Why the Best Team is the One you Have Now

I’ll save you the trouble of reading all the way down. You have more important things to do.

Your best team is the one you have now because it’s the one you’ve got. It’s not the one you want, it’s not the one you’re building. It’s the one you have.

But, wait, you protest. Isn’t that like saying the body you have now, with its endearing bumpy bits, is the best one? That’s some shoddy logic, you say. Honestly, I would think the same had I not seen these two pieces of evidence to the contrary.

1. Joy’s Law: “no matter where you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else”.
2. Psychological safety outranked all other behaviours — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability — in high performing teams, according to Google’s data in their People Analytics Team.

Nothing is more difficult to dislodge than an idea and how often do we hear in discussions on the war for talent, to hire the best, the smartest, the whatever? But here’s the thing, “smart” refers to the capability but not willingness to work for or with someone. Let’s do a mental floss of the idea that the “best teams are made up of the ‘best’ people” because:

The Best are not the Brightest — Psychological Safety Matters More

On the first point Bill Joy, co-founder of SunSystems (now owned by Oracle), argued that the most important knowledge lives outside the boundaries of any one organization and so the challenge is to find ways to access that knowledge. Joy was not talking about the old “war for talent” — hiring better employees — but a newer one: tapping networks of smart non-employees for innovation and problem-solving horsepower. Because not any one company can solve all of its customers problems alone, the goal for thriving organizations is to “create an ecosystem that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals”. Think co-creation, open competitions, networks, virtual communities. You, managers and team leads, have to step back from “absolute” authority, and accept that all answers won’t come from you — they’ll be found in the network.

On the second point, the People Analytics Lab (PiLab) in Google, after 3 years of studying all kinds of data and different team configurations across all of their departments, found that high performing teams do 3 things.

What do high performing teams do?

1. During meetings members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’ — Link to article
2. Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — which means they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average and as a group, seemed to have have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
3. Third, members of the good teams reported a high sense of psychology safety, “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’

And to harbour on the point, psychological safety mattered more than all other behaviours. You can read the whole study in this New York Times article, “What Google Learned from its quest to build the perfect team”. The paradox, of course, is that Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

Simon Sinek also argues for creating psychology safety in his book, Leaders Eat Last, which has made its rounds in management circles. He points out how the principle cause of failure among organizations is the tendency to focus more on numbers and short-term results than on people.

When numbers are prioritized over people, the result is an organization where people simply don’t feel safe inside the organization.

If people don’t feel safe inside the organization, they can’t possibly work together to face all of the never-ending challenges that come from outside of the organization. However, when people do feel safe — what Sinek calls a strong Circle of Safety — people can be their authentic selves and employee engagement is up as a result. Don’t believe me, believe this study in Harvard Business Review.

How do you create psychology safety?

You make sure that people are heard, that people talk in equal proportion; you assume the best not the worst of intentions and show you care about your team.

In short, be a human!

And start with the team you have.

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