The "Team=Family" Exercise

Anti-Impression Management and Clarity practice: I wrote a book called “People Before Tech: Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” ?

At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us about a demo at [email protected] ?

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As we were saying yesterday, we have seen a direct correlation in the team dynamics of our clients between increased Engagement and increased Psychological Safety. To aid in that we have created a new play in our Playbook called the “Team=Family” exercise.

With so many definitions of Engagement flying around it’s worth being clear what we mean when we say “Engagement” - the teammates’ degree of emotional closeness, how well they know each other, how tight they are as a mini-community or even a family, how much they care about each other and how empathic they are. Whether or not they would recommend their place of work or if they feel the brand represents them is often the (frankly ridiculous) definition some people give “engagement” and that of course tells us nothing in terms of the team’s wellbeing and consequent performance.?

It’s also important that we say it again - Engagement/Relatedness/Emotional Investment/Sense of family - whatever we want to call it- are just one of the behaviors or dynamics we can attribute to high performing teams and in isolation, it would simply not be an efficient measurement - which is incidentally why we despair with the companies who have bought an Engagement survey and think they are getting any semblance of a true measure of the teams’ levels of Psychological Safety. In particular, if we keep in mind what definition they usually operate under.

In today’s world of work, few of us are part of one team only and most of us are in some type of a matrix where we are members of several teams at once. It may seem hard to square that the intimacy created in a tight team bond can be replicated across both and people do seem to have some type of loyalty-driven response where one team is “most like family” in their minds above all others but nonetheless this exercise even works for teams.?

https://youtu.be/spoWvL3lp8w?

In this video, we suggest some simple ways to test how emotionally close your own teams are and then some ways to increase that with regular exercises to increase that connection.

For clients of our Psychological Safety Dashboard - we would advise you consider doing this new “Team=Family” Play you’ll find in your Playbook even if you think you are “above it” or if your dashboard shows Engagement to be consistently high, see if you can do it as a team version of a Couples’ Game where you answer on behalf of other teammates to test your knowledge of them. ?

Keep an eye on the data after this play and see if you can observe any other trends in decreased Impression Management and increased Openness and Courage for instance.

For those of you who don’t have access to the software, try some of the questions suggested above and simply treat the exercise as filling in a dating profile and then going a step further and sharing intimate details as you would over a pint in a new group of friends.?

Let us know how you did!

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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are:?Understand,?Measure?and?Improve

Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at?www.peoplenottech.com?or reach out at?[email protected]?and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.