What makes a successful design team?
With return to the office and a growing team, conversations about work culture, stress and ways of working have been popping up a lot around me, so I wanted to share some thoughts.
What makes teams successful?
A lot of people have pondered this question but did not come to a conclusive answer. Is it having the smartest people on the same team? Or people who work the longest hours? Or people with similar personality traits — like being introverted or extroverted?
A few years ago Google decided to look into what made the most effective teams. As the New York Times article dedicated to that goes, it turned out that some groups that were ranked as most effective teams were composed of close friends, others were made up of people who were strangers outside the office; some had a strong leader and others preferred a less hierarchical structure. Teams with nearly identical makeup could have radically different levels of effectiveness. What did the effective teams have in common then? On successful teams everyone got a chance to talk and was aware of how others are feeling.
The same article continues to tell us that ‘conversational turn-taking’ and ‘average social sensitivity’ are aspects of what’s known as psychological safety. The Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’
Google ended up identifying 5 factors that are key to team effectiveness. But I will not be covering them all, since I want to expand on psychological safety, with it being a very broad term.
What are the ways to create psychological safety?
Collaboration pretty much stems from the definition of psychological safety. It’s not only about getting a group of people to work on something together, but also about giving everyone an opportunity to speak up and contribute. Collaboration in the remote world requires some adjustment from how we used to collaborate in the physical world, and there are some tips that can help with that on HBR.
Trust is an extension of psychological safety and without it working together successfully is very very difficult. When people trust each other, they are not afraid of experimenting, challenging each other and failing… It’s also easier to give honest feedback and collaborate. Lack of trust goes hand in hand with working in silos, micromanaging, and higher stress levels due to hidden confrontations. From my personal experience, when there is trust, the team can quickly identify issues and improve. There is no magical recipe for building trust overnight, so that is something you need to invest time and effort in.
This leads us to feedback. The skill of giving feedback is critical, especially in design teams. The topic is getting more and more traction with authors of Radical Candor and No Rules Rules preaching about honest and open feedback. The thing with feedback is that some people are worried about hurting other people’s feelings and choose to stay quiet even if they disagree. Referred to as ‘ruinous empathy’, this behaviour causes more harm than good in the long run. For everyone to feel safe to speak up, the team environment needs to be safe and respectful. And if the team is hierarchical, more senior people have the responsibility to lead by example and not only encourage honest feedback, but reward the candor.
Last but not least is transparency. Transparency is not the most obvious one for psychological safety, but it is important. With transparency I refer to things like everyone on the team knowing what the leadership team is doing, what decisions are made, which direction the company is taking. It is not always possible to be fully transparent, especially in big organisations, and in those moments it’s key for the leaders to be open about it, acknowledge the uncertainty and deal with it together. For people on the ground not knowing what to expect can get stressful. There has been a lot of research done on stress. Dan Lyons in his book ‘Lab rats’ says that our brains are wired to deal with stress that is intense but brief, like escaping from a predator or fleeing from a burning building. We’re not wired to handle chronic, ongoing stress, even if it is relatively mild. When doing lab experiments on rats, scientists have discovered that to get a lab rat depressed, it doesn’t take too much — simply a bit of continuous stress, nothing life-threatening or drastic. When you think about it, it’s scary how a workplace full of change and uncertainty can become that depression driver due continuous stress.
To summarize, the biggest secret to successful teams is psychological safety. And while there are different aspects to it, healthy collaboration, trust, feedback and transparency are really solid building blocks.
