Building trust and rapport with students outside the classroom

Building a thriving culture of excellent behaviour, mutual respect, kindness, and joy, are common aims of school leaders and teachers. We want to go to school every day and focus on what we do best: teaching our subject, using our expertise to help children make progress, and forming healthy relationships in a safe place.

Everyone should come through the gates in the morning and feel a sense of belonging and safety. ‘I am about to experience another day of feeling comfortable, looked after, at ease, and academically encouraged and challenged. And I’m basing those feelings of safety on experience; the fact that the day before, and the day before that, were similarly predictable and calm’. That’s what I like to imagine children and staff will feel when they are en route to our school.

Firstly, I’m going on the basis that a school has a clear, consistent, fair behaviour policy that teachers and leaders use effectively. For me, building relational trust can only work well in an environment where there are sky-high expectations of behaviour which are reinforced consistently by staff. No matter how good you are at building trust and relationships with students, they’ll never fully trust you if you don’t help build an environment in which they are safe and respected by other students and staff. So, before I proceed, there is no blue sky thinking, here. Schools must work hard to make respectful, good behaviour the norm.

That’s step one. It’ll impact lessons, teaching, learning, break and lunch, and how just about everyone feels about being on this school site every day.

Now, assuming this is in place, or is developing, you can improve the school culture exponentially by deliberately building a sense of belonging and relational trust through daily interactions.

As a Deputy Head, I have the privilege of doing duties at all hours of the school day, and walking around the school an awful lot. Sometimes this feels challenging when your to do list mounts up, and you are out of your office, essentially just talking to people. But it is real work, and it has real productivity. I’m not great at everything, but one thing I pride myself on is putting in the hours, interest, smiles, and care, to build trust with children across the school.

Good Will Hunting features the wonderful relationship between the troubled Will (Matt Damon), and his therapist, Sean (Robin Williams). Will isn’t interested in forming a bond, or even engaging. But Sean persists. He asks tough, open questions. He uses humour. He has high expectations of Will. He always shows up. He doesn’t give up. He models his own vulnerability. He allows dialogue and sharing. The bond that they form is not only touching, but it allows Will to develop other relationships and goals in his life. In some way, I’ve always aspired to this sort of impact on someone’s life. But life isn’t a movie, and school staff have different time constraints and pressures than Will and Sean.

But there’s so much we can do;’ so, here’s what I’ve learnt, and what I do, to try to build trust and relationships.

Top and tail the day – out on the gates – see every child

My aim is to see almost every child come through the gates in the morning, and to see them walk out at the end of the day. Yes, this takes some juggling with other things, but it’s effectively blocked out on my calendar every day. The morning is a chance to set the tone: big smiles, hello how are you, what have you brought in for food tech? But it’s also an opportunity to align the children with your expectations, for example by correcting uniform or checking for trainers, etc.  Finally, this is a good time to see students who might need a conversation after an event the previous day. Tell me about the house point you got in Spanish? I saw that you picked up a detention in Maths – shall we talk about it?

At the end of the day, we can have similar conversations. The consistency of having trusted staff on the gate at the beginning and end of the day makes a huge difference to how the children feel about coming on and off site. This year, I’ve had a lot of students, who I don’t know well, come to chat to me on the gate about something they are worried about, purely based on the fact they see me in that same place every day, and feel a sense of familiarity.

Lesson changeovers

Being out and about during the transition time, including the ‘hot spots’ where student build ups occur, is a great time to be a positive presence. Of course, this means some correction, but also positive conversations, pep talks, check ins, helping people find their way because of room changes. Importantly, be consistent – the children will appreciate knowing you are usually in the same place.

Break and lunch

This is probably the best time to build trust and rapport. The students have more time and space to express themselves. Keep moving around, speak to as many groups as you can. Be proactive with things like litter, behaviour, and general conduct so you are visible promoter of mutual respect and kindness. Good quality supervision at these times means that staff can spend time getting to know the children and following up on things, while overseeing calm, safe recreation time.

How are you?

I speak a lot about these three simple words. Asking other how they are, then listening and responding, gives people a chance to engage with you. But, even more importantly, it improves the odds of them asking you in return, and then an ongoing, two-way dialogue begins. When it becomes the norm for students and staff to dialogue in this way, great things happen!

Always be fair, always be consistent.

Trust is built on so much more than conversations. We tend to trust people based on how dependable they are: can I rely on this person? For school staff, this means being consistent and fair; treating students the same when they behave in a certain way and showing up for them in the same way. Sanctions will be needed sometimes, so follow the same process each time and explain to students how you investigate and make judgements (link to behaviour policy). Don’t overlook things for those you have pre-existing relationships with; they will notice, and so will others. Fair treatment of students can turn negative situations into positive ones.

And finally, consistency goes for your demeanour and mood, too. It’s hard to trust someone who reacts differently, day to day.

Do what you say

We have a lot of intentions during the school day. To go and check in on certain staff or students. To log house points. To get our marking done. It’s hard to do everything. But if we tell a child we will do something, be it phone their parent or come back and see them later on for a wellbeing check in, we have to follow through. Weeks or months of trust development could be undermined by one or two instances of not showing up.

Ask first and de-escalate situations with positivity

Moving onto more technical ways to build trust and rapport with students, especially those less familiar or sure of you or their adult relationships, try asking first. If a group approach you who need to be spoken to, don’t charge in with an immediate, negative correction. Ask something, establish some common ground. Always say please and thank you. Always finish the interaction positively. It’s very rare that a conversation, even if it involves correction of some sort, won’t involve warmth, kindness, positivity, and relationship building. Whether a student is moving somewhere they shouldn’t be, has got their shirt untucked, or just been unkind to another student, you can simultaneously correct their behaviour and build a relationship with them through speaking with respect and asking questions / listening, too.

Maintain positivity

Also known as fake it till you make it, at times. Our mood has a profound effect on those around us. Showing up with warmth and energy can lift people, on a Monday morning or dreary Wednesday afternoon. Your positivity may be the difference to a child walking away with a smile, ready to engage positively with the next person.

Communicate with staff and encourage them

Talk to staff about what you notice when you’re out and about, talk to them about the climate of the school and how it can be improved. Model your interactions with students clearly so that other staff observe and feel empowered to do the same. Being out and about to build relationships with students doesn’t come naturally to everyone, so keep promoting it publicly.

New students or those struggling with staff relationships

Some children, for a variety of reasons, trust less easily than others. If a student is new, for example if they arrive via a managed move, I try to encounter them as often as possible in their first weeks with us. This begins by getting to know them, of course, but also by being crystal clear about school expectations and systems. I want them to know the school as well as possible, so they can predict what will happen in their day, and not have to react to things after the fact. It’s hard to trust what’s going on around you when there are too many unknowns. Overtime, you can get to know them, but to begin with, give them the best chance to succeed by being clear and consistent.

Ultimately, I believe children benefit from two things:

  1. Staff presence around the school, ensuring positive behaviour and correcting it consistently when it falls below that standard
  2. That same staff presence involves warmth, kindness, and a relentless desire to build strong relationships with the students

Behaviour spreads, and you’ll be amazed how quickly culture can shift when staff increase their presence and become consistent and positive role models across the school. The more dependable these figures are, the more trust will exist between students and staff, and therefore the school as a whole.

Thanks for reading

researchED Surrey 2022 – reflections

On Saturday 8th October 2022, the sun shone gloriously across Surrey, thus enabling both a beautiful day for researchED-ers from across the country, and me the chance to open this blog post in clichéd fashion.

The sun merely acted as a symbol for the energy and optimism of the hundreds of people who gathered at Farnham Heath End school for a day of CPD, by educators, for educators. Yet again, Jack and the FHES team put on an event that was well organised, friendly, and lived up its renown of first-class catering!

This wasn’t my first rodeo, but it was my first chance to present at researchED. Yes, I was given a red lanyard and no, that elevation in status did not calm my nerves. I initially cursed Jack when I saw that my speaking slot was session 6 (graveyard shift), worried that I would spend the day nervously rehearsing my lines in anticipation of messing up my talk in front of the two people that I was sure would turn up.

But, I was wrong. The brilliant conversation among delegates and speakers, the high-quality presentations, and the ever-replenishing coffee meant that the day sailed by, and I barely thought about my session until it loomed in front of me at 15.20.

Sessions that I went to:

While my school role isn’t strictly linked to CPD / Teaching and Learning, it is a huge passion of mine, and when I saw Rachel Ball on the session one listing, I knew I had to attend. Rachel has really lived it – she reads books, papers, and diligently researches things, and then applies them to her school. She reminds me in many ways of Jade Pearce in terms of intelligence, work ethic, humility, sincerity, and dedication – I’d really recommend engaging with these two on Twitter, conference talks, blog posts, etc. I especially liked Rachel’s focus in the session on ‘Responsive CPD’ – that is, seeing how things land at your school, listening to staff, and then tweaking your provision based on that. Fantastic stuff.

Travelling next door, I slalomed through what felt like hundreds of people to attend Isaac Moore’s session on the principles of great teaching, according to cognitive science. His presentation can be found here. If you haven’t met Isaac, he is a humble, softly spoken man of great intellect and kindness. But his work packs a punch. Not only in the quality and depth of content, but also in the at times direct, at times humorous method of delivery with which he enthralls an audience. I loved this session! I laughed, I cried, etc etc.

Tom Sherrington then stepped in last-minute to deliver a session on team coaching. Ah, music to my ears! As a coach, and a teams researcher, this was fascinating. Tom has a huge wealth of experience in working with actual teams – seeing what works, what doesn’t, and how we can improve them. What I like about Tom’s line of thinking is that he promotes ideas that encourage efficiency; for example, the model of team coaching he proposed meant that team members and leaders might attend fewer 1:1 meetings, in favour of a group coaching approach that would also lead the group to healthy, productive conversations. It’s an excellent adaptation of his walkthru model for coaching.

I also attended a session by Neil Almond, who spoke about the explicit teaching of knowledge required to improve comprehension for students. I have to admit, the skills vs knowledge debate in reading / comprehension isn’t something I’ve come across before, but Neil’s presentation was packed with research and genuine evaluation. I could see a room full of primary teachers thinking, nodding, questioning each other, reflecting on how this information might change their teaching. That’s what researchED is truly about.

My session on high-performing teams:

I found this a difficult session to plan for, given that I had 40 minutes, perhaps less.

So I split the talk into 3 sections:

  1. What does research, across many sectors, tell us about high-performing teams and how we can codify some of their traits
  2. Which do I feel to be the underpinning factors that elevate all the others to help a team truly thrive
  3. How can we take some good bets from the above and apply to school teams

The slides are available below, so please feel free to read and use.

If you are curious about the underpinning factors, for me it is resoundingly the team’s sense of belonging and psychological safety. Teams can, in theory, perform without those. But not often for long. And certainly not with happy staff who are developing and enjoying high-levels of trust and wellbeing. I’m passionate about belonging and have delivered other talks about this element of teamwork alone.

Finally, I picked out a few wins for school teams, which were:

  1. Knowledge and mental models
  2. Communication
  3. Meetings and debriefs
  4. Learning culture

So, in 40 minutes I gave a fairly whistle-stop tour through high-performing, thriving teams. If you’d like to know more, please get in touch. I’m reading, writing, and presenting on teamwork every day, so I’d be delighted to work with you.

Thanks for reading

Sam

s-crome-high-performing-teamsDownload

What Every Teacher Needs to Know, by Jade Pearce

Why I read it

I would have bought and read this book regardless, but I was lucky enough to read and give feedback on ‘What Every Teacher Needs to Know’ last autumn. If you have followed Jade, you’ll know that she has spent the last three years on Twitter sharing countless resources. Teaching and Learning Guides, presentations, and many, many research paper summaries. Her work provides expertise, for free, without ego. It was clear that this book would always aim to follow a similar route: a comprehensive guide that provides genuine value to teachers and leaders. Jade recently said to me ‘I can’t believe people have actually paid for it’, not realising that she has been creating high-quality content for years that have added so much value to the education sector that I couldn’t even put a number on it.

