Smarter-Faster-Better - Part 2 of 2...

Enhance your team’s performance by making sure each person feels safe and valued.

What’s the recipe for a great team? A group of overachievers or superstars? Not exactly.

Google’s Project Aristotle spent two years researching what makes a team great. The project found that even a team of average performers can accomplish great things if the team has the right dynamic.

But what’s the “right” dynamic? Well, the most important factor is whether team members feel psychologically safe. Team members feel safe when they know they won’t be ridiculed for making mistakes or suggesting ideas. Project Aristotle found that safe teams were more likely to perform better, envisioning more innovative products or meeting sales targets.

Psychological safety enhances performance because it allows team members to admit mistakes, which means any issues can be quickly addressed. Team members also feel more comfortable sharing unconventional ideas, which makes the team as a whole more creative.

“Safe” teams also thrive in an environment that is, in general, caring and respectful. Project Aristotle found that the safest teams are made up of empathetic individuals, which shouldn’t come as a surprise: it’s easier to trust people when they care about you.

Team members also feel safe when they’re encouraged to contribute to a project’s success. Such encouragement shows each member that he or she is an important part of the group with opinions that are highly valued.

Naturally, team leaders are tasked with fostering this psychological safety. So if you’re a leader, make sure all your team members have their voices heard at least once in every meeting.

If you notice a team member is upset, encourage the person to share what’s wrong and make sure other members respond in a caring way. Resolve any conflicts in the open and never interrupt team members when they are speaking. Make sure everyone feels valued and respected!

Fostering a commitment culture increases your company’s overall success.

During the boom times in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, many CEOs felt that HR departments and other “company culture” ideas were irrelevant to the startup world. Developing ground-breaking ideas and products were all that mattered.

Were they correct? Not at all. An exhaustive study has shown that company culture is deeply important to the success of any firm. And a “commitment culture” is the most successful kind of culture you can nurture at a company.

In a commitment culture, management focuses on building trust and attachment to the company. Commitment culture companies rely on trust, care and the emotional connections between the organization and its employees. Such companies don’t necessarily aim to hire the smartest, highest achieving individuals. Instead, firms look for people who fit their larger team and company vision.

In 1994, Stanford Business School professors James Baron and Michael Hannan started a study of nearly 200 Silicon Valley technology start-ups, in an attempt to understand more about the relationship between company culture and profit.

The team found that of the five different company cultural styles they identified, commitment culture companies consistently proved to be the most successful. Not one commitment culture firm went bankrupt; they were the fastest to go public; and they maintained the highest profitability ratios.

There’s another benefit to supporting a commitment culture, in that it allows a company to maintain fewer middle managers. Commitment companies hire driven, high-quality specialists who are usually good at managing themselves. That means a company’s middle management ranks can be leaner.

Your company is more efficient when specialists can address questions or problems directly. A mid-level operations manager might not know which server to choose, for example, but an IT specialist can make the right choice immediately.

Find new applications for old ideas and let your emotions guide your creative work.

Innovation isn’t always about starting from scratch. After all, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to develop a groundbreaking new car!

So instead of trying to create something completely new, strive to use old ideas in new ways.

Behavioral economics is a good example of this phenomenon. The pioneers of behavioral economics combined psychological and economic models to try to understand why humans so often make decisions counter to their interests. People decline deals if they perceive them as unfair, for instance. This runs against the idea of rational behavior, which holds that people make decisions purely for gain, put forth by traditional economists.

Behavioral economists thus managed to gain groundbreaking insight by finding new applications for old concepts.

Brian Uzzi and Ben Jones, business professors at Northwestern University, in 2011 analyzed a range of creative academic papers. Using an algorithm, Uzzi and Jones evaluated 17.9 million papers and found that in the most creative papers, 90 percent of the content had already been published elsewhere.

The innovative papers were considered groundbreaking because they approached existing concepts from new angles, not because they developed new concepts alone.

Here’s another good way to boost creativity: tune into your feelings. Let emotions and intuition guide you. How you feel about a situation or idea will tell you whether you’re dealing with something great or just run-of-the-mill.

Disney Animation President Edwin Catmull uses this strategy with his writers. When his team was working on the movie Frozen, for instance, he had them explore their emotional connections with siblings. Doing so allowed the writers to portray the relationship between the characters Anna and Elsa in a raw, authentic and relatable way, one big reason for the film’s sweeping success.

Final summary

The key message in this article:

Staying productive, motivated and competitive is ultimately about making the right choices, both in your daily life and with your most ambitious goals. Set stretch goals for yourself, then narrow them down into achievable parts. Overcome distractions by staying prepared. Making the right choices isn’t just good for you – it’s better for your team and the company overall.

Actionable advice

Learn a new concept by talking or writing about it.

Next time you read about something interesting, tell a friend or write a short essay about it. Your brain processes ideas more deeply when you engage with a topic, allowing your brain to build new neural connections. You’ll better understand an idea and will be more able to recall it, the more neural connections you establish.