We Need "Teaming" More Than Ever

This week we’re returning to a topic we’ve already started last week in “The Future Is Agile” newsletter so for those of you who subscribe to both, this will be somewhat of a repeat but to be fair, even if were to spend months on this topic could we pretend to have exhausted it. In this article called “Instant teaming” we list some of the situations where we need the concept of “teaming” -forming ad-hoc functional teams-: if we have new projects or new people in the team; for collaboration; for learning; and for any other manifestation of our VUCA world where configurations need to change rapidly as the circumstances around us change. We also enumerate some of the things we view as essential to achieve teaming on the fly: openness and courageous leadership; clarity in purpose; common language; agreement in ways of working; instant empathy; non-competitive mentality; and instant bonding. 

Some of these are rather self-explanatory and there’s no one better than Brene Brown to teach us what courage is and why vulnerability makes leaders -for those of you reading this who are PeopleNotTech clients and using the Psychological Safety Dashboard, the “Courage Hackathon” in the Playbook was designed with her principles in mind-. 

In that same Playbook, you’ll find plays to aid with increasing the clarity of purpose, to find a common language and to agree on the ways of work - in particular the “Team Relaunch” one which we strongly advise everyone reading this has in their calendar if they haven’t already done it since the start of the year. 

But what of the other things on the list - how do we achieve instant empathy, bonding and shake the competitive spirit and more importantly, why do we need to do that?

Well, the "why" is simple - we can never truly work "as one" and apply ourselves fully to every extent of our abilities if we feel we are in some type of internal competition with another teammate, we can’t understand how they feel and we don’t much care.

When teams have the luxury of time and there’s no need for teaming, these grow “naturally”, we learn by virtue of how they haven’t come to fruition that our doubts and fears regarding our teammates are unnecessary, we start getting to know them on an intimate human level as time passes so of course, we start being emotionally invested in them.

A need for teaming simply means that the time to let these things grow at their own pace is absent, so we need to invest trust in lieu of letting it become the product of experience so we need to emulate that same end state through some other methods. 

Whichever play you choose or create, teaming is possible, it’s desirable and it can be absolutely magical and with a 2021 brimming with challenges ahead, we need it more than ever.

When it comes to instant bonding and creating ad hoc empathy, we wrote extensively about the need for both and there are plays in the Playbook to address both -such as the “Humour Workshop” and a mini-version of all of the plays is included in our “Instant Teaming” play- but what of this “non-competitive culture”?

As we were saying, the team members who come from other teams where they had had hefty amounts of Psychological Safety in the past, will have a better chance to instantly team on the spot, simply because they have the advantage of having experienced a healthy dynamic previously, so they have the mental model in place. By contrast, those who come from toxic cultures and dysfunctional teams will struggle the most, as they can’t even imagine a Psychologically Safe environment where their fears and apprehensions that stop them from being open and performant, are unnecessary. 

They come from work environments where Impression Management is rampant and everyone is fearful of appearing incompetent, ignorant, negative or disruptive.

The first one, trying to avoid looking incompetent is mainly caused by this scarcity mentality that we need to find ways to avoid for teaming. It is causing us to be focused on competition instead of collaboration. If team members believe they could be disposable and therefore experience job loss, they will be unable to experiment, to learn, to create or take risks as someone else in the team may have interchangeable skills or replace them. 

Again, with the luxury of time, the need for impression management ought to diminish as we observe it’s an unfounded fear, as others better understand our skillset and we feel stable and valued. In "teaming", we have to replace this by initial clear statements that assert the necessity for each individual. This needs careful consideration in terms of presentation, as it means different things for different industries (an ad-hoc ER team won’t contain possibly redundant multiple trauma surgeons, but in a software project everyone can write a spot of HTML and in business, everyone has opinions on best practices) and this specific presentation is a job that’s firmly on the plate of the Team Leader.

In tomorrow’s article, we’ll go over some tips to address this.  

If you want to see an example of where teaming is needed, look towards any large scale emergency response -and what bigger scale than the pandemic response which de facto saw us all become a giant team, and maybe one that we need to relaunch to go through the next few months- but even if you're not part of the vaccination effort, irrespective where you are and what you do, you’ll find yourself needing teaming more and more going forward and that simply means instant togetherness with a sense of purpose, enough goodwill to create a group-level trust dynamic and to magically transform into a Psychologically Safe high performing bubble which yes, is as complicated as it sounds, so achieving it takes careful consideration and intentional human work, but it is also, certainly attainable and well worth building.  

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

Get in touch at www.psychologicalsafety.works or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.