The mysterious power of team intelligence
Bulletproof hacks for a Rockstar team performance
Last time we were exploring the first Superpower: Responsive Mindset. This article will take a closer look at Team Intelligence as a Superpower to build and manage Rockstar teams.
Let’s be honest: Teams suck! If you are a founder or manager of a team, the last thing you want to do is tiptoing around the sensitivities of your people. Even just the offer to have a one on one coffee meeting with your UX designer, will open the floodgates to them moaning about their colleagues, salaries or even worse discussing their personal lives with you. You could not care less. Running a business requires you to take care of stakeholders, customers and cash flow. Why bother about someone’s plea to bring their dog to the office, when Covid19 is about to ruin everything you have built thus far? Or even worse: they are all into Vegan now, so the cow milk that seemed perfectly fine for the last couple of years is suddenly not good enough anymore.
Now, here comes the problem: whilst any founder or manager can probably relate to such feelings, this attitude is not helpful, when the business you are building is based on the contribution of your people.
Let me give you an example: my Cofounder and I had some pretty rough conflicts last year. We were running on a treadmill, trying to desperately manage the workload. What we did not realise fast enough, was how we were slowly drifting apart. The conflicts between us were becoming worse and worse to the point where I dreaded going to the office. When I spoke to Max (also an entrepreneur), he gave me a super valuable but equally simple advice: “Have a one-on-one every day for 30 minutes and watch how all the “emotional stuff” will dissipate into Nirvana”.
And so, we did! Admittedly I had my doubts. The trench between us had grown quite deep already and perhaps from the perspective I was in, I just could not see much room for hope. Our only commitment to each other was to listen to our concerns with an open heart. That’s it! It only took us three days to get back on track. As simple as it sounds but just listening to each other’s pain and worries seemed to do the trick. We kept going for a while to make sure we would stay connected and not lose track again. Every now and then we will do these sequences, when we feel it is necessary. Now, this trivial idea sounds like a pretty good advice for any relationship to me: it applies to marriages, families, business partnerships, you name it.
A few years ago, I was still living in Sydney. At the time I came across a framework called RELISH, which provides some neuroscientific context for the little anecdote I just shared with you. I found the framework conclusive, mostly because it did not try to reinvent the wheel but rather combined existing ancient philosophies and psychological theories with neuroscientific insights synergistically into a blueprint for living your life in a social context. So, let’s take a closer look and see what insights we can gain from it for running a business!
Neuroscience guides breakthrough performance in Startup teams
When working through his own personal development, Peter Burow, the author of the framework, stumbled upon many nuggets and insights starting from the Mayan culture all the way to modern attachment theory. The gist of it? Based on his research he created a succinct framework, which helps teams to grow and flourish especially in times of extreme change. Working closely with neuroscientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Queensland, the Australian identified six unique social cognitive needs, which can be applied to your Startup culture, team meetings and coaching all the way to how you communicate with your customers and even to run your daily life.
Let’s look at the needs one by one and see how they might be relevant for running your team productively.
1. Relatedness: We want to belong! And we want to know where our place in the group is. If you don’t believe me, watch how people in a workshop will almost zombie-like go back to their exact seats after a break. The biggest fear, dating back to our ancestors is the threat of being excluded from the tribe. Google also calls this the space of psychological safety. It is the most fundamental of all needs and develops in the infant through the attachment to the mother or father in the first 6–12 months. Professor Matthew Lieberman at UCLA conducted some interesting experiments and found that the experience of social exclusion activates the the same regions within the brain that are activated when a person experiences physical pain. The brain’s interpretation of social exclusion mirrors its interpretation of physical danger.
If the members of your team do not experience a sense of belonging, all sorts of strange things start to happen: Politics, the culture will be spiralling down and productivity goes into free fall. A friend once said to me: “you cannot tell people often enough how much you value their work”. It makes sense: if you feel like you are adding value to the team, then you will become a crucial part of the tribe and be encouraged to be productive. So, as leaders we need to double down on the identity if the group and its members, so they feel valuable and safe.
2. Expression: Have you ever been part of a group of friends or colleagues, where you did not dare to express how you really felt? Did you ever take part in a meeting that felt like an utter waste of time, but you did not believe you could articulate your frustration for fear of being dissed? Expressing your own feelings is crucial. And if you cannot do this, then you are masking. We know from neuroscientific studies: when you mask your feelings, your intelligence drops temporarily since your brain is consistently preoccupied hiding your true emotions and hence you will be struggling solving complex problems at the same time. According to some UK studies this corresponds to the drop in intelligence when smoking dope. Our brain wants to self-express. So, as founders we need to provide the channels for our team to articulate our internal states. This could be done in daily standups through a quick and honest check-in how everyone is feeling. The articulation of your feelings alone will help release at least some of the internal tensions and help your team to focus on the task at hand.
