Have you ever been assigned to work on something that had to be done and that nobody believed was possible? It might have been because of external pressures or because someone high up in your organization wanted it. The result, though, was that you were told to give it a good try, with a wink, because you were also told not to waste too much time on it. Years ago I was in one of those situations when I negotiated an agreement between many large organizations with other people who’d gotten the same marching orders. The stakes were high and the interests of the organizations were diverse, so getting an agreement was considered impossible.
The reason I mention this situation is because I was part of a small group of like-minded people who thought our task could be done. We worked for months to understand each other’s needs. Eventually we came to know and trust each other, and were able to create something that our organizations not only accepted, but supported. Once there was an initial agreement between just a subset of the organizations everyone else got on board, including many state and federal stakeholders. Momentum built and within a couple of months the agreement was signed in the state capital, with speeches by the Governor and other dignitaries. It showed me what a small, committed team could accomplish.
To me, the most interesting thing about the process of developing the agreement was how much it depended on our small team getting to know each other. If we hadn’t developed a great rapport, nothing would have happened. It was our friendship and trust that allowed us to find a solution, and it seemed like there was something more, too. Although we didn’t know what that “something” was called at the time, I now know it’s called psychological safety. And it’s a big part of creating group genius. It’s when our brains link with other people’s brains in ways that don’t necessarily make it to our conscious minds, but this linkage can produce spectacular results that can seem like magic. And it feels fantastic.
In this article, we’ll explore that linkage and explain why we have to be doing well individually before we can be effective members of a team. And while “doing well” includes eating right, getting enough sleep, and exercising, in this article we’ll focus on the mental and emotional aspects of it and how those connect with team dynamics. There are lots of sites that can help with an individual’s physical well being and that explain how people can improve their individual performance. If you want more information about those areas, check out the links.
High Performing Teams are Superorganisms
The thing to understand in order to go beyond great individual performance is that high performing teams become a superorganism, an organism made up of many individuals. The team members actually become psychologically and physiologically linked to the other people in the group. Said another way, what happens to each individual, both emotionally and physically, becomes part of the group experience and affects the experiences of all the other team members. This is why resilience and the ability to connect positively with others is so important to being a great team member. Each person’s state is contagious. So if you’re not bringing the team up you’re pulling them down.
The group experience phenomenon happens for a number of reasons that are related to our five senses and how our nervous systems function. When we sense something happening to someone else, mirror neurons activate portions of our brains that would be activated if that same thing happened to us. The sense that’s probably been studied most and that’s widely known in this regard is vision. For instance, it’s been shown that when a mammal sees something happening to another member of their species, similar portions of their brains activate. We react the same way, and this reaction is especially important now because looking at the faces of the people we’re interacting with is all we get over Zoom.
Vision isn’t the only sense that creates this reaction, though, and it may not be the most potent sense. Imagine we’re at a game or a concert. Think of how people around us might be dancing, arm pumping, shouting, clapping, and displaying excited facial expressions. At these times our excitement level rises, too. When we hear the people around us and see them moving in a certain way, like dancing or smiling, the parts of our brains associated with these movements light up and we tend to imitate these behaviors, which reinforces our brain activity. These neural and physical responses link us to the people around us in a very real sense.
Linking Brain Activity is Key for Teams
This linking is important to team performance because of something Google identified and publicized a few years ago. They spent a long time on a study called Project Aristotle, which looked at what makes teams highly effective. Answering this question was so hard they almost failed, but they ultimately found psychological safety was the foundational characteristic of their best teams. There were other common traits, but Google found “psychological safety was by far the most important.” It was also a necessary characteristic. While highly effective teams might not have all the attributes Google identified, all of their best teams had psychological safety.
In a nutshell, psychological safety is the ability to be yourself in a team environment without fear, even when uncomfortable things happen. For instance, let’s say the boss makes a mistake. How does the group respond when someone else points it out? Do they welcome the insight (including the boss), or do they subtly, or even overtly, tell the person they’re out of line? There are lots of sites that discuss psychological safety so, again, if you want to learn more about it check the links. I’m just going to share some questions I developed that can indicate whether your team has psychological safety:
- Do you feel comfortable speaking your mind, or do you censor yourself?
- Is there nervous laughter during meetings?
- Do people act the same way, and say the same kinds of things during meetings as they do outside of them?
