About the magic of a team

Having worked with many different teams, and reading through the do’s and don’ts for team success, I have stumbled upon a number of supposed “contradictions”:

• Psychological safety is key, but harmony is dangerous: Teams are advised to create the space needed so that everyone feels at ease to contribute what he/she thinks is best. Reference is made to family life, where behaviors are natural and no one feels compelled to disguise him/herself and put on a show. This allows team members to be vulnerable, talk about what truly matters to them, what they struggle with, and where they feel overwhelmed. That is how a powerful basis is built to jointly tackle major challenges. On the other hand, there is broad evidence that teams shall not strive for harmony. Avoiding conflict means failing to make difficult trade-offs required to prioritize, tolerating poor performance and signaling that it is not appreciated to express dissent.
• Teams should be diverse, but small: We all know about the power of a broad mix with regard to gender, cultural background, technical experience and much more. On the other hand, there is a lot of indications that the highest level of dynamic and creativity comes from teams that have around five members, not more. Many design thinking teams are set up like this. And I have seen several big teams splitting after realizing the downside of too many members. Yet, given the natural boundaries in an organization to “pick and choose” the team members, how to create true diversity with just five people?
• Share a clear objective, but allow the freedom to innovate into unexpected territory: Success comes from pulling in one direction, as opposed to team members working in convenient silos on their individual puzzle pieces. Yet: The greatest innovations do not come from early consensus; rather, it is often the “stupid” ideas “that will never work” which, when pursued with courage and determination despite little support from the majority, have the big potential to ultimately bring breakthrough change.
• Short-term bottom-up planning is a prerequisite for accuracy and buy-in, but long-term top-down expectations cannot be ignored: The insight around what is possible and how is foremost residing in the team. And given the many uncertainties around any innovation, a long-term planning necessarily can only be indicative, if not necessarily wrong. This conviction stands behind sprint planning, Big Room Plannings, working in increments, and other elements of agile methods, where any plan is only accepted once there is sufficient team confidence around it. Yet there is also a need for corporate strategic planning, annual budgets, and management being able to pull all strings together, and to therefore give top-down requirements and timelines.  

Unfortunately, there is no standard answer how to address these opposites, and deal with the associated trade-offs. The optimal path depends most of all on the context, the starting position, the people and tasks involved. There is, as so often in life, no black and white. Yet, and talking here from my own experience, there are a few measures that we individually and as a team can do to maximize performance in any context, and that help overcome the challenges coming from the above contradictions:

1. Give up the ego: This sounds trivial and reasonable, but it is one of the hardest things, as we tend to identify ourselves with our own ideas – and if our own ideas are not what is implemented in the team, than what is left of ourselves? Aren’t we then just insufficient, useless, nothing? It takes personal courage and reflection to realize that our true value is not determined by whether the ultimate result is of our own making, but by how much we put into the process, how much we engage, stand in for our ideas, reach out and be at service of others, for the purpose of creating something that is bigger than our own small selves. Once we have realized that in a team, we become unstoppable.
2. Move from knower to learner: At early stages of our career, driven by how we have been educated, we are convinced that what is expected from us are the right answers. Not knowing is seen as failure, as sign of lack of expertise and of weakness. Yet, true progress is not created through the things we already know. It is driven by revealing what we do not know, by asking questions that we cannot answer ourselves, but that become the stimulation for the magic of the team.
3. Jointly experiment, reflect, and then adapt or restart: Human beings derive emotional peace from certainties. Yet, in a fast-paced, complex world, there are less and less such certainties. In order to deal with it, we need to realize that there is no such thing as a pre-defined path from project start to project end, but that reaching the end depends to the willingness to start, make progress, fall behind, drop, fail, and restart again. With hindsight, in our elaborate retrospectives, we are very capable in identifying what has gone wrong, why, and how we could have avoided it. Such learnings are important. Yet, as the challenges evolve and change, so does the optimal approach. We will never have learned enough to avoid failure, and so it is best to see team work as a constant process of experimenting, reflecting, and then adapting or even restarting.

I have seen astonishing teams, and I have seen teams that despite all odds made great things happen. Observing them, as the magic unfolds, is a true source of inspiration. What is your view? Happy to discuss!