How to create a high performance team

The Distinction Podcasts are all about about bridging the gap between academic research and leadership practice. Your hosts, Garin Rouch and Dani Bacon,  have read an extensive amount of academic papers and identified the 5 keys areas that high quality research shows you should focus on as a leader of a remote team. 

There is so much quality research that managers could benefit from implementing into their daily routines and approach. We want to bridge the gap between research & management practice. We'll also be producing infographics to accompany the sessions so follow us on Linked and Twitter. . We want to equip managers and the HR practitioners who support them with strategies and tactics you can implement immediately to optimise performance (and bust a few management myths along the way!). 

• Build and maintain trust
• Reduce your team’s cognitive load
•  Facilitate Social Cohesion
• Leverage the collective IQ of your team
• Develop conflict resolution skills

Thanks for listening!

Distinction is an evidence-based Organisation Development & Design Consultancy designed to support modern, progressive organisations to bring out the best in their people and their teams through training, consulting, and coaching.

Our professional and highly skilled consultants focus on delivering engaging, results-focused and flexible solutions that help our clients achieve their business objectives.

Find out more at https://distinction.live/how-we-can-help/

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Transcript

Garin Rouch  0:04  

Welcome to the distinction podcast. This session is all about optimizing team performance.

Garin Rouch  0:21  

So, this is one of four sessions that we're running. This is specifically for leaders that are working with remote teams. So, session one, which is available on YouTube, is all about leaders and remote work and what we can specifically do.  This session is looking at optimizing team performance.  Session three is a dedicated session that purely focuses on decision making and session four is all about well-being. So, my name is Garin, I'm an organisation development consultant. And I do a lot of work with teams, both through coaching and consulting as well as observing hundreds of meetings over the years and doing reports on them, and pretty much seeing the good, the bad, and the ugly in terms of how teams can actually perform.  So we're going to share some research today. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Dani Bacon  1:12  

My background is in organisation and people change. I spent six years as Director of people at Investors in People and now run my own consulting practice. So, I've led and worked as part of remote teams for the last 15 years, so I've got lots of practical experience in this arena.

Garin Rouch  1:25  

Brilliant. Thank you. So, when we were deciding on the different subjects to look at teams immediately came to us as one of the most important areas because there's so much research that has been done on leadership teams, and these sessions are all about bridging the gap between academic research, and management practice and making sure that as much quality research actually finds its way to support the day-to-day practices.

 And with that research, there have been some quite incredible findings. So, for example, it finds that group efforts actually exceed individual performance more than, 85% of the time, because teams are just one of those natural things that organisations rely on to deliver task. There's so much importance placed on it as well.  The point of this session is to identify five specific actions that you can take away to apply to your work. And then, as we go through the research -  and we've read a lot of research on it.

Dani Bacon  2:23  

-       hours and hours, days, probably, and probably not yet,

Garin Rouch  2:28  

So we often start with some ideas about what we think the research will tell us. And then as we go through it, we start to uncover some of the myths around management practice and I think sometimes it's important to find the specific actions to focus on.  One of the reasons that we looked at optimizing teams is because there's so much that can be done to optimize team performance. On the whole, only 15% of employees across organisations are engaged at any one time. And that's quite an astounding number So, if you as a leader can actually help engage your employees that can have a huge impact on productivity can’t it Dani?

Dani Bacon 3:06  

It can absolutely. If we had a machine that was only working at 15% capacity and productivity, you’d need to do something about it. But so often organisations know their teams are not performing anywhere near to their maximum capacity or effectiveness because they just let it drift and don't try and it better.

Garin Rouch  3:22  

So, the more engaged your employees are, the better the organisation performs. So engaged workplaces enjoy significantly better profitability, productivity, satisfaction, lower staff turnover, less absenteeism, and fewer accidents as well. 

So let's get into some of those myths now that we uncovered along the way. 

So Myth number one is fresh blood improves performance. So, this is a very commonly held belief and I'm sure you've seen this as well, is that if a team stays together too long team members become too comfortable with each other, standards will go down. The team will be tolerant of each other's mistakes, the team's performance will plateau.  What the research finds is that is not true, the only type of teams where that is actually fairly true is in research and development teams and they found that performance plateaued in R&D teams after three years. What they found is that stable teams, over time, just continue to perform and the best teams just keep getting better and better year on year because people can more interdependent. They start to rely on each other specialist knowledge and skill and experience as well.  Dani, what are your findings?

