Get Better at Being Human Part 3: Understanding Us

If you’ve been following this series, I hope you are enjoying the journey to better understand yourself and those around you. If you haven’t – check out Part 1 and Part 2 and start developing better human habits! We are in the full throes of a technology-defined era with capabilities progressing every day. We humans simply can't afford to step-back and see what’s next for us. The challenges we face - as people, families, teams, companies, communities, and society - clearly show a need to hone and advance our core human skills to build better experiences and outcomes for us and generations to come.

Many people are feeling disgruntled, fed-up, lacking in energy and purpose. By taking steps to better understand ourselves and other people, we can create greater agency to improve the daily experiences of work and life. And this can ripple across others – lifting up friends, partners, colleagues, even teams and companies.

With these two elements in place, we are poised to create significantly improved impact, through building an understanding of us.

There are many examples across sports teams, communities and businesses demonstrating the value and impact of engaging the power of the whole. Google’s Project Aristotle set out to explore the secret to high performing teams. They discovered the common ingredients included maintaining strong psychological safety, having shared goals and structured ways of working, setting clear standards and expectations, and building connection to a meaningful purpose. And critically, the best teams included team members who listen to one another, build understanding, and show sensitivity.

The Inclusion Rule

No-one can deny Michael Jordan’s phenomenal skill as an individual basketball player. ?However, Phil Jackson, head coach of the Chicago Bulls at the time, knew it wasn’t enough alone to sustain exceptional performance, and so he introduced a new tactic – the triangle strategy. In this approach, one player doesn’t get all the glory, instead, everyone had opportunity to be a playmaker and so this became known as the ‘inclusion rule’. Working together as a team, building strong relationships, understanding each other’s strengths and gaps, to build a group of players greater than the sum of their parts, potentially enabled Chicago Bulls to become the most successful basketball team, ever.

‘Talent wins games. But teamwork and intelligence win championships’ – Michael Jordan.

Going it alone, Michael Jordan would have found glory in isolated games, maybe even a championship. He, and they, wouldn’t have achieved the consecutive triumphs the club earned through their hard work as a collective.

Choosing to ignore

On the flip side, instances when people block or ignore the power of the group have ended in human disaster.

In 2018 and 2019 (just 5 months apart) two Boeing aircraft crashed, killing everyone on-board. This was a complete tragedy, but for Boeing, a company previously well-respected for its commitment to safety and quality, it was a huge shock too. Lengthy inquests followed and in summary, these tragic accidents showed what can happen when an organisation loses sight of its core mission, choosing to ignore the voices of technical experts in favour of those focused on commercial growth. A new system had been developed for this specific model of aircraft, and despite many engineers flagging their concerns about its safety, these had been batted-away to ensure achievement of financial results.

When we ignore the voices we don’t want to hear, or have indirectly excluded, the outcomes can severely come back to bite us.

Opportunity or Threat?

It can be difficult to unleash the optimal power of the group because our brains can classify moments when different views are expressed as a threat. Our amygdala kicks in, initiating the fight-or-flight response system, and we seek to close conversations, get out of situations, save ourselves…

Blood rushes to our heads, our hearts pump harder and louder, our palms feel sweaty. It’s not just life or death scenarios, any of these everyday situations could trigger this physical reaction:

• Someone challenges the proposal you have worked weeks to prepare
• You encounter uncomfortable silence or intense conflict in meetings
• You receive difficult, perhaps unfair, feedback on your style and impact
• You’re overlooked for an opportunity based on an assumption about your skillset or motivation

When we create conditions where people feel trusted, able to share their views and ask questions, inspired by a future vision, and crucially, have psychological safety, research shows we become more open-minded, feel more motivated and resilient, and creativity flows.?Individually, finding ways to reframe these instances as opportunities and flooding our brains with positive emotions (fueled by oxytocin – the reason behind that warm glow when we feel belonging), can lead to better experiences and outcomes.

Be more Ted!

Ted Lasso, the fictitious coach of Richmond FC in the Apple TV Series, often shares sound advice to harness the best in his team. ‘Be curious, not judgemental’ is a solid basis for seeking to understand the whole.

Here are some other actions we can all take to build our understanding of us and capture our collective potential:

1. Interrupt your natural brain processes. Challenges can trigger a threat response and biases can creep in to help us more efficiently process information, resulting in unhelpful assumptions or quick exits. Instead, pause and ask questions. Turn threat into curiosity. Buy your brain time to calm down, take in the information, and seek understanding. Questions such as ‘that’s interesting, can you help me understand x or y’, or ‘I hadn’t considered that perspective, how will your approach help us achieve the key outcome?’
2. Seek input before formulating a view. Withholding a decision or judgement (being more curious) can help build an understanding of the whole picture. In that process, proactively seek out views from those you know have a different perspective. Try to appreciate their view, it could help you both develop a stronger solution.
3. Disconnect the message from the person. Our emotional response to words or action triggers feelings towards another person. Remembering their perspective, their argument, their decision, isn’t them; behind it is another human, with feelings, needs, a family. Using language to show you appreciate them as a person, can help build connection and find channels to move forward.
4. Build visions and stories to demonstrate the value of the whole. Consistently sharing an exciting and inspiring future path is critical to align and engage teams. Sharing how everyone contributes and is responsible for this mission is important too – behind every sale / new product / target reached, etc. is every function in the company. Telling stories and sharing examples can help bring this to life. Ensuring people feel genuinely valued and part of the company’s strategy fosters a sense of worth and belonging and can prevent slipping into a culture of blame.
5. Intentionally build psychological safety. Last, but certainly not least, create an environment where people feel safe and supported in being vulnerable. Able to share their true thoughts, voice crazy ideas, expose risks, and call out bad behaviour. This starts with leaders being true role-models and can be reinforced through regularly measuring the strength of psychological safety - this will always require work to maintain and improve.

"No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you're playing a solo game, you'll always lose out to a team" - Reid Hoffman, co-founder LinkedIn