Hidden Potential, by Adam Grant

I love Adam Grant’s work. An organisational psychologist by trade, Grant explores motivation, teams, and potential, among many other things. In his book Think Again (blog here), he discusses how we tend to retreat to a bunker with our views and defend them till the end. He explores how we should think more objectively, seek a range of views, and proactively try to disprove our own assumptions.

Grant’s work mixes research, anecdotes, and beautiful prose, which makes it accessible for any reader, while providing further research to explore if you want a bit more. I was delighted when Hidden Potential reached the top of my reading list for all these reasons.

The opening gambit:

When considering mastery, learning, and high performance, we need to look beyond both ‘talent’ and the 10,000 hours of practice rule and understand that ‘what any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with appropriate conditions of learning’.

‘In a world obsessed with innate talent, we assume the people with the most promise are the ones who stand out right away. But high achievers vary dramatically in their initial aptitudes. If we judge people only by what they can do on day one, their potential remains hidden.’

The book has so many takeaways that are applicable to leaders, teachers, or anyone looking to improve their outlook or performance with a skill or hobby. I’ve tried to cover the key things that I found useful, both summarising them and using Grant’s own words.

Cognitive ability vs character

Evidence shows that although novices learn chess (in this particular study) faster if they’re smarter, intelligence becomes nearly irrelevant in predicting the performance of advanced players. In chess, the early advantages of cognitive skills dissipate over time. On average, it takes over 20,000 hours of practice to become a chess master, and over 30,000 to reach grandmaster. To keep improving, you need proactivity, discipline, and determination to study old games and new strategies. This principle could be replicated across many other sectors or processes: our starting point does not need to dictate our future progress.

One study decided to explore whether training in cognitive processes and skills, or character skills, would have more of an impact on performance. They took entrepreneurs, and divided them in two: half did cognitive skills training, for example the nuts and bolts of running a business (HR, finance training, etc.), while the other half did character training, e.g. discipline, determination, etc and putting those qualities into action. The character training entrepreneurs saw their profits grow by 30% in the next two years, nearly triple the cognitive skills group.

Grant argues that these have been called ‘soft skills’, in a derogatory sense, for too long. The initial term came from the military, where army psychologists tasked with training troops, divided it into ‘hard skills’, which involved with working with physically hard things like ammunition or tanks, and then soft skills, which were job-related skills that didn’t involved interaction with machines. By this definition, even finance is a soft skill. A few years later, the psychologists recommended discontinuing these terms, as it made character skills, or soft skills, sound inferior or weak, whereas in fact they turned out to be the greatest source of strength.

In other words, a big chunk of Hidden Potential is dedicated to research and anecdotes about the power of character. Resources, knowledge, and skills are important, of course, but the evidence suggests that attitude and character can be honed and turn into your performance super power.

Making mistakes (deliberately!)

Grant spends a lot of time discussing how we are often averse to discomfort when we are learning or working on something. Making mistakes or experiencing a setback can make us feel vulnerable and less likely to practice or a try again.

But learning happens when you put yourself in a position where you can practice and make mistakes in a low-stakes fashion. Studies and anecdotes mentioned in Hidden Potential look at language learning in particular, noting that people often try to acquire a body of knowledge in a field, before they feel confident enough to start applying it. But you can code from day one, speak from day one, coach from day one. Your comfort grows as you practice, not just when you learn knowledge.

So rather than waiting till you know 1000 words on Duo Lingo, start speaking Spanish immediately in all sorts of contexts – make mistakes, learn from them, and ditch your inhibitions. Think about something you are mastering at the moment – how could you embrace this principle?

Human sponges

The best learners are like sponges, curiously hoovering up information, ideas, observations. But social scientists look beyond curiosity, noting that ‘absorptive capacity’ is the key trait: the ability to recognise, value, assimilate, and apply new information. It hinges on two key habits: 1) how you acquire information (do you react to new info, or proactively seek it out) and 2) do you link this new information to the goals you are pursuing, and apply the information to help you move towards those.

Being a sponge, then, is about consistently taking the initiative to expand and adapt yourself, even when circumstances go against you. Another key element is determining which information to absorb and which to filter out. Sometimes we become comfortable, perhaps complacent with our work or something we are learning, but let’s think about how we can be sponge like and relentlessly pursue more information to apply to our practice.

Advice vs feedback

Instead of seeking feedback, Grant recommends asking for advice. He says feedback often tends to focus on how you did last time, but advice shifts the focus to next time. In experiments, this shift provided more specific suggestions and more constructive input.

