How Teams Succeed (with Colin Fisher)

Colin Fisher: Thanks so much for having me, Russ.

Colin Fisher: The collective edge is the often-ignored and overlooked power that we have when we’re in groups and that so much of what we do at work, what we do at home, is in groups. We’re influenced by even imagining that we might be in a group or other people who we identify with. And yet for how important they are in human behavior, we’re shockingly bad at them: that we ignore the influences they have on us, that we’re pushed to conform in ways that are incompatible with our own goals and our own well-being, and that we can see they really make a mess of things when we don’t pay attention to them.

So, I’m hoping the collective edge is understanding really how to harness and control and push around these unseen and ignored forces of group dynamics.

Colin Fisher: Well, people’s struggle with group projects kind of keeps me in business–that, if it came naturally to us, we wouldn’t need somebody like me to study this, to teach about it, and organizations and governments to ask for help with this because it is something that’s really tough.

So, when we say group, we could be referring to everything from very broad social categories like Americans, or British people, or spelunkers, or jugglers, that–these sort of big, big social categories that describe people.

But, a team is a small, bounded, interdependent group that’s come together to accomplish a goal of some sort, that there’s some purpose to their being together.

Now, it’s not that we suddenly–there’s some demarcation point where you graduate from being a group into being a team. It’s more like a continuum of what I would call groupiness; and I call it groupiness because the scientific term is ‘group entititivity,’ which is really unpleasant to say or to spell. So, I think ‘groupiness’ sums it up a little bit better.

And that the groupier your group is–so, when we move from being a social category to people who actually interact. You’re a crowd. You’re actually, sometimes a crowd graduates into having some shared purpose. You’re on a subway, the train gets stuck and somebody gets sick. We might suddenly go from having a crowd to people who are actually trying to do something together and that kind of we gradually can make our way towards being a team.

But this is important because real teams are primarily the vehicle by which human problems get solved. That, the big breakthroughs, the scientific breakthroughs, the great musical albums, all the sports teams we look up to, the discoveries that are going to change the world–those are almost entirely done by groups and teams, and that these real teams are the ones who, they’re so great when they’re actually working, but that it also feels so rare that they can work together well.

Colin Fisher: I mean, the Free Rider Problem, which the social psychologists usually will call social loafing, but they’re essentially the same thing–

Colin Fisher: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the reason I think I don’t use the term ‘free rider’ is because it’s usually not entirely free, right? In most of our groups, it’s not that somebody truly doesn’t contribute at all. It’s really our accounting of how much effort people should be putting forward to collective tasks.

And, the economists are absolutely right that it’s baked into our psychology that, when accountability for any outcome gets diffused across larger groups of people, that we don’t try as hard. And that there’s some great psychological experiments of this that show that even when we believe there are other people who are doing some task with us–the classic study by Bibb Latané and colleagues is about cheering. So, you’re in a little room cheering and they either tell you there’s a whole bunch of other people doing it and they pipe some noise into your headphones; or that you’re doing it alone. And that when you believe there’s other people, you try less hard. You have less output.

So, this is absolutely a problem in any group situation, and that the way that we generally can solve these things is by having real shared purpose and shared commitment to our goals. And, that the kind of flip side of that is that when we really strongly identify with other people–and our friends and family are the best examples of this–we actually will try harder than we would on our own behalf. Right? So, it can cut both ways.

And that’s what’s so special about groups, is: yeah, if it’s something we don’t care about, if it’s people we don’t identify with and it’s just a bunch of nameless other people who happen to be doing the same task at the same time, we’ll try less hard. But if we really strongly identify with the other people in the group, the purpose that we’re working towards, then we actually might try more than we would if we were working alone.

So, groups can be both the cause of and the solution to these kinds of effort and free rider problems.

Colin Fisher: Yeah. I mean, I think the flip side of this in a lot of group projects–so, to come back to we’re both professors who’ve been teaching a bunch of group projects–and that when I see my colleagues complain about, ‘Oh, we’re so concerned about free riders and that people are not going to try hard on these projects, and that’s going to drag down other people’s grades,’ my first thing is: ‘What assignment are you giving them? What task are you giving to this group?’ Because, tasks are one of the most powerful forces in determining whether or not people will collaborate effectively.

