Easy in theory, difficult in practice

In a recent HBR article, the authors wrote about research they had conducted over a year on the relationships between how dispersed teams were and the speed at which their projects either succeeded or failed. While dispersed teams appeared to be more efficient than co-located teams when it came to completing successful projects, co-located teams were quicker at abandoning those projects which were doomed to fail.

The first finding seems logical.

Dispersed teams often have greater diversity than co-located ones which could lead to more creativity and innovation if that diversity is effectively leveraged. Dispersed teams usually also face more constraints with their ways of working which might encourage them to be more disciplined in their work efforts.

The second finding is more surprising. The authors provide three explanations for this:

1. There are often higher coordination costs for identifying, communicating and addressing major project challenges when teams are dispersed. Team members at one location might feel that their work is proceeding well but be unaware of major concerns from other sites.
2. Dispersed teams tend to invest more effort up front in discovery or planning activities to enable them to work autonomously. However, this might increase the likelihood of their being unwilling to write off sunk-costs.
3. They might place greater faith in senior leadership's ability to overcome significant issues with the project.

The authors do provide some suggestions on how to make dispersed teams more efficient at weeding out the walking dead:

• Improving the project intake process to be better at filtering out those projects which should never have been initiated
• Increasing the opportunities for dispersed teams to communicate between their different locations to ensure they have a complete picture of what is going on
• Increased management oversight

While I'm in favor of the first two suggestions, there is always a risk with the third of micro-management or overly heavy governance.

But what if the main reason that team members are unwilling to speak up proactively about impending failure is because they are afraid to do so?

Remember that the third explanation for the difference was the belief in senior leaders being able to resolve any major project issues. But just as we might have excessive faith in those leaders we don't see regularly, we might also be afraid to share our concerns of project failure with them.

And this brings us back to psychological safety.

When leaders haven't created a culture of safety then project issues are prone to fester longer. It is relatively easier for leaders to make staff who are co-located with them feel comfortable about speaking up, but it takes greater effort for them to establish and sustain such safety with dispersed team members.

But when we consider the financial and human costs of failing slowly, isn't the incremental effort to create safety worth it?

A recent HBR article showed how kindness could serve as a lever to generate productivity improvements. The authors explain that while receiving kindness can enable us do better work, the act of giving compliments is equally powerful at making us feel better. Some suggestions were provided in the article on how leaders can create a kinder work place but will a few tactics be enough to change culture?

Think about a team with a prevailing toxic culture where team members are actively engaged in one-upmanship with one other. Showing kindness to a fellow team member might be seen as a sign of weakness, or even worse, interpreted as a manipulative ploy to gain an advantage.

Isn't our reluctance to be kind to someone else based on how this kindness might be perceived just another form of fear in the work place? If so, then once again, psychological safety serves as the fan to blow away the fog of fear.

Along with encouraging team members to not be afraid to speak up when they see something wrong, to try something new without fear of social repercussion or to be vulnerable without embarrassment we should also make it safe for team members to be genuinely kind to one another without fear of ridicule or suspicion.

Kindness kicks in at each of the first three stages of Dr. Timothy R. Clark's 4 Stages of Psychological Safety model.

Inclusion Safety is giving someone else the respect they deserve as a fellow human being and isn't kindness one of the basic ingredients to showing respect for one another? Learner Safety is granting someone the permission to engage in the learning process and wouldn't we show kindness by encouraging them as they are learning and by giving them a helping hand when they need it? Contributor Safety grants them the permission to create value within our team and recognizing this value they have created is a form of kindness.

So what can we do to create a kinder team culture?

Many of the same practices which are used for building psychological safety are applicable.

• Have a conversation with the team about kindness and encourage them to add something related to it in their working agreements such as "We will show kindness to one another without fear".
• Model kindness yourself. As the authors state in their article "By giving compliments and praising their employees, leaders are likely to motivate team members to copy their behavior and create norms of kindness in teams."
• Incorporate kindness into your team's ceremonies. For example, to start a retrospective with the right mindset, ask team members to acknowledge the kindness of a fellow team member over the past sprint.
• Encourage both tangible and intangible acts of kindness. Spot awards which team members can give each other are great, but so is saying "Thank you, I appreciate what you are doing!" or "Can I give you hand with that?".
• While not the ideal role model for anyone, you could choose to emulate Hannibal Lecter who finds discourtesy "unspeakably ugly" and refuse to tolerate unkind behaviors from the stakeholders you or your team interact with.

Google used to have "Don't be evil" as their motto. Zappos used the motto "Share Happiness". Why not adopt "Be kind" for your team?

In one of my earlier articles, I had proposed the use of behavioral nudges to help improve project governance. After reading an HBR article this week in which the authors provided a number of suggestions on how to sustain newly adopted behaviors in the context of the imminent return to in-person office work, I thought that a nudge-based approach might also help with increasing psychological safety.

On the surface, this might seem like a bad idea. After all, if your prevailing culture is toxic, drastic actions might need to be taken to see meaningful improvements. There could be a few "bad apples" at all levels of the organization structure who won't change and may need to be shown the door. There would also be some benefit in providing education to all staff on the importance of psychological safety and what they can personally do to build it.

But once the dust has settled on these overt tactics, different approaches are needed to sustain the desired types of behavior.

At the risk of necro-quoting, following Gretzky's “I skate to where the puck is going” approach will work well when hiring if we bring on new staff who are committed to creating safe environments, but what about our existing staff?

Hallway posters are not the solution. "Loose lips sink ships" might have worked during past war times, but we are playing the long game when we want to build psychological safety. And with the strong likelihood that flex-place arrangements will persist well beyond the end of the pandemic, such visual cues won't translate well to the virtual world.

