The 80/20 of Effective Teamwork - Part 1

This is the first part of a multi-part series on teamwork. Stay tuned for more!

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The title of this post is a little bold I admit. The word "effective" can mean vastly different things to different teams. So I'd like to start off by talking about the types of teams that this article is for.

They types of teams I work with are involved in thought-work. This can be software engineering or anything else. I work with people who solve problems, produce knowledge, whose opinions matter. A team is not a machine where the individual members are replaceable cogs.

This article is not specifically for teams who are struggling (although, they would certainly benefit). Even teams who are doing pretty alright can benefit for the ideas in here.

Behavior change is hard

Teamwork is not a once-off task. It's all about daily small interactions and activities. A lot comes down to habit. And we all know how hard it is to take control of our own habits.

If you are in a team that is struggling to team, you need to realise that you can't fix things in one swell foop. It takes time to change behaviors and build alignment.

The very first thing to realise is you are trying to improve a team is that people are people. Humans are prone to human error. So whatever improvements you make or systems you implement should keep this in mind.

It's useful to think about curb-cuts. I discussed that idea in a previous article.

Behavior change is hard. There are many techniques that make it easier. One very effective mechanism is accountability. Accountability, in a work setting, can feel scary. Peer to peer accountability can feel judgemental. But peer to peer accountability, driven by curiosity and a genuine interest in building one another up, is pure gold.

That's not possible without a big helping of psychological safety.

Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is a term people wave around a lot. The pursuit of psychological safety can go wrong, it can lead to sickly sweet work cultures where nobody can criticize anyone else's work. That is not safe. That is the opposite.

What you want is a culture where people feel safe to take interpersonal risks. Where it's safe to share criticism and crazy ideas, where it is safe to talk about mistakes and ask for help, where it's safe to admit to being a human with bad days and rough edges.

Many great things can be built on a bedrock of psychological safety. But it's not a simple thing to achieve.

Let's pretend for a moment that you are scared of spiders. If someone tries to help you overcome that fear by surrounding you with spiders and expecting you to interact with those spiders in a gentle and productive way, that would seriously not work. The way to overcome a fear is through gradual, thoughtful exposure.

Trust is easy to break and hard to build. It takes time and intentional action to build psychological safety.

The rest of the 5 factors

Google did a cool thing. They ran a research project called "Project Aristotle" where they worked to answer the question: "What makes a team effective at Google?".

The word "effective" means different things to different teams. So they studied a whole lot of different teams. They looked at 115 engineering teams, 65 sales teams (maybe more, I don't know). They looked at high and low performing teams. They looked at effectiveness through the lense of leadership, individual team members, performance metrics, and executive opinion. They performed double-blind interviews and massive surveys.

They looked for factors that impacted qualitative and quantitative metrics across different teams, and different types of teams and showed robust statistical significance.

And they shared their conclusions. Thanks Google ♥️

According to Google, the top 5 factors for effective teamwork are (I'm quoting Google directly here):

1. Psychological safety: Team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other
2. Dependability: Team members get things done and meet Google's high bar for excellence
3. Structure & Clarity: Team members have clear roles, plans and goals
4. Meaning: Work is personally important to team members
5. Impact: Team members think their work matters and creates change

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking these things are simple, but they have hidden depths.

Let's consider dependability for a moment. If there was someone on your team who was not dependable then how would you work with them? Maybe you would try not to (they would miss opportunities to prove themselves, to grow and to add value). If you were forced to work with them you would need to have plan Bs in place for if/when they dropped the ball. You'd want them to do non-critical work (effecting their sense of meaning and impact).

Even the perception of low dependability has a similar effect.

Perceptions and communication scales

Can a person appear to be un dependable when they are actually dependable? Yes.

It's pretty common for people to leave conversations with different conclusions. One person could leave a discussion thinking that a commitment was made, while another thought the discussion was theoretical.

It's pretty common for different people do have different ideas of what the priorities are, and how value is measured.

Communication is key! But communication isn't easy.

I like to borrow wisdom from the Zen of Python:

Explicit is better than implicit.
Readability counts.
Errors should never pass silently.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

Diversity matters

Diverse teams are fantastic on so many levels. But it's important to realise that diversity comes with challenges. People from different backgrounds communicate in different ways and value different things.

Culture is not a collection of festivals, food and funny hats.

Deeply understanding the culture of every person on a diverse team is often not possible. And judging a person's behavior against your own cultural norms is not not productive.

There are some shortcuts worth knowing about.

If you are working in a diverse team then please read The Culture Map by Erin Meyer.

Many people push back on the ideas in the book, saying that it's a book of stereotypes. But, again, cultures come with behavioral and communication norms. It's useful to have some idea of what the average behavior is in different parts of the world.

It is reductionist way of seeing the world. But it's useful regardless as a starting point.

The book outlines a few different scales across which cultures vary. These scales don't only apply to cultures as a whole. They apply to individuals. It's helpful to be familiar with these scales and to think about how the people you interact with differ from you on these scales.

There are folks who over-explain and who under-explain. There are folks who tip-toe around giving criticism and those who are very willing to tell you exactly what is wrong with your work and your mother. There are people who are more convinced by theory and some who want to cut to the chase and focus on practicalities.

The scales discussed in The Culture Map give us a lense to better spot these kinds of differences, a language to discuss them, and some ways to adapt.

Of course, there is a lot of variation in individual cultures. A lot of people are just plain weird (some of the best things in life are weird).

Stereotype threat

No discussion of diversity is complete without a mention of Stereotype threat.

This is often discussed in the context of education, not work, but it is clearly applicable in diverse teams. Stereotype threat theory states that "minority students underperform because of pressures created by negative stereotypes" [ref].

You can find a more in-depth discussion and some resources in this article

Stay tuned!

There is a lot more to say on this topic. I'll be sharing more in future articles.

If you are hungry for more information right now, here are a few books that have helped me with my understanding of the concepts covered in this article:

• The Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg
• Atomic Habits - James Clear
• The Culture Map - Erin Meyer
• Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behavior Change - Julie Dirksen

Does your team need help?

I mentioned earlier that I work with teams. One of the products offered through my company, Prelude, is a Team Dynamics course/intervention. The basic idea is that we start off by assessing your team to figure out where the gaps are, and then address those gaps though training, individual coaching, and other interactions.

We are pretty careful about measurement. We can reliably see improvements across all the 5 factors of effective teamwork that Google identified in Project Aristotle.

This product is for:

• teams that are struggling to team
• teams that are scaling up and want to get through the expensive "storming" phase as quickly as possible
• teams that are already doing pretty well, but see room for improvement

The audience is pretty broad because it is not a one-size-fits all solution.

If you are interested in this, please feel free to grab some time with me for a chat.