Dani Bacon  4:34  

Yes, I think there's a temptation when you've got teams not working well that you change the members. You can change the people in your team but without really looking at the underlying reasons why the team is not working in the first place. So I think, unless you address the underlying issues that make teams in effective, you can swap the people in and out all the time but you're not going to make a massive difference in effectiveness.

Garin Rouch  4:57  

And also, it takes time for a team to ramp up performance doesn't it? The research shows it takes from 2 weeks to three months to become a really cohesive unit. And at the moment there are lots of teams being bought together, project teams being disbanded, people are part of two, three, four or five teams even. And so what happens is that effort that goes into building that team is never truly leveraged, and that stability is key.

Dani Bacon  5:25  

I think particularly environment now we've got people who have been furloughed and they're coming back to work and they're part of a team and then furloughed again so you've got that constant churn in team makeup at the moment because of the context, we're operating in

Garin Rouch  5:37  

Myth number two is, there's no one size fits all approach, there is no secret sauce that is going to fix your team. Every team is different, its own workloads priorities, problems, levels of uncertainty, different organisational context.  Teams are human systems, they're not engineered mechanical systems you can't just push lever A and lever C to get certain outcomes, it's not quite like that.

Dani Bacon  6:10  

It's very seductive the idea that there might be one solution to this,  that you read the right book and then your team will perform effectively but unfortunately, it's not just like that you need to pick and choose the best bit from all that the best practice out there that’s going to work in your environment.

Garin Rouch  6:23  

Yes. The keyword there is environment. You can't motivate people, all you can do is create the environment around the person.  So let's take the best research here and just try and think about how you can develop that environment.

Myth number three. And this is particularly prevalent in organisations that are going through struggles at the moment where is the real focus, and that is the myth is, it's not just  about the numbers or the profit, actually, what creates employee motivation. There’s a big study in the Journal of Business Ethics recently, and this is backed up by five studies that showed that employee motivation is 17 to 33% higher when profit is not the primary concern. And that really emphasises the importance of teams and organisations having what Jay Richard Hackman would call a compelling purpose and Daniel Pink also reiterated.  People need to be understanding what difference do I make in the world? And a really astonishing statistic by the University of Leiden basically found that 25% of employees doubt the usefulness of their work, so they go into work each day, wondering exactly what it is that they're actually creating what value they're creating as well. So, managers can play a big part in that can't they,

Dani Bacon  7:36  

They can.  It's really important that managers continue to reiterate what the purpose of the organisation is and they really help their teams and their individuals on the team to understand the contribution they're making to that purpose. Never assume that it's known and never assume once you tell somebody they will remember.  They need continual reminding as everything changes and shifts around them. They just need reminding about the difference they're making and why their work matters.

Garin Rouch  8:01  

Number four is the Tuckman model. You may know it as the forming, storming, norming performing. And it's something I get quoted to me a lot by managers - "we just need to get through this storming phase"  - "and how long have you been in the storming phase now?"   - "Well, two years". It's an interesting thing, and it was a really good bit of research, and it really creates a really good mental model for managers to think about. Recent research, Palmer Knight for example in 2007, found evidence that storming actually takes place for the entire lifetime of a team. It's always just a fundamental part of being a team

Dani Bacon 8:39  

It’s a reflection of the environment we operate in now that the world around us is changing so quickly, and teams are changing so quickly so every time you change a small variable in that way, the makeup of the team or the environment the teams operating, then you are back into that storming phase so you never get to a steady state because the world's changing too fast.

Garin Rouch  8:59  

And I think that's a really important thing to think about as a manager should orientate yourself.  It's very fluid it's very dynamic, and it's almost like gardening. You can't just stop gardening, you've got to keep tending to the soil, making sure the right seeds are in the right place, all those types of things. You've got to keep maintaining it as well having you can't just leave it in, and hope that it will work well because you've done the hard bit already.

