Love it. What do I mean when I say encourage dissent? Most of us... if we're in a leadership role, most of us don't do a good enough job opening the floor for that dissent or disagreement.

If I'm just being totally honest. We think we do. We're in a meeting, we're bringing all the heads together, and maybe at the very end we say stuff like, okay, sounds like we're all headed towards consensus, but anybody, questions, concerns, clarifications? You ever gotten that little rhyme, questions, concerns, clarifications? You ever been on the receiving end of that rhyme?

We think it's like opening the door for dissent, but you know what it's more like? Questions, concerns, clarifications? It's more like when you're at a wedding and the officiant towards the end says, if anyone Questions, concerns, or clarifications.

You know you're not supposed to say anything, unless you're in a soap opera, and you were supposed to be dead for the last two seasons. But we do that, right? Or we do the email novel, and then at the very end we write, thoughts?

What I mean by encourage dissent is open that floor a bit more and tell people what I am looking for is disagreement here. I told you I was a full-time business school professor. This is where I learned this lesson.

I learned a lot about MBAs in my time there. And, well, actually, most of it I can't share. But I learned a lot about MBAs.

And one of the things I learned is that MBAs express dissent in the form of a question. There's like a power distance. They don't feel comfortable just outright saying, you know, you're full of crap.

So they ask a question. Are you full of crap? crap?

No, it's not that simple. But they ask a question. And I wasn't doing a good enough job creating space for questions.

I would lecture for 55 minutes in a 60-minute session. And then at the very end, I'd go, okay, as everyone's packing up their bags, I go, okay, any questions? And of course, there would be no questions. And then people would come to my office afterwards and ask me all sorts of questions. Because there were always questions.

I just wasn't creating enough psychological safety in the classroom. So I flipped it. I changed my lecture so I'd always be done in about 45 minutes.

So they knew. no, we're not packing up yet. There's still 15 minutes left of class.

And I would say, okay, we've talked about this theory and this theory and this theory. I made a lot of rabbit jokes. I told you when you're supposed to take notes and take pictures of slides and when you're not. I do all sorts of crazy stuff like that and I speak a little too fast. Sometimes I make jokes that don't land.

Sometimes they do and then it distracts the whole class. So I know I was probably unclear about something we talked about today or I know I probably sped too fast through a concept about something we talked about today. So what questions do you have?

for me. You see the difference? Any questions versus what questions do you have for me? And then I was comfortable waiting the 15, 30 seconds it took for people to realize I was serious.

When I got out of business school and went back into the business world, I did the exact same thing. Instead of questions, concerns, clarifications, it was, okay, you know what? It sounds like we're all headed down this avenue, but I want to check in just before we do.

Because I have my own knowledge, skills, and abilities. I have my own background. I have my own experiences, which means I have my own biases, which means I have my own blind spots.

So what am I missing? Can you help me find what I'm missing? And immediately we would get a much more robust discussion than we would when I would just say questions, concerns, clarifications.

That's what I mean when I say encourage dissent. Okay, so we've talked about common understanding and psychological safety. We have one last one for you, one last dictionary definition, the sense of pro-social purpose. What is this all about?

Pro-social purpose. This is the extent to which team members feel that they're making a contribution towards work that benefits others. You know, I like to think about this. If I could get a little mean here for a second. We've heard a lot in the last.

10 years about the importance of having purpose, a mission statement, a strong answer to the question why. We're told we need to write a compelling why, a compelling mission statement. Maybe we need to start with that. We need to start with why, right? We're told that.

And the truth is what most people want from their work isn't an answer to the question why. It's an answer to the question who. As in who do we serve? I want to feel like I'm actually making a difference in someone's life.

And in order to do that, I need to know who we're doing any of this stuff for. You saw it in Jesse's speech today, this theme of of fans first. I know who I'm doing this for. I'm not here to win a baseball game. I'm here to entertain a group of fans who come from a variety of different backgrounds and have a lot of different stuff going on in their life and wear their respite from it.

