Getting to high performance teams
Like many trainers, I offer and deliver leadership training on a range of popular topics. These are topics such as psychological safety, resilience, and growth mindset. I think that everyone knows that there is some sort of connection between them, and that they probably all help in their own way towards better functioning teams. But I haven’t seen or read anything in the literature that really explains how they connect together. So, I’ve done some deep thinking about it. And I think that there’s a really nice way to understand that there really is a pathway through these skills, which you can build in the right order to get your teams super-successful.
So what’s step one? It starts, I think, with asking questions and listening. These are the foundational skills for high performing teams. Why? Asking good questions and listening is the gateway to trust. Trust really cannot develop between people unless people within the team feel heard. It is such a basic human need to feel connected, to feel seen, and to feel heard. And that doesn’t happen unless the the leader in the situation is able to frame and ask good questions and to listen.
These sound like simple skills, but believe me, there’s a lot more to them than you might imagine. The discipline of asking questions that are full of curiosity and free from judgement is not easy. And I should know. As a courtroom lawyer, I absolutely understand how 2 similar sounding questions can actually be profoundly different in terms of the response that they will elicit.
And listening, well, there’s a lot of research and literature about the different levels of listening and the ways in which we engage with one another. Asking questions, and listening are very teachable and learnable skills, and we can use these foundational skills so that we can develop trust within our teams.
So step 2 is to develop trust. Our question and listening has been the foundation trust to flourish, but there’s a lot more to trust than just this.
Trust itself needs some work. It’s an elusive commodity, and there are some very helpful thoughts in the literature and research on leadership into how you gain it and how you hold onto it. It’s often by habits that you can learn and practice and monitor and review in yourself. Leaders who understand the mechanics of trust, and have plans for how to grow it within teams take a huge step forwards towards high performance.
So what then is the dividend and return on the investment of time which is needed to grow trust? Well, it seems clear to me that the outcome of trust is psychological safety.
Psychological safety is therefore step 3 on the path to high performance. It is built on the trust which was developed through questioning and listening. But having established the pre-conditions for psychological safety, the next question is now to foster it further. Unsurprisingly, there are a host of ideas, tools and techniques to help leaders recognise the threats to psychological safety, and to fend them away.
Our brilliant minds which are wonderful in so many ways are also liable to the occasional error, and sometimes these errors are almost inevitable because of the way that our brains are set up to work. This introduces the topic of unconscious bias. This is an enemy to psychological safety, and it is one of the topics that leadership training should take seriously in order to really keep their teams safe.
So, again we ask the question what the benefit is of psychologically safety within teams? Why work so hard at each stage to develop these leadership skills? When do we see the long promised ‘high performance’? Well, rest assured, we are just about there.
There are 2 great dividends from psychological safety. You open the door to productive feedback and to unlocking the collective intelligence of your team.
If you have collective intelligence, everyone in the team is contributing, and if everyone in the team is comfortable asking for, receiving, and giving feedback, then this team will grow. It will upskill constantly, and you will then achieve high performance.
There is a lot of wisdom to impart on the topic of how to give feedback effectively. If a leader does not have the skill to give effective feedback, then all the good work building up to this point is wasted. Good feedback allows team members to habitualize all their good behaviours, and to error correct on any thinking or behaviour which is not optimal. This is living the dream of growth mindset.
Harnessing collective intelligence is vital to making the most of the benefits of having a psychologically safe team. There are teachable skills that help leader to become great facilitators within meetings, and to ensure that team members are working productively, collaboratively, and sparking off each other to generate the ideas that will drive the business forward.
So here’s a recap of the steps to high performance.
Questioning and listening (which gives you…)
Trust, (which gives you…)
Psychological Safety (which gives you…)
Productive feedback and collective intelligence (which gives you…)
High performance.
It does seem to me that each step is contingent upon the one before, and if there is any weakness in the chain, of course there will be problems.
Sustaining high performance within teams is a matter of continued listening, continued trust building, and particularly the setting of good KPIs and review and reward mechanisms. If the review and reward mechanisms are seen as unfair, then the system breaks because the trust becomes lost because the team members may feel that they are not being seen and that they are not being heard.
My final note is that you haven’t seen ‘growth mindset’ in this blog. Growth mindset is the idea that through good feedback and error correction, everyone has a strong chance of making significant progress on all aspects of their performance. I think that almost all leadership training now presupposes that this is correct, and that a leader’s role is to grow the skills and capabilities of all their people. If this assumption is not shared, then the entire endeavour of leadership is probably largely misunderstood.
So perhaps any journey on high performance should start with ensuring that there is a shared understanding and assumption that all team members are capable of growth in the right conditions.