And that, well-designed work–so, this research comes largely from my mentor, Richard Hackman, who came up with Work Design Theory–and that basically said, ‘If you give people whole pieces of work where they can see the outcome of their labor and its effect on whoever happens to be using it’–so, if you’re in an organization, that you actually see it through to the client. If you’re doing a report, that you see your supervisors use it, or whoever is on the other end of it. And that people understand its significance. So, it’s got to be important to somebody.

And that this, often, is something we fall down in. We sometimes throw work to groups that’s not important. Sometimes as professors, we throw projects to groups because, ‘Oh, I don’t know what else to do with this. Let’s just turn it into a group project.’

So, it’s got to be, have, what we call ‘task identity,’ where we can see the result of our labor in the final product. It’s got to have task significance. And that we also have to have autonomy over our work processes. That, human beings–and this comes up with some of the issues with incentives–human beings don’t like feeling controlled.

So, when we believe that someone else is the master of our own fate and our own destiny, we tend to try less hard. And that, in a much more practical, managerial sense, if you’ve got a micromanaging boss that tells you every step of the way to go on some kind of project, when something goes wrong, that’s now their fault. That’s not your fault anymore.

So, groups are most motivated when they have work that has these different qualities. And, also–what I skipped there was feedback from the work itself. So, when things have this character, like, I use the analogy of Pac-Man a lot, where if you have a bunch of dots on the screen, and you’re taking your little Pac-Man around and it’s eating up the dots, you see your progress towards the goal as you’re doing the work.

And the problem in organizations, in a lot of group projects, and for students is that the tasks don’t have this quality. That, we’re not sure how much progress we made. We had a two-hour meeting, how much closer to the goal are we? I’m not so sure. Can I see the actual outcome of my labor on the project that we’re creating? Or in some cases, can I even see the project that we’re creating? Do I understand why it’s important and what its impact on users, clients, whoever is going to be?

And so, when we give groups bad, what we would call impoverished tasks that don’t have these qualities, it’s no wonder they don’t work hard, because we gave them essentially bad work.

Colin Fisher: Yup. I mean, that’s absolutely–in my mind one of, if not the most important roles as a leader, or manager, or anybody who is trying to collaborate with others–that, I’m saying, ‘Oh, let’s have really important, significant tasks.’ But, there’s an inherent tension in things that are really important–that we want to have a more just and peaceful world, or we want to eliminate poverty. Right? Those are, as you say, inherently less specific, more abstract, more difficult to figure out how we’re going to measure them than much more concrete goals where it’s, like, ‘Okay, let’s complete this video game level in the next five minutes.’ Those are really easy things to measure.

So, this kind of tension between the importance of a goal which tends to correlate with its abstractness, and trying to come up with these clear, important, measurable goals is at the heart of, I think, everything that leaders and managers should be paying attention to.

Now, I think the first-order thing–it’s a sort of 101 answer to this question–is just: it is much more common that people could make the goals that they have clearer and more measurable. And that there are some low-hanging fruit ways to do it. It’s just that we get caught up in all the other pressures we have on ourselves. We don’t think those things through, or we do think them through, but we don’t communicate them to everybody else.

So, we may have an idea of, ‘Oh, this is the measure I want to use. This is the goal I want to achieve.’ But then, we don’t have that discussion as a group. So, some people think one thing; some people think something else.

But then, the second-order thing is: Can we have a vision of the future where this goal is achieved? So, even if we don’t know exactly how we’re going to measure this as we go along, can we paint a vivid picture that we can all share of what this future will look like?

And so in the book, I talk about JFK [John Fitzgerald Kennedy] charging NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] with putting a man on the moon within 10 years. Now, there’s lots of little goals that go underneath that, but that’s a vivid picture that everyone at the organization could rally around. Then they could start to deconstruct that larger goal into smaller goals on their own, as was appropriate for their part of the organization. So, that kind of challenge when you have those abstract goals is to say, ‘Well, how can I paint a more vivid version of a future where that abstract goal has been achieved?’

Colin Fisher: Absolutely. Another part of the way this gets taught in business schools most of the time is with the acronym SMART goals. They’re Specific, they’re Measurable, and then some people say Achievable for the A, some people do something else. Some people do Realistic for the R. So, the A and the R are a little squishier. And then Time-bound.

But, there’s something getting at this idea of psychological: if we don’t think we can achieve a goal, then we try less hard. If we really believe it’s impossible, then we’re not going to engage our best effort in it.