Dani Bacon  9:22  

That's a really nice analogy actually I like that analogy of a team in the garden.

Garin Rouch  9:26  

I use it a lot. Sometimes when, obviously not in virtual world but I do train I actually take soil, seeds, a flowerpot,  everything into the training room and I get people to actually, as managers grow plants, because there is such a close analogy to the two things as well. Okay, so that's obviously just some myths, we've promised you that we're going to give you five actions that you can implement to resolve today. So we're going to take you through them each of those five areas. We've actually identified some key things to think about as well so Dani, do you want to kick us off with number one?

Dani Bacon  9:59  

Yes, then kicking off the number one, the first action is about building team trust. So, one factor that comes up all the research is trust.  By trust we mean that all members of the team grow to have shared expectations about the attitudes, behaviours, and actions will be other members of the team. And that as those predictions are met - or not - the team learns to what extent they can rely on each other.  It's worth saying that when researchers look at trust they talk about five dimensions of trust, the three that are really common and then another two that have come along slightly later than the first three.  One is around trust in abilities, that's our knowledge and belief in the abilities of others in the team. The second one's benevolence so that's about the amount of support, autonomy, emotional care  we expect to receive from others. The third was integrity so that's around confidentiality and ethical values, then the two new ones. There's one around predictability, the extent to which people keep commitments that are made and are available, and are consistent. And then the final one is around transparency. So to what extent are people sharing information, being open and being clear on what their roles and responsibilities are, or tasks, they're working on.

Garin Rouch    11:05  

And I really like the fact that you can actually break, what is a really big word trust, down into individual units so you can really, as a manager, focus your efforts on which the particular type of trust that you want to work on. Absolutely.

Dani Bacon  11:17  

So, the mindset matters.  There's several really high-quality studies that have shown that intra-team trust is a significant predictor of the effectiveness of team. And we know that trust plays an even greater role in the effectiveness of virtual teams compared to teams that are co-located. So, some research back in 2013 found that as team virtuality increases, and this probably isn't massively unexpected team coordination declines and communication gets more difficult, but in teams where there are high levels of trust, then those problems around coordination and communication are offset to some degree by the fact there's greater trust, so there's a real value in building trust ass a manager to make your teams function more effectively. 

What does high trust look like so trust in a team? It means that other team members can suspend the judgment about things going on, they're not going to jump to conclusions. And they're more willing to hold back and go okay let's just be a bit curious about what's going on here. So you're preventing potential misunderstanding and conflicts. It will also be shown the teams that trust each other are much better able to tolerate uncertainty and much more willing to take risks, so they're both important factors when we're operating in an uncertain and ambiguous terrain that we find ourselves in more so than ever now. 

And then when team members trust each other they more readily share information and emigration willingness to trust in each other’s knowledge. We saw in the last podcast that,t that willingness to share information and knowledge is so important, particularly in a virtual remote world. Then, how do you do it then? We know that trust is important so what do you do to make it happen? Well, in teams, and this alludes back to the myth. Trust develops over time as individuals learn more about each other. There are some things that are more important than others it's not just a case of sitting back and hoping that three months in trust will be there. 

So the first one’s around availability. The one factor around trust that takes on a much greater level of importance in vertical teams is availability. S, researchers found in virtual teams if you've got someone going habitually off grid, or they're not available, then that erodes trust or it stops it building. And that can have a really significant impact on team performance regardless of how strong, all the other factors of team effectiveness are,

Garin Rouch  13:30  

Which is, I guess that's a perception issue, isn't it? So, for example, working weird hours at the moment, particularly as we're moving into lockdown three. So we're not always available. So, if we don't have a narrative around why we're not available, then people will create their own narrative around it as well. Or if someone's actually doing some deep work and they just go offline, no slack, no WhatsApp, no email for two hours to get a big piece of work done or to do some deep thinking that could actually potentially be perceived incorrectly and damage trust

Dani Bacon  14:04  

Yes, it could and that's why it's really important that teams have norms or they establish norms and ways of working and agree how they're going to operate with each other, how they're going to use Slack, how they're going to use their out of office how they're going to communicate with each other about what they're doing and when they're available

So the second way of building trust is protecting the team from negative behaviour. So, believing that others have good intentions is a really important element of trust and in virtual teams particularly if just one team member engages in negative behaviour such as dishonest communication then team trust will decrease.  So managers and HR practitioners need to tackle this early, they need to look out for dishonest communication and be really intentional about correcting it where they see it and make sure that team members know that's not the way the team works and that's not acceptable in the team

Garin Rouch  14:51  

That can be tricky for managers can’t it? Because that's a subjective call. It's you being really clear about what is appropriate what's not appropriate. Having a line, and also having some potentially difficult conversations with team members and they may not see if something wrong with what they're doing. You have to go there to maintain the performance.

