Team Dynamics

In the fast-paced and complex adaptive environment of healthcare, effective teamwork is not just desirable—it’s essential.  Project Aristotle (5 year research by google) found there were five components to a high performing team: psychological safety coming out on top with dependability, clear goals and objectives, meaning of work and impact of work after that. We know from Amy Edmondson’s work how important psychological safety is but it is often used as a kind of buzz word or throw away line.. ‘just ensure you have psychological safety.’ What does it really look and feel like in practice.

I have just had the experience of being on jury service. A scenario where you are placed into a group of 11 other people who know absolutely nothing about it each other and we are expected to come together to decide on a verdict. I am quite rightly not going to discuss the case or identify any of my fellow jurors or even tell you where the jury sat it order to protect the integrity of the process. What I will share with you is how it felt to put psychological safety into action and what I thought were the three key elements of success that might be helpful for any of you who are working in the complex, diverse, sometimes fleeting, teams within healthcare.

Getting to know each other:

Basically getting to know each other matters. There is even evidence that we perform better when we develop friendships within our working environment. Over the period of the case we tentatively got to know each other as people in the breaks and when we were asked to step out of the court. You are not allowed to talk about the case until you get to deliberation, after you have heard all the evidence, so we needed something to talk about. We talked about our lives, the nuances of where we lived, our jobs, our favourite food and films and over time it got deeper with us exploring peoples hopes and fears for their jobs or their future. We moved from strangers to a bonding group. Building trust we know is crucial in any team and it is built when people feel they belong and will be treated with respect, kindness and fairness. This is what we were doing when we were simply talking to each other about our lives. As part of the ‘getting to know each other’, we also went from a sea of different faces to human beings with a variety of life experiences, we had things we shared and things we didn’t but we took joy from learning about what those were. Fundamentally though we had shared things like our values and our responsibility.

Different perspectives:

Jurys are by their very nature, made up of a diverse group of people; age, gender, and ethnicity and so on. Part of the deliberation meant we heard the different and diverse perspectives in the group. We all heard the same evidence but we didn’t all hear it in the same way. We initially did not all come to the same conclusions about the case. So we listened. We were curious about why someone had a different view from our own. We talked about it honestly, openly and respectfully. Within the group there were different skills and life experiences that were bought to the table. One of our group developed a flow chart for us to consider our options, others talked about their understanding of the different legal terms which they had learnt about in different circumstances or previous jury experience. Each of us helping the other. Throughout we thanked each other, acknowledged when someone came up with a good point or remembered a piece of evidence that was helpful. In short we really appreciated the contributions of every single one of the group.

Distributed ‘leadership’:

I have always thought that you needed ‘someone in charge’, that you had to have one person who set the tone and facilitated or led the others. However, this was not the case on this particular jury. We were given clear instructions by the court as to what is expected of us and about our role and those of others. This helped avoid confusion and ensure that each of us understood what we were there to do. We had a shared purpose and goal. There was no one person who was in charge or took the position of leader. We organised ourselves without this. Therefore it wasn’t the job of a single person to create the team or instruct on the right way to behave or to build psychological safety, it was down to all of us. We even helped boost morale, it is a big responsibility making decisions about another person or persons life, and we constantly reinforced the sense of collective decision making. We were lucky, (or did we make it happen) that we didnt have conflict. We had challenge but in a respectful way.

Am I describing a too good to be true scenario. Genuinely no. Not for us. We all felt it. I am sure that there are people who have been on Jurys where it is not the case but given that I experienced such a resoundingly positive experience I thought I would share. I hope that you found it in some way useful to think about the next time you are working with a group of people you really don’t know very well or at all. My one suggestion above all else? Get to know each other.