PRACTICE

6

CREATING A HEALTHY TEAM ENVIRONMENT

The most important thing about creating a healthy team environment is to ensure people feel it is safe to take risks.

—Linda Henry, CEO, Boston Globe

FORMATION OF A POSITIVE COMPANY CULTURE

The need for connection has never been greater. As a leader, you are facing the very real impact of rising rates of burnout, languishing, and depression at work. Further, fears in our pandemic era range from worries about job security to worries about being left out. These realities make creating a healthy team environment that much more pressing.

We can now say for sure that collaboration and high employee engagement positively impact profit, and there are hard costs to organizations should employees be disengaged. In fact, Gallup found that highly engaged teams show 21 percent greater profitability, and teams who score in the top 20 percent in engagement realize a 41 percent reduction in absenteeism and 59 percent less turnover. On the flip side, an exhaustive report by the Engagement Institute (a joint study by the Conference Board, Sirota-Mercer, Deloitte, ROI, The Culture Works and Consulting LLP) found disengaged employees cost US companies up to $550 billion a year.

The offering of this practice is to help you know how best to create a healthy team environment. Leading from the best parts of you (your visionary, resilient, courageous, authentic, and best self), it’s time to turn that energy fully on others. Your gutsy, resolute goal: ignite others to lead from their best self with one another. Only when you, the leader, understand that you’re not alone but in it with your team and others, and bring your unique best self, including strengths you bring to the table, is your best leadership of a healthy working-together environment sustainable. Team leaders, to be effective, need to know what their people are like, what their people are doing today, how they are feeling, and how they can help as team leader.

DEVELOPING AND ENCOURAGING THE PRACTICE

As we navigated the best thinking from our own experiences and the experiences of those we interviewed, and looked at the relevant research on healthy teams, what emerged as where we think you can focus to foster a healthy team environment in the most intentional way are our six essential actions to creating a healthy team environment. We will dive further into each of these six concepts and provide insights on each. They are:

1.   Understand and unleash team member strengths

2.   Set team direction and strategy

3.   Communicate honestly and convene frequently for service excellence

4.   Learn and develop together

5.   Make it appreciative

6.   Ensure psychological safety

UNDERSTAND AND UNLEASH TEAM MEMBER STRENGTHS

Gallup emphasizes that “strengths-based teams communicate using a common language grounded in what’s good.” Gallup is dedicated to bridging the science of analytics with the art of advice and learning and wants us to forget all the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts motivational sayings and focus instead on why it is imperative to know and support everyone’s contributions to the team. Gallup finds that the most engaged and productive teams have three things in common:

•   They share a common mission and purpose.

•   Collectively, they understand and appreciate each team member’s strengths.

•   They intentionally use the strengths of each team member.

Gallup’s premise is that every individual brings something unique and powerful to the team, and conversely, every individual retains areas where they’re just not strong. Further, it is up to you (the leader) to work with the individual to help them know how they naturally excel, where they need help from their teammates, and what shared goals or purpose they’re all using a strengths-based approach to achieve. Specifically, we suggest you use a strengths-based approach to intentionally promote effective delegation, successful partnerships, and deeper collaboration, among other outcomes.

Based on research as cited in Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 book with Tom Rath, leaders who regularly focus on individual team member’s strengths can make a dramatic difference. When focused on strengths, there is a 1 percent chance that a team member will be disengaged, as opposed to focusing on weaknesses (22 percent). See Figure 6.1 regarding the four domains of leadership strengths as depicted in the StrengthsFinder’s work.

FIGURE 6.1 The Four Domains of Leadership Strength

Gallup^®, CliftonStrengths^®, and the CliftonStrengths 34 Themes of Talent are trademarks of Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved.

In Practice 1: Investing in Your Best Self, we went into more detail about how to uncover your strengths as you aim to be in flow. We encourage you to do the same for the members of your team. This includes helping each team member to know the strengths of the other members. As team leader, it is your responsibility to match the right people to the right roles, such that their own strengths can be maximized not just for the benefit of the team and organization but also for team member engagement.

General Chuck Wald, a retired director and leader in Deloitte’s government and public services practice, is no stranger to matching roles and responsibilities. He has been charged with these “matches” in his various positions spanning a decorated career in military operations worldwide and then in his capacity as a business executive.

