Overcoming challenges as a team
As a leader re-engaging a team member or needing to find solutions to a challenging situation there is much that neuroscience can teach us. Team performance, engagement and cooperation can be improved through a team culture that instills trust between team members.
The SCARF model
The SCARF model sets out the conditions we seek in a social environment. By understanding these conditions, you can help avoid team members becoming disengaged or disruptive and foster a healthy team working environment.
The social motivations of a team
A team is a social environment and our brains are wired to seek out certain conditions in social environments. We are sensitive to any ‘threats’ to these conditions, which result in physiological changes that impact performance. When in a threat state we will see challenges as beyond our resources to manage. So leaders should carefully curate social situations to minimise threats.
People often disengage due to a lack of perceived autonomy, a lack of choice or a lack of certainty. Understanding these conditions can help you avoid team members becoming disengaged or disruptive.
The SCARF model (Rock 2008) sets out the conditions we seek in a social environment. These social motivations are:
- Status. Feeling valued. Being seen as knowledgeable, being asked for expert input in a meeting, given an important role, given positive feedback.
- Certainty. Knowing what’s happening, what is expected, by when, next steps.
- Autonomy. Having choice, how or when I do my work, for example.
- Relatedness. Being part of a group, able to relate to others and feeling included.
- Fairness. Equal pay, recognition, air-time, time with the boss.
A threat to any one of these areas can trigger a strong emotional response. Can you remember a time you had a negative experience in a group or team and see how it relates to one of these conditions?
The SCARF model can be shared with your team to help them better understand their own response to a situation, to be able to rationalise it and move forward. As a manager this model can be used in coaching conversations with members of your team, to help them understand why they might be struggling to engage.
Counteracting uncertainties
The good news for you as a leader is that the effect of the social motivations identified in the SCARF model is collective and cumulative, both positively as well as negatively; meaning that a condition negatively impacting certainty can be counteracted with a positive experience of relatedness.
For example, whilst the future of a business, an individuals’ role and whether they’ll return to ‘normal’ office life are uncertainties that can’t be controlled, the effect of these uncertainties can be counteracted by creating certainty in other ways. Such as stepping up communication, setting clear expectations or review points. Or increase transparency through ‘founder, “ask me anything” drop-in events’ for example.
Your role is to draw your team’s attention to ways in which they do have autonomy, choice and certainty and to create these for your team. There are ways in which you can create certainty by setting expectations, with an agenda or process for example — as discussed in my article ‘The mechanics of successful online team meetings’.
The secret of successful teams is emotional awareness
Raising self-awareness, social awareness and creating opportunities for team members to feel connected will improve a team’s performance, their resilience and adaptability.
The best predictor of a team’s ability to work together is their social intelligence which is underpinned by individuals’ emotional intelligence. Teams who who are emotionally aware and articulate will more easily build and maintain trust. A lack of emotional awareness can undermine trust. Trust is lost when a person’s words and behaviour are conflicted. Our brain mirrors the emotions of others and is triggered when there is a mismatch. Such as the boss who asks how you are and then starts reading emails as you reply, or the person who says “I’m fine” when they are obviously not.
Trust can also be built through clarity around roles and responsibilities, accountability for delivering and following through on promises to the team. With trust, team members can more easily receive feedback, increase their self-awareness, learn and grow individually and as a team.
Building emotional awareness and trust
A simple tool to start building trust in a team is a regular ‘retrospective’ following the keep, stop, start model. It can be used as a team is forming or at regular intervals on a project:
- Keep — what’s working we should keep doing
- Stop — what’s not working we should stop doing
- Start — what should we start doing?
- I also like to include: Questions — what I’m not clear on.
I like to ask the team to write their answers individually and then share with the group, going around the table, adding to what’s already been offered. It is important that the team frames their contribution factually, focusing on the situation and avoids sweeping statements about individuals, good or bad (giving and receiving feedback is another topic all together).
Teams who are more emotionally aware and articulate will surface tensions and shape their way of working to support the team’s productivity, enabling the team to be more resilient when facing challenges. Here is a process to raise emotional awareness once a level of trust has been established between team members:
When a situation arises that triggers someone or multiple individuals in the group.
Firstly, acknowledge the individual impact by labelling the emotion; frustrated or deflated for example. Labelling the emotion takes the heat out of it.
Second, take a look at the facts of the situation, as an observer would, and in the past tense. Attempt to park any emotion and avoid discussing future implications or assigning blame.
The SCARF model covered above can help a person to understand why they had a strong emotional response that may, or may not have been relative to the scale of the ‘problem’ or situation.
Third, re-frame the situation in a new light; as a learning opportunity or options narrowed down. What can be taken from the situation to move forward with?
In summary, teams are social environments and we are social creatures — easily unsettled if we perceive a threat to our social standing. The more comfortable a team is in articulating challenges, expressing conflicting opinions and cooperating to find solutions, the more successful and resilient they will be. Over time, socially intelligent teams learn to regulate how they interact to suit team members.
This ability to self-regulate and speak freely comes when there is trust and a sense of connection between team members, which is built upon the social awareness of the team. Team members will learn to be more self-aware, as you invite them to connect with one another, listen, and trust one another to speak their minds.
These qualities can be coached by you, the team leader or with the support of a Team Coach, such as Aata’s Jennifer Clamp.
Source of inspiration: NeuroLeadership Institute Webinar ‘Coaching Your Team Virtually: Coronavirus and Beyond’.
Hi, I’m Jennifer Clamp, a Founder Coach who works with purpose-driven female founders who are ambitious for the future and wish to bring their vision into reality 💫 ↓
Learn more about how Founder Coaching can be a liberating experience for you at withaata.com