Dani Bacon  15:13  

And I think as a manager, it's about not being afraid of having those difficult conversations but also not going into them in a confrontational way.  Just sharing your observations, what you are seeing going on, explaining how you are seeing the world and giving them a chance to share their view of the world.

Garin Rouch  15:32  

In the last session, we’re not on commission, Gervase Bushe,  has a really really nice model for that for Clear Leadership doesn't he which is how you can share what you're seeing observing and invite the other person's perspective in, and to do it just so you can actually understand what's actually going on. 

And then the last point around trust is about being mindful about sharing negative feedback. So, a key element of trust in teams, believing that the members have got the abilities that they need to perform well, so although you need to share feedback so you've kind of given the team information on how they're doing and where they need to improve and what they're doing well. You just need to be really careful about how you do that. So, if you share negative feedback that say the team’s is terrible. You're useless at doing this"  That's going to really diminish their belief in abilities and their own in their individual abilities and their ability to operate effectively as a team. So, when you're providing that feedback, it's really important to make it specific about a particular task or an event or a particular behaviour, there's not going to undermine the team's inherent ability to perform the task. 

Garin Rouch  16:32

And then some of this is feedback 101 isn't it, but it's amazing how often when emotions or a play or in the back and forth conversation. It just comes out on doesn't it?  “you always…”.

And then that person interprets it or because you're factually wrong, then it's interpreted in the wrong way as well so it's really about being very precise and really planning what you're going to say so.

So that's number one. 

Number two is something that's been around for quite a while but I think it's really important in the in application of teams and that's cognitive load.

So, cognitive load was kind of characterized in 1988 by psychologist John Sweller. And so what is it? Well basically cognitive load is, is the total amount of mental effort being used in working memory so some of you who’ve done a little bit of psychology for you probably come across this. So, we only have so much working memory can only hold on to so many items, and therefore when we're working, the more of a cognitive load that we have, the more inefficient we become, the more overwhelmed we become,  the less proactive we become, and therefore the less effective we become as well.

Garin Rouch  17:45  

One of the ways in which we want to encourage you to think about it is to think about the team's collective cognitive load.  Teams have taken on a lot of responsibility, particularly in organisations where people have been furloughed. All of a sudden people's jobs have doubled, tripled, quadrupled or have had to make some difficult decisions about what can't be done. And so teams are overloaded, and therefore that’s really important to think about what is realistic in terms of what my team can do? And what can I do as a manager to lighten their cognitive load?  Do they have too much responsibility? What things can I do ?

Without getting too much into the detail and we would definitely signpost you to the work that was done by Sweller and lots of things of other things like Mind Tools for example.  

There's basically three types of cognitive loads you've got intrinsic cognitive load, and basically this relates to the aspects of actually completing the task itself.  So what actions do I need to do to complete this task?  The second area is the extraneous cognitive load, and that relates basically to the environment in which the task is being done. So, that’s thinking, okay so who do I need to let know that I'm doing this piece of work?  Or who do I need to hand this over to afterwards?  And then the final cognitive load is germane cognitive load, and that relates to the aspects of the task that you're doing that require special attention to create high performance. So these are the real value adds that you would do to a task. So if you're doing the task multiple times at the germane cognitive load is when we are thinking about doing it so in future times when you do the task, it becomes quicker, faster and more efficient. 

When we're overloaded we can't tend to those things equally. And what are the effects of heavy cognitive load for teams?  Well, research shows that performance goes down. Teams become less effective with decision making and problem solving, they start to use it as a shorthand when they're making decisions. And it also increases stress levels. And sometimes the manager can be the source of this cognitive load. So it's really important to be thinking about as a manager is what can I do to ease it and what can I do to prevent it?