Getting unstuck

The big difference between people who learn, grow, and perform well, and those who do not, often comes down to how they respond to adversity.

A rut is not a sign that you’ve tanked; a plateau does not mean you’ve peaked. When we’re stuck, it’s time to reevaluate the path and thinking objectively about what we can do next. Progress rarely happens in a straight line; it typically unfolds in loops.

As Grant says: ‘skills don’t grow at a steady pace. Improving them is like driving up a mountain – as we climb, the road gets steeper, and our gains get smaller. For us, sometimes performance stagnates before it improves again. This has been evidenced in many areas, from Tetris players to golf, to memorising facts. Sometimes when we reach a dead end, we have to back down the mountain a little and find a different path back up.’

Cognitive Scientists Wayne Gray and John Lindstedt discuss how scrapping an initial plan and trying out a new one is tricky because of the decline in performance. ‘Performance suffers as new methods are being invented, tested, rejected, or accepted. We ascend after the ‘implementation of a successful new method, to surpass prior levels of achievement’.

Sometimes we find it hard to accept that the perfect map doesn’t exist.

Group learning

There is a beautiful anecdote that features throughout the book, about the ‘Golden 13’ (see more here) in 1944, the first black officers in the US Navy, who had to train in a segregated area, and stayed up late together studying as a group to pass their exams. When learning and revising, they each decided to specialise in an area of training, and then teach the others, taking it in turns. They all wanted to succeed, so they worked together. This group banded together in difficult circumstances to support each other, teach each other, have high expectations of each other, and be accountable to one another to pass their tests.

Grant says that considerable research shows that studying with knowledgeable colleagues is good for growth. From the intelligence agencies, to medical schools, studies show that groups who teach and learn together outperform others. He cites 16 meta-analyses which show that students who were randomly assigned to tutor their peers ended up achieving higher scores in the material they were ‘teaching’. Researchers concluded that when tutoring others, they not only got to know the material better, but developed more positive attitudes towards the subject matter.

None of this is surprising to us as teachers. We remember things better after recalling them, we create layered understanding when we think of ways to explain things and how we might explore misconceptions. But in other areas of our lives, it helps to embrace the discomfort of trying to teach or explain things before even we have reached mastery. Interestingly, even being told you’re going to teach something is enough to boost your learning.

High expectations = high effort and performance

Grant cites research showing that high expectations lead to higher performance. When we are underestimated, it can limit our effort and growth, known as the golem effect. When people tell us we can do a great job, we tend to rise to it. But studies have also shown that we evaluate the person who holds the expectations of us to determine how credible they are. For example, if we perceive someone to be ignorant and they underestimate us, we will likely work hard to prove them wrong, whereas if we perceive them to be competent, we may take their low expectations seriously, and it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Teams and collective intelligence:

‘Unlocking the potential in groups requires leadership practices, team processes, and systems that harness the capabilities and contributions of all members. The best teams aren’t the ones with the best thinkers, they unearth and use the best thinking from everyone’.

Collective Intelligence is a group’s capacity for a group to solve problems together. It’s easy to assume that the IQ, or knowledge, of the group, might be key to success. But in a meta-analysis of 22 studies, researchers found that collective intelligence depends less on people’s cognitive skills, and more on their prosocial skills. The best teams had team players, those who figured out what the group needed, and enlisted everyone’s contribution.

Being pro social, or a team player, doesn’t mean that people are chatty, warm, and like ice breakers. They glue the team together through recognising that they need one another to succeed in their task, and through this, they establish a common identity and then stick together to achieve their goals. Pro social team members, who involve others, help create teams who invest in this common cause.

Favourite quote:

‘Personality is not your destiny – it’s your tendency. Character skills enable you to transcend that tendency to be true to your principles. It’s not about the traits you have, it’s what you decide to do with them.’

Favourite moment:

One study showed that people who had side hustles, or even serious hobbies, that they did in their evenings, performed better the next day in their regular jobs. The motivation benefits outweighed any distraction costs, and their confidence increased at work.

I’ve often wrestled with my conscience about how my work aligns with the research, reading, writing, and the projects I’ve undertaken on high-performing teams. I’ve always felt that the extra hours I put in on these things not only contributes to my learning and competence back at my day job, but also helps me to feel fulfilled and motivated.

Leaders should encourage and support those in their teams when it comes to putting their energy into projects or other things that help them to thrive.