In Summary:

What Every Teacher Needs to Know has the subtitle: How to embed evidence-informed teaching and learning in your school. To achieve this, and it does, it is divided into three parts:

  1. Part One: What does the evidence say? A summary of seminal research – Jade summarises 20 pieces of education literature, from a range of sources. For each piece, the key details are outlined meticulously, followed by a regular heading ‘Takeaways for Teaching’. I cannot imagine how long it took Jade to summarise these papers, some of which are huge. Every prescient detail is here for us, the reader, over 127 pages. In a matter of minutes, we can dip in and become informed about a key study, and then go to the source if we need more.
  2. Part Two: What does evidence-informed teaching look like in the classroom? Jade chooses seven areas of evidence-informed teaching she believes to be most important, such as explicit instruction and retrieval practice. For each one, she outlines the theory and research, but then adds in a plethora of practical applications across a range of subjects. The complex becomes tangible and accessible. It really is a step-by-step guide of theory to implementation.
  3. Part Three: How can schools develop an evidence-informed culture? This was the part that I was most looking forward to reading, and I hope Jade would say that I was the most encouraging about! Changing a school culture in any direction is tough, but adopting an evidence-informed mindset, and then application, is a real challenge. Here, Jade outlines, in micro detail, the steps that she and her school took, over a period of years, to become evidence-informed in their teaching. This includes precise direction over how to structure staff briefings, flexi-INSET days, and Teaching and Learning groups. It’s reflective, detailed, and does the heavy lifting. Fantastic.

Key Takeaways

Don’t take my word for it: it would have been easy for Jade to write her own anecdotal reflections on years of teaching and learning experience. And yet, she takes the approach whereby we explore the research with her, and then look at how it could be applied. Some sections look at the criticism of concepts or research, so that we can engage in debate. This is very much a ‘don’t take my word for it approach’, and the reader is much better off for it.

The Valhalla of Bibliographies and Recommended reading: every section of Jade’s book is packed with references to research papers and books, but she also compiles recommended reading lists for what helped her on this evidence-informed journey. So within this book’s wealth of knowledge from Jade, comes hundreds of others’ knowledge through the references and reading lists – you must check through them – it’s a career’s worth of reading and fun!

Keys to the mansion: if you want to become more evidence-informed as a teacher, as a school, or just want to improve your knowledge of certain components of evidence-informed teaching, this book has it all. Depending on your aims, Jade’s book will give you everything you need to make progress in your quest. It’s not just a map to the mansion, it’s the keys to the door.

Evidence informed vs evidence based: Jade points out that there is a difference between being evidence informed and evidence based. Evidence-informed teaching, Jade explains, combines research with a teacher’s expertise and professional judgement; they can apply this to their own context to teach effectively for that particular school or group. Evidence-based teaching, though, can imply a more fixed or prescriptive approach whereby a teacher is guided by research findings over their own experience. Jade explains that her approach aligns with the former, which is the basis for this book’s exploration of research and professional judgment.

Favourite quote:                                                             

‘Evidence-informed teaching enables us to reduce workload by identifying those practises that have a large impact on workload but little impact on learning’

Read this if:

You are a teacher who wants to improve their knowledge about evidence-informed teaching

You are a leader who wants to learn and share about key studies and approaches to teaching and learning

You want to develop a whole-school strategy to evidence-informed teaching

The book is out on 15th September 2022. Buy it here.

Thriving Teams #9: Team Mental Models

Some teams work together in intense, high-pressure situations. Military teams may face perilous situations as part of their day-to-day working life; medical teams have lives in their hands and must treat each one with the same level of care and expertise. For these teams, having a shared knowledge and language of what must be done, and who is doing what, is essential – life and death, even. And yet shared understanding and knowledge of the team’s processes, expertise, and team members is vital for any thriving team, whatever the stakes.

When I first became a Head of English, earlier in my career than I anticipated, I created what I thought were brilliant schemes of work, processes for Controlled Assessment, and other high expectations of how we would operate as a department. The team were enthusiastic and adhered to what we discussed in meetings. We performed well in terms of accountability measures. And yet, there were inconsistencies galore: in attainment, the way we marked, the way we gave feedback, and the way we thought was the right way to teach and learn English. I neglected to ask the question: how can we work better as a TEAM, and utilise the expertise of everyone to improve the group’s work as a whole?

If a team sets off on a project or task, they must be equipped with team knowledge. TEAM knowledge. Not only do individuals need to know what they are responsible for, and how they will carry out certain decisions or pieces of work, they must also understand how the wider team will do the same.

We know that productive teams self-correct, are adaptable, flexible, and cohesive. Their amassed knowledge means that they can follow a process flawlessly, but also adapt as necessary by drawing upon this knowledge and collective experience to make changes when needed. Step forth, mental models.

James Clear states that a ‘mental model is an explanation of how something works; it is an overarching term for any sort of concept, framework, or worldview that you carry around in your mind’. We have these for all sorts of things in life and at work. However, Team Mental Models (TMM; also known as shared) are defined as team members’ shared, organised understanding and mental representation of knowledge about key elements of the team’s relevant environment. Team Mental Models support team members in making sense of the team and the team task. They describe why the team exists, what things look like currently, and what has to be achieved in terms of the future state of the team. In other words, TMM help members understand how things relate to each other; individual strands become interwoven.

Types of TMM and their benefits

Mental models can be categorised in different ways, for example as being task-related or team-related – both are important and have positive effects on teamwork. Whereas task mental models depict what the team must do in terms of aims, logistics, equipment, etc. teamwork mental models denote how the team should work together – defining roles, how people like to work, etc.

There are countless reasons, supported by research, regarding why we should develop our team mental models. Firstly, unique knowledge within a team can often be lost, leading to reduced efficiency and performance; those who possess unique expertise should share information that is critical for the team’s effort (known as transactive memory). This communication must be clear and understandable, and avoid jargon or anything that makes it less accessible (Ervin et al., 2018).

Team mental models, then, increase team knowledge. A team with a critical level of knowledge is able to adapt; this skill has been deemed “one of the few universally effective group strategies” (Driskell et al., 2018) because it modifies the team’s actions to be as efficient and functional as possible. Knowledge created and optimised by team mental models unlocks creativity and adaptability.

Cannon-Bowers and Salas (1990) speak of the unspoken communication a high-performing team can harness, commenting that ‘they can often coordinate their behaviour without the need to communicate” (Cannon-Bowers & Salas, 2001). Expert teams develop compatibility in members’ cognitive understanding of key elements of their work and performance, and, by doing so, are able to operate efficiently, without the need for overt communication, and hence perform tasks more effectively.

All in all, team effectiveness will improve if team members are mentally congruent and have a shared understanding of the task, team, environment, and situation. Teams whose members share mental models of both task and team variables are expected to have more accurate expectations of team needs and can anticipate the actions of other members, compared with teams where mental models are less accurate or strong. Can you say this about your teams? It certainly prompts reflection on how we lead our teams and what everyone knows, and what the effects of this knowledge are.

Teams with accurate and effective Team Mental Models will operate smoothly, with satisfaction, cohesion; performance will improve. Team cognition will rise to a point where team members are equipped to make good decisions for the team, can predict common outcomes, and can contribute more meaningful ideas to the group. 

So now that you are equipped with a mental model of what a mental model is (not sure that works but thanks for sticking with me!), let’s discuss how we can improve these within our teams. How do we actually optimise our Team Mental Models so that they add value to our team work, and don’t just add to workload?

Here are 7 evidence-informed ways to improve Team Mental Models and their effectiveness in your team:

Thinking like a (healthy) team: to start with, it’s a good idea to explore the team’s values, processes, and remit. This should centre around how the team actually works together, and whether or not at this point there is a culture of genuine team work and sharing. You could discuss some open questions as a group, such as: ‘how much do we share as a team?’ ‘Do our processes encourage and incentivise team work?’ ‘Do we take what we learn as a team and use it in tomorrow’s plans?’. The point is, your team needs to start thinking like a team, before it can begin developing team mental models.

Role clarity: A major aspect of team mental models is understanding who does what and when. A lot of this is about role clarity – it’s very easy for team members to assume they know what the role and responsibilities’ of other team members are, without gaining that insight. So the focal point here is ensuring that the team understands team roles, their overlap, how and when they work together, and which other members from other teams are often incorporated in team tasks. Importantly, this is the time to identify gaps, too.

Sharing expertise within the team – team learning is a vital part of a thriving team, and what better way to increase the knowledge of the group than by regularly asking team members, or those from another related team, to present on an area of their remit or expertise. Functionally, this could be a 5-10 ‘in the hot seat’ portion of a meeting where the team member explains their role, their key knowledge and processes, how they work with other team members, and conclude with a discussion with the team about how others can better use this knowledge. An example could be a counsellor coming to a Head of Year meeting (all part of the wider pastoral team but not the core Head of Year team) to discuss how they take referrals, how they differ from other services, and how they’d like the team to work with them in the future; this will then prompt a discussion. Or someone within a department feeding back on a project they have been working on – it sounds obvious, but the focus of the discussion should be on how the team can use this knowledge to improve their work together.

Modelling best practice: it’s not just about sharing individual expertise for the greater good of the team; it’s also important to model what excellent team work looks like in this particular team. This could involve scenarios of ideal teamwork in the team being created and agreed by team members, who then share those exemplars to the team and discuss how close they are to this in day-to-day practice.

Evaluations and Debriefs – regular team debriefs, if managed well, can improve team effectiveness by 20-25%. I blogged in more depth about debriefs here. These reviews are the perfect opportunity to establish and consolidate team mental models. They need to focus on shared accountability for how to improve a process or aspect of the team’s work: everyone has a voice, a no blame culture, and an honest discussion about how to move things forward as a group. These reviews can also evaluate how mental models have been applied in the past.

Cross-team collaboration: in many organisations, schools included, the communication and teamwork between teams can sometimes be lacking. In schools, this could be a lack of dialogue between academic and pastoral staff, or different approaches being implemented unwittingly between key stages or phases. Every team has overlap with other teams – to keep a sense of organisational cohesion, and to improve mental models across teams, opportunities should be created for teams, or members or teams, to meet to improve the shared knowledge between these groups.

Building TMM on a foundation of psychological safety: Team Mental Models, by definition, are a form of team sharing. Yes, this can often be detail or process focused, but also involves staff sharing how they feel about aspects of work – what is working well or not, for example. Creating cohesive team mental models that make a team more efficient and productive, will involve team members being honest and open with each other. Otherwise the mental model will be inaccurate, and this will actually hinder team performance. So, as I write in most of my blogs, it seems, the foundation of all these conversations and ideas is that the team has a culture of psychological safety.

Further, management website CG Net have created the useful graphic below about how to launch and maximise team mental models:

Source: https://www.ckju.net/en/dossier/team-mental-models-increase-team-performance

Of course, all teams have processes and knowledge shared between them already. You might be wondering, is the term Team Mental Models just adding a name to things that already exist? But deliberately considering and discussing a team’s mental models is a step beyond what most teams will carry out. The real gains are made when a team actively questions the way it shares knowledge; the way it works together; the way that things overlap. How do we use our knowledge to enhance our team work?

For my work with teams this year, that will be the key question: so, how do we use xyz (whatever we’ve just been looking at) to improve our work together as a team? This was a question that I neglected as a HOD, but aspire to achieve now as a leader of other teams.

With this blog post, I have reduced the number of academic papers referred to, in the hope that the writing will be more accessible and less dense. If you’d like to explore Team Mental Models with me further, I have a huge bank of papers that kept me busy for weeks in the run up to writing this. I’m very happy to share any time!

Thank you for reading

Sam

Further reading:

Cannon-Bowers, J.A. and Salas, E. (1990) Cognitive Psychology and Team Training: Shared Mental Model in Complex System. The 5th Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology, Miami, FL, 1-4. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/showciting?cid=2451472

Driskell JE, Salas E, Driskell T. Foundations of teamwork and collaboration. Am Psychol. 2018 May-Jun;73(4):334-348. doi: 10.1037/amp0000241. PMID: 29792452.

Ervin JN, Kahn JM, Cohen TR, Weingart LR. Teamwork in the intensive care unit. Am Psychol. 2018 May-Jun;73(4):468-477. doi: 10.1037/amp0000247. PMID: 29792461; PMCID: PMC6662208.

Mathieu JE, Heffner TS, Goodwin GF, Salas E, Cannon-Bowers JA. The influence of shared mental models on team process and performance. J Appl Psychol. 2000 Apr;85(2):273-83. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.85.2.273. PMID: 10783543.

Salas, E, and Cannon-Bowers, J (2001) The Science of Training. Annual Review of Psychology.

All on the same page: How Team Mental Models (TMM) increase team performance | CQ Net – Management skills for everyone (ckju.net)

How to boost your team’s success with shared mental models – Work Life by Atlassian

The Practice of Groundedness, by Brad Stulberg

Why I read it

Over the course of Pocket Wisdom, it won’t come as a surprise to you that I have researched a lot of books. For reference, here is how I find most of them: books by authors I’ve already read; books recommended by those authors; books I discover on podcasts; personal recommendations; trawling through lists online. I remember hearing Brad Stulberg speak about his books Peak Performance, and then Groundedness, and decided to go for the latter. Here was a successful, intelligent chap appealing to the audience to take stock of their busy lives and be present. Also, the cover. I love the cover.

