Finding the Formula: Nurturing Wealth and Wellbeing in Teams and Organizations

Welcome back to xNEWS, where we explore principles and practices of leadership in an exponentially changing world.

My partner in this experiment is Deborah Ancona, a professor at MIT. You can learn more about me here and Deborah here.

We plan to publish a biweekly newsletter in the form of a dialogue. Today, I respond to Deborah's newsletter from two weeks ago (which you can find here) and, in turn, she will respond in two weeks.?

We hope you will join us with insights and questions along the way. Please feel free to connect and message me on LinkedIn.

With the release of the new edition of x-Teams, Deborah and I are both reflecting on how x-teams have grown and changed over the years. Deborah closed her last newsletter with this question:

Henrik, you mentioned a passion project at the end of your last newsletter. What’s next for you?

One project I’ve been pursuing is helping teams and leaders at every level strive toward the dual outcomes of wealth and wellbeing. Many leaders believe there is a tradeoff between performance and mental health—I do not. At least there does not have to be. Importantly, when they work, x-teams are a powerful means to achieve both outcomes.

However, high-performing teams are not necessarily a harmonious place. Because x-teams care as much about their external world as their internal world, the diversity of input can create tensions. Such tensions, we find, carry the promise of breakthrough performance, but if leaders and teams cannot find a way to harness them to positive ends, they can spiral into disappointing performance and adverse negative mental health outcomes.

How can we maintain harmony within tension?

In Amy Gallo’s HBR article, “Why We Should Be Disagreeing More at Work,” she suggests that to keep our disagreements productive, we let go of needing to be liked, focus on the big picture, find a role model who is skilled at being direct and honest, and learn not to equate disagreement with unkindness. Amy highlights the positive outcomes of healthy disagreement, such as pushing each other to find better solutions, finding opportunities to learn and grow, improving relationships, creating more job satisfaction, and developing a more inclusive work environment.?

For leaders, this requires maintaining a balance, wearing two hats: the people hat and the P&L hat. This isn’t easy. Some think it amounts to a choice, but we think not. Mark Mortensen and Heidi K. Gardner’s Harvard Business Review article, “Leaders Don’t Have to Choose Between Compassion and Performance,” explores how the two hats aren’t mutually exclusive. The challenge for leaders isn’t trading off between performance and compassion, “but rather about trading off between different elements within each so that they can free up time to focus on what creates the most value.”

Managing those trade-offs requires ongoing conversations in which leaders approach employees with transparency to learn what needs their focus and how to find solutions together. But none of this is possible without fostering a psychologically safe environment. In my HBR article with Amy C. Edmondson, “Research: To Excel, Diverse Teams Need Psychological Safety,” we cover how diversity does not help teams perform better without psychological safety. In fact, without psychological safety, diverse teams perform worse on average. Psychological safety translates the tensions that arise from diversity into positive outcomes, both in terms of wealth and wellbeing.?

How do we foster psychological safety?

Amy and I suggest three methods: framing, inquiry, and bridging boundaries.

1. Framing - Establishing a shared understanding of your work and the context within which you operate helps build psychological safety. Frame meetings as opportunities for information-sharing, free from judgment and evaluation, and frame differences as a source of value. Differences in opinions and perspectives can benefit the team as a whole.
2. Inquiry - Ask people to contribute their thoughts and listen carefully to what you hear in response. Utilize open questions and questions that build shared ownership and causality. Practicing these questions and a willingness to listen to what others are saying will establish psychological safety.
3. Bridging Boundaries - This is when you take the first two tactics to the next level—asking what individual team members can do to bridge expertise and background boundaries. Encourage your team members to ask each other questions such as:?

• What do you want to accomplish? (Establishing hopes and goals.)
• What do you bring to the table? (Establishing resources and skills.)
• What are you up against? What are you worried about? (Connecting on concerns and obstacles.)

There is always more to learn.

Psychological safety is one path to achieving the dual outcomes of wealth and wellbeing, but the reality is complex. There is still much more to learn. One critical piece is finding a rhythm. Working in a high-performing team is exhausting. Like in a high-performing orchestra, each section needs to rest or at least slow down at some point.

Deborah, how can x-teams orchestrate a rhythm that supports the balance of wealth and wellbeing???

?

Thank you for reading the latest edition of xNEWS. Look out for Deborah's response in two weeks, and don’t forget to subscribe.