Feels different, doesn't it? We know about this research, actually, from the research of, well, a couple different researchers, Amy Rosnesky and Jane Dutton around job crafting, Adam Grant, Justin Berg. I'm just dropping names to prove that I was a business school professor, by the way. One of my favorite studies of all of this is a study done on university college. call centers that call for donations.

Have you ever gotten one of these? If you graduated from like a big state school, you probably got one of these calls. You know the ones I'm talking about.

They call you usually at night. I don't know how they get your cell phone, but they get your cell phone and they tell you about all the exciting things going on on campus. So would you like to donate a thousand dollars to the new student union? No.

Would you like to donate five hundred dollars to the new stadium and put it on a brick on the walkway up? No. Okay, would you like to donate, I got this one, this is a real one one time, would you like to donate a thousand dollars to the new Would you like to donate $20.08 to commemorate the year of your graduation? What was funny about that, too, is it was like grad school.

I didn't even attend, like, on campus most of the time. But to commemorate the year of your, it's weird, right? You've gotten these calls.

These people are persistent. It's like all the annoyance of a telemarketer mixed with the persistence of, like, Sam I Am from Green Eggs and Ham, right? They just keep asking, With a fox, would you like to donate in a box? Would you like to donate on a train in the rain?

Would you like to donate in a mouse with a house? Kid, I'm just trying to pay off my student loans. And then we can talk about donating, okay? Think about the person on the other end of that phone call though. That's got to be a sucky job, right?

Call jerks like me get told no often. It turns out it is. The turnover rate in a job like that, by the way, is 400%.

That means every year, the people who are hired for that job, everybody in the entire call center quits three times a year. And you thought you had problems, right? So one research study...

sought to convey this sense of pro-social purpose. And what they started to do was they took one group and they had them during breaks. They had them meet with a scholarship recipient from the university.

Another group just kind of got a break because it's science. You're supposed to have a control group. But this group got a break, five-minute break, got to meet with a kid who got a scholarship. And as a result, they could go to that university, got to hear what they were studying and the difference that that scholarship made. And then they followed the two different groups for a period of a month.

And at the end of the month, what they found was the group that actually got to meet the who. the group that got to meet who, dramatically outperformed the other group. They made twice as many calls. They were on the phone for twice as long.

Their donations went from an average of $400 to an average of $2,000 a week. I mean, it's impossible to overstate how dramatic that effect is because they knew their who, right? We saw the same thing in the professional world. There's a fascinating story of a turnaround of an industry that's kind of traditional, kind of tied up. kind of boring, kind of struggles with recruiting.

Does this sound familiar? This one's actually accounting. Apologies to the accountants. It's this company KPMG. A couple years ago, they launched this thing they called the We Shape History campaign.

And at first, it looked like a standard corporate propaganda campaign. Kind of cool. We told stories about how KPMG was involved in the recovery efforts of 9-11. They even went back throughout history. They told stories about how KPMG was the company that certified the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. managed the logistics for the Lend-Lease Act during World War II, which brought the United States in to support the Allies.

They told stories, but then they did something crazy cool. They did something really bold and also brilliant. They asked their people for their stories. At the time, KPMG in the United States had 27,000 employees, and they launched what they called the 10,000 Stories Challenge. So do the math.

They have low expectations here. 10,000 Stories Challenge. What they said was, you tell us.

us your story. How does the work that you do shape history? How does the work that you do matter?

They even created an app where people could actually make their own versions of the poster. And they were shooting for 10,000 stories in a year. And the stories started rolling in a whole lot faster than they thought.

They got stories like this. They got stories like, I help farmers grow because I support the farm credit system that keeps family farms in business. I know I look like an auditor, but that's what I actually do. Thank you.

I help families grow. I stop cybercrime because I'm involved in the forensic accounting units that's managing accounts and making sure that people aren't victims of identity theft. Do you feel the difference?

