20 Oct Perfect Teams
A few years ago, Google decided to investigate what skills, traits and backgrounds could be combined to engineer the perfect team. It turned out that it wasn’t about picking the best and smartest people. Rather, the results depended on the ways teams worked together and spoke to one another. Teams that were high in “psychological safety” were the ones in which collective intelligence was magnified and outcomes were best.
Psychological safety develops when we feel like we can be our genuine selves (vulnerable, but with appropriate boundaries) within a group of people. When there is high psychological safety, people perceive the group as a safe place to take risks. They ask questions and share ideas, feeling confident that others on the team will respond supportively. So how do we bring our humanity into our interactions with others and promote psychological safety within our teams? A study involving a vulnerable robot can help us understand how to encourage people to engage and collaborate.
Researchers had a robot join human players in a challenging game that required teams to work together to achieve collective outcomes. The robot was programmed to make vulnerable comments, neutral comments or remain completely silent while working with different teams. The vulnerable robot would acknowledge mistakes, saying, “Sorry guys, I made a mistake this round. I know it’s hard to believe, but robots make mistakes too,” or “Darn, sometimes I run out of memory and can’t process things fast enough.” The neutral robot offered fact-based statements such as, “That round was executed efficiently.” The silent robot said nothing until the very end of the game, when it politely uttered, “Goodbye,” and rolled away. Compared to the neutral and silent robots, the presence of the vulnerable robot encouraged human players to converse more substantially with one another, distribute conversation more equally and perceive their team’s dynamics more positively.
Sometimes when I’m collaborating with others, I think being a good leader means putting on a superwoman cape and saving the day with swift and perfect solutions to every problem. Then I remember the vulnerable robot and instead say:
This is a learning opportunity and I’m confident we can figure this out together.
I’m not sure about this and want your input.
What concerns do you have about this plan?
What are your ideas about how we can make this work?
Perfect people and robots don’t exist. However, it’s nice to know that perfect teams are possible when there is psychological safety.