In summary

Brad Stulberg noticed a trend among friends, colleagues, and coachees, that something was happening in their lives that didn’t bring contentment. Despite their success, they felt something wasn’t quite right – something was missing. They were essentially looking for peace, but on the life / work treadmill, just couldn’t find it. They told themselves how much they wanted to turn it all off – the news and business, and emails and notifications. And yet when they did, they felt unsettled and restless.

Stulberg calls the restlessness heroic individualism – an ongoing game of one-upmanship, against yourself and others, paired with the limiting belief that measurable achievement is the only arbiter of success. You feel as though you never quite reach the finish line.

In Ancient Eastern psychology this is a concept known as the hungry ghost. It has a bottomless stomach. It keeps on eating, stuffing itself sick, but never gets full.  For us, this can be seen as ambition always exceeding the results obtained, and nothing giving satisfaction.

That’s why Stulberg created the principle of Groundedness. The book outlines what issues we tend to face in our society, and how they affect us as individuals. A wealth of scientific research is used to reveal what causes unrest but also happiness. Stulberg then introduces 6 pillars of groundedness, with each one exploring a range of practical ideas about how to introduce them into your life.

Is this a self-help book? Yes, I suppose it is. It is evidence-informed, practical, and very wise. Stulberg draws from many ancient and religious figures, too, in the quest to help us become truly grounded in the present, to lead fulfilled lives. I read it through the eyes of an individual, but also a leader – every page of this book helped me to reflect on how I can help others become more grounded, too.

Key Takeaways

Groundedness ‘is unwavering internal strength and self-confidence that sustains you through ups and downs. It is a deep reservoir of integrity and fortitude, of wholeness, out of which lasting performance, wellbeing and fulfilment emerge. When you prioritise groundedness, you do not neglect passion, performance, or productivity. Nor does it eliminate ambition. It situates and stabilises these qualities, so that your striving and ambition becomes less frenetic and more focused; less about achieving something in front of you and more about living in alignment with your innermost values. When you are grounded, there is no need to look up or down.’

The six principles of groundedness:

  1. Accept where you are to get where you want to go. Stulberg discusses how this applies to both your own life circumstances, and the norms of stress. In the words of Marcus Aurelius ‘it’s normal to feel pain in your hands and feet if you’re using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. For a human being, stress is normal – if you are living a normal life’. This chapter really helps one gain acceptance and perspective of life.
  2. Be present so you can own your attention and energy
  3. Be patient and you’ll get there faster
  4. Embrace vulnerability to develop genuine strength and confidence
  5. Build deep community
  6. Move your body to ground your mind

Each principle has a chapter of explanation, examples, and research to go along with it, as well as practical case studies about how to enact the principle.

Achieving happiness: Stulberg explores scientific research about happiness, concluding that it is usually found in the present moment and not in hopes of the future; once we secure a comfortable income, happiness doesn’t tend to increase (it can occasionally for a short time). Conversely, Stulberg references Ben-Shahar’s ‘arrival fallacy’, the way that we live under false hope that once we ‘make it’, we’ll be happy. We may see a temporary boost, but it doesn’t last; when this cycle repeats, it can be easy to lose hope. In conclusion, enjoying what we have in the present is the most likely way to feel fulfilled.

Performance: Performance science is revealing that lasting success requires a solid base of health, wellbeing, and general life satisfaction. Without this foundation, someone can perform well for a short period, but will inevitably experience burnout. Linking to intrinsic motivation, performance is maximised when goals are worked towards from deep within, and not from a more external source. Further, when you adopt a performance-approach mindset, you are playing to win, with confidence and focusing on the rewards of your success; this positive approach means you find it easier to get lost in the moment and enter a flow-like state; however, with a performance-avoidance mindset, you adopt more of a deficit model where you fear failure, try to dodge mistakes and circumvent danger. Research shows that the latter leads to poorer performances, and while performance avoidance can lead to some short-term wins, it won’t help in the long run. As an individual and leader, how can we help imbue a performance approach in ourselves and our teams?

Technology! I don’t want to demonise technology in fear of sounding hypocritical and extreme, but Stulberg looks at many studies which (unsurprisingly) reveal the negative effects of social media, smart phones, notifications, etc. on our wellbeing. We are validated by activity on our phones, and  apps are deliberately designed to appeal to our sense of what might be important or exciting. The content often triggers a dopamine release, making experiences seem meaningful, and therefore, desirable to repeat. Fortunately, Stulberg provides a few solutions about how to separate ourselves from this world, and by preparing us to feel worse before we feel better, if you do separate yourself from technology. This sounds simple, and yet we are all guilty of the above!

Favourite quote

The book is packed full of practical exercises you can try to better attain a sense of groundedness. There are far too many to list, but they occur at the end of chapters and are straightforward to follow. These are always accessible and can be adapted to your daily routine. But importantly, they urge the reader not to merely think / read about groundedness, but to try it out and experience its principles in a proactive sense.

 As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh says, ‘if you want to garden, you have to bend down and touch the soil. Gardening is a practice. Not an idea.’ And so it is the same with groundedness!

Favourite moment:

Under the Deep Community principle, Stulberg creates a beautiful analogy. The Redwood trees in California, the tallest in the world, can grow 200-300 feet. And yet, their network of roots only plunges six-to-twelve feet underground; instead they spread hundreds of feet laterally, overlapping and linking with the roots of other trees, forming a formidable, unbreakable foundation. Like the redwoods, we can thrive by having a community of people around us, to build a mutual network of support and acceptance.

Read this if

You want to slow down and be more present

You are looking for more fulfilment in your life; you want to prioritise yourself, and your contentment

You want to help others become more grounded, as individuals and a team

Support bookshops and buy it here

The Best Place to Work, by Ron Friedman

Why I read it

I read Ron Friedman’s Decoding Greatness a couple of years ago, and found it compelling. I applied many of the principles to my leadership and teaching; for example, the concept of reverse engineering to break down the key components of something successful. Check out my blog for more. I subscribe to Ron’s newsletter, too, which I recommend. Therefore, I was hoping to read The Best Place to Work in 2022, and fortunately received it for my birthday in July – thanks to my bro!

In summary

In the early stages of the book, Friedman writes: ‘studies indicate that happy employees are more productive, more creative, and provide better client service. They’re less likely to quit or call in sick. They are brand ambassadors outside the office. Investing in workplace happiness doesn’t cost the company money, it ensures they stay on top.’

Essentially, Friedman applies an evidence-based approach to true happiness and fulfilment at work. The book is pitched at leaders who want to make a different – first by understanding what people need, and then by providing practical examples of how to make this happen. As with his other work, Ron parks his ego at the door and focuses on research, reflection, and great story telling!

Key Takeaways

  • What did you fail at today? Master performers don’t get to where they are by playing at the same level every day. They do so by risking failure and using the feedback to master new skills. Like Amy Edmondson’s work on Psychological Safety, Friedman proposes that it can’t just be individuals who are willing to grow through failure, but that it must be an organisation-wide ethos to decouple fear and failure. To normalise this, Friedman suggests that leaders ask staff ‘what did you fail at today?’, in an attempt to discuss how people overcame challenges or mistakes – to own and share them, to focus on the growth beyond them. ‘If you’re not failing, you’re not growing’.
  • Motivation and avoidance mindset: if we are motivated by fear of failing, or ‘avoidance mindset’, we will work hard to produce good results so that we don’t fail. The trouble is, this doesn’t tend to lead to creative or innovative thinking; if it does in the short term, the chances are we’ll be feeling stressed and unhappy. In short, when avoiding failure is the primary focus, work is more stressful, and is, studies show, harder. In the long run, that takes its toll. So leaders, don’t motivate or goal-set by what could go wrong – don’t have a deficit model for your work, but sow positivity and celebrate the bumps along the road. Reward the attempts, not just the outcomes.
  • Work friendships are effective – I’ve always been a critic of a work-based team-building activity. The bowling trip. Yoga in the gym. But mainly because some workplaces put those sort of events as their flagship wellbeing provision. Friedman quotes studies, though, that show that workplaces where colleagues are friendly, or friends, outperform the work of acquaintances. There is more on the line when working with friends, which means we tend to work harder for each other, while employees tend to stay in their workplace longer when they work with friends. He also highlights research into workplaces with a lack of friendships, and the negative impact that this ‘process loss’ can have. Friedman explores the science of making friends, specifically proximity, familiarity, similarity, and how workplaces can utilise this knowledge.
  • Superordinate goals: to achieve a sense of togetherness, teams should have superordinate goals – that is, goals that require multiple members to work on together. This goes back to previous blogs I have written: does your team have goals for the group to achieve together? If members only have individual goals to work towards, they have no incentive to be team players or support one another. During the pursuit of these superordinate goals, it’s important for teams to share moments of negativity, celebrate the wins, and to support each other relentlessly.
  • Mimicry and conforming: Friedman quotes many fascinating studies about how we mimic the actions and behaviours of others in an attempt to conform. We even tend to mimic and adopt the emotions of those around us. Mirror neurons are used to reflect what we see from others, meaning that our brain is always scanning for a chance to be safe by replicating what it sees. This is, in essence, how culture at work is formed. It’s why defining core values, and then living by them, is vital for a workplace. But it’s also why leaders have such responsibility for what goes on around them. Staff mimic leaders in particular – the way they respond to others, deal with a crisis, or overcome setbacks. The leader’s behaviour, and the behaviour they accept around the organisation, will become the norm.
  • Concluding ideas: Self Determination Theory: the pillars of Ryan & Deci’s psychological needs model, Self Determination Theory, are Competence, Relatedness, and Autonomy. If these primary needs are met, they argue, people will be fulfilled. This model has a lot of empirical research behind it, and I’ve been a proponent of it since I read (and blogged) about it in 2019. Friedman puts SDT at the heart of his concluding comments, urging leaders to reflect on the competence, relatedness and autonomy of their staff. Hear hear!

Favourite Moment

I haven’t quoted many of the studies in depth as the book reflection would be unreadably long. Trust me, though, there are so many fascinating pieces of research to uncover in The Best Place to Work, as well as a lot of anecdotal experiences.

My favourite, though, linked to the takeaway on mimicking and conforming. Friedman set up an experiment for two groups, who would complete a puzzle.

Group one, in the waiting area, would be exposed to someone talking loudly about how they’d done a similar puzzle to this before, and how it was boring, a waste of time, and that they were only doing it for the reward being offered. The other group overheard someone talking about how energised they had been doing tasks like this before, and how they’d overcome the challenges with enthusiasm.

Group one performed much less effectively than group two in the puzzles; interestingly, they couldn’t pinpoint the reason why, and had no recollection of the ‘bad apple’ they’d overheard in the waiting area.

This study really hit home for me. We are, unwittingly, a source of motivation or demotivation for those around us every day. The way we frame our work and our feelings can have a huge impact on how others approach their work or lives.

Read this if:

  • You want to improve workplace culture
  • You are a leader who wants to understand people and behaviour

Support bookshops and buy it here

Effective Coaching, by Myles Downey

Why I read it

Like teaching, it is important as a coach to keep topping up your knowledge and development. I’ve done coaching courses, but also like to read a few books a year to help me both reflect on my practice, and the experiences and wisdom of others. A few people recommended Myles Downey and his work on coaching, particularly non-directive coaching. The book is well reviewed and it’s not hard to see why!

In summary:

Myles Downey, an experienced coach in a variety of settings, wrote Effective Coaching to impart some of his key principles of coaching. There are a variety of chapters that define coaching, explore the key concepts of coaching, and finally a few chapters that apply it to the workplace and teams. Myles’ passion for unlocking the potential of colleagues shines through in how he discusses coaching. Every sentence in the book goes back to how we can help others minimise any interference in their development and performance.

This is a book that defines coaching, explores its benefits, and then provides the reader with many layers of coaching skills.