This isn't just what we've done in the past. This is what you specifically do. And here's what I think is absolutely amazing.

At the end of this campaign, which they cut short after six months, because instead of 10,000 stories, they got 42,000 stories in six months. Twenty seconds. 47,000 people, 42,000 stories, right?

So some people did the assignment twice. They got 42,000 versions of the answer to the question, who benefits from the work that we do? And then they did their annual employee engagement survey.

And here's what I think is fascinating. They slipped the question in and they asked, hey, did your manager participate? Did your direct team leader actually talk about purpose? In blue, you see the team, the responses on the engagement survey from the teams that said, yes, my manager regularly communicates purpose. In gray, you see the ones that said, that said no they don't.

In some cases it's a 30 point difference. We have 80% of employees surveyed whose manager talks about purpose saying, I feel the work that I do makes an impact. It's down to less than 40% for the managers that don't.

The lesson here is that it's not about what you say from the top, it's about what the people who interact on teams every day say about who benefits from the work that we do, who we serve, and why it matters. The lesson here is that people want to do work that matters. and they want to work for leaders, team leaders, who tell them that they matter.

So we've got companies of all sizes in this room, and what's amazing about this is this works at just about every level, so long as the person that's actually circling people up is telling them. Who? Who do we serve? Who is served by the work that we do?

All right, you might not be able to do this whole propaganda. You could probably make some pretty cool posters, though, I'm just being honest. But you might not be able to do that. But here's a couple things you could do.

Think about the ways we could rework tasks. Are there people whose entire job does not bring them into contact with anyone who is served by the work that we do? They don't interact with customers or stakeholders or anything.

They're behind the scenes. They're just on the floor. They're just doing that.

Is there something we could add to their job that lets them? them see that benefit a bit more. Even if it's not a customer, even if it's just letting them know how the work they do fits into the puzzle and serve somebody else inside the organization, an internal customer, could be a strong answer to the question, who? If you can't do that, is there a way we could bring them in?

Is there a way we could, on a quarterly basis, bring in some of our best customers, just talk about what they do and how we help support them so that everybody gets to see how we help people who is served by the work that we do? And as we're doing all of this, make sure we're all... also sharing progress. Make sure we're sharing progress about where we're going as an organization. Make sure we're sharing progress about how we're helping improve that company.

There's a whole wealth of motivational research that supports the idea that people want to be a part of something that's moving forward, that's making progress, that progress is a powerful human motivator, especially if it's progress towards work that serves other people. So can we share progress onto that? If we do that, we'll build that sense of pro-social purpose.

And along with common understanding and psychological... safety will build those cultural elements I was telling you. It's not John's three, it's my three.

Common understanding, psychological safety, and pro-social purpose. But here's what's amazing. What we find about team culture is that the sum of these is greater than just the parts.

That there's a synergy that happens when you start to build all three. When you start to build the sense of common understanding and pro-social purpose, you start to attract better people. You start to get the best people because they want to do work that matters. They want to work for a team that understands them and tells them they matter. So you start to get better people.

You start to solve some of those recruiting errors because you can say, this isn't just what we do, this is who we do it for and why it matters. So you get the best people. When you build common understanding and you build psychological safety, you get their best ideas because they feel safe to communicate them, even if they sound crazy. And they know how their work fits in, so they know how their idea is going to be received. So you get the best ideas from your people.

And when you build psychological safety and you build pro-social purpose together, you get those same people's best effort because they know why it matters. they're doing, who they're doing their work for, and they feel free, they feel like they have a sense of it. And if you haven't figured it out, this is the triangle you can take a picture of, because this is the complete one.

When you build common understanding, psychological safety, and pro-social purpose, you get a team that's better than just those three elements. You get a team that's better than the one you had before. You might even say you get your best team ever, or at least the best one you've ever led.

Thank you all so much for having me.

Transcript for:Enhancing Team Innovation and Productivity

Transcript for:
Enhancing Team Innovation and Productivity