Thanks for reading! Go buy it here

How dysfunctional is your team?

My researchED Warrington talk, 2024

When we think of a dysfunctional team, it’s tempting to conjure an image of a group of people arguing, scowling, raising their voices or storming out of rooms. Overt dislike, perhaps. Toxic leadership with malignant approaches to accountability, maybe. And yes, those things are bad. But the truth is, most dysfunctional teams don’t look anything like that. It would be much more straightforward if they did!

One of the most common forms of team dysfunction lies beneath the surface of warm, friendly, affable teams. There might be mid-meeting smiles. Sharing of cake. Discussions about family, hobbies, etc. And, of course, those things are important. But the aim of a team should be to utilise the combined brain power in the room to create ideas, processes, products, that an individual alone wouldn’t be capable of. They should share lively discussion, debate, and will inevitably disagree at times on the path to finding the best solution for that piece of work. If a team places comfort over ambition and challenge, then it won’t get much done. And, in my experience, a friendly meeting atmosphere often (not always) projects good vibes superficially, but in fact belies dysfunction that lurks beneath.

But, nothing about teamwork is simple, and I don’t wish to oversimplify. There are many features of dysfunctional teams, so let’s unpick that further.

On the 2nd March I delivered a talk at researched Warrington and decided to pick four areas of team dysfunction that one could identity and overcome.

To begin with, I discussed the Lego Movie (no apologies!), in which the poor Lego people are ignorantly going about their lives singing that ‘everything is awesome when you’re part of a team’. To be fair, it looks great. Everyone follows the systems in total harmony, all day every day. The height of efficiency. But eventually the protagonist realises that he has no purpose, no why, no individuality – no one has explained what’s going on or why they work the way they do – they are just expected to follow blindly. What appeared to be systematic and efficient, actually turns out to be oppressive and lacking any real teamwork.

  1. Lack of clarity: teams need to know exactly where they stand and what they are working for and towards. There should be crystal-clear clarity for the team’s values, goals, processes, vision, and many other things. Lack of clarity leads to uncertainty, inconsistency, and potentially lack of commitment. Therefore, we have to regularly articulate and review all aspects of the team’s ethos and work so that everyone understands and is still aligned with it all.
  2. Lack of trust: according to Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, this is where it all starts to go wrong! If we don’t trust those around us, we are less likely to involve ourselves in team discussion and debate. We won’t contribute our true views or experience. That’s the kryptonite in teamwork – if team members aren’t openly sharing, we have squandered the reason and potential for even meeting as a team to begin with. Teams must build belonging, psychological safety, and create actual mechanisms within and between meetings for staff to contribute in a safe setting. It takes time!
  3. Lack of evaluation and voice: some teams launch things in September and then review how it’s going in June. Clearly, this is a flawed approach. Teams should build in regular debriefing opportunities that explore processes and that aren’t linked to (emotive) outcomes or data. Try surveys or in-meeting feedback so that things don’t fester – we need to ask big questions to 1) understand how the team feel and 2) to tweak things as we go along.
  4. Lack of accountability: in Intelligent Accountability, David Didau talks about how the school system in the UK, with its various accountability measures, encourages people to blame, hide mistakes, and be put under pressure. Indeed, some schools and workplaces use accountability as a stick. But many other teams have no accountability at all. We need to create purposeful accountability so that everyone is motivated around a common cause, without being pressured or mistreated when things go awry.

Of course, these are just four element of team dysfunction, discussed briefly. If I was going to ask a team about its work, I’d begin by asking about what members think of the team’s vision, purpose, and values, and then ask them how that permeates their actual work. I’d ask how they decide and create things, and what sorts of things get done in meetings. I’d ask what and how they learn and grow as a group, and again how that feeds back into their work.

Please find a PDF version of my presentation here:

dysfunctional-teams-s-cromeDownload

If you’d like to learn more about what I think of teams, and a whole load of research about how to improve them, check out my book: The Power of Teams

A huge thank you to everyone who organised, and attended, researchED Warrington 2024!

Sam

researchED National Conference 2023 – The Power of Teams

The National conference was always going to be special for me this year. John Catt and I worked out that, with my book draft submitted in spring, the release date would likely occur around this time. Sure enough, six months later, I had a very happy book launch day in and around the researchED National conference.

The conference was absolutely NOT all about my book. But the book launch brought to the fore some of my favourite things about these conferences, and the (on the whole!) eduTwitter community.