Key takeaways:

  1. Coaching definitions are wide-ranging but always inspire! Here are a few from Downey: ‘the coach does not need to impart knowledge, advice or even wisdom. What he or she must do is speak, and act, in such a way that others learn and perform at their best.’ ‘Think of all the learning and creativity that has been lost because a manager imposed their own solution on a colleague, rather than asking a simple question such as ‘what could you do?’’ ‘Coaching is the art of facilitating the performance, learning and development of another.’
  2. Watching a coaching conversation: when I did a coaching course with Growth Coaching International, each session we did began with watching a video of a coaching conversation. This was so insightful! Downey talks about showing people the power of coaching by modelling it infront of their eyes. Powerful stuff.
  3. Reduce interference to raise performance: Downey provides a list of factors that could be called ‘interference’, in other words something that holds you back from top performance. Coaching can be utilised to help the coachee (or player, as Downey calls them) to overcome the interference and take control. The mantra: potential minus interference is equal to performance
  4. Generating understanding and awareness: Downey defines skills linked to these as: listening to understand; repetition, paraphrasing, summarising; grouping (grouping together themes or ideas you’ve heard and playing them back to the coachee); silence; asking questions that follow interest; asking questions to clarify. He provides an explanation of each in a brilliant chapter about how a coach can use their listening to generate better awareness and understanding from their coachee, which the coach then acknowledges with certain cues to build trust and consolidate the clarity of the understanding of both parties.
  5. Coaching in the work place: The book discusses how coaching can be implemented in the workplace, primarily through line management, and as a manager or leader both in meetings and in day-to-day conversations. Downey urges more of a coaching approach to line management especially, so that there is room for learning and creativity for the person being managed. One area that was particularly interesting was to see how Downey advocates turning appraisals into self-reflection conversations, where the coachee can reflect and the manager can coach them through their own development plan.
  6. Getting started: Downey dedicates a chapter to how to begin, maintain, and review a coaching relationship. He breaks down what to do in the initial sessions, and how the relationship will evolve as sessions progress. This is a very practical, useful part of the book for new coaches.
  7. Teams: I had a keen interest in how coaches can work with teams. Downey discusses how a coach can help reduce interferences for the team, such as: issues with team hierarchy; how members listen to and understand each other; how they give each other feedback and have challenging conversations; how they set and pursue goals; and many other aspects of the team’s work. In simpler terms, a team coach can help the team discover and focus on the who, what, and how of the team’s work. This begins in a hypothetical sense, but by the end of the chapter Downey gives a tangible example of how a coach could facilitate a team meeting with a mock script.

Favourite moment:

Here a series of excerpts from the book that really inspired me as a coach, and reignited my coaching flame!

‘The goal of coaching is to established a firmer connection with an inner authority that can guide vision and urge excellence and discriminate wisdom without being subject to an ‘inner bully’, that has established its certification from external dictates and imposes them on you without your authority to do so.

Coaching has the capacity to bring humanity back into the workplace. We are perhaps on the brink of discovering the extraordinary benefits of letting humanity loose on the workplace and beyond.

People work better, more productively, more effectively, more creatively, when they are cared for. And caring means difficult conversations, too. Coaching can tap into the resources of the whole human being, for the benefit of the employee and the organisation.’

Favourite quote:

Coaching brings achievement, fulfilment and joy, Downey suggests. And I would agree.

‘Effective coaching in the workplace delivers achievement, fulfilment, and joy from which both the individual and the organisation benefit. By achievement I mean the delivery of extraordinary results, organisational and individual goals achieved, strategies, projects and plan executed. Effective coaching delivers sustainable achievement, because of the emphasis on learning and because the confidence of the individual is enhanced. The impact on performance is typically sustained for a longer period and will impact on areas not directly subject of the coaching.

In fulfilment I include learning and development. A business result is one thing, but to achieve it in a way that the individual learns and develops as part of the process has greater value – to the player, the line manager or coach and the organisation, as it is the capacity to learn that ensures an organisation’s survival. Work can be meaningful; individuals through coaching begin to identify goals that are more intrinsically rewarding. With fulfilment comes this increase in motivation.

And joy. When people are achieving their goals, when those goals have some meaning and when learning and development is part of the process, enjoyment ensues.’

Read this if…

You want to become a coach

You are a coach who wants to engage with the wisdom of another fantastic coach

You are a leader who wants to adopt more of a coaching approach

Buy it here

Thriving Teams #8: Team Diversity

In the build up to the 9/11 attack on New York City, the CIA missed countless clues that may have lead to the detection of the plans to destroy the World Trade Centre. The organisation suffered from perspective blindness, the way in which we can be ignorant to our own blind spots; the Agency had created homogenous teams of mainly white, middle class, similarly educated staff. They were intelligent, shrewd, and completely lacking in cultural or cognitive diversity to tackle wide-ranging problems. Put simply, a more diverse group would have had a richer understanding not just into the threat posed by al-Qaeda, but other dangers in the world. This is what Matthew Syed contests in Rebel Ideas when talking about the CIA and its staff: ‘each would have been assets in a more diverse team. As a group, however, they were flawed.’

Syed isn’t taking particular aim at the CIA, but rather the way that many organisations have, and continue to, staff their teams. Rebel Ideas, which I draw upon further in this post, contains many lessons about creating diverse teams that will improve team performance.

According to research from Forbes (2017), teams outperform individual decision makers 66% of the time, and decision making improves as team diversity increases. Compared to individual decision makers, all-male teams make better business decisions 58% of the time, while gender diverse teams do so 73% of the time. Teams that also include a wide range of ages and different geographic locations make better business decisions 87% of the time. This is only one piece of research, and, honestly, there are other studies that show that greater diversity can cause other barriers to thriving team work, but one thing is for sure, we have a lot to learn about team diversity.

What diverse teams are and why they matter:

Team diversity can encompass both inherent (e.g., race, gender) and acquired (experience, education, cultural background) differences among the team’s members.  Some of these differences are more obvious than others. For example, we can visually observe a team’s racial or gender diversity, and there are studies that show the reduced effectiveness of those groups who lack diversity in these areas. It can be more difficult to understand the team’s diversity in their acquired features; for example, two team members with similar inherent characteristics, may have a diverse breadth of experience between them that is only apparent upon further investigation. Conversely, two members who are inherently different (i.e., visually diverse), may share similar expertise, views and experiences. So there is a nuance about what kind of diversity will truly serve the team.

Matthew Syed distinguishes diversity as cultural diversity (race, sex) and cognitive diversity (their experience, skills, ways of solving problems). He suggests in Rebel Ideas (Syed, 2019) that cognitive diversity is the most potent for teams, suggesting that it doesn’t matter where team members are from or what age they are, if they are all trained in the same discipline, they won’t naturally bring a wide array of viewpoints to a discussion.

Complex problems generally rely on multiple layers of perspectives. The more diverse the team, the larger range of potentially viable options there are. Whilst we all have our own ‘blind-spots’ which we cannot see, as noted in the CIA, we can lean onto others to help make us aware of them. As Syed writes, if you have 10 of the best minds who all think alike, then the ideas brought to the table are effectively just one person’s worth. However, if you have 10 minds all thinking differently, then there is no limit on the amount of creative and inventive ideas that will emerge.

While it is arguable that organisations are becoming more alert to the benefits of diversity, there is still a long way to go. In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review (sign posted by D Clutterbuck), a study found, based on board meeting transcripts, that, while each white male spoke for an average of 11% of the time, women averaged only 8% and black directors a mere 4% (HBR, 2022).  This reveals that there is a long way to go in creating equity in organisational culture, and this post will highlight how team diversity isn’t just about initial recruitment, but rather a team’s culture and promotion of diverse views and thinking in its teams and boardrooms.

And, what are they waiting for? A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above (HBR, 2015). Many more studies come to the conclusion that non-homogenous teams are simply better at working together; diversity in teams challenges members to think beyond their own perspective, and to become more objective, interrogative, and innovative.

In a study by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and supported since by others, when juries were populated by diverse groups, they were less likely to make factual errors than homogenous groups. In a separate financial study, researchers found that individuals who were part of the diverse teams were 58% more likely to price stocks correctly, whereas those in homogenous groups were more prone to pricing errors.

Diverse teams are found to be more likely to re-examine information, to debate different points of view, to scrutinise each other’s actions, and most importantly, disrupt homogeneity and the groupthink mindset where we revel in the comfort that our team members are similar to us, and will likely agree with our line of thinking. Finally, studies also reveal that diverse teams are more likely to be innovative, and develop new products.

Before we look at challenges that diverse teams face, let me summarise that team diversity can allude to cultural or inherent characteristics, cognitive characteristics, and also the culture of the team to contribute new and diverse ideas. The post isn’t advocating for certain methods of recruitment or to make tokenistic gestures towards diversity, but rather aims to highlight the huge benefits that teams can enjoy when they have a group that brings differing experiences, skills, views, and culture.

Some challenges:

However, while there is plenty of research to laud the effects of team diversity, there are challenges to consider when staffing teams.

Teams can develop what are known as a ‘fault lines’ (Bell & Brown, 2015)– divisions that may compromise team cohesion, relationships, and effectiveness. In other words, the team may form subgroups, based on one or more attributes; these faultlines are their strongest (and worst) when they are across several attributes, e.g. profession, sex, education all at once. Teams with fault lines are more likely to split into subgroups or cliques, leading to increases in task and relationship conflict, and decreased team cohesion. Knowing that these faultlines exist is important, not from the perspective of recruitment (for many reasons!) but in terms of how we utilise team diversity as a benefit and not a hindrance. More on that later.  

Sticking with what you know, or creating an echo chamber, can feel pretty good. Regular affirmation regarding your approach feels pleasant. A sense of collegiality and everyone rowing in the same direction is enthusing. But these subjective feelings mask what is likely to be an inefficient team.  Our unconscious bias, studies show, means that we tend to think pessimistically about diverse teams and viewpoints, even when the benefits are occurring in front of us. We tend to revert to the comfort of homogeneity.

One study (HBR, 2016) involved participants solving a murder mystery; during the process, teams were joined by new members, with some groups adding a member from their existing network, and others receiving someone unknown to them – an outsider. Interestingly, the teams with new members who were known to them felt more confident about the process and their final decision; teams joined by an ‘outsider’ judged their interactions less effective, and were less confident about their outcome. And yet, those latter teams’ success rates were 60%, compared to the 29% of more homogenous teams. Research shows that this isn’t uncommon: so the onus is on the team and its leaders to normalise diversity, celebrate it, and acknowledge what the team needs to in order to successfully navigate a range of views and opinions.

Working on diverse teams with a variety of viewpoints and experiences can feel like hard work, because it is. It is more complex and nuanced to navigate a discussion of differing ideas, examining facts carefully and finding a path forward as a group. It feels harder, and yet it produces results. Psychologists call our desire for easier processes the fluency heuristic – just like re-reading material can seem like a simple, effective way to consolidate learning (warning, do not do this!), we may feel positively about a group discussion with low conflict and high agreement.

Interestingly, studies have shown that people overestimate how much conflict there is in diverse teams. This type of unconscious bias can clearly have a significant impact not only on hiring but also on the ways in which leaders create teams and encourage collaboration.  Without realising it, they may be reluctant to add diversity to a team or to assign colleagues with different backgrounds to work together, in response to fear of the tension and difficulty that could ensue.

Put simply, we like group think, which is the term attributed to the phenomenon of homogenous team thinking. Irving Janis stated (Yetiv, 2003) that striving for unanimity overrides motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. As Janis points out, when ‘groupthink dominates, suppression of deviant thoughts takes the form of each person’s deciding that his misgivings are not relevant, that the benefit of any doubt should be given to the group consensus.’ As a result, individuals hesitate to dissent, and conflict avoidance becomes a norm. Groupthink is most likely to occur in groups that are cohesive or, in other words, exhibit a high level of amiability among their members 

In task-oriented work teams, there is some evidence that team members have more social affinity toward one another when they are similar; however, social affinity does not necessarily indicate which team members will rely on one another for expertise or team efficacy (Joshi, 2015). In other words, superficial affinity can feel comforting, but it doesn’t have as much impact on team performance as the team’s ability to work together.

Ways to boost team diversity and effectiveness:

So far, we’ve discussed both the proven benefits of team diversity, as well as exploring some challenges that diverse teams may face before they see the fruits of their labours. So, how can teams really harness the power of being different?