In doing so, General Wald has fine-tuned his own vision for what drives a healthy team:

A healthy team knows: What are the goals? What is the objective? What are we trying to do? What are the expectations? What is the tolerance for failure? And even if we fail, our leader has our back. If you can’t communicate that, you won’t be effective. Sincerity and empathy are interwoven. There are times when you can’t tell “everything” as a leader, but the others can’t think that you are holding things back from them because you’re insincere. Also, change is tough, and change management is another part of leadership. How do you motivate people to accept change in their best interest? The healthy team leader accounts for all of this.

General Wald’s points resonate with us. Without a solid understanding of how to motivate the individuals on your team, it’s almost impossible to expect them to thrive during times of organizational change.

SET TEAM DIRECTION AND STRATEGY

To effectively engage and clarify team direction and strategy, we highly recommend beginning and ending with a spirit of collaboration. In the end, members of the team will need to buy into all of this to effectively stay motivated and engaged.

As we defined in Practice 5: Inspiring a Bold Vision, having a vision is the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination. This can be applied at the individual, team, business unit, or organizational level. We invite you to apply some of the same tools as you engage and clarify your team’s purpose and vision. As a refresh, your guiding principles will be:

•   Being clear about your organization’s purpose and “why”

•   Listening with humility for brilliant ideas

•   Having courage to take a leap of faith

•   Communicating with enthusiasm about what you know, what you don’t know, and the path forward

Establishing a Compelling Direction

A healthy team needs a compelling direction, which states definitively: “This is what we’ll achieve, and this is how we’ll achieve it.” Direction is the reason a team exists—its vision, mission, goals, or aspiration. It provides a purpose for the team members to rally around, and shapes both the team’s strategy and tactics.

In thinking through the strategy for a compelling direction, it should be both long- and short-term. Long-term direction might be captured in a formal purpose, vision statement, or aspiration: something for team members to rally around. Short-term direction may be captured by goals or frameworks such as key performance indicators (KPIs) or objectives and key results (OKRs) that describe how the team will make intermediate progress to reach their long-term overarching direction.

A clear direction provides team members with an anchor for their commitment to the team. Consequently, the direction should be framed in ways that encourage team member buy-in. It has long been accepted that an effective direction must be clear and challenging but achievable. Recent thinking also highlights the importance of the direction being meaningful and ethically aligned, as the workforce is becoming increasingly purpose driven. To align with the team’s direction, team members must not only understand the mission, but be willing to support it—something that may be largely dependent on the compatibility of their own desires and preferences.

Traditionally, it’s the team’s leader who provides, inspires, or drives a team’s direction; however, a team might also be self-directed, with distributed leadership increasingly recognized as an enabler of team effectiveness. A clear and compelling direction also helps a team understand how it should relate to other teams within the organization, where collaboration might be fruitful, and where the team should work (and negotiate) with others. Teams need the flexibility to respond to the local conditions and their relationship to other teams. It may be advisable for teams to set their own goals and success criteria within overarching strategic parameters established by management. The importance of a compelling direction is further heightened for cross-functional teams, which are likely to be faced with company politics and an environment of competing priorities. Without a strong direction, ideally at a strategic company level, a cross-functional team is unlikely to drive through silos to achieve their objective.

As Deloitte’s intensive work on team building and infrastructure has shown, a team with a compelling direction will not only motivate its members but may also inspire support from beyond the team.

COMMUNICATE HONESTLY AND CONVENE FREQUENTLY FOR SERVICE EXCELLENCE

A survey conducted by Atlassian, a software company that develops collaboration tools, revealed that 1,000 team members across a range of industries found that when honest feedback, mutual respect, and personal openness were encouraged, team members were 80 percent more likely to report higher emotional well-being. If team members aren’t feeling good about how they communicate with one another, how can you expect them to perform and service your customer and clients with excellence? What it takes to get the most from your team is the ability to convene often and communicate honestly (even, and especially, when opinions differ).

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by bestselling author Patrick Lencioni outlines the root causes of politics and dysfunction on the teams where you work and the keys to overcoming them. Counter to conventional wisdom, the causes of dysfunction are both identifiable and curable. However, they don’t die easily. Making a team functional and cohesive requires levels of courage and discipline that many groups cannot seem to muster. The dysfunctions Lencioni lays out include absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.

•   The fear of being vulnerable prevents team members from building trust with each other.

•   The desire to preserve artificial harmony stifles productive ideological conflict within the team.

•   The lack of clarity or buy-in prevents team members from making decisions they stick to.

