About Scalability, Teamwork and Trust.
For anyone who works in a team. And what you can do about it.
Books can have a profound impact on your thinking, mindset, and behaviors. One way it can impact is raising an important question and reframing your point of view. I remember reading “The Art of Scalability” book by Martin L.Abbott and Michael T. Fisher almost 10 years back. I was reading the book as an architect, working on designing scalable systems and architecture.
Never I would have thought it would alter my view of scalability forever by raising an important question. “Why do scalability problems start with organizations and people, not technology, and what to do about it?”
Over the years of leading transformations, products, and teams, the question can’t be more important than ever for me. You can have the most amazing vision and strategy. But you will fall short of realizing it without the right organizational design, culture, people, and team to execute the strategy.
“None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful”- Mother Teresa (but debatable).
These words encapsulate one of my fundamental beliefs of Teamwork that the future is always co-created. Therein also lies the ‘Art of Teamwork’ and an essential element of a scalable organization.
Bringing together a group of talented people is only the start.
There is NO team without trust and collaboration.
Trust is the foundation of high-performing teams. Teamwork is a collective effort and so does our individual ability to influence the right mindset and behaviors to build trust and collaboration.
So what you can do about it?
1. Support a culture of psychological safety
Google researched to uncover evidence to an important question ‘What makes a Google team effective’? They found psychological safety as the number 1 reason for effective and high-performing teams. https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/
“ Psychological safety — Team members should feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other”.
Psychological safety and trust are self-reinforcing. Psychological safety is what your receive, Trust is what you give. Think it this way. Trust … Will YOU give others the benefit of doubt when they take a risk? Psychological safety .. Will OTHERS give you the benefit of doubt when you take risk?
Respect people for who they are now. We sometimes have an idealized version of a person in our minds. We struggle with the conflict of the future idealized version and real person.
Reward for taking risks and experimenting. I have always seen awards for achieving results and successes. Rarely awards for taking a risk, learning from experimenting. How about an ‘EPIC Fail award’?
Run team health survey measuring psychological safety and leverage for team retrospectives. Leverage the 7 questions Amy Edmondson used in the study where she introduced the term “team psychological safety”.
A workplace should feel challenging, not threatening.
2. Practicing Radical candor to grow as a team.
In one of my favorite leadership books ‘Radical Candor ‘, Kim Scott goes into the core of developing people and building great teams.
Radical candor is finding the sweet spot between ‘caring personally’ and ‘challenging directly’ to help develop and grow people.
https://www.radicalcandor.com/
You help people grow in a positive, caring way. It means pushing others beyond their comfort zone without being disrespectful.
Practice radical candor. You have to care first, before challenging.
3. SYSTEM thinking
When something fails in life or in business — who is to blame? The late W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993), renowned engineer, statistician, professor, author, and management consultant, argued the question isn’t “Who?” but “What?”
Dr. Deming insisted that 94 percent of variations observed in workers’ performance levels are because of the system. People are a part of the system. People can’t perform better than the system allows, which he explains in his book The System of Profound Knowledge® (SoPK).
That only leaves 6 percent to special causes outside of the system — user error.
Rusell Ackoff, a pioneer in systems thinking, used to explain that “A system isn’t the sum of the behavior of its parts; it’s the product of its interactions.”
Instill the practice of running effective retrospectives and root cause analysis. Think system, question what happened and what are the contributing factors. Study the interactions between the people.
I have found that something is liberating about retrospectives when done right.
It’s the SYSTEM and Interactions, rarely the INDIVIDUAL.
4. Managing conflict.
Many leaders have an idealized version of collaboration devoid of conflicts. We expect people always to get along and agree on everything.
Quoting from ‘Art of Scalability’ book — “Good or cognitive conflict helps teams open up the range of possibilities for action… a culture of acceptance and respect for diverse opinions is more likely to generate more alternative. Bad or affective conflict results in physical and organizational trauma … Team experiencing this type of conflict fight over ownership and approaches.”
Example of Good or Cognitive conflicts :
Team brainstorming on ‘Defining and refining Product OKR ( Objectives and Key Results)’ aligning with product vision, business strategy, and user research.
Team brainstorming on ‘How to solve data downtime and business impact due to data quality issues’. Ex- Sales performance executive dashboard is not working as expected due to data issues.
Example of Bad or Affective conflicts:
Team discussing lack of communication plans for an upcoming product launch and who should own it.
Understanding sources and managing conflict is an important element of teamwork, collaboration and creativity. We all owe this to ourselves and the people we work with to spark healthy cognitive conflicts and end value-destroying affective conflicts.
We cannot be conflict-averse. You can try to avoid conflict, but you cannot escape the conflict.
5. Adopt a mindset of Intellectual humility.
Mark Leary, a social and personality psychologist, defines intellectual humility as ‘recognizing that a particular personal belief may be fallible, accompanied by an appropriate attentiveness to limitations in the evidentiary basis of that belief and to one’s own limitations in obtaining and evaluating relevant information.’
My personal experience shows that our personal and societal belief systems can be counterproductive to intellectual humility. Intellectual humility can be misconstrued as a lack of knowledge and confidence. This might work against someone who always wants to project confidence. On top of that our society rewards confidence, not humility.
Instead, shift your belief system to one promoting diversity of thinking and tackling your own cognitive biases to make the best decisions through intellectual humility.
Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less. -C. S. Lewis
How is your intellectual humility? I found this 2 min Test and personal report very useful.
Make a simple shift from ‘I am usually correct’ to ‘I am sometimes wrong’.
6. Foster engagement and connection outside of work
Patrick Lencioni author of the book ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a team’ has noted, that high-performing teams are built on trust, and trust requires vulnerability — revealing our true selves to others.
That’s why it’s important to foster real connections among your teams, just as it’s important to come to work and be productive each day.
I believe real connections are built by sharing our personal stories, having fun, and caring for each other. What your team really needs to get to the next level is to know each other more outside of work.
Prioritize time to build real connections.
A closing thought. My biggest success and failure as a leader have been the ability and inability to make people work together towards a common goal.
Thank you for reading and supporting me.
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