Rewarding or recognizing behaviors which promote safety helps, but if not designed properly, such carrots could generate unwanted consequences and won't generally contribute to long-term sustainability

But if we think of Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and 2 model from Thinking, Fast and Slow, a well-designed nudge could shift the cognitive System 2 process required to behave in a different, safer manner to the lower effort, default-driven lazy System 1.

One example of such a nudge might be an add-in for e-mail, persistent chat and instant messaging tools which would analyze content as you type it and offer suggestions on different wording. Such an assistant should be more like the intelligent suggestion capabilities offered in e-mail platforms such as Gmail rather than the reviled Microsoft Clippy assistant which plagued MS Office 2000 users.

Another nudge could be an assistant which would analyze received text content to proactively alert you that it might contain bad news so that you can be better prepared to respond to it.

And yet another would be to use virtual backgrounds in video conferences with key messages highlighted so that while we are speaking with someone, the importance of safety remains front and center.

If developing sustainable psychological safety is a journey, it might keep rolling with a few nudges.

An HBR article piqued my interest: “Your Board Needs a People Committee”. In it, the authors provide services which a talent-focus on the part of a subset of the board could bring to helping the leadership teams they support in attracting, retaining and developing their #1 asset. The authors assert that the typical annual reviews of people data conducted by most boards are insufficient as these only provide lagging evidence of where corrective change might be needed.

I realized the same benefits could arise if boards took an active interest in how companies are going about increasing their business agility.

A year ago, I had written an article covering the benefits of a top-down and bottom-up approach to improving organizational agility as in many companies middle management is where transformative change goes to die. A top-down approach is likely to be side-stepped or given lip service by middle managers and might be actively resisted by teams. A bottom-up approach might work for individual teams but to get commitment from the delivery and control partners which make up value streams, top-down support is essential.

But the fly in this particular ointment is that senior leaders rarely stay put.

It is not uncommon for a senior executive to change portfolios every two years, especially if they are being groomed for a C-level position. I’ve seen more than my fair share of transformations which were cancelled or rebooted prematurely because the original sponsoring executives had moved on and their replacements either felt that the changes were no longer a priority or they had a different vision for the desired end state.

We know that the road to increased business agility is a long and arduous one for large companies. The likelihood that the primary executive sponsor or key members of the steering committee will remain the same over the journey is quite low. Given this, wouldn’t it make sense to actively engage the board to guide (and in some cases drive) aspects of the transformation?

Beyond the issue of executive attrition, there are a couple of other reasons why this is worth considering:

• Board members are usually involved with multiple companies and could help the leadership team in establishing realistic targets as well as in identifying innovative practices which they have seen work elsewhere.
• Increases in business agility should lead to greater value realization and improved talent retention. Both of these should be of great interest to boards, so why would they not want to be more actively engaged?

Of course, to make this work, the board and the executive team will need to develop rules of engagement and some definition of roles and responsibilities to reduce the likelihood of board members overstepping their boundaries.

So if you are leading a business agility transformation and have got buy-in from your senior leadership team, your selling work is not done. Take it to the board!

HBR published an article this week titled Managing your WFH paranoia. In the article, the author focuses on the impacts of the “out of sight, out of mind” concerns which many workers have developed over the course of the past year resulting from COVID-19 pandemic work restrictions. Such fears could include a sense of persecution, feelings of abandonment or being disrespected.

She also provides a number of tips on how team members can avoid or overcome these concerns including:

• Establishing clear expectations with stakeholders
• Prioritizing what’s important and not overextending one’s commitments
• Being aware of one’s reaction to negative feedback or a lack of feedback from others, and seeking to understand it rather than becoming defensive or more paranoid
• Compartmentalizing the concerns and finding methods of being able to park those concerns at the end of the workday

Such tactics are helpful, but always remember that it takes two to tango. While we want our team members to be as self-managing as possible, what we do as leaders will go a long way towards helping them do so.

So what can you do as a team lead to help your team members avoid such fears?

Tune up your team’s working agreements

Assuming your team members have already developed a set of ground rules for how they will interact with one another, it might be a good time to refresh these rules. Facilitate a candid conversation with your team about fears of isolation and encourage them to identify additional rules for how to go about surfacing such fears. Explore what behaviors should be reinforced or avoided to reduce the likelihood of such fears festering. Don’t hesitate to lead by example. Give them instances of when you might have felt these same concerns and how you dealt with them.

Be (more) responsive

You might feel that you are an excellent communicator, but are you testing this assumption regularly? Could you do more to provide feedback in a clear, timely manner? Is the way in which you respond (or not) sending the wrong messages? Ask your team members, either in a group or one-on-one, if they can think of a recent specific scenario where their your remote interactions with them made them feel more concerned than if you had been working with them in person.

Check in regularly

While I’m sure you are using regular informal surveys or other techniques to see how your team is feeling, you might wish to add some questions specifically related to how your team members are feeling. As as example, you might ask them to grade their level of comfort or confidence on a sliding scale.

Be aware of their commitments

Make sure that there is transparency around who has committed to what. Encourage your team members to work a sustainable pace and to come to you if they are not confident in pushing back when someone asks them to take on more work than they feel comfortable juggling.

Provide support resources

If you have the ability, set up some virtual workshops or lunch-n-learns on how to manage stress and fear of failure concerns when working remotely. Encourage your team members to identify a “buddy” within their team with whom they can have candid, safe two-way conversations about this topic. Locate suitable online videos related to the subject and view and discuss them together during team meetings.

Remote work is here to stay.

If team leaders and team members work together to tackle the concerns that come with this way of working, their efforts will be like a bright sunshine burning off the fog of fear.