  1. Highlighting differences and group identity: there is a huge body of evidence that supports creating an agreed vision, purpose, and sense of belonging in a team. Unsurprisingly, research says the same about group differences. If the group’s identity is built on the acknowledgement and celebration of its diversity, the team are more likely to accept and benefit from these differences. In other words, fault lines can be reduced by positively framing the team; groups perform better when they believe in pro-diversity, and this needs to be narrated and verbalised by leaders.
  2. Goals: nothing unites a group and gives it compelling direction like a set of agreed goals. These should be specific, team goals, which will bind the team together and help them focus on the bigger picture, even if some of their differences do feel difficult at times.
  3. Improving team cohesion and helping behaviours:  Liang et al (2014) found that team diversity can lead to lower levels of helping behaviours among teams, and therefore it is important for teams and their leaders to devote time to developing a sense of team unity and cohesion, perhaps through a shared identity, or more practically through clearly defined roles and understanding of the team’s expertise and processes. If the team has role clarity, and understanding of different aspects of its expertise, they can appreciate each other’s contributions.
  4. Reject hierarchy: In Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed quotes a study from 1972 that discovered that teams lead by junior managers were more likely to succeed than those with a senior manager in charge. Confusingly, studies also show that teams with no managers at all don’t perform that well. Syed discusses the ‘prestigious’ leader. These are individuals who attain influence and command without engaging in displays of dominance. Individuals who exhibit prestige share wisdom and are willing to teach others. They recognize they don’t know everything, so they instead listen attentively to others when they need to.  It is this form of transformational leadership that is most likely to facilitate the benefits of a diverse team.
  5. Psychological Safety: if a team is diverse, inherently or cognitively, that may mean little to its chance of progress if there is no culture of psychological safety. Psychologically safe teams are open to discuss processes, successes and failures; there is a culture of healthy feedback and an absence of blame. Given that a diverse team may feel less naturally comfortable in this environment than a homogenous group, efforts should be expended to build belonging and psychological safety. The benefits of the diverse thinking of the team will be lost if individuals don’t feel confident in contributing to team discussions.
  6. Mix it up to innovate: For teams to achieve innovation in the workplace, diversity can be a key component. Syed points out that academic papers with the “most impact” were found to have “atypical subject combinations” whereby academics bridged traditional boundaries and married two topics together – like physics and computation or anthropology and network theory. By inviting, yes – actually seeking out, diverse opinions, views, and expertise, the team can look beyond its assumed positions, and see existing processes with fresh perspectives.

How can we apply these lessons to schools?

School teams present many challenges and opportunities. Most teams, let’s say tutor teams in a secondary setting, won’t have been put together deliberately based on an optimal combination of cultural or cognitive diversity. And yet, they will be diverse and teeming with experience and views.

School staff are often part of multiple teams, some of which they will have chosen, and others not. Some they will have been recruited deliberately for, and others not. This dynamic presents challenges in that we often cannot compose a team based on a variety of attributes. So, what can we do to maximise diversity?

School teams should be hives of psychological safety and belonging. Using some of the strategies from earlier in this blog post, leaders should normalise a team culture where members not only feel safe to share and learn together, but also build in time and opportunities for the culture to grow. Meetings and debriefs can be scheduled to discuss ideas and processes; members can be given ownership over leading team learning in meetings. Finally, leaders should verbalise the uniqueness and strength of the team’s diversity, and create a culture where every member understands the benefits of their differences.

It’s clear from research that, while diverse teams can be difficult to create and, in some cases, manage, the benefits are potentially fantastic. There are many layers, from an ethical principle of inclusion, equality, and diversity, to the sheer potential that diverse teams have to significantly outperform homogenous groups. I hope that this post has helped your own thinking about the creation and success of your teams.

Thank you for reading

Sam

References:

Bell, S.T. and Brown, S.G. (2015), “Selecting and Composing Cohesive Teams”, Team Cohesion: Advances in Psychological Theory, Methods and Practice (Research on Managing Groups and Teams, Vol. 17), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 181-209. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1534-085620150000017008

Forbes (2017) New Research: Diversity + Inclusion = Better Decision Making At Work. New Research: Diversity + Inclusion = Better Decision Making At Work (forbes.com)

Harvard Business Review (2015) Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter (hbr.org)

Harvard Business Review (2016) Diverse Teams Feel Less Comfortable — and That’s Why They Perform Better

Harvard Business Review (2022) A seat the table is not enough, pp21-25

Joshi, A., & Knight, A. P. (2015). Who defers to whom and why? Dual pathways linking demographic differences and dyadic deference to team effectiveness. Academy of Management Journal, 58, 59 – 84

Hsiao-Yun Liang, Hsi-An Shih, Yun-Haw Chiang (2014) Team diversity and team helping behavior: The mediating roles of team cooperation and team cohesion, European Management Journal,Volume 33, Issue 1,

Syed, M (2019) Rebel Ideas

Yetiv, S (2003) Group Think. British Journal of Political Science , Jul., 2003, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Jul., 2003), pp. 419-442

Coaching the Team at Work, by David Clutterbuck. Part One: Teams

This is a Pocket Wisdom first! I bought this book to learn more about coaching, and team coaching. These topics unite my two professional passions: high-performing teams, and coaching for development. However, the book is so densely packed with research, theory, practical ideas, and Clutterbuck’s wisdom, that I had to split the post in two. You see, what I didn’t anticipate was a huge literature review of teams and high-performance in teams.

This post concerns all of the book’s reflections on those topics; a future post will explore the team coaching element of the book. I hope the author will forgive me for ignoring the main basis of the book, to begin with at least.

In summary

The book’s aim is ultimately to improve team performance and effectiveness by applying team coaching processes. This is a fascinating area of which I have no experience, hence wanting to dedicate an entire future post to this component of the book.

However, as I mentioned, many chapters in the book explore a wealth of evidence regarding how teams form, perform, and succeed.

Key Takeaways

  1. What is a team? – Clutterbuck explores various theories about the difference between a team and a group, looking at definitions from Katzenbach, Hackman and Thompson in particular. Some characteristics of a team are: complementary skills, commitment to a common purpose, commitment to the same performance goals, commitment to a common approach, mutual accountability. Another model adds: members depending on each other, the team having clear boundaries, being stable over time, and that members have the authority to manage their own work and internal processes. This should be a point of reflection for us – are we in a group or a team? If we want a team, how can we follow this advice to make it more cohesive and authentic?
  2. Teamwork Quality measure – working in a team is not the same as working as a team; one measure from Hoegl and Gemeunden is the Team Quality model, which explores six components: communication, coordination, balance of member contributions, mutual support, effort, and cohesion. This model is worth exploring in more depth.
  3. What is high performance? I’ve spent a year researching high-performing teams, and it was refreshing for Clutterbuck to challenge the concept of performance in a chapter of this book. A possible definition is ‘a team that consistently maintains and evolves a climate that encourages and achieves a level of effective collaboration that meets or exceeds stakeholder expectations’. But it isn’t perfect. Further questions include: is performance measured collectively? Who judges performance and how? Over what time period is performance measured? So, again the question is: how do you measure your team’s performance? What does high-performance look like for your particular team?
  4. Characteristics of high-performing teams – Hackman found five key criteria: 1) is it a team, with clear boundaries? 2) Does the team have compelling direction and purpose? 3) Does the team’s structure enable rather than impede teamwork? 4) Does it have the resources and external support to deliver? 5) Is competent coaching available to help members? Champoux et al share six of their own characteristics: high level of trust, high level of respect, commitment to a clear and common purpose, willingness and ability to manage conflict, focus on results, alignment of authority and accountability. Clutterbuck discusses other excellent team models, including examples from The Culture Code, and Five Dysfunctions of a Team, in a fascinating chapter that both supported, challenged, and inspired my thinking on what makes a team high performing.

Favourite moment

Clutterbuck supplies questionnaires throughout the book that could be given to team members in order to evaluate an area of the team’s work or performance.

Notable examples include the ‘Is this a real team?’ and the ‘Team Player’ questionnaires.

Favourite quote

This is a brilliant quote. Please excuse the length!

“Teams provide the bridges between individuals and the organisation; and between the need to make localised decisions and customise the requirement to adhere to large-scale plans and strategies. Teams also provide the focus of activity that meets people’s needs for socialisation. They establish the environment where people can share effort, reward and risk. They provide a sense of common identity, rooted in shared ideas, purpose, stories and attitudes. And they provide an opportunity for conversation, support, recognitions and other activities that make people feel motivated and raise self esteem.

Unfortunately, teams don’t always live up to their promise. The depressing evidence is that many, if not most, teams in the modern workplace do not harness their collective capability to anything like the extent that they could. Failures of structure and process, lack of purpose or commitment, internal conflict, and poor leadership sap the team’s potential to work at its optimal level. Some of this loss of performance is inevitable – a simple dynamic of team size, for example – but most is readily manageable, if team members and leaders are minded to reflect intelligently on how they operate and have the skills to do so.”

Reflect

The first part of the book, focusing on teams, gave me many chances to reflect on the teams research I’ve engaged with so far. Here are some questions you may find useful:

  • Would you class your team as a group or a team?
  • In your team, how would you define high performance?
  • If you could survey your team about their work, what would you include?

Read this if

You are a team leader

You are a coach

Support bookshops and buy it here

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni

Why I read it

I really enjoyed Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage, and have since read some of his other works, and listened to interviews and podcasts featuring his words of wisdom. Since beginning my research project on teams, I had to check out The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – a unique take on teamwork which begins with what usually goes wrong.

In summary

Lencioni is known for writing leadership fables – fictionalised accounts of workplaces that have a narrative and a moral and intellectual purpose to them. In this case, he creates the fable of Kathryn Petersen, a new CEO drafted in to rescue a failing company; throughout her time with DecisionTech, Kathryn employs the five key principles of the Dysfunctions model. I was initially skeptical about the fictionalised case study, and yet I found it insightful and fascinating, as the other characters reacted to Kathryn’s ideas – a range of employees both accepted and rejected her work – we see the best and worst of teams and human choices in the fable. At the end of the book, Lencioni outlines the model in a more objective, theoretical way – the combination of the two creates a tangible, easy-to-interpret team model.

Here is the model for the five dysfunctions of teams:

The book outlines the issues, how they stem from the foundational base of absence of trust, and then shows how Kathryn (who I feel like I know, now!) over comes each in turn with a set of practical strategies and conversations.

Key Takeaways

For this book reflection, I’ll go through each of the 5 dysfunctions in turn, outlining the trap, and then how to get free!

1.       Absence of trust: teams who lack trust tend to hide how they feel, mistakes, failures, and do not participate in debate. This can lead to holding back information, unproductive meetings, and not seeing the best in each other.

2.      Fear of conflict: a lack of trust leads to fear of conflict. Without a healthy culture of conflict, difficult issues are often avoided, and staff try to minimise any risk to their reputation or performance. This often leads to a lack of innovation, creativity, and collaboration. Meetings are dull, safe, and not worth having.

3.       Lack of commitment: when teams become conflict-avoidant, they begin to fear potential mistakes or failure. There are a couple of issues with this, beginning with a lack of desire to commit to ideas or project through the fear that it may not work out. Secondly, if an idea is put forward by a leader, if the team is low in trust and conflict, they might not commit simply because they didn’t get the chance to discuss or contribute towards it from the outset.

4.       Avoidance of accountability: If you were unable or unwilling to commit to an idea, the chances are you won’t give it your all. This could lead to lower standards. Secondly, if people still fear conflict and don’t trust one another, they are less likely to hold each other to account.

5.       Inattention to results: finally, if you haven’t been fully invested in something, and haven’t developed it as a group during its life cycle, it’s difficult to analyse the results in a meaningful way. Team members are much more likely to focus on their own, individual goals and results, rather than those of the wider team.

As the book sets out, there is a way to combat these dysfunctions and it all starts with trust. Leaders must model vulnerability, invite feedback, create a dynamic of psychological safety, decouple fear and failure, and change feedback culture. Staff must be encouraged to engage in conflict regarding tasks, processes, successes and failures. Meetings should be a compelling environment to debate, share, and engage with each other. Only then will the team be able to progress up the pyramid, and commit to ideas, hold each other accountable, and scrutinise how they can improve results as a team.

Favourite moment

Throughout the fable, Kathryn tries out something to enhance her team’s work. At almost every step, there is a combination of progress and pitfalls. The case study is wonderfully realistic – no leader can turn everyone’s mind around. Some will instantly buy into a way of working, others will take more time, and some never will. Lencioni isn’t promising a silver bullet, here. Kathryn is diligent, emotionally intelligent, and shrewd, yet she faces both success and failure along the journey.

Favourite quote

‘Kathryn paused for effect before delivering her next line. “Let me assure you that from now on, every meeting we have will be loaded with conflict. And they won’t be boring. And if there is nothing worth debating, then we won’t have a meeting.”’

Reflect

Here are some questions for you to reflect on regarding your own teams:

  • Do team members openly and readily disclose their opinions?
  • Are team meetings compelling and productive?
  • Does the team come to decisions quickly and avoid getting bogged down by consensus?
  • Do team members confront one another about their shortcomings?
  • Do team members sacrifice their own interests for the good of the team?