So, how do you measure the team's cognitive load at any one time? Well, there is one method, and that's where you actually look at the dilation of your team members pupils.  That's probably not appropriate.

Another probably more simple way of doing it is actually to ask the team in a non-judgmental way. Do you feel like you're effective and able to respond in a timely fashion to the work you asked to do? 

It’s not the most accurate measure but the answer will gauge whether your team's feeling overloaded.  And then, if the answer from all your team is overwhelmingly or clearly negative, then you can start to apply some heuristics or just some simple methods to try and understand if and why the cognitive load is too high and then start to actually do some things to actually reduce that cognitive load. 

And so when we're thinking about this what can we do? Well, the things that we can do are really thinking about how we can eliminate some of the responsibilities that the team has.  How can we potentially provide technical training that they may not have on systems, for example, they're only using excel at an intermediate level. What happens if you actually give them advanced level? would that make them more efficient? 

Another thing as well that's kind of comes from the software world which I think is quite a good model to think about here is lots of teams do things very quickly at the moment. And in order to do things really quickly. They're taking shortcuts, which are creating workarounds where it's really the better way of doing things, and a more sustainable way of doing things is actually something that will take longer. So what that's doing is building technical debt in the system. And so when we're doing tasks required lots of working memory to require, how to do certain things, where certain things are kept. And that puts more and more pressure on the team's working memory. 

So, other things that you can do as well is to actually map out the processes of your team or individuals on a platform like Miro or mural on whiteboards and look for opportunities to automate. I know there's a lot of bad press about things like AI and automation but automation in this age is your friend.  Anything you can do to actually automate tasks or make them more efficient, or just to get rid of them is going to be more effective in the long term. 

And also thinking about word I need to hire me more resource or just to reorganize the responsibilities of the team.  I’d probably say another thing to be really mindful of is, when you're with your senior managers and you're being asked to do particular jobs or take on certain responsibilities… Sometimes we don't want to look bad to our senior leaders, that we're not capable, that we can't do it. But if we say yes to things our teams don't have capacity for then what happens is they pay the price for this, they become overwhelmed. And this this often comes out when you actually sit down with team members in terms of how many things that they're doing and what's realistic and what's possible.

Things that you can do are things like the Eisenhower matrix where we start to map out. It looks like we're doing everything in that urgent - important area. Now what are we doing that could be more in the important not urgent area that could actually help us start to create better systems. And just looking actually streamlining processes as well. Any thoughts from you Dani on this one?

 Dani Bacon 23:01

Yes, I think if you can get someone from outside the team to come in and help you with that review of your processes it can be really helpful to have an external pair of eyes.  Somebody is not really embedded in the way you work and you can ask those questions as a critical friend.  So why do you do that? And often you'll uncover - Well, it's just the way we've always done it. 

Garin Rouch 23.20

So it's those famous words “we've always done that” It's tradition, isn't it? Even if it is really horribly inefficient as well. 

Dani Bacon 23:26

Yes, and I think on the automation front, bringing an expert - just for a short amount of time because sometimes you don't know what is possible to automate until you bring in somebody who says “You do realize you can do that in 10 seconds rather than 30 minutes is taking you to do that”. So don't be afraid to bring in expertise, just to open your eyes about what's possible from an automation perspective.

It’s that balance that when we work with engineering companies they're always thinking about the battle between production and maintenance. And when you're running machinery, you don't run machinery 100% you run it 90 or 80%, and you put the maintenance time in there to make it more efficient in the long term you've upgraded so we don't really do that with human systems do at the moment. 

No, We're very bad at doing that.

Garin Rouch 24:12

Okay, so that's number two cognitive load. And number three, what's, what's that for you to me. 

Dani Bacon 224:17

Number three is all around team social cohesion. So, social cohesion emerges in teams where members like to work together they form emotional bonds of friendship and there's caring and closeness around among group members, and this social cohesion just helps teams be more effective.

