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In order to generate alignment, you have to be willing to discover places of misalignment. You even have to be willing to walk away or radically alter your plans based on what you discover. The alignment you create might be that you mutually agree that the project you’re working on is so flawed, or so out of sync with individual goals, that the best course of action is to cancel it altogether. Radical alignment doesn’t mean you do something at any cost; it means you find a course of action that’s most aligned with the individuals present. And that might be an agreement to take no action or to
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What they are describing is aligned action, and it is the holy grail of teamwork, partnership, and collaboration. Navy SEALs work toward this outcome as well, albeit in a different way. Their infamous “hell week” is meant to select not only individuals with intellectual grit and physical stamina but also people able to achieve what psychologists call group flow—what one SEAL officer describes as “ability to step beyond oneself” so they can merge with the unit and act as one.2
Speed and team agility are the greatest assets in a rapidly shifting environment,
SEALs must achieve a kind of unconscious connection to each other. Often there’s no time to ask for permission or to sit down and think things through. The team must flow, and members must be able to sense each other’s intentions. When one person is better suited to lead because of their position in the field, the others must follow them. Everyone must think on their feet and be able to both assume and relinquish leadership at a moment’s notice.
A team is not just a group. It is a collection of individuals who have become something greater. A group doesn’t just add but multiplies capabilities. A team is a group of people aligned in their movement and mission to achieve a specific goal and able to complement and amplify each other’s talents.
teams of all types can be functional or dysfunctional—and are usually a mixture of both. It is quite common for people to re-create family dynamics in the workplace that come from their families of origin.
Businesses and even the larger culture are now in a state of near-continuous change, which means we all now live in the VUCA world, and, as with the Navy SEALs, teamwork has become a core and necessary skill.
teams of mediocre players (by their standards) could be high performing. Also, teams made up of all introverts, all extroverts, or a mixture of both were as likely to be as great as they were to be mediocre. The researchers decided the “special sauce” was not in the makeup of the teams,
The first behavior that predicted a high-performing team was equal speaking time among team members.
The second characteristic is something they called average social sensitivity—if the researchers asked teammates about another teammate’s emotional state, would they usually be right in their assessment?
Two strong indicators of psychological safety are teammates’ awareness of each other’s emotions and equal speaking time for each team member.
although individual skills and intelligence are essential to team performance, the emotional environment of the team makes all the difference. In other words, teams, like individuals, need both their cognitive intelligence quotient (IQ) and their emotional (intelligence) quotient (EQ) to perform well.
Trust is the essence of leadership; you become a leader by earning the trust of followers, not by achieving a specific rank or position.
psychologists Amy Cuddy, Matthew Kohut, and John Neffinger encourage leaders to connect and demonstrate warmth first before projecting strength. Projecting strength and competence first might actually generate fear instead of trust.
Most organizations start by implementing more top-down control. But this practice requires much effort and lowers morale by disempowering the people you most want to motivate. Ordering people around can be incredibly toxic to creative work—that is, all knowledge work. The company actually needs for people to bring their full selves to the work at hand, but for this to happen, it must find a way to welcome those full selves. Welcoming in more of the full selves requires developing more empathy for each other. Humans can be messy and unpredictable creatures; without empathy and understanding,
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Statistics have shown that one reason brainstorming is of limited value is that people often pick up on subtle social cues about what the leader wants and then simply confirm it. This can be subconscious or conscious—disagreeing with the boss can often be a career-limiting move. This means one of the primary jobs of any team leader, parent, or spouse is to create a context in which it is safe for people to tell you difficult news.
Conversations about subjects that engage both our intellect and our emotions—in other words all important topics—are difficult to have.
The ability to welcome and integrate diverse perspectives and skills is at the core of healthy collaboration and creativity—and therefore of innovation. Being part of a great team means cocreating an environment in which people feel free to share ideas that run counter to what the group expects—bad news or countercultural ideas—and in which the group is able to reconcile opposing viewpoints and move forward. They don’t get stuck in analysis and a never-ending search for consensus or fall apart because of conflict.
Too often it is easier to just let something slide than it is to create a potential conflict. This is amplified if the person we disagree with is of higher status and/or is prone to taking offense and making things difficult for us. Leaders must create an environment in which disagreement is welcome. They do this by listening and creating opportunities for people to be willing or even expected to speak up.
As Edmonson says, “Psychological safety is not a personality difference but rather a feature of the workplace that leaders can and must help create.”
Although power differentials are perhaps inevitable, they can shift day to day and topic to topic, so it is in all parties’ interest to be vigilant about inclusivity and fairness. It often doesn’t take much to change how people interact, but you must be deliberate about it.
Speak with courage and vulnerability, listen with gentleness and compassion, and 99 percent of the time a conflict will be resolved naturally.
It is the listener’s job to encourage sharing, and this is best done by being nonjudgmental and curious and not negatively reacting either verbally or with body language to what the speaker shares.
Speak with courage and vulnerability and listen with curiosity and without judgment to create the richest interactions.
disagreements between people are going to persist no matter what conversation they have.
We might think disagreements are a problem to be solved, but really, they are a feature of every healthy human interaction.
By taking time to share deeply with each other, we build bonds that go beyond simple plans, tools, and agreements. We build a basis for deeper understanding, forgiveness, and trust.
It is increasingly essential to have emotional conversations at work because collaboration is now an essential component of most jobs—and working together, whether we like it or not, is an emotional experience.
Manipulative and charisma-driven leadership are being replaced with empathy-building conversations. Some of the best leaders are, in fact, the most relational and the humblest. Although this might sound like touchy-feely nonsense to hard-nosed traditionalists, consider that General Stanley McChrystal—former leader of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and commander of the US forces in Afghanistan—advocates for leaders to become more like gardeners. This, he says, has more to do with tending and empowering people than it does with being directive, making decisions, and giving orders.2
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