Connection: in the last 12 months, I have made lots of great connections with educators. Some of these are passing conversations at conferences, others turn into strong friendships and mutual support. In-person conferences have the power to bring people together to share, discuss, learn. It’s powerful. The night before, I was lucky enough to see many amazing people for a pre-conference dinner, although that was possibly less erudite than the following day.

Networks: there are growing networks popping up and doing incredible work. Subject-specific, pastoral, MAT-wide, cognitive science… the list could go on. Events like this give people a chance to engage in conversations that might help them find a network to connect with. It’s about so much more than just the day of the conference!

Support and encouragement: all of us share our work with a sense of trepidation and humility. At events like researchED, presenters are encouraged with warmth and energy. Everyone wants others to thrive and succeed. On a personal note, I was overwhelmed by well wishers on Saturday. From my close friends Nikki and Lekha ordering a special cake, to people I don’t know coming for a chat during the day (I’m the tall one, in case you want to say hello!), it was wonderful to see how supportive everyone was. I think that’s a universal experience at this type of event (other conferences, too, of course!

Me with the cake from Lekha Sharma and Nikki Sullivan – annotation courtesy Brad Busch

Range of expertise: the scale and diversity of sessions was incredible. You could have learnt about hundreds of different things on Saturday. There was everything. Where else do you have such a range of knowledge and experiences at your finger tips. I went to Sarah Cottingham’s talk and revelled in how much I still don’t know (though she did a brilliant job at teaching me a few things.

With the amazing Sam Gibbs – first person I signed a book for!

Thank you to those who came to my session on The Power of Teams. And those who didn’t, who’d like to find out more.

This was a quote that I read to my audience that I absolutely love – this is one step to achieving the real potential of your teams.

‘The best teams invest a tremendous amount of time and effort exploring, shaping, and agreeing on a purpose that belongs to them both collectively and individually. This purposing activity continues throughout the life of the team. By contrast, failed teams rarely develop a common purpose. For whatever reason – an insufficient focus on performance, lack of effort, poor leadership – they do not coalesce around a challenging aspiration.’

Katzenbach and Smith – The Discipline of Teams

Please get in touch if you have any questions, and thank you for your support.

Sam

researchED S CromeDownload

The sun’s out! Let’s evaluate everything!

The summer term is often when the most evaluation occurs across our school teams. Planning afternoons, away days, and the ever-elusive ‘gained time’ prompt us to consider what we’ve been working on this year. The most effective teams will evaluate and debrief throughout the year, of course, ensuring that it is the norm to review practice and make improvements, and not wait for a certain interval to make a change.

But it’s inevitable that in the summer we turn our attention to the next academic year. Every team in the school should celebrate successes, strive to improve, and spend some time this term evaluating how they can grow. So, how should we effectively evaluate the work in our teams?

What:

Team debriefs are most effective when they do not just react to outcomes, but purposefully review various areas of the team’s work. Here are some ‘whats’ that you could evaluate:

Vision and values – if your team has a certain sets of values, or a clear vision for its work that year, then you can reflect on how evident and purposeful those have been to the team’s work. Empty values or a long-forgotten vision are not serving the team, so key questions might be: what are our values / vision, if those didn’t stick? And how can we make these a tangible part of our work? Is the team able to articulate the values and vision?

What were we aiming for? If you did this last year, or had a plan for improvement this year, it’s time to see how you did. Hopefully(!) the team reflected on its goals throughout the year, but, if this is the first time they are resurfacing, discuss with the team how they went and what the barriers were to meeting those goals. What can we learn for next year about the way we set, approach, and review our goals?

Processes – Tannenbaum et al’s (2013) research shows that effective debriefing (summarised here)  has many factors, but one of them is reviewing processes and not outcomes. They recommend scheduling debriefs well in advance so that they are not associated with a win or a loss, to use a sporting reference. So, reflect on which processes need a tune up and conduct debriefs that evaluate the way the team is working, and not on its outcomes alone.

Consistency – you might have agreed team processes earlier in the year, and your team members then executed the plan; but how consistent are the approaches across the team? Is the marking consistent and based upon the principles the team co-agreed? Is the behaviour policy used the same by all in the team? Use scenarios and examples to work out if you are as consistent as you should be.

What’s next? Of course, a mid or end-of-year evaluation process should also focus on what’s coming up next. What should the team prioritise for next year? Where in its journey is the team’s work currently sitting, and what needs to come next to further the team’s effectiveness?

