3 Pillars of High-Performing Teams
- Build safety
- Share vulnerability
- Establish purpose
5 Drivers of Team Performance
- Everyone in the group talks and listens roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short.
- Members maintain high levels of eye contact, and their conversations, gestures are energetic.
- Members communicate directly with one another, not just with the team leader.
- Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team.
- Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back to share with the others.
Words are noise. Group performance depends on behavior that communicates 1 powerful idea We are safe and connected.
Not coincidentally, successful groups have adopted family-sequel identifiers like Pixarians, Googlers, Zapponians.
Magical Feedback Phrase
I’m giving you these comments because I’ve very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.
Physical Proximity Builds Up Emotional Closeness
The closer the people, the more efficient the connection between them.
Action to Build Safety
- Overcommunicate my listening – yes uh gotcha
- Spotlight my fallibility early on – that’s just my two cents, what am I missing? what do u think
- Thank the messenger – never ever shoot the messenger
- Preview future connection – make small but telling connections between now and the vision
- Overdo thank-yous
First We Take a Leap
Then we build trust. Too often we do the exact opposite – we build trust, then we leap. Science shows that we got it wrong.
Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust – it comes before trust.
Ask Your Team These 3 Questions
- What is one thing that I currently do that you’d like to me to continue to do?
- What’s one thing I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often?
- What can I do to make you more effective?
After Action Review (AAR)
- What were our intended results?
- What were our actual results?
- What caused our results?
- What will we do the same next time?
- What will we do differently next time?
Before Action Review (BAR)
- What are our intended results?
- What challenges can we anticipate?
- What have we or others have learned from similar situations?
- What will make us successful this time?
Separate Performance Reviews & Professional Development
Build a wall between these two so that the emotions caused by performance review don’t influence professional development.
Mental Contrasting
- Think about a realistic goal that you want to achieve.
- Take a few seconds and picture the obstacles between me and the goal as vividly as possible.
It improves our behavior and motivation to reach our goal. What seems like repetition is, in fact, navigation. Do nurses and surgeons need to be told their role in a surgery is important? Do they need to be informed that if someone makes a mistake they might want to speak up? The same applies for the sense of belonging. Belonging and higher-purpose needs to be continually refreshed.