Colin Fisher: Yeah, I mean, I think–Steve Jobs, it’s an interesting case because he’s in some ways such a dichotomy. He had these great visions of what the future would be and was good at communicating them to, as you say, rally around a lot of people to him. And then, he did a lot of things that I think, honestly, if he had been better about encouraging others to contribute their ideas and creating what we would call a more psychologically safe environment around him, they might’ve been even better. Or he might not have been kicked out of Apple in the first place and needed to come back.

I think the danger in looking at these biographies of leaders who achieved a lot is that everyone does some stuff great. Almost nobody does everything really, really perfectly. And, that rather than thinking of it as something that’s intrinsic, that’s a trait of those people, I like to think of it more in terms of the functions that we need to achieve for any group.

And I think some of the leaders who maybe don’t get quite the acclaim of the Steve Jobses of the world are the ones who just do what needs doing in the group. And sometimes that’s articulating this great vision for the world; and sometimes it’s being part of a government, being a mid-level government official, and rallying everyone together to provide more effective services for the people in the country.

There’s a great example that I know Richard Hackman had studied–I wish I could remember his name off the top of my head–but he was a holdover from the Carter Administration into the Reagan Administration. Obviously the people who had been appointed on his team were mostly Democrats. They had been appointed by Jimmy Carter, and they were staying on to help with the transition to the Reagan Administration.

And, he gave this great speech about the importance of the work that they were going to do, and why it was important to put their political differences aside and make sure that we all stay on, and we all keep trying hard, even though all these things around us are changing. I think the leadership that’s not just ‘I’m going to change the world in a way that’s going to be really, really visible and everybody’s going to see it’–I think our culture really prioritizes this kind of, what I would call this increasingly cult of individualism, that says, ‘We want to see these great individuals and tell their stories,’ rather than to say, ‘Apple is a great company; it’s got a great story. There are a lot of people who have contributed to that over the years.’ And that Steve Jobs may be an easier, you know, kind of handle for us to understand that story and its twists and turns.

But that, the likelihood, if we really dig into it from other people’s perspectives, of how that came to be, isn’t just about Steve Jobs. Right? It’s about an entire group of people.

And, I haven’t dug into this particular story as much, but every time there’s a scientific discovery or a great company that’s really associated with a single individual, when you start digging underneath that, you find a great group that was around them. That, really, nobody does this stuff on their own. So, finding a way for us to understand these accomplishments not just as heroic individual accomplishments, but truly as collective accomplishments, because I think that represents reality better.

Colin Fisher: Absolutely. So, I definitely don’t disagree with anything you said towards the end there. Right? That, bringing tasks to life, to keep people in touch with the purpose of the work that they’re doing, is such a fundamental part of leadership.

And, I mean, this goes even back to the foundations of studying organization. If we look back all the way to Max Weber, his idea of charisma was that we’re going to have these increasingly bureaucratic organizations that are going to be more and more depersonalized. That, we’re going to be further and further away from seeing the impact of our work, from really feeling these human connections.

That, where the word ‘charisma’ really came to be associated with leadership was from these writings of Weber, where he’s, like: ‘We’re going to need people who bring these tasks that bureaucrats are doing to life, because they’re going to be faced with this problem.’

So, I mean, I think that’s been fundamental to a lot of ideas about leadership for a hundred-some-odd years now. And, I think that’s completely true. And that tasks end up being overlooked. That we have–I think a lot of people look at tasks as given. And some of that problem comes from looking to examples from sports, like Bill Belichick. Like, you know what all football coaches, all sports coaches, have at their disposal that you don’t have if you’re a middle manager, is you have really well-designed tasks. [More to come, 28:54]

Colin Fisher: Yep, that’s right. Everyone’s got these huge advantages when we’re trying to learn from sports coaches. And there’s this work sports coaches just don’t have to do in terms of specifying some of these concrete goals, and structuring tasks, and structuring roles in ways that just aren’t done in most organizations. For the most part, we don’t have things that are as good as sports, because people would do it for fun if it was as good as sports. Like, I mean, we don’t need–almost none of us go home and do the group projects we’re assigned in school for fun, but plenty of people go play sports on the weekend on their own.

So, tasks are completely overlooked as this.

But, I think when we look back at the stories of great sports coaches–and this is again not to take away from all the great things they did–sometimes the accomplishment is bringing together those particular people at those particular time. So, like, the–all the coordinators, and the coaching, and the infrastructure that was around when Matt Cassel was the coach of the Patriots–I was living in Boston at that time, too–

Colin Fisher: Yeah, yeah. So, that was around this unheralded quarterback when Tom Brady gets hurt.