We know that from the research that socially cohesive teams tend to have greater psychological safety, which helps team members feel more free to speak up and ask for help, propose ideas and solutions without that fear of negative consequences.  And socially cohesive teams are much more likely to cooperate and interact with each other. So they're more likely to exchange ideas and share information. And just like trust,  we know that social cohesion pays an even greater role in the effectiveness of virtual teams compared to teams were co-located. 

The challenge is it's just much harder to foster social cohesion in a virtual world than it is when you're all face to face. There was some research from June 2020, that found that there are four factors that correlate with employee perceptions of their productivity on collaborative tasks while working from home. And they found that one of them was social connectivity so employees who were satisfied with the social connections in their teams were twice as likely to maintain productivity on collaborative tasks whilst working remotely. So, social cohesion is not a sort of fluffy thing there's a direct correlation to individual and team productivity so put the effort into social cohesion and you create a more effective productive team.

Garin Rouch 25:44

That's often what you'll hear managers say, Oh, this is just HR fluffy stuff isn't it, this is this has got a really hard edge. And when you look at the research and you look at the rapid evidence assessment. This is like double A level quality research in terms of leading to productivity and positive outcomes for the organisation. 

Dani Bacon 26:01

Absolutely. So, how do we do it how can we foster social cohesion?  So the first one is about creating time and space for informal interaction between your team members so they are not always just communicating about task. So there's a lot of great research into nurses who work online and work remotely. And they found that using the theatre analogy that when they're on stage, talking to patients, they're doing their job. It is really important for them to have a kind of backstage environment where they can talk to each other. Away from managers, away from their patients. And that gives them the space to relax, it gives them the space to get to know each other, but it also gives them a space to informally analyse what they're up to and how they're working and discuss ways of improving performance. So that's one thing you can do as a manager is to make sure whatever tools or platforms you're using if there's that kind of informal interaction space.  And that as a manager you're not there, you're not on that space. So, the team can work together in a kind of informal way without worrying that the managers kind of looking over their shoulders and judging what they're talking about,  

Garin Rouch 27:09

It's this thing about sort of forced fun isn’t there.  It’s about taking a carefully curated approach to really ensuring that social relationships develop is there?

Dani Bacon 27:18

So yes, I like that.  One of the things you can do to foster social collaboration is where you make time for socializing, don't leave it to chance, don’t leave it to your team members to solve their own social activity outside of work.  See it as a core part of your day to day functioning, so create intentional opportunities for socializing, but also be aware of individual styles. So not everyone's going to love with karaoke using session or, murder mystery event, but you can be really creative and find different ways of creating opportunities for social interaction.  Be it social events, be it creating communities of practice or book clubs or giving people a chance to connect over those sorts of things.

One thing I've seen being really effective and working in several organisations is informal coffee pair-ups. So you randomly pair up people across the organisation once a fortnight have a 15-minute zoom, coffee, and that gives people a chance to have a conversation with somebody that they won't necessarily come across in their day to day work but they just get to know each other and they build up links, a building social cohesion occasion. 

And then you can have things like check-ins at the start of meeting so if you make the beginning of every meeting you have just a space for people to check-in and say what's going on with them, that just gives people a chance to get to know each other a little bit more,  to start to understand a bit about what's going on in each other's worlds. So they'll know if they've got three children running around the house, trying to be home schooled. Those sorts of things just help people get to know each other and really understand each other's lives. 

And then the last thing you can do to foster social cohesion is around teamwork training. So this has been shown to have really positive effect on virtual teams.  So that’s training teams on how to work together. So not just training them to complete a task. It’s about helping them understand the importance of providing social support within a team, or giving them tools to manage conflict amongst teammates, and other things that make teams more effective. 

Garin Rouch 29:07

There is a difference between team building and team working strategies.  I think it’s important to the difference between the two isn’t it?

Dani Bacon 29:12

Yes, absolutely, and both have got that place. Soo I've seen some really effective traditional team-building events that aren't work-related particularly. When there's a higher purpose of some kind.  I've seen some be really effective where team buildings have been built around a charity event so the teams are working together on something that we're going to deliver to charities. So one I was involved in was building bikes for a charity that would then be donated to young people who needed them to get to college or to help with their caring responsibilities and focusing the team around something that's got a higher purpose, really helped people put aside their work functions and roles and just get to know each other. 