3. Leading the Pack: We want to achieve! It turns out that status and individual achievement will trigger the release of dopamine in our brains. Remember that first time you were presenting on stage and got standing ovations? Or, the feeling after that 100m sprint when you outdid the competition? Small achievements will make you feel proud and give you the energy to keep going even when things are getting tough. As a founder you can foster that sense of achievement by regularly recognising your team. Interestingly, money only plays a minor role in this. Aligning individual motivations with the team’s goals are a lot more important for a productive culture than financial incentives.
4. Interpersonal Connection: It’s all about love! In case you think, I am losing it, think of a time in your life, when you didn’t experience love (and I am not just talking about romantic love). Unless you are perfectly fine, living like a hermit under a rock for the next 30 years, chances are that love is an important aspect of your human existence. As a Startup founder you may sometimes feel like the walking dead because your business is barely surviving, making just enough money to pay for a cappuccino in that local coffee shop but not enough to really get by long-term. In these situations, there is nothing better than talking to another founder who has truly experienced the same trauma. In the blink of an eye, you feel understood and that emotional baggage is only half as heavy as just an hour ago. Feeling genuinely understood by people who can empathise with what you are going through is often necessary. This is precisely why groups like the anonymous alcoholics make sense. The group has a shared sense of pain and struggles. We need a group of anonymous entrepreneurs.
You may have heard of Oxytocin, a neurotransmitter which typically gets released in a mother when she looks at her infant. Or remember that ecstasy trip when you were young and wild, dancing away loving even your worst enemy? MDMA is the synthetic drug behind ecstasy, which fosters deep connective feelings and the release of Oxytocin. Interestingly, when we feel down in the dumps, we often get a hit of Oxytocin. This serves an important evolutionary function: to reach out to people when the going gets tough and to find solutions as a group rather than individuals.
5. Seeing the Facts: Learning, learning, learning
The top reason why artificial intelligence has taken off in the 21st century is because we have started simulating the human brain and are feeding algorithms with experiences (essentially data) which trigger a self-learning-process from the bottom up. This happens in contrast to more traditional programming approaches where a programmer would design abstract rules to cater for every eventuality through if-then statements. So, it is not a surprise that learning is part of our human experience and makes us flourish in ever more complex life situations. This is what the 5th social cognitive need is about: our brain is looking for constant feedback in order to navigate complexity and deal with previously unseen situations. The advantage of working in a Startup environment is that you are almost forced to update your knowledge consistently. In fact, you are entering unchartered territory from day 1 and so learning is part of the deal. Still, it may be a good idea for us founders to facilitate proactive learning sessions where we exchange ideas, provide feedback and try to catch some of that genius from other people around us.
6. Hope for the Future: „Let your hopes, not your hurts, shape your future.”
The brain needs reassurance that the story will end well. Provided you have done a great job as a leader on all the other social cognitive needs, hope for the future will implicitly and mysteriously emerge. It is a lag indicator and not a lead indicator. It means that as you are building a team it is less critical to provide the perfect vision for the future than to make people feel safe, let them self-express, provide them with a platform for achievement, connect with them and offer some useful means for feedback and learning. Hope for the future will then become an emergent quality.
Key points:
- Even though you might think that as a Startup founder you are an alien completely disconnected to everybody else, it turns out, that there are six fundamental social cognitive needs that the human brain shares and that we as entrepreneurs should be aware of.
- If you pay attention to these needs when working with your team or external stakeholders, you will have a much easier time, growing your business and creating a strong culture.
- The number one and most important wish your colleagues brains have to you as a leader, is to make everyone feel safe and worthy. Whatever creative methods you can use to do that, will make all the difference
- Giving your colleagues the opportunity to self-express in Check-in’s and other means will help people to feel more connected and get on with their day without feeling they need to hide parts of their identity. That does not mean they start running around naked in the office but rather that there is a genuinely caring and empathetic culture which provides the platform for people to be respected for who they are regardless of race, age or sexual orientation.
- The first two needs are the most important, however there are additional needs which all build on the first two such as leading the pack, connection, learning and a genuine hope for the future.