That mattered, too. Those people were really highly thought of, and there was a lot of other stuff going on.

And so, I’m not–although I’m willing to give an individual leader like Belichick credit for, as you sort of say, preparing the ground for a time when something like that could happen, I don’t think if we take Bill Belichick and move him around to other teams and other infrastructure, independent of these other people, that we would necessarily see the same kind of results.

And, there’s actually–there’s a great study of this by Harvard Business School Professor Boris Groysberg and his colleagues. They looked at investment analysts, and that’s a culture where they hire stars away. Other firms hire stars from other firms. And, they looked at whether they hired just the individual star or whether they also took the admin team with them.

And they found the portable star’s performance was really only portable when you hired their team. When you just took the star, it took them a long time to get off the ground. And, in a lot of cases, you never see that performance become portable.

So, this again speaks to this idea that, like, individuals are different in their talent. And I’m not trying to say they don’t. But I think that too many people think only in terms of individuals differing in their talent and assessing individual performance, and then overlooking the role of the team, the task, and the work that they’re doing in trying to understand what’s going to help us accomplish our goals.

Colin Fisher: Absolutely. I love that story. I may steal that from you. I told you that.

Colin Fisher: Yeah, yeah. No, I think that’s exactly what the message of the book is.

And, what I think one of the most important lessons from research is that so much of, I think, what managers are–I don’t think they’re taught it explicitly, but they are taught that they are supposed to be these saviors who can cajole people into trying harder, that through the strength of their personality and charisma.

And yet, when you’re up against people who don’t know what they’re working on, they don’t know why it’s important, they don’t even know what they’re doing, or they have different ideas of what they’re doing so they can’t coordinate, and you have poorly designed, dreary, repetitive tasks, you’re going to lose. No amount of charisma is going to overcome bad work. You’re always going to see people not trying as hard as they could.

Whereas when you tell people why work is important, you trust them to do that work, and give them autonomy on the process–not the outcome that they’re trying to achieve, but how they’re going to achieve that outcome–then you see better results.

And, I mean, I think that’s been borne out over the years by just tons and tons of research about how structure–the structure of collaboration–mostly the goals and the task, but also some other facets of it–really governs the motivation and performance of groups.

Colin Fisher: I love the question, because when I tell people what I study, it’s like, ‘Oh, I study teams. I teach about leading teams.’ So, many people think I’m going to be this big fan of team building exercises.

Colin Fisher: Yeah. And so, many people, that’s what they know about this field. And, when I say it’s based on a flawed premise, this comes back to the idea that, before we can work together, we’ve got to have trust first. If I don’t trust you, we can’t work together. And so, the first step is going to be some time where we get to know each other, so then we can start to trust one another. But, this turns out not to be very true.

And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that when we say the word ‘trust,’ we’re conflating a couple of different things. That, there’s what psychologists would call relational trust, which means I trust you with my deepest, darkest secrets. I know you’ve got my best interests at heart, mostly in a kind of socio-emotional sense. A lot of times we have this with our family and our friends.

Now, a lot of team-building exercises are geared toward building that socio-emotional trust, where we’re comfortable telling each other things about our lives, our families, our interests, and so forth. But, there’s another kind of trust, which we would call instrumental trust or task-based trust. That means when I ask you to do a task, you are going to do it to the standard that would satisfy me. And, it turns out that that task-based trust tends to be what’s more important when we are working in an organization.

And, these two kinds of trust are not as correlated with one another as you might think.

So, I can think of a lot of my friends and family members who I would not trust to do work to my satisfaction if we found each other on the team together. We don’t need–

Colin Fisher: Yeah. No, no.

Colin Fisher: Of course, it’s–yeah. Not you, if you’re listening [?]–

Colin Fisher: But yeah, someone else.

So, this idea that, ‘Oh, let’s have these exercises,’–which over the years have been increasingly focused on socio-emotional trust: that, they’re about disclosure about our feelings, and our past, and all these other kinds of things–is going to then lead us to work-based trust–the task-based trust that we need when we’re working together–is just fallacious. That’s not true. The two things don’t correlate that well. And, the best way to get task-based trust is to do tasks together. Right? When we start working together, I’m going to see: Do you deliver things the way I need them delivered to do my work? And, am I going to do the same for you?