Snagging list –  Adam Robbins (2021) recommends keeping a ‘snagging list’, a shared document which details issues or challenges that crop up throughout the year so that we don’t wait for a year to pass by and then forget or misrepresent things that have occurred. Create a shared, live list that team members that can add to at will, and add to meeting agendas so that they are regularly discussed and acted upon. This also removes the huge build-up of issues over time which then leave the team confused as to where to begin.

How:

I like to use a variety of methods to gather information, interrogate the feedback I receive, and give a voice to staff on the team.

Surveys – nothing fancy, just use Google or Microsoft to create a survey for your team. Try to make these specific and about something you’ve covered recently. Don’t make the scope too broad. Say we’ve just had a department meeting about diversity in our curriculum, and a few threads came from that meeting. Your survey could have 2-3 very targeted questions for the team to answer, looking at what they think of our current provision, and what they would do / recommend to change this in the future. This gives all staff a voice and builds on something targeted that you have already raised and discussed. Then, show the staff what the feedback was and what prompts it has given you, before you narrow down the trends into a certain direction.

Live discussion – if you are going to use people’s time by gathering them together, try to make the most of the collective brainpower in the room by having lively discussions about what the team is evaluating. See the climate subheading next if this sounds like a difficult thing for your team to implement well at this stage. Both Andy Buck and Doug Lemov have written about methods to manage these meetings in my upcoming book, The Power of Teams, but, in a nutshell, try to give time in the meeting for: thinking time, uninterrupted individual feedback, and discussion in pairs or small groups before building up to the wider team. There should be a systematic method for everyone to have their say.

1:1s – as team leader, your job is to make sure that everyone has a voice and has been heard. For some people, even the safest group debriefs won’t elicit their true thoughts. Go around the team, listen to them and incorporate their views into the evaluation process.

Climate:

Evaluation and feedback can only be effective if the team feels willing and able to share their views. If it isn’t a team norm to share openly and have healthy discussions, and possibly conflict, then a lone end-of-year evaluation process will yield little. The climate for team evaluation needs to be built on belonging, psychological safety, and team humility (lead and modelled by the leader) that striving for improvement leads to mistakes, vulnerability, and requires mutual support. It should also be regular and just ‘part of what we do’.

A leader can improves levels of psychological safety on their team by asking for help, admitting when they don’t know things, modelling how to ask for and receive feedback about their own work and performance, and by decoupling fear and failure. In this team, we learn from mistakes, we support each other to improve, and we know that bumps in the road are inevitable.

Follow up:

Evaluation is layered, and can’t be done in a single sitting. Information gather, discuss, come up with proposals, then evaluate again. Teams need to make decisions and get on with the work at some point, but if you’re going to put the effort into getting team feedback to help you evaluate, then you need to set off on the most informed foot when the plan begins.

Codify your findings – the snag list we mentioned earlier documents issues. But, over the course of a team’s life, you could conduct hundreds of team debriefs and hopefully improve many areas of the team’s work. It’s important that during these meetings, notes are made and recorded, so that lessons can be learned and reviewed in the future. This method may also help you spot patterns, and codify some of the best ways that your team works and improves. Think of this as an extension of the snag list: what did we identify? How could it improve? What did we do? What impact did it have? What’s next? The record of your evaluations now will pay off in weeks, months, and years.

Do what you say – an evaluation process is labour intensive. It can be energetic and purposeful. People will give their views in good faith. So it’s vital that the evaluation leads to action. Be transparent about feedback, set a direction of travel, make sure everyone understands how and why things are going to be tweaked or changed, and what you hope you will achieve from doing this. Staff won’t buy into debriefing if nothing happens after.

Enjoy the sun

Sure, evaluation processes lead to more work and can give you a dose of humble pie, but I love a good team debrief. It’s something special to behold when your team openly give feedback, work towards solutions, and are invested enough in the team’s work to really lead on improvement. This is why we work on teams: because we are stronger together, have a variety of views and experiences, and the best way to leverage this is to ensure that everyone is involved in the team’s direction.

This summer term, I wish you and your teams well as you embark on improving your work for both staff and students.

Thanks

Sam

References.

Robbins, A. (2021). Middle Leadership Mastery. Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing.