•   The need to avoid interpersonal discomfort prevents team members from holding each other accountable for their behaviors and performance.

•   The pursuit of individual goals and personal status erodes the team’s focus on collective success.

The dysfunctions are interpersonal—trusting and managing conflict well—but also require the right intent of team members—focusing on ensuring clarity of mission and focusing on collective results over individual results. All of this requires excellent skills in building trust and in communicating effectively. When there is too little trust in the workplace or with a team, it is a toxic work environment. This is the opposite of our aim for team health.

Dan Helfrich, CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP, is a big advocate of creating a healthy team environment through the alignment of trust and vulnerability, which he says, “comes in all shapes and sizes—acknowledging mistakes past or present, acknowledging unease and that you are grappling with a decision.” For example:

I often talk with teams, small or big groups, saying, here is what I am wrestling with. “Here is what I’m wrestling with” is a really good way to both demonstrate vulnerability and invite feedback. In my mind, the healthiest team environment invites dialogue and disagreement, acknowledges that some decisions are hard to make and don’t have clear black-and-white answers. What that also does over time is culturally builds a healthier team environment that can also transcend individual moments that might not work for an individual or group of individuals on the team.

We so agree with Dan’s view. Especially as it relates to inviting dialogue and disagreement—it’s so important that all team members feel empowered—even encouraged—to voice constructive critiques. It’s what oftentimes leads to the best decisions.

Assume Positive Intent

Lynn has a value at the university: assume positive intent. Janet has a similar leadership principle well-known to her teams: assume and expect positive intent. Susan has written and spoken publicly about the costs of blaming and shaming (in any relationship). We all agree that coming from a place of assuming positive intent, in which we don’t leap to blaming or shaming others but instead lead with curiosity about intention, is a key component of healthy team leadership. If you have ever been disappointed by the actions of another, you know that assuming positive intent is easier said than done. As you look to communicate honestly, fostering a no-blame and no-shame environment is essential and at the heart of our advice about how to begin to foster team-based trust. This means you don’t give yourself permission to blame and shame any team member—and you hold others accountable if you see it happening (mistakes are learning opportunities—disappointments are best for private coaching or feedback with individuals).

While to err is human and we can be harsh and unforgiving about our own mistakes, we judge other people’s mistakes even more harshly than we judge our own. This double standard is very well documented in scientific research and is called the fundamental attribution error. This phenomenon will absolutely derail efforts to create a healthy team environment. Here’s how this plays out: When we make mistakes, we often blame the circumstances of the situation rather than take responsibility for the mistake. When other people make mistakes, we tend to overemphasize the other person’s role in that mistake and quickly blame them. As a result, we tend to make assumptions about what led to mistakes made by others (“they had negative intentions,” “they clearly don’t get it,” “it was their fault”).

Once these conclusions form in our own minds, we tend to act as if they are true. This double standard can be countered through one simple cognitive shift. Assume positive intent and give others the benefit of the doubt. Assume that they had positive intentions, identify the situational details, and get the bigger picture. When leaders blame and shame, trust erodes.

To put this in further context, Janet shares,

To assume and expect positive intent from those around you can be the North Star for the big things: decisions around how to shift the business, discussions around social justice and social purpose, conversations around what went wrong and what to do about it. But it goes for the everyday stuff, too: giving and receiving feedback, establishing boundaries, and respecting others’ boundaries. When you believe we’re in this together, for the long haul and for the right reasons, it makes you a more trusting teammate and more patient leader. It fosters a more productive working environment. And in the end, it can lead to better outcomes for your team, your organization, and you.

The team will follow the leader’s actions. If you struggle yourself with assuming positive intent, we invite you to circle back to Practice 1 where we outlined how to return to your best self. You can’t be operating from your best self and be blaming and shaming another at the same time. Practice this return yourself and ask it from your team members. Model the way. Talk about how you are “assuming positive intent” in a situation or with a comment and show what this looks like (typically, this stance is followed up with a genuine question or set of questions, not interrogation).

We have found that if you lead from a place of (1) giving people the benefit of the doubt and (2) modeling a true learner mindset, you will set the stage for an open, even generous climate of team communication. Healthy conflict is not available unless we assume that every situation is more complicated than one person can see (implicit positive intent) and then respond not with our own advocacy or blame, but with inquiry. As you convene frequently (virtually or in person), open and honest dialogue is essential. When the leader communicates with a specific style, others follow suit.