So, rather than having team-building exercises that are decoupled from the tasks–where we go off-site, go to the outdoors, do trust falls, and reveal our secrets–we’re much better off if we just do the task. And, if the task is too important for us to make mistakes on the first time, to create work-like, task-like simulations that allow us to build this task-based trust.

Now, of course, it’s true: We do need to trust each other a little bit. We need to be able to say, ‘When you’re not doing what I need you to do, I have to be able to say that to you, and vice versa.’ Because our primitive brains are so afraid of ostracism, we’re very hesitant to do that. We don’t like to feel like, ‘Oh, this other person is not going to like me, and so I’m not going to give them feedback. I’m not going to tell them what I need.’ So, we do have to overcome that, and that’s absolutely a really important thing to do.

But, I would reverse the way I think a lot of people who use team-building exercises think of this logically and say, ‘Let’s first work together, and then through that work together, let’s figure out how we can tell each other the stuff we need to tell each other to get this work done.’ And, that we’re going to create an environment of what Harvard scientist Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety: that, we feel like we can ask questions, we can make mistakes, we can push each other, and give each other difficult feedback without the fear of ostracism.

And, that kind of trust is really important for getting work done. So, it’s kind of reversing this logic of ‘let’s do trust-building stuff first and then get to work,’ and say, ‘No, let’s get to work. Then through doing that work, or something close to it, we’re going to build up the kind of trust that we really need.’

Colin Fisher: So, I think there’s a couple of interesting things there. What both sports and the military, I think, do really well is they actually do practice a lot of this stuff.

Colin Fisher: When we want a sports team to do well, they have training camp. Right? And a lot of the stuff happens at training camp besides doing the work, but a lot of it is doing the work.

Colin Fisher: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that we see–when I teach this, I use Coach K, Mike Krzyzewski from Duke University’s kind of pitch to the U.S. Olympic team, when he’s getting together all these highly accomplished professionals who, as you say, have already been to the top of the mountain. They’re already really rich, and we need them to work really hard together during this camp so they can match an increasingly competitive other set of teams.

And, what it does come back to is a lot of what we were talking about: to paint this picture of the future, to impress upon them this important shared goal that we all share. It’s absolutely true in the history of both military and sports that when you’re in the field, playing hurt, and trying to grit your teeth and get through the pain to the next thing, your caring and compassion for your fellow group members, for your fellow teammates, does matter. That’s a really important thing. But, usually, we don’t want that to be purely dyadic. In other words, I don’t want it to be, ‘Oh, Russ is my best friend, so I’m going to try really, really hard when it’s Russ, but I’m not going to try really, really hard when it’s Dan.’

And so we need that to infuse the whole group; and that really requires this kind of shared identity that comes from: one, even knowing who is part of your group–which in organizations is shockingly uncommon. There’s one study that said only 7% of top management teams know who the other members of the top management team are. They all give different numbers of people who are even on the team. Only 7% of them all give the same number. 93% of them have at least some disagreement on how many people are on this team.

Like I said, in sports and these other things, we have a lot of advantages. It’s like, ‘Who is on the team?’ Well, I know who is on my team, and I know I can share an identity with them, and all these things.

So, those are definitely important things. Sustaining performance over time is really hard.

When you’re talking about–we’ve been talking a lot about football, where, in the NFL [National Football League] they’ve got 16 games in the season–

Colin Fisher: Oh, right. Yes. I know that, but I messed that one up: 17 games in the season now. And, there are a lot of injuries to the team. And I think there’s a fair amount of randomness that’s baked into those kinds of team situations.

But, sustaining team performance over time is of course hard. When you build up one goal and achieve it, there’s always going to be a little bit of a letdown when you’re trying to say, ‘Hey, let’s do the same thing again that we’ve already done.’ You do need some skill in spinning that into something new.

But I think that’s–it’s a less common problem outside of a situation like sports. We don’t have the analogy to winning a championship when you’re a design team, or a consulting team, and these kinds of things are a little bit different. And the number of shots you get at things are also different. And, of course, people still get sick. Life still happens to people. But, we don’t have the sort of, like, randomness that we have, especially in the NFL.