Read this if:

You are a team leader

You want to create effective team culture

Support bookshops and buy it here

Thriving Teams #7: Team Conflict

A study from the University of South Wales, quoted in Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code, revealed the startling impact that a ‘bad apple’ can have on a group. In a team activity, someone was planted, unknown to the rest of the group, with the mission of disrupting the team. The plant would undermine people’s ideas, look disinterested, or disrupt the work process. Compared with other groups who did not have this mole, the bad apple groups performed 30-40% less effectively. Even the teams that looked the best on paper were disrupted by this behaviour.

While ‘bad apples’ are hopefully rare, being perceived as a trouble maker is something most of us fear. We worry that if we challenge others or contradict an idea, that we will be seen as someone who finds problems instead of solutions; we worry that we will be associated with those who are like the bad apple described above. In my post on psychological safety, we discovered that one of the key pillars of a safe team is being able to voice views without fear of reprimand – it is essential for team members to feel safe to contribute, even if it conflicts with the views of others. And that is fundamentally different to being a bad apple who undermines the team and its goals.

This post explores what team conflict is, how it can be managed, and finishes with top tips for leaders to best utilise team conflict. And, if you associate the word conflict with something antagonistic, try to reframe that connotation; team conflict can range from mild disagreements of views about a task, to more personal disputes, with the latter being less frequent.

Put simply, team conflict is necessary, healthy, and your team’s secret weapon to improve processes, culture, and, in turn, results.

What is team conflict?

Team conflict is often categorised as either being task-based or relationship-based. Task-based conflict might involve disagreements over ideas and opinions related to the task, or how to complete the task, while relationship-based conflicts are more interpersonal, and may pertain to personality clashes or traits.

Although task conflict is widely believed to be beneficial, and relationship conflict  destructive, evidence does not always support this conclusion. One study develops the idea that the emotion regulation abilities of team members affect how they manage task and relationship conflict, both as individuals and as a team. Findings from a field study involving 39 teams (Zhang, et al 2012) support the argument that individuals skilled in emotion regulation can take advantage of task conflict to perform effectively and limit the negative impact of relationship conflict.

The question is, then, how do we facilitate our teams in developing their emotional regulation, and approach to managing team conflict?

Behfar et al. (2008) found that poorly performing teams tended to take an ad hoc approach to managing conflict, rarely correcting the root causes of conflict, whereas highly performing teams tended to develop conflict management strategies that promoted understanding, provided equitable treatment of all parties, and emphasised the concern with managing both task accomplishment and the interests of individual team members.

Sooner or later, all teams run into conflict. That is an inevitability, and teams should anticipate and prepare for how they will utilise this conflict. Teams who do not experience conflict, or say they do not, merely operate under an illusion, one in which individuals are likely to be holding back, perhaps to preserve a misplaced sense of harmony. These teams are  often amicable and friendly, but are unlikely to live up to their true potential.

Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a fascinating book that firstly creates a fable of a CEO taking over a company which is low on trust and high on dysfunction. Over the course of the fable, we find out the five dysfunctions of teams, which Lencioni then explains in depth at the end. The five dysfunctions, as highlighted in the graphic below, are: absence of trust, which leads to fear of conflict, which leads to lack of commitment, which leads to avoidance of accountability, and finally inattention to results. Put simply, if the team doesn’t have a culture of trust and open discussion at the outset, then collaboration and buy in is less likely to occur, leading to reduced commitment and effectiveness.

Have a look at the graphic, and reflect on your own teams. Is it possible that your team don’t feel confident enough to discuss and exchange ideas? Can you relate to the escalation of the pyramid? Having recently surveyed teams in both the education and corporate sectors, I can assure you that questions such as ‘We take time to find new ways to improve our team’s work processes’ or ‘it is easy to discuss difficult issues in this team’ often receive low agreement, and therefore every team should explore this area.

Source: Lencioni and Strategypunk,com

As a 2020 NASA (yes, NASA!) podcast discusses, ‘the goal is not to reduce conflict. The goal is to manage conflict. You nurture the kind of conflict that is going to lead to constructive criticism, and then you work towards minimizing the conflict that is going to create interpersonal issues amongst people.’

Suzanne Bell, a teams expert also contributing to the podcast, goes on to explain that team members need to be highly agreeable in nature, but qualifies that by discussing that agreeability is more about warmth, friendliness, tact, etc. which means that when conflicts do arise, they have the traits to ensure that the conflict does not become personal. So we use our agreeability not to avoid conflict, but to manage conflict successfully.

The role of a leader in managing conflict is vital. This can start by a team leader inviting feedback of their own performance, or inviting conflict and objective feedback to an idea they have presented. Modelling how to deal with conflict will help create team norms. Beyond this, managers and trainers may be able to help team members strengthen their emotion regulation skills so that they can deploy attention, reappraise the situation, and suppress the expression of negative feelings (Kanfer & Kantrowitz, 2002). In addition, managers and team leaders can encourage groups to collaborate, expressing their ideas openly and working to integrate them into viable solutions teams are apt to be well prepared to make use of task conflict to gather information, create alternative resolutions to issues, and implement solutions, thereby promoting group performance (Jiang, et al, 2012)

To resolve conflict, teammates need to participate in open and honest communication. This can occur only if they do not feel worried about being judged or ridiculed by others on the team, and can engage in difficult conversations about a problem. This is why psychological safety is a must in teamwork and why we keep coming back to this vital area of team life.

Five practical tips for managing conflict in your team

1.Conflict is part of the narrative and vision

Part of a team’s norms and behaviours should be the idea that conflict is part of what makes us a good team. ‘We will disagree on things, we will work together to iron out differences of opinion, and ultimately we will use our collective diversity as a strength. It’s important that when we disagree, we remember that it is not personal, that we are a team, and that we are working together for the best possible outcome’. This narrative should be ever present, especially when a team is working on a project or about to start a discussion.

2. Create the right team conditions

As mentioned earlier, a team that has high trust and psychological safety, will find it much easier to engage in task-related conflict. Establishing this team culture takes time and effort, but means that you will be able to work as a group to feel united by your differences. In other words, create the best possible team conditions before introducing and encouraging conflict.

3. Conflict framework and radical candour

An effective way to introduce healthy conflict into your team is to create an agreed framework for how this might work. Firstly, using the famous quadrant from best-selling book Radical Candor can help the team understand how we can care personally and challenge directly, along with avoiding the traps of the other less effective feedback methods. Building on this, the team could agree and anticipate a way to deal with conflict in meetings; this could be a script, some key phrases, or agreeing how we will behave and speak to each other during task-conflict. For example, ‘when we do disagree on something during a task we will…’ – this then becomes a shared agreement that can be referred back to.

4. Addressing conflict when it arises

When conflict does arrive, the team leader may need to facilitate it within the group, for example by allowing everyone an equal chance to give their views, by focusing on the task and its processes, exploring the rationale and vision for the tasks, and finally in helping team members to avoid blame or interpersonal conflict. Once the team sees that conflict is handled in a constructive, safe manner, they will be more willing to exchange views and openly debate and discuss their work.

5. Celebrate the conflict gains

Many of us don’t relish the thought of conflict with our colleagues; therefore, if a team does have some healthy, constructive discussions in a meeting, it’s important to celebrate that. We should embrace both the way that the team worked through a problem as a group, but also the benefits of doing that – for example, the improved process or idea that has arisen from the conflict. This frames conflict as something positive to experience together – the group becomes more united, and the results improve.

The bad apple experiment actually discovered something just as, if not more important. One team had a member who had the perfect counterbalance to the mole’s disruptive tactics. Each time they tried to disturb the group, the other team member, let’s call them the good apple, would defuse this with warmth, humour, and steering the group back on track. This team performed as well as the non-mole teams, thanks to the good apple’s healthy way of managing potential conflict.

The challenge for us as team members and leaders is how we can reframe team conflict and utilise it to unlock the team’s best thinking. By understanding conflict, and managing it constructively, we can increase our good apples and thrive together.

If you’d like to talk further about how I have applied surveys, psychological safety, or other methods to improve team conflict, please get in touch.

Thanks for reading

Sam

References

Behfar, K. J., Peterson, R. S., Mannix, E. A., & Trochim, W. M. (2008). The critical role of conflict resolution in teams: A close look at the links between conflict type, conflict management strategies, and team outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 170 –188. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1037/0021-9010.93.1.170

Coyle, D. (2018). The culture code: The secrets of highly successful groups. London

Jiang, J, Zhang X, Tjosvold, D (2012) Emotion regulation as a boundary condition of the relationship between team conflict and performance: A multi-level examination. Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 34, 714–734 (2013)

Kanfer, R., &Kantrowitz, T. M. (2002). Emotion regulation command and control of emotion in work life. In R. G. Lord, R. J Klimoski, & R. Kanfer (Eds.), Emotions in the workplace: Understanding the structure and role of emotions in organizationalbehavior (pp. 433–72). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Lacerenza, C. N., Marlow, S. L., Tannenbaum, S. I., & Salas, E. (2018). Team development interventions: Evidence-based approaches for improving teamwork. American Psychologist, 73(4), 517–531. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000295

Nasa (2020) Ep 175: The Science of Teams | NASA

Belonging, by Owen Eastwood

Why I read it: I recently connected with Rebecca Levett, a brilliant sports psychologist who also happens to be a distant relative, as we put together some thoughts for an event. During the conversation, Rebecca recommended Belonging; 3 minutes later, it was in my basket, and 48 hours later, it was perched atop my reading pile. Throughout my reading and thinking about teams, I’m most drawn to the sense of belonging, trust, and unity that can be galvanised in a group or workplace. I often wonder if it’s being adopted that sharpens that knife for me, or whether it’s just a natural curiosity; but what could be more important when establishing a team, than making sure it is a safe place that welcomes and looks after all in its care?

In Summary:

Owen Eastwood considers our ancestors throughout the book, reflecting upon how they understood our primal need to belong – to work together, to thrive in groups. Over the course of Belonging, he poignantly considers his own childhood, one in which his Maori heritage helped him to understand the past, and shape his identity. This book, then, provides reflections, research, traditions, anecdotes, and plenty of thoughtful musings, as Eastwood explores why we need to belong, and how we can achieve it. He asks thought-provoking questions of us, such as what is the optimal environment for this group to perform to their best? And it soon becomes apparent that the group will only thrive when they feel a sense of belonging.

Some books about culture and workplaces feel cynical. Belonging seemed heartfelt. Authentic. Eastwood has found deep connection with his past, present, and future, and uses this sense of perspective to aid others in doing the same. It’s a quotable book, but also stacked with practical ideas and a huge range of examples. One that will stay with me.

Key takeaways:

  1. Us Story: Eastwood spends significant time explaining the importance of storytelling, and particularly in creating an ‘Us story’. In other words, exploring who the group is, why they exist, and what their history is. Eastwood helps organisations and teams look at their past (ancestors, origins, legacies), then the future (where are we going, what do we need to do this) and finally the present (do we have a sense of identity that flows into everything we do). There are many examples in the book of how groups have created their own ‘us story’, but something of note is that we resonate more with everyday traits, actions, moments of synergy – ordinary people working hard to achieve excellence, rather than ‘superhero’ stories of individual brilliance.
  2. Belonging is not a fixed state: we constantly evaluate whether or not we belong. Environment, and behaviour of those around us, are key factors, and we require consistency to feel safe. Therefore we must make sure that we establish behavioural norms and values that are lived; gestures, speeches, or meetings won’t cut it to build belonging. If our people are constantly evaluating this, we must be consistent. ‘Once a strong culture is set, it’s essential that its foundations and relevance are regularly revisited by the team’.
  3. Belonging before performance: in our high-accountability working culture, sometimes workplaces don’t accept people until they have proved themselves. But this is a false economy: people will only thrive when they feel accepted and safe from the outset; we must offer true belonging before we have ‘proof’ of someone’s work or output.
  4. Extrinsic motivation weakens a team: while extrinsic motivation can help motivate individuals (usually in the short term) with things like money and status, this emphasis on the individual weakens the team. The team needs to have a strong sense of collective intrinsic motivation: a shared story and set of goals that everyone is striving to reach.
  5. A visual, shared vision: Eastwood proposes that visualisation can be a powerful tool; imaginging a successful future and believing in it. This can also become a literal vision, with displays, videos, and other visuals being utilised to constantly remind the team of how they belong, and the story they are part of. It’s vital to get input from others so that the vision is genuinely shared. This culminates in his description of a beautiful project he worked on with Ford as part of their desire to galvanise their Le Mans 24 team.
  6. Trust: the Seattle Seahawks motto is used to good effect: ‘years of building a relationship can be ended in seconds’. Eastwood discusses how trusting others reduces stress and gives us a sense of peace and belonging. But it’s a calculated risk: how do we know we can trust someone or a group? As well as warning of how delicate trust is, he outlines some ways to build trust: authenticity in what we say and do being the same; loyalty; competence; consistency in our behaviours and performance over time; adaptability; emotional availability.
  7. Control and Autonomy: Eastwood refers two of his own ancestral concepts: tapu and noa. Tapu describes aspects of life that are sacred, prescribed or non-negotiable – in a workplace, these could be values, or even protocols that everyone must abide by. By contrast, noa are areas of life that do not share these rules and allow more self expression. The idea is that to create true belonging, we should clearly understand what in our lives is tapu, and what is noa – the balance is important, as too far one way could be demotivating, controlling, or chaotic.