If you censor yourself, if there’s nervous laughter, and if you hear different things or see different behaviors outside of meetings, your team doesn’t have psychological safety. This lack of psychological safety hurts your team’s performance in several ways. The most obvious is that the team doesn’t benefit from the ideas and insights that aren’t spoken. If people censor themselves or say different things than they normally would, the things rattling around in their heads aren’t shared and so those ideas can’t stimulate ideas and insights in other team members. This is the first way a lack of psychological safety screws up team performance, it limits what each person contributes.
More Ways Fear Reduces Team Performance
Beyond limiting what’s shared, the absence of psychological safety indicates fear is present, and it’s probably accompanied by other negative emotions. And while the scientific understanding of emotions and creativity is rapidly evolving, fear tends to trigger the fight or flight response which reduces the creativity of individuals, again reducing the number of ideas and insights available to the team. In fact, one of the best ways to enhance creativity, in terms of idea generation at least, is to produce positive emotions in people. So there’s more to this than simply reducing fear and other negative emotions.
This reduction in creativity happens because negative emotions, like fear, actually reduce the number of ideas our brains create, which reduces the options available to the team even if everyone forces themselves to share everything in their heads. When the fight or flight reaction is activated, there are simply fewer ideas available to us because limiting the brain’s options helped our ancestors react quickly and survive dangerous situations. This is the second way a lack of psychological safety hurts team performance, it limits what each person can contribute.
Worst of all, though, is that one person’s fight or flight response tends to trigger everyone else’s mirror neurons to put them into fight or flight, too. And because our fight or flight responses (i.e. our negative emotions) are stronger than our positive emotions they tend to overwhelm our psychological safety. This is why team dynamics can be messed up by a small portion of the team, or even one bad apple.
The Negativity Bias and Defensiveness
This negativity bias pushes everyone towards a defensive state. Beyond reducing creativity, each person’s visual field is literally narrowed and they process less of the visual information that’s available. They also think about defending themselves. Both effects essentially unplug them from the team superorganism. The emotions the individuals feel infect the rest of the team with similar emotions, especially negative emotions. This group experience of emotional feedback, if it’s in the wrong direction, not only limits what each individual can contribute, it also kills the ability to fully connect to the other members of the team. This is the third, and most deadly way a lack of psychological safety affects team performance. It infects everyone on the team with the limitations fear creates, and it isolates the members of the team from each other.
So fear and other negative emotions are something each individual has to guard against in order to foster psychological safety. The way to create psychological safety goes beyond simply defending against negative emotions, though. In order for individuals to thrive they need to have at least three positive emotions for each negative emotion they have. Similarly, the interactions between team members have to be biased towards positive experiences in order for psychological safety to emerge. The idea is not to eliminate negative emotions and experiences, though. That’s actually been found to be detrimental. The way to psychological safety and avoiding the fight or flight response is to make sure each negative experience is balanced by at least several positive experiences.
That’s why each person has to be doing well, individually, to create group genius, which is when teams are most effective. The fight or flight response turns our teams into a bunch of detached individuals trying to survive when we could be a cohesive superorganism that’s improvising in real time to create the best solutions. This sharing of emotions is why even one individual who’s in a bad place can destroy group genius. It’s also why psychological safety can be developed in a team through the creation of positive group experiences and why it can persist for long periods of time. So sharing of emotions is a great advantage we have, we just have to use it to connect in positive ways.
Connections Psychological Safety Enables
We all know the kinds of connections psychological safety can create. It’s when we click so well that we know how the sentence is going to end before the words come out of our friend’s mouth. It’s how their idea is easy for us to understand and combines with our idea to synergistically create something neither of us could have imagined by ourselves. And why the expression on our face creates the same idea in their head, too. This is what happens when you’re with your family, or friends, or team mates, who all accept each other and have each others’ backs. That’s what psychological safety feels like.
Having experienced this phenomenon is why I’m so committed to the mission at Transcendeam. It was fun and exciting to work with a small group of colleagues to create something everyone said was impossible. But the real payoff was when we got the world to notice and other people, other organizations, joined us. I believe this kind of interaction, when group genius produces achievements that attain a life of their own, is what will enable the changes our world needs. My goal is to develop enough understanding of how this process works that we can recreate it at will. I need your help to get deeper insights into how teams interact, though, so please join our community and contribute your ideas and your experiences. Here are some questions to help get the conversation started.
- What are some examples of group genius you’ve experienced?
- What enabled, or inhibited, group genius within your team?
- What other ways does a team link together as a superorganism?
- How have you enabled your teams, either as an appointed leader or team member?