I do think it’s, of course, a leadership challenge. So, it sounds like we both have a lot of familiarity with Boston sports–the Celtics last year coming off a championship. That was a tough follow-up season. We saw a lot of the injury luck there. But, I don’t know that I would say, ‘Oh, there was some kind of leadership problem,’ for a team not repeating. I think that’s a common and challenging thing for teams to cope with. It takes a lot of luck to win championships in highly competitive environments in the first place. As long as you’re not imploding–and in the book, I talk about some bands that were one-hit wonders. They succeed, and then they completely turn on each other, usually because the pressure for individual members to get more of the credit for themselves overrides the collective goal after they’ve succeeded once.

Colin Fisher: Thanks so much. I appreciate your calling that out. It’s always good to hear which little parts are resonating.

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s so important. When I’m working with an organization, this is almost always where a lot of our work is: where they’re saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got a team of 20.’ And, I’m like, ‘Great. You can’t do all the work with all 20 people. You’ve got to make some decisions about who is going to do this part of it and who is going to do this part.’

And, the egos and the politics come into it to the point that a lot of managers don’t want to engage with this problem. They’d rather just invite all 20 people to the meeting rather than deal with the discomfort of saying, ‘Actually, only these six people are going to deal with this task.’ But, although the word committee or task force can again evoke some of these group project ideas in our head, they often sound unpleasant. That’s usually the path that will help us thread the needle between saying, ‘I’ve already got these 20 people, I want all 20 of them to stay engaged, broadly.’ But, having meetings with all 20 of them is a recipe for accomplishing nothing.

I mean, everyone knows this, and everyone still does it–which is, again, what keeps me in business here–that a meeting with 20 people is going to be largely a one-way communication. We’re not going to hear what everybody thinks. We’re not going to get everybody’s perspectives and information unless we’re having an extremely long meeting. So, we’re already set up for failure by doing that.

And so, I think there are some situations–I think senior leadership teams often are the situation, or boards of directors–where they would be better served by asking some people to leave. But, in the absence of that, saying, ‘Well, here’s a discrete task that we’re going to do, and I’m going to have a task force or committee do that, and that task force or committee will have three to seven members.’ Just making that the default mode by which we actually do the work, and making these meetings of all 20 of us to be the exception and not the rule.

Colin Fisher: Yeah, I mean, this was such a great study. It’s a real classic, where Edmondson–Amy and I actually both had the same mentor in Richard Hackman. So, Amy was setting out to test this model with these nursing teams in a couple of hospitals; and their main metric for nursing team performance in the hospital was adverse drug events. So, the number of times that the patient had a bad reaction to the drug, often because the wrong drug was prescribed or administered, or it was administered incorrectly. So, it was seen as this measure of errors, essentially.

Colin Fisher: Yeah, you don’t want that. So, it sounds objective, and certainly the hospital thought it was objective.

So, she measured some things about the stuff we’ve been talking about–how clear the goals were, the quality of the tasks, et cetera–in these groups. And she found the exact opposite of what Hackman’s theory would predict. The teams with the best structure–they had the clearest goals, they had the best tasks, they had autonomy, they had all the good stuff we’ve been talking about–were reporting more adverse drug events than the teams that were what we would call poorly structured.

So, it looked like these well-structured teams were making more mistakes, completely contrary to the theory.

She dug underneath that and started interviewing the nursing teams: this is such a puzzling result, how could this be? What she found was that it wasn’t that the well-structured teams were making more mistakes. They were just reporting more mistakes.

So, the well-structured teams are like, ‘These are really dangerous events. Of course, you have to report them.’

Whereas the poorly structured teams were saying, ‘Oh, you don’t want to be the one to make a mistake, so you have to think twice before you’re going to tell your manager about this thing happening.’ And so their threshold for reporting things was just much, much higher. So, they reported far less adverse drug events.

And this is really the discovery of this idea of psychological safety, where she went, ‘Oh, there’s this difference in climate that is emerging.’ It’s definitely correlated with how well-structured these teams are, but it’s also independent of that.

And, this is where I think leadership behavior matters a lot. Leaders have a ton of influence on how psychologically safe a group is–a lot from the perspective of how easy it is to kill psychological safety. It just takes blaming people a couple of times, yelling once or twice, and then people become much more hesitant to speak up. They become hesitant to admit when they’ve made mistakes, even when it’s life or death.

These kind of human dynamics can really warp our perspective of how well teams are doing if we’re not paying attention to both the metrics we’re using and to how psychologically safe these groups and teams really are.