Favourite moment: sharing pain

We often share the good moments and results with our teams. We nailed this. We succeeded in that. So and so is doing great work in this. But do we discuss the bad? Do we share pain and learn from it?

Social Anthropologist, Harvey Whitehouse, says that sharing difficulties or pain can create ‘identify fusion’, and have two tangible benefits for the group. Firstly, the group creates more intense togetherness through the sharing or a mistake or a difficult moment; secondly, reflecting on the painful moments often creates practical lessons for the future.

A maori spiritual adviser adds that a healthy culture would take a moment of pain, and then ‘carve the story into our walls’, so that the current group, and future descendants, can learn from our experiences.

Favourite quote: ‘we lived it together’

I’ve written before about communication, candour, and conflict, and we know that it is vital for a group to disagree, or give each other feedback, in order to develop and grow. The question is always: how do we do this constructively, so that people give and receive feedback well, and can therefore act upon it?

Eastwood talks about being explicit that, within the team, feedback is part of what we do, how we help each other. It should be included in the ‘us story’ of the team so that there are tangible links to how those before us gave each other feedback.

He gives an example of how a sports team created a safe framework for how players could give eachother feedback with a type of script that might help begin the conversation. For example:

‘Hey, can we chat? Today I think I saw something out there (name it) which looked below the line we’ve set. I could be wrong, so just tell me if I am – we are just trying to grow together’.

The sentiment above says: we are a team, we have high expectations of each other, how can we improve together?

How does this link to my favourite quote?

One of the players from this team spoke about the benefits of being open with each other and how their culture began to change. He mentioned the importance of targeted, specific feedback and only focusing on the things that would ‘make the boat go faster’.

But the quote I liked most was his reflection on how the team grew. ‘What was important was that we lived it together’.

Key questions and reflections:

Do you feel you belong at your workplace?

How do you help others to feel a sense of belonging?

What is your workplace’s ‘Us story’ and how could you improve this?

How do you review the sense of belonging and trust at your workplace?

Read this if:

You lead teams

You want some ideas about how to create groups or teams where belonging, trust, and aligned vision are the core of what you do

Support bookshops and buy it here

Thriving Teams #6: The FA/UEFA Pro Licence and High-Performing Teams

‘Andy, I’m a big palace fan, well done mate’. I’d just arrived at St George’s Park, and got out of my small Hyundai alongside the Range Rover of Andy Johnson, a Crystal Palace legend and one of my all-time favourite players. He politely said ‘Thanks, mate’ in return, got in the car, and left my life as quickly as he entered it. Not my finest moment.  A quick message with a friend informed me that he’d just scored the winner in a legends competition called the Generations Cup, at which point I saw other Palace favourites Mile Jedinak and Jobi McAnuff leave, too. Fortunately, they were too distant for further self-induced humiliation.

And so, I arrived at St George’s Park feeling even more humble than when I’d been making the three-hour journey, earnestly listening to the High Performance book on Audible at 1.5x speed (you can’t tell the difference) to ensure I finished it by the time I returned to Surrey two days later.

I had been invited to the FA and England football HQ to observe the FA and UEFA’s Pro Licence course, the most elite football coaching qualification. Previous learners to have completed the course include Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, and this year’s cohort features similarly household names, who I won’t mention while they complete their studies.

During the course, learners are invited periodically to St George’s Park to complete various modules, while FA tutors also do workplace visits to track progress and offer guidance along the way. The Pro Licence is a hugely complex course which has been developed and honed expertly over the last ten years; rather than attempt to explore how the course runs, this post will outline the experience I had over two days with the team. The module that I’d been invited to was on ‘High-Performing Teams’, with my contact being a mentor of mine, Alistair Smith, who has worked in Education, Elite Sports, and with many other high-performing organisations as a consultant, speaker, and advisor.

Here are some of my key takeaways from two days of listening and discussing what football, and many other industries, can teach us about high-performing teams.

Clear vison and narrative at every turn

When you wander around St George’s Park, the vision for the England Football set up is clear: pride, inclusivity, passion, unity. The facilities are immaculate, the attention to detail is pinpoint, and the visuals are striking. There are endless photos commemorating iconic moments and people from England’s history as a footballing nation; these adorn corridors, staircases, and even the bedrooms in the on-site Hilton – I slept with David Beckham above my bed, posing triumphantly after THAT goal against Greece in 2001. There is a memorial half way along the long, winding drive from the main road that commemorates Arthur Wharton, the first black professional footballer, and other touches throughout the site that visually celebrate England’s footballing history.

When you step inside the corridors where the classrooms and learning areas are based, the walls are clad in photographs of the three lions and what that means today: men’s football, women’s football, youth football, disability football. The narrative is clear: we take pride in who we are, we all belong, and we are a family. Clearly, a lot of work has gone into creating a vision and set of values for England Football, one that encompasses every team in the set up – it is clear, over communicated, and impossible to miss.

The site is a hub for all things football, with youth games often played here, a pitch that emulates Wembley’s, and even a place for Premier League referees to get a massage on a Monday morning.

Codifying High-Performance

My Thriving Teams blog series is attempting to take an evidence-informed approach to how teams can succeed and become more than a sum of their parts. That, too, was the focus of this module of the Pro Licence.

So, what came out from two days of knowledge sharing and discussions?

The learners had been given some homework before we got together; they had to spend some time with an elite team outside of the football world, ask them about what made them successful, and then prepare a 20-minute presentation. During the course of a few hours, I listened and asked questions as ex-footballers and coaches told the group about elite RAF squadrons, The Savoy restaurants, rock group The Coral, and countless other examples. The takeaways were fascinating, but often similar.

These elite teams shared many things, usually a commitment to vision, purpose, small details, and a winning mentality – we do everything we can to be the best we can be. It became apparent that thousands of hours of preparation often went in to a process that was over in a matter of minutes or hours. Finally, I was perhaps surprised how often these elite teams relied upon systems. Clear, flawless systems. Systems that everyone knew and everyone relied upon. In the words of an RAF squadron leader: ‘no room for mavericks, the system soon sorts them out’. Ultimately, in high-pressure situations, it was protocols that allowed teams to function effortlessly, with role clarity and confidence.

Later in the day, the course delegates, with some facilitation by FA tutors, attempted to codify their learning so far. Here are the top aspects of high-performing teams that they recorded:

  • Vision – purpose, buy in, intrinsic motivation – shared goals
  • Culture – are the team psychologically safe but still committed to improvement? Is there genuine group belonging and trust?
  • Ambitious goals
  • How the team reviews, evaluates, debriefs
  • Team work and communication: role clarity, candour
  • Shared mental models and systems
  • Selflessness
  • Relentless drive to improve and grow
  • Identifying team responsibility and team accountability

During this module, three guest speakers were invited to pass on their own experiences and insights regarding high-performing groups. Emily Martin, a prison governor; Danny Kerry, formerly the Team GB Hockey chief for the men and women’s teams; and Damian Hughes, host of the High Performance Podcast.

Emily Martin was an inspirational speaker and was extremely reflective. A former social worker, Emily transferred into prison leadership, working her way up to Feltham as governor, turning the prison’s fortunes from catastrophic to thriving. During her talk, she recognised how many leaders have a diverse community in front of them, which is why it is, in her words, vital that we become ‘culturally congruent’ with our team – that we understand their story, so that we can lead them, and advocate for them, with the empathy and understanding that they deserve.

Emily also advocates a calm, humble leadership style. She spoke of the importance of being calm in the eye of pressure; this sense of calm allows your team to feel confident, but also allows you to help them find their own solutions to problems without the threat of a leaders’ sense of panic or tension. The words that I wrote down and underlined on my pad of paper were simple yet have come to mind every day since: ‘Confident, calm and assured in enacting; humble in reflection’. Emily promotes a sense of relational, trusting leadership where the leader sets the right temperature for the team, actively listens to them, and protects them at all costs.

Danny Kerry then came to speak to the group about how he has attempted to codify high performance in elite hockey. The mind-set that he wishes to imbue upon his teams is to see opportunity and threats in the same way: every challenge is something to embrace and to galvanise the team towards. Danny spent a lot of time discussing vision, culture, and team norms. He stressed the importance of gaining collective agreement over the team’s vision, so that members and leaders can refer back to this and use it as an anchor for tasks and decisions.

A tool that one could apply to any team when evaluating vision and culture is as follows:

  • Integration: what is shared? What is consistent?
  • Differentiation: what is contested?
  • Fragmentation: what is ambiguous?

This framework allows a team’s leadership to review organisational culture by identifying how well the team can articulate the overall vision. It’s important to understand which part of the vision is shared and consistent throughout the team; this then helps evaluate what might be ambiguous, as those things could soon become contested.

Danny also advocates mapping out the team’s vision, values and behaviours – for GB Hockey, this manifested in a display with key words pertaining to those. Then, crucially, the team checks in regularly: in the last few weeks, did we live our values and behaviours?

As far as team leadership goes, Danny’s model is similar to Emily’s: people will feel responsible for the environment and team if they are involved.

Over the course of the two days that I spent at St George’s Park, I felt immersed in an environment that was dedicated to a clear vision and purposeful narrative. Every individual that I spoke with was committed, humble, and eager to improve. I spent hours speaking with people who were fascinated in the teams research I had read and reflected upon; they sought to know more and understand more. When I presented to FA staff about the science behind team debriefs, they accepted the input with enthusiasm and humility, and peppered me with questions about all sorts of other research. This is an organisation with a clear culture of learning.

What I learnt more than anything, was that football is like many other industries: striving for improvement by focusing on people. There was more discussion of trust, belonging, autonomy and collaboration as the focal points for successful team work than I had anticipated; as a multi-million pound industry with unreasonable accountability measures (sounds familiar!), it was heartening to see staff and learners alike putting team communication and involvement at the heart of what they do.

Finally, it was a wonderful and inspiring experience to spend two days with the FA on their UEFA Pro Licence course, and it’s easy to see why this is the world-renowned course for coaches to complete on their journey to the highest level. If I’m invited back, I’ll improve my car-park chat and continue to learn more about how we can all be part of thriving teams.

Just like the research I have been disseminating, this experience was an invaluable one, and is contributing to my study of high-performing teams and cultures. As I continue with this research project, I have begun creating presentations and workshops on this area of work – please let me know if you’d like me to contribute to similar work that you may be undertaking with your teams.

Thriving Teams #5: Team Communication

Mother Theresa once said “I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together we can do great things.”, and there is a lot to unpack there, both on relational and spiritual levels. The ideal model for a team is just that: doing great things together, and being more than a sum of the individuals’ parts. John Amaechi goes further and describes teaming as a ‘selfless’ process where you willingly sacrifice personal gains for team productivity.

The more I ruminate on what makes a truly thriving team, the more I realise that a group of talented, even selfless team members, will not prevail unless the team climate is conducive to sharing, working together, and developing. After reading over 50 academic papers and 25 books on teams and leadership, communication within the team arises time and time again as a big factor in the team’s effectiveness. The word communication can sound generic, waffly, even a bit intangible, and yet if we take an evidence-informed approach to unpicking team communication, there are many nuanced aspects we can improve.

It’s important that I reiterate the terms of this research project. This isn’t necessarily a leadership blog, or about how to lead an organisation. The research I have assimilated pertains to how teams perform: not THE team, but the teams within the team, if you like. The organisation as a whole may have its own set of values and culture set by the leadership team, and yet every team within the organisation will have their own ways of working. What I want to explore is how each team leader can maximise the effectiveness of their team.

On that note, I repeat that communication may seem an obvious, generic factor to consider. But we cannot assume that every team within an organisation has a healthy culture of communication and conflict management. Staff members who perform well in one team, may perform less effectively in a team where communication, familiarity, and conflict have not been managed well.

Team Communication

Given that we spend most of our day communicating, it can be easy to overlook how we might dedicate more time and thought to improving team communication. Similarly, it’s easy to overestimate how effective communication is within our team; if you meet regularly and speak a lot, then what is there to improve?