LEARN AND DEVELOP TOGETHER

What about learning and developing together fosters a healthy team environment? After all, we have work to do and everyone is already stretched thin, especially with the stressors of our new hybrid working realities.

Investing in your staff’s professional development is not only vital for team retention, but we observe a stronger appetite for upskilling than ever before. Assessing the current skills and abilities within a team will enable managers to strategically plan targeted development programs that consider any potential skills gaps. Regular development initiatives can help keep employees motivated, while frequent training programs will also establish regular reevaluation of employees, skills, and processes.

There are two focus areas where we believe you want to aim your team learning and development time and energy. The first is on the team itself. This includes providing education and learning on many of the skills we address in this chapter. The aim with focusing learning and development on the team itself is so that the team works together more effectively so all members can achieve what you set out to accomplish with high engagement and outstanding results. The second focus we believe you want to aim your team learning and development efforts around is on the functional and technical upskilling required to compete and win. By this, we mean having guest speakers, reading assignments, training, and other learning initiatives aimed at everything from competitive innovations to better ways of getting work done.

In the age of disruption, where the only constant is change, continuous learning is essential. Creating an organizational culture of continuous learning is critical in attracting and retaining top talent in an increasingly tight labor market. Beyond the case for talent acquisition, continuous learning is what will help equip entire organizations to change at scale. Setting a vision that celebrates education, innovation, and problem-solving skills in our increasingly complex digital world will differentiate great leaders from good ones and will position business more competitively for the future.

Another aspect to creating healthy teams through continuous learning is to pay attention to job evolution. How often are jobs changing, which ones, and to what degree? Fifty-three percent of respondents to Deloitte’s 2020 Global Human Capital Trends report say that between half and all of their workforce will need to change their skills and capabilities in the next three years. As jobs change, does your investment in organization-wide continuous learning support that evolution? Just tracking the cumulative number of learning hours doesn’t address how the organization is being reinvented and adapting to external change. For example, if you aren’t seeing productivity gains as a result of new technologies being integrated into the workplace, then you may need to look at how jobs need to shift to take better advantage of those technologies.

MAKE IT APPRECIATIVE

Positivity strategist Robyn Stratton-Berkessel states:

An appreciative voice provides safety for others to speak their truths. It is invitational and watchful. An appreciative voice is unhurried and patient. It can reframe situations to be helpful and resourceful. It is flexible. The appreciative voice is inclusive. It acknowledges diversity and identifies opportunities to offer possibilities to hold the space for transformational shifts to emerge.

We have seen the power of appreciation and how it can accelerate the creation of a healthy team. The theory is this: what you focus on, grows. When you train your eye to appreciate, you see there is so much to be appreciated. Think of this to leverage the strengths of your team as a whole and the individual members in it. Stratton-Berkessel adds:

This is a big shift from the traditional view of organizational life where we’re rewarded to focus first on mistakes and problems, while the strengths and best assets get taken for granted. This human pattern is built into our evolutionary need for survival: people shut down (or attack) when faced with threat, and they open up (and include) when they feel safe. When one’s mind and heart is open, positive emotions, thoughts, and actions follow.

Stratton-Berkessel’s book Appreciative Inquiry targets organization development and what the authors call a “strengths revolution,” which is a befitting term for what we want to convey in the arrive and thrive arena, too. As she says in her book:

At its heart, appreciative inquiry is about the search for the best in people, their organizations, and the strengths-filled, opportunity-rich world around them. Appreciative inquiry is not so much a shift in the methods and models of organizational change, but appreciative inquiry is a fundamental shift in the overall perspective taken throughout the entire change process to “see” the wholeness of the human system and to “inquire” into that system’s strengths, possibilities, and successes.

In a 2017–2018 Deloitte study The Practical Magic of “Thank You,” more than 16,000 professionals were surveyed about how they want to be recognized, for what, and by whom. For the day-to-day, the best recognition may be the easiest—say “thank you”! Even when the accomplishment is significant, cash isn’t king. Across organizational levels, generations, genders, and Business Chemistry types (revisit Janet’s favorite tool for investing in your best self from Practice 1), the most valued kind of recognition is a new growth opportunity. Pioneers, Drivers, and Millennials value these new opportunities even more than others do.