Tannenbaum, S. I., & Cerasoli, C. P. (2013). Do team and individual debriefs enhance performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 55, 231–245. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0018720812448394

‘The research behind high-performing teams and how to lead them in schools’ – my researchED talk

Teams are fascinating to me, perhaps because I spent a chunk of my early career dismissing the value of teamwork. Inefficient. Unproductive. Too many voices.

Then, as I began to lead teams, from an English department, to a tutor team, to a learning and teaching team, and many others, I began to revise this view. We are better together. The problem is, we often don’t expend much time, effort, or thought into transforming our teams from a bunch of people who meet together at set intervals, to cohesive groups that achieve great things.

In fact, I can’t think of any leadership course I’ve done in the last 10 years that has explored team work, or high-performance teams. Too much time spent on what makes a ‘leader’. Leader vs manager. How to have a difficult conversation to get what you want. Don’t get me wrong, all of these things can be useful (to a point), but the missing ingredient was how to tangibly bring disparate groups of people together and make them a team.

What’s more, there was little to no acknowledgement that teamwork is a highly nuanced, well evidenced area of our working lives. It was all team building without any aim or substance – bowling and yoga style.

After spending two years reading research, talking to teams across sectors, and visiting a lot of schools, I am a full ‘teams’ convert (no, not you, Microsoft).

I have written some blog posts about different areas of teamwork, and am investing my time now in writing a book, The Power of Teams, and am in the privileged position to speak to schools and conferences sometimes about how they can enhance their own teamwork.

On the 25th March, I presented at researchED Birmingham. It was a wonderful day. I met some delightful, knowledgeable, passionate educators, and learnt a lot from the sessions I attended. My talk was titled ‘The research behind high-performing teams, and how to lead them in schools’. I will be presenting this again at Warrington and Kent, and delivering the sequel at Cheshire on the 8th July. Stay tuned.

Here is a quick summary of the talk, and a PDF of the slides.

I start by discussing the research I’ve seen regarding high-performing teams across a range of sectors. We know how unique school teams are, for example you might be a member of 4-5 teams at your school, while Jerry in the Google Finance HQ might only be in one – the finance team. But we can learn a lot from teams cross-sector, simply because human behaviour, while context dependent, is still applicable and relatable across different industries.

Common traits of high-performing teams:

  1. Vision and purpose
  2. Belonging and trust
  3. Ambitious, clear team goals
  4. Role clarity, mental models, and systems
  5. Communication, candour, conflict
  6. Review and evaluate
  7. Team diversity and characteristics
  8. Learning culture
  9. Enabling organisational conditions

I’ve created my own teams ‘model’, which I explore more in The Power of Teams. The model provides five area of teamwork that can yield high-performance: Belonging, Alignment, Operations, Development, and Dynamics.

I believe that all are important and vital to the team’s ongoing success; yet, my personal view is that belonging is the foundational layer. Teams can have a vision and aims, put some systems together, and do good work, but it will always be limited without a sense of belonging and trust. How do teams really establish and work on their ‘persistent problems’ if there isn’t enough psychological safety to share openly, challenge each other, and frame conflict in a health way?

Build Belonging:

Teams should prioritise how they build trust and psychological safety. Some ways to do that include:

  • Offering belonging before performance
  • Understanding that belonging is not a fixed state
  • Creating a story for your team – who are we, why are we here, what do we do
  • Creating a culture of psychological safety where the team can speak openly, do not fear failure, discuss mistakes as learning opportunities, and use this sense of trust to create ambitious goals

The talk finishes by looking 4 areas of teaming to consider for your school teams:

Knowledge and mental models: teams should spend time auditing and codifying the knowledge they require, possess, and want to possess. Then, work out a way to share and increase this knowledge, which is an ongoing, ever-present part of team life. This knowledge can be applied to create mental models of what the team does and how it does those things, so that members have ultra role clarity.

Communication: agree communication methods and times with your team. Make sure your comms isn’t just a list of jobs and dates, but includes developmental and reflective elements, too.

Meetings: don’t waste people’s time. Meetings should feature learning, discussion, sharing of expertise.

Learning culture: a team should see one of their remits as being to learn. We learn together. We coach each other. We relentlessly pursue knowledge and improvement, together as a group. We debrief and review. We don’t just do stuff and complete tasks.s

So, there it is, a summary of my talk. I hope it’s useful. I’d like to think that speaking about it in-person is a superior experience.

You can catch me presenting this talk at:

researchED Warrington

researchED Kent

And a new talk about teams at researchED Cheshire

Pleased find the slides here:

red-birminghamDownload

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

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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

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