Let’s begin with a short literature review of research regarding team communication. Firstly, communication frequency is not a proxy for effectiveness. Communication quality, you won’t be shocked to read, is far more important than how often it happens. Too much noise can mitigate, rather than enhance, performance (Marks, et al, 2000).

Interestingly, Pentland (2012) conducted a study that found that the best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meetings. Energy is measured by the number of, and nature of, exchanges among team members, while engagement is about the way team members communicate between themselves, e.g. engagements between members a and b, a and c, and b and c. Other defining characteristics of successful teams’ communication included: everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure; members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic; members connect directly with one another – not just the team leader; members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back.

The same study found that social time turns out to be deeply critical for team performance, accounting for more than 50% of positive changes in communication patterns in the call centre studies. In this particular research, the call centre CEO was so encouraged by the results, that he began to put all staff on similar break patterns, promoting team cohesion and communication and sacrificing call centre handling time so that all staff could be together.

Building on the notion of team energy and engagement is the concept of familiarity, defined as the level of knowledge team members hold about one another. Robust evidence suggests that familiar teams outperform unfamiliar teams on a variety of tasks (Salas et al, 2018). As team familiarity increases, team communication becomes more strongly related to team performance, due to team processes and shared mental models becoming more efficient and embedded.

While there is an argument to focus on domain-specific knowledge when it comes to the content of what teams seek to learn and understand, high-performing teams must excel at generic communication skills. A study into surgical teams showed that the more critical needs of the team were communication related: mutual monitoring skills, being alert for potential mistakes, speaking up regardless of seniority, communicating using standard language, and ensuring messages are accurately received.

In summary, research shows that high-quality communication may clarify information related to the task, ensure team members are on the same page, and mitigate any overlap in efforts geared towards task completion, providing clarity and certainty.

Communication types

So, the evidence suggests that team communication must be high quality, and that team energy, engagement, and familiarity all contribute to improve team communication and performance. The next question, then, is what does evidence say about the most effective types of communication?

Given that communication can be defined as an exchange of information, it seems reasonable that the evidence points at information sharing, knowledge sharing, and openness of communication as being some of the most effective forms of communication. In fact, information elaboration demonstrates a stronger relationship with performance than all other communication measures, with knowledge sharing also exhibiting stronger relationships with performance than several other types of communication. Similarly, openness of communication is more strongly related to performance than frequency. Openness encompasses all aspects of communication that can be linked to quality, as it entails whether team members can easily communicate with others (Salas et al, 2018).

Knowledge sharing is the process where individuals mutually exchange their knowledge and jointly create new knowledge. This implies that every knowledge sharing behaviour consists of both bringing knowledge and collecting knowledge, which is an essential part of team culture – the open exchange of expertise and knowledge. Not only does that improve the team’s shared knowledge, but also fosters an open attitude to sharing, reciprocation, and trust. Teammates who have unique expertise should share the information that is exclusively known to them that will nbe critical for the team’s effort; it must be clear and understandable, avoiding jargon (Ervin et al, 2018). Teams who have a culture of information and knowledge sharing are able to adapt quickly and are more flexible or open toward each other’s input, exhibiting higher levels of performance (Hoogeboom, 2019).

Putting the evidence into practice – practical advice for team leaders!

Organisations should ensure that teams, and their leaders, understand the impact that effective communication has on performance. This should include setting aside time for the team to talk with one another to increase familiarity, shared mental models, to clarify any misunderstandings and to discuss any communication issues or potential conflict.

Here are six tips to turn the team-communication evidence into practice:

  1. Information elaboration: the team leader must decide how to best impart information about roles and tasks to team members, who must understand what is expected of them. We already know that information elaboration links to team performance, but it is worth asking your team how they want that information conveyed. Meetings, email? 1:1 drop ins? Despite many adopting the adage “if you can send it in an email, don’t have a meeting”, Kat Howard (2020) warns against this medium: ‘there is a vast sense of unfulfillment in any text-based conversation and this can stem from either the way in which email is used or just the desire for fewer emails’. My advice is to agree with your team about how and when information will be conveyed. For example, every Thursday afternoon I send one of my teams a bulletin of key information for the following week, a routine that we decided would work well, and complements our fortnightly in-person meetings.
  2. Knowledge sharing: being part of a team that has a genuine culture of learning and development is galvanising and purposeful. This can be furthered by teams who exchange their knowledge for the benefit of the team. One strategy is to dedicate meeting and team time to the sharing of knowledge and expertise, allowing team knowledge to grow, shared mental models to be created leading to greater team efficiency, as well as the feeling among team members that they are learning and growing together, improving team cohesion and morale. This could include beginning meetings by asking a team member to share some expertise or something they have researched; create a rota, give everyone an opportunity, and observe the multiple effects of a team who regularly share their knowledge. Celebrate and give platforms to the expertise across your team.
  3. Building energy and engagement: we read earlier how important energy and engagement is for teams, outside of a formal meeting setting. These foundations can be laid, in my experience, through exercises that build belonging and trust. Dan Cable (2018) suggests that a powerful method to build relatedness and belonging within a team is to ask each person when they are at their best. Which circumstances bring out the best version of themselves? It’s a fascinating question. The rationale is, that by sharing this self-reflection, your shared vulnerability helps to bond the team, but also that each member’s response helps the team to understand what each other look like when they are truly thriving. I also advocate building a team culture where laughter, shared vulnerability, and engagement with each other’s lives will pay off in spades when it comes to future productivity and cohesion. As Kim Scott states in Radical Candor, for a team to achieve profound growth and change, they must care personally and challenge directly.
  4. Open, honest communication: evidence informs us that openness is a vital characteristic for team members to possess, so how can we foster this within our teams? Leaders can take the initiative by inviting feedback, providing honest communication with their team, and by facilitating open dialogue within team meetings. As long as parameters are set so that the team understands how to have open, constructive conversations, this will become an essential, energising part of your team’s culture. The key question for me as a team leader is: does every member of my team feel comfortable communicating, and being honest with, every other member, including the leader?
  5. Fostering genuine team building and conversation: Pentland’s research found that, in high-performing teams, team members need to communicate with other team members. Consider setting up small groups for projects or a discussion within meetings; foster their communication, collaboration and trust. Keep rotating these small groups so that the familiarity among all team members is high.
  6. Over communicate your listening: whether you’re a team leader or member, Dan Coyle finds in The Culture Code (2018), that the best cultures are full of people who listen intently – no, avidly. Their heads are forward, eyebrows raised, bodies still – they are listening with enthusiasm, which opens up a clear path of open communication. Team leaders can model this, encourage this, and keep referring back to how, on this team, we actively listen and engage because we are unique group who benefits from each other’s ideas, input, and expertise.

As Mary Myatt writes in High Challenge, Low Threat (2016), ‘allowing everyone’s voice to be heard is a vehicle for great messages to be broadcast. Too often, good work and appreciation are not given the platform on which to be celebrated’. I would reiterate, here, that every team in an organisation needs to promote those values – one team’s culture won’t transfer to another’s, so every team must establish the right culture for communication. I could go from an English department meeting to a coaching team meeting and find different values, forms of communication, and approaches to managing conflict.

Every leader should think carefully about how they and their team communicate, and begin to apply some of the evidence-informed approaches discussed in this post. I’ll make the assumption that your team are working extremely hard, that they are passionate, and good at their roles; yet that effectiveness as a team can only be harnessed with clear, open, precise communication across the whole team.

Next time we’ll look at how Thriving Teams welcome and manage conflict.

Thanks for reading

Sam

References:

Cable, D (2018) Alive At Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do. HBR Press, Boston.

Coyle, D (2018) The Culture Code. Penguin Random House, London.

Ervin, J. N., Kahn, J. M., Cohen, T. R., & Weingart, L. R. (2018). Teamwork in the intensive care unit. American Psychologist, 73, 468 – 477. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000247

Hoogeboom, A.M.G. and Wilderom, C.P.M. (2019). A Complex Adaptive Systems Approach to Real-Life Team Interaction Patterns, Task Context, Information Sharing and Effectiveness. Group & Organisation Management, Vol 45 (1), 1-41.

Howard, K (2020) Stop Talking About Wellbeing. John Catt, Woodbridge.

Marks, et al (2000) Performance implications of leader briefings and team-interaction training for team adaptation to novel environments. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85, 971.

Myatt, M (2016) High Challenge, Low Threat. John Catt, Woodbridge.

Pentland, A (2012) The New Science of Building Great Teams. Accessed 21st February 2022. The New Science of Building Great Teams (hbr.org)

Shannon L. Marlow, Christina N. Lacerenza, Jensine Paoletti, C. Shawn Burke, Eduardo Salas (2018) Does team communication represent a one-size-fits-all approach?: A meta-analysis of team communication and performance. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Volume 144, Pages 145-170,

Thanks for the Feedback, by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen

Why I read it:

As part of the Thriving Teams research project that I am midway through, the importance of communication and constructive conflict keeps shining through in research and studies that I have read. After reading Radical Candor, which focuses on the art of giving feedback well in order to improve the performance of those around you, Thanks for the Feedback seemed like a logical next step, given that it switches the focus to the receiver.

In Summary:

Most books on feedback and managing conversations focus on the initiator, or giver of the feedback; Radical Candor, is, of course, a brilliant example of a book that can help you improve the way you challenge yet care for your team. However, Thanks for the Feedback focuses on the receiver of the feedback. How do we react to feedback? What can we be aware of, and what can we do, in order to make sure the feedback is something we can accept and act upon? These are the key questions that are addressed in Thanks for the Feedback – a truly enlightening study of how to receive different types of feedback so that it has the desired intention: to help us to grow and improve.

In the words of the authors: ‘our primary purpose is to take an honest look at why receiving feedback is hard, and to provide a framework and some tools that can help you metabolise challenging information and use it to fuel insight and growth.’

Key Takeaways:

  1. Feedback comes in three forms: Appreciation, coaching, and evaluation. Appreciation covers gratitude and praise; coaching gives you pointers about how to improve performance; evaluation rates, ranks, and compares your performance to show where you stand. To understand what type of feedback we are being given, we can reflect on these three types, and gain greater clarity and precision by asking for the type of feedback you want,  even if that means negotiating with the feedback giver over the type they were hoping to give vs what you want.
  2. Three triggers that can be barriers to receiving feedback: Truth triggers: The content of the feedback is wrong, unfair, or unhelpful. We can get triggered when we feel the content of the feedback isn’t right. Relationship triggers: we dismiss the feedback from the specific person giving it, perhaps because of our relationship with them or view of them, rather than considering the content of the feedback. Identity triggers: the feedback we receive strikes our identity, and sense of who we are, leading us to become threatened. For each of these triggers, the authors provide a range of solutions to help remove the barriers.
  3. The benefits of receiving feedback well: probably self explanatory, but worth reminding ourselves: your relationships become richer; you learn and improve; colleagues find it more enjoyable to work with you; it is easier for you to work with others to solve problems; you model the way for others to receive feedback well.
  4. Being self aware when we receive feedback: the book is excellent at providing scenarios about what you may think and do when receiving feedback, including some undesirable responses! The acknowledgement of these likely outcomes then leads to suggestions of how to transform them into something productive. One example is the recognition of what your ‘internal voice’ may say to you during feedback, and how to harness it for good.
  5. We can play an active role in how we receive feedback: Thanks for the Feedback provides a conversation framework that most feedback conversations fall into: Open, Body, Close. For each section, the authors give likely processes and scenarios, as well as questions for the receiver to ask to make the conversation as productive as possible. The whole process encourages us to not only be aware of how we will feel during the feedback conversation, but also prompts us to ask certain questions for clarity, and methods to question, query or disagree – without being / seeming defensive or dismissive. The proposals are there to help us understand, embrace, and employ the feedback to help our growth, and not merely to put a brave face on it publicly!
  6. Assessing what’s relevant: feedback can come in many forms; perhaps the conversation is solely about this piece of feedback, or perhaps feedback is sandwiched in between other topics. This book aids the reader figure out what their feedback really means; to objectively assess how the feedback could be of worth, and how it helps us see the way we are and to focus on the most important next step: how to act upon it, or not. The awareness one gains from reading the book, and understanding more about what types of feedback we are likely to accept or reject, is invaluable for future conversations.

Favourite quote

The book is packed with questions one can ask to elicit precise, useful feedback, but here are a few of my favourites:

  • What’s one thing you see me doing that gets in my way?
  • What’s one thing I could work on?
  • What’s one thing I could change that would make a difference to you?

Read this if:

You are a leader wishing to gain awareness of how you give and receive feedback

You want to understand how and why you feel certain ways when being given feedback, and want to seek out tools to combat your usual responses so that the feedback becomes useful and productive

Buy the book here