The Practical Magic of “Thank You” research also found that big wins aren’t the only thing people want to be recognized for. It’s also important to recognize the effort they put in (especially Guardians, Integrators, staff, and millennials), their knowledge and expertise (especially Drivers, Guardians, and staff), and their commitment to living the organization’s core values (especially Integrators). It matters who’s recognizing who, and whether the preference is for recognition from one’s direct supervisor, from leadership, or from colleagues depends on who is being recognized, with Business Chemistry types and generations showing particularly meaningful differences. Your appreciation of someone need not be shared with the whole world to make it count. Most people prefer recognition that is either shared with just a few people or delivered privately. Fewer want recognition that is widely shared, Guardians, Integrators, and Baby Boomers, in particular. Bottom line: recognizing people’s unique contributions, and doing so in the ways they prefer, is one approach to demonstrating they belong, and to helping them find meaning in their work.

ENSURE PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY

We’re living in a world with assorted work environments and formats, thanks to technology, multinational companies, entrepreneurship, and global health crises. No matter what arrangement we’re navigating, what do we all want and need first and foremost? Hint: it’s not money, and it has many implications.

“Sorting out future work arrangements, and attending to employees’ inevitable anxieties about those arrangements, will require managers to rethink and expand one of the strongest proven predictors of team effectiveness: psychological safety,” write Amy C. Edmondson and Mark Mortensen for Harvard Business Review.

Much of the work done in many organizations is done collaboratively by teams. The team is the molecular unit where real production happens, where innovative ideas are conceived and tested, and where employees experience most of their work. But it’s also where interpersonal issues, ill-suited skill sets, and unclear group goals can hinder productivity and cause friction.

Psychological Safety at Work: Google’s Project Aristotle

Following the success of Google’s Project Oxygen research where the People Analytics team studied what makes a great manager, Google researchers applied a similar method to discover the secrets of effective teams at Google. Code-named Project Aristotle, a tribute to Aristotle’s quote, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (as the Google researchers believed employees can do more working together than alone), the goal was to answer the question: “What makes a team effective at Google?” The researchers found that what mattered most was how the team worked together, and the most important variable of working together effectively was the presence of psychological safety.

Organizational behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson of Harvard first introduced the construct of “team psychological safety” and defined it as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.

To illustrate what psychological safety means in action, here is the list of questions Edmondson asked to measure a team’s level of psychological safety. Team members were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with these statements:

1.   If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.

2.   Members of this team can bring up problems and tough issues.

3.   People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.

4.   It is safe to take a risk on this team.

5.   It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.

6.   No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.

7.   Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

The preceding list of questions might be helpful in your pursuit in having meaningful conversations with team members, but we will cut to the chase. In her TEDx talk, Edmondson offers three simple things individuals can do to foster team psychological safety:

1.   Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.

2.   Acknowledge your own fallibility.

3.   Model curiosity and ask lots of questions.

Of the six essential actions to creating a healthy team environment presented in this chapter, we posit that the final essential action of ensuring psychological safety is the only one that, if absent, kills the effectiveness of the team even if the other five are present.

A tip for greatly increasing your ability to ensure psychological safety is to reflect on your own state of being at any given time while working. How intertwined is your personal life and leadership impact? Wellbeing at Work author and chief scientist workplace for Gallup Jim Harter says very.

Our careers impact all the other areas of our lives. We don’t come to work as robots, we come to work as human beings. If we have bad relationships at work, we’re going to take that home with us. Numerous studies show that our work environments affect our physiology and risk of disease. They affect how we view ourselves, the opportunities for involvement in our community, and how we partner with people with similar passions as us.

THRIVER’S WISDOM

POWER RECAP Creating a Healthy Team Environment

Key Points About This Practice

•   Team members want you, the team leader, to make them feel part of something bigger, that you show them how what they are doing together is important and meaningful.

•   Team members want you to make them feel that you can see and connect to them in their current experiences and authentic stories, care about them, and challenge them, in a way that recognizes who they are as individuals.

•   Strengths-based groups communicate using a common language grounded in what’s good.

•   Remember that every individual retains areas where they’re not strong.

•   Sincerity and empathy are essential ingredients to exceptional team leadership.

•   A clear direction provides team members with an anchor for their commitment to the team.

•   With honest feedback, mutual respect, and personal openness encouraged, team members are more likely to report higher emotional well-being.

Suggested Actions

•   Understand and unleash team member strengths.

•   Engage and clarify team purpose, vision, mission, and strategy.

•   Communicate honestly and convene frequently for service excellence.

•   Learn and develop together.

•   Make it appreciative.

•   Ensure psychological safety.