"For me, it’s a head-versus-heart thing. The heart loves “numbers go up,” “momentum,” and extrapolations from small sample sizes — Lamar Jackson will never win a Super Bowl. It always wants to bet on the Current Thing accelerating. The head loves regression — regression to the mean, regression analysis, any type of regression; you name it. It knows from experience that if the heart bothers to look at the data, it will find that its confidence in the Current Thing will often be misplaced. "~Nate Silver

This is Part 3 of my examination of psychological safety and teams.

Here is the overview, where I outline this series and make the claim the over-rotation towards psychological safety for teams likely did more harm than good. 

In Part 2, I argued that Project Aristotle's main conclusion, which started this whole "student body left" shift towards psychological safety, is likely not even correct.

Obviously, administering the wrong medicine to teams does more harm than good, just as the move away from fat towards carbs in the 70s made us fatter and also did more harm than good.

But, believe it or not, there may have been a worse problem than writing the wrong prescription for teams.

The bigger problem was the search for a generically most important factor in team success...a silver bullet if you will.  That strikes me as a problematic push towards artificially reducing the variation and complexity of teams and team success.

This Part 3 then makes the case that it's not the "more than anything else" but the team variation...understanding it, mapping it, and helping the team leverage it...that is the key to increasing team effectiveness.

The bigger problem was the search for a generically most important factor in team success...a silver bullet if you will. 

The Pattern is that There is No Pattern

They had it.

Project Aristotle had the answer.

If you read that NYT's article carefully, you will see how much trouble they had finding any patterns that they could link to team effectiveness. 

According to the researchers...not team composition, structure, familiarity, personality, intelligence...nothing stood out as key to team effectiveness.

Even when they stumbled on the importance of Team Norms, successful teams often had very different norms.

Here's some quotes from the article, including some from the researchers themselves:

No matter how researchers arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference.

Some groups that were ranked among Google’s most effective teams, for instance, were composed of friends who socialized outside work. Others were made up of people who were basically strangers away from the conference room. Some groups sought strong managers. Others preferred a less hierarchical structure. Most confounding of all, two teams might have nearly identical makeups, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of effectiveness. ‘‘At Google, we’re good at finding patterns,’’ Dubey said. ‘‘There weren’t strong patterns here.’’

Google’s research had identified dozens of behaviors that seemed important, except that sometimes the norms of one effective team contrasted sharply with those of another equally successful group. Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be played down? The data didn’t offer clear verdicts. In fact, the data sometimes pointed in opposite directions. The only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them.

I read that and thought, "That's the answer, but they don't see it."  The pattern in their data is that there is no pattern.

Here We Go Again:  It's Not the Mean. It's the Variation.

When I was the Six Sigma practice leader for a consulting firm, early in our efforts with new clients, we began trying to shift their focus from the absolute level of their performance...their averages...to the importance of seeing and understanding the variation in performance around those averages. 

Consider an array of successful teams: A Navy SEAL rescue with no casualties.  A group of start-up founders who finally make it after the 3rd pivot.  A championship baseball team...one from say, Japan or the Dominican Republic vs one from the US.  King Henry V and his outnumbered victory in the Battle of Agincourt. The constantly changing teams who played football for De La Salle High School across the years 1991-2004 who each contributed to the school's 151 consecutive game winning streak. A lab that regularly produces blockbuster drugs across researchers and modalities. 

The competitive and environmental contexts are different.  The missions are different.  The pressures are different.  The talent, broadly defined (skills, personalities, determination, mix of Me-first vs Team-first, etc), is different.  The structures are different.  The leaders' styles are different.  The amount of resources available are different. The approaches to decision making (consensus, autocratic, delegation, clear DACIs) are different. The norms are different, not just the play-nice-psychological-safety norms, but norms around transparency, no-excuse accountability, willingness to both call each other out and help each other out, etc. The degree of "team policing" that holds each member accountable to the norms and performance standards are different. The definitions of winning are different. And yes, of course, the degree of perceived psychological safety on each team is different.

And yet, all those teams found a way to win.  And it was different from team to team, often dramatically so.

When it comes to teams, it's natural to feel a bit overwhelmed by all the different variables affecting success and to want to try to simplify that complexity.

But think of all the great songs you have heard across many different genres.  Can you boil it down to the one thing, "more than anything else," that makes them all great?

"There are only twelve notes between any octave, but it's the infinite ways you can put them together that touches the soul." ~Billy Joel

As with music, so with teams. 

Just as it's a mistake to try to reduce that variation between great songs to the "more than anything else" that great songs have in common," it's a mistake to try to figure you what those one or two factors are for teams.

And, with teams, it is double-trouble to try to reduce the complexity and variation to problems you understand and like to work on.

Relative comparisons keep a team from drinking its own bathwater and remind them that there may be a lot of room for improvement, no matter what they have achieved so far.

Working with Team Variation

If you are a consultant working with teams, what does it mean, in practice, to "work with team variation?"

It means you would 1) have a research-backed model of team effectiveness, 2) cast a wide net to understand the current equilibrium of forces acting on the team you are working with and 3) trust the team to know what dose...of what medicine...it needs.

Have a Model.  As listed above there are a number of forces which affect team success.  It is best to have a model of those forces, not one that you pulled out of your backside, but one that is actually supported by replicated research.  

Cast a Wide Net.  Having such a model will enable you to, first and foremost, not fall prey to your your own biases about teams and what a good team looks like.

Second, it will enable you to cast a wide net to 1) locate this team in that multidimensional team effectiveness space and 2) help you develop hypotheses about where the best leverage is for improvement. (I personally use the research-backed Rocket Model, developed by Gordy Curphy, one of the best Industrial Psychologists I have ever worked with.)

You measure each dimension of your model through surveys and interviews and come back with a report that lets "the team see what the team thinks it looks like."

Let them see where they stand on an absolute and a relative basis (compared to other teams in the data base similar to theirs). 

Relative comparisons keep a team from drinking its own bathwater and remind them that there may be a lot of room for improvement, no matter what they have achieved so far.

Just doing a survey without the benefit of a relative/comparative database to keep the team honest is like leaving your calculator at home for your Trig final.  You're going to have to work a lot harder.

Trust the Team. Once the team has seen its scores (i.e., seen how the members of the team feels about the various dimensions that might be affecting their performance) and how they compare to other teams like them, trust the team to decide what it wants to work on. 

In other words, don't be a solution (psychological safety) looking for a problem. Don't be the doctor who "knows what you really need."

Let the team decide what it wants to work on.  Give them an array of options for how they might work on it.  And help them administer the dose that is right for them.

Believing in variation means allowing the team to decide.

Because teams fix teams.  Not consultants.

And teams find a way to win...their way.

Or, as is often the case, they don't. 

Not every team wins...not every team becomes high performing, no matter how much psychological safety they have.

Coming Attractions:  This whole series is arguing that the over-rotation towards psychological safety has done more harm than good.

One of the ways something does more harm than good is through unintended consequences.

In this regard, there are three important unintended consequences to touch on. 

Part 4 will discuss how the focus of psychological safety took our eye off the Talent ball.

Part 5 will talk about side effects that occurred in the dynamics on teams that increasing the focus on psychological safety ushered in.

And Part 6 will describe the worst side effect of all...the lowering of our aspirations.

Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is an executive coach, organization consultant, and designer of The First 100 Days and Beyond, a consulting service that has helped hundreds of leaders stepping up into challenging new jobs get the best start of their careers.