Team Flow: New Research

Team flow arises naturally when each member’s skill level aligns in synch to address their challenges as a unit. During this shared state, everyone feels it viscerally, where achievement is seamless and time ceases. This profound experience triggers multiple benefits, including heightened focus, positive emotions, and intrinsic satisfaction. When a team experiences flow collectively, they can feed off one another's energy, naturally elevating overall performance. Team flow happens across domains from the surgical theater to the volleyball court.

Neuroscience

New research reveals the neural processes underlying team flow when members are "in the zone." This activity orchestrates the integration and synchronization of various brain regions, propelling team members into a hyper-cognitive state. Team flow fosters improved information processing and neural synchrony within this heightened state.

Trust

Team flow enhances trust and effectiveness. Research shows that flow increases trust in virtual settings, creating a benevolent atmosphere. Shared positive experiences boost trust in the team's success, stimulation, and inspiration. Consistently maintaining these conditions builds trustworthiness, fostering positive expectations about team members and reducing the need for control. Positive emotions from shared flow experiences significantly contribute to creating trust, goodwill, reciprocity, and stability among team members.

Playing to One's Strength

Caroline Webb,?a Senior Advisor to McKinsey on leadership, where she was previously a Partner and the author of “How to Have a Good Day," directly links how teammates may achieve a flow state.

?“Managers can encourage their colleagues to seek out activities that play to their personal strengths. First off, that might mean having a conversation with people about their real personal strengths, in companies where that’s not part of the regular dialogue. Then, they can encourage their colleagues to craft a new project to play to those talents … Alternately, after having these conversations about the strengths and skills their team members most enjoy using, managers can encourage their teams to apply their strengths more fully and deliberately to work.” As such, it’s also vital?“that team members have engaging projects and activities on their plates that invite flow consciousness.”

Team Flow Model

Dr. Jef van den Hout PD Eng is an associate researcher and lecturer at the Eindhoven University of Technology and holds a Ph.D. in the conceptualization and measurement of team flow. While there's research on flow states in athletics and the arts, Dr. van den Hout's original research fills a crucial gap regarding its occurrence within the workplace. Consequently, he developed and tested a team flow multilevel model delineating several prerequisites, characteristics, and benefits. This new research and model provides vital insights into fostering and sustaining team flow experiences. The following summarizes seven critical facets of this holistic, integrated model.

Collective ambition: A shared intrinsic motivation and sense of purpose that drives a team's pursuit of goals.

Common goal: A clear and ambitious objective that all team members internalize, leading to growth and coordination.

Aligned personal goals: Individual and team-level goals that are compatible and avoid conflicts, fostering effective teamwork.

High skill integration: Balancing challenge and skill by leveraging complementary abilities and coordinated actions within the team.

Open communication: A system of clear, timely, and constructive feedback that promotes shared knowledge and coordination.?

Safety: Creating a safe environment that encourages learning, growth, and risk-taking without fear of failure or judgment.

Mutual commitment: Full attention, focus, and alignment among team members towards the common goal, enabling teamwork and flow.

Dr. van den Hout and his colleagues envision using this new innovative instrument to monitor team flow, which "can be a benchmark for figuring out what a team needs to perform at a high or more synchronous level.”

Conclusion

Team flow enhances trust, effectiveness, and performance, providing numerous benefits like focus, satisfaction, and improved neural synchrony. Trust is crucial, as shared positive experiences foster it. Managers can encourage team flow by matching member's strengths to engaging projects. Monitoring team flow using Dr. Jef van den Hout's team flow model can enhance team performance and synchronicity. Team flow is an aspirational state that calls us to self-awareness and to play a better game.

References

Winston, L. (n.d.). Team flow: How to make productivity contagious, https://wavelength.asana.com/workstyle-team-flow/

Shehata, M., California Institute of Technology, & Tohoku University. (2021, October 4). The first neuroscience evidence of team flow as a unique brain state, https://neurosciencenews.com/team-flow-brain-19405/

Peifer, C. (2021, September 8). Effects of flow on trust and team effectiveness in virtual teams. Frontiers in Psychology. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.697093/full

van den Hout, J. J., Gevers, J. M. P., Davis, O. C., & Weggeman, M. C. D. P. (2019). Developing and testing the Team Flow Monitor (TFM). Cogent Psychology, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311908.2019.1643962

?Webb, C. (n.d.). How to have a good day. https://carolinewebb.co/books/how-to-have-a-good-day

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