Garin Rouch 29:54

It takes the politics out of it doesn’t it?  It sets a higher context.  It not consequential so you can engage with people, and you see a different side to that person but it requires a lot thought doesn't it?

Dani Bacon 30:04

Yes, and you see people step outside of their traditional roles and people who aren’t a manager or leader stepping up and taking charge which is great. 

Garin Rouch 30:05

And again, it's so important, it really does require put some time and investment into it as well. 

There's a lot of stories that are coming out from the Christmas quizzes that have been happening. “Well we had 40 people on the call, only 10 people really spoke” Do people really want to engage with each other to have drinks online? Not everyone drinks, how do you facilitate those, those kind of social interactions to really bring that organisation together as well. So that's number three. 

Number four is virtual team meetings. So, Dani and I have, and I'm sure you have as well, been in certainly more than your fair share of meetings.  One of the things that is a part of my role is I observe lots of meetings and give people feedback on how they go. I would probably say if organisations in this country could actually really optimize the way in which team meetings work this would have a substantial impact on the GDP of this country as a whole. What they could achieve versus what they do achieve is quite a big gulf. So what we're going to do is we're just going give you some really clear specifics here.  We’re thinking about the model of 60 – 30 -10.  So when we think about this. So 60% of your effort should be going into the design of your team and the meetings that it has - how you actually design the task that it does, how you design what it makes decisions on and how it does those decisions as well.  30% should be about the actual launch of the team and how you actually set it up to do really well in these meetings and 10% of your effort should be going to ongoing coaching, to ensure that the team continues to improve and perform better as a team as it moves forward. So here we go,  we got five for you. So the first one we want to think about is when you bring the team together is to really think to yourself, is what it does, consequential, challenging and clear?

Garin Rouch  32:09  

Okay, so it's the three C's. So they sound really good but what do they actually means. So consequential - so when this team meets, is it going to have an impact on the team?  is it what you guys are actually going to discuss is it going to have a big impact on the performance of the team? The second thing is challenging. Is the content of what you talk about, is it intellectually challenging, or, does it require the experience and know-how and knowledge of the people around the table, and therefore requires the collective IQ of this team to actually engage with this as an issue. And then finally, is it clear/ Is it just crystal clear what goes into this meeting, or what shouldn't go into this meeting? That requires you to take a bit of a step back and think about the overall governance structure of your team -so what goes into 1-21s? what goes into project meetings? what goes into the virtual team meeting? what needs to be escalated because we don't have enough authority?  So it's all really clear what goes into each meeting.  And then people can come into these meetings thinking something big is going to happen today, I need to pay attention.  I'm not going to kill time. And I'm not going to sit here and WhatsApp my colleague while we're in this meeting, saying how bad this meeting is. I really have to pay attention. 

So the second thing is a reflection of the fact that it's virtual, and therefore we really need to think about the process. Virtual meetings are more tiring than face-to-face meetings, and face-to-face meetings can be like endurance events. So virtual meetings by their very nature need to be shorter, and therefore more frequent.

You need to have clear agendas and papers ahead of time for people to read and feel prepared, particularly in a virtual world. And be very specific in terms of what you want the for people to do in preparation.  Is that item on the agenda  for a decision? Do you want me to make a decision based on this therefore I need some supplementary information on Monday to come with questions? Or you're just consulting with me to get my insight then you will you make decisions. Therefore,  you don't miss manage my expectations.  Or is it for information,  we're going to share some corporate messaging or whatever it is.

A meeting shouldn't really be for information only because that's really boring. And there are other methods of actually sharing that information. We can be far more creative about it as well. The meeting should not be an inbox exercise where I as the manager speak to all of my direct reports individually.  It should be things that actually require the team's thinking.  And if it really is like that then you have to wonder, is it a real team?  Does it actually have a purpose? Are you an artificial team? And actually might need to think about dividing the team up a little bit?

And also, you need to have an annual plan of what meetings should be held and when. When's our planning cycle? When do we do our quarterly reviews? All those kind of things. So we've got some real cadence into the meetings so there's a real kind of momentum as well. 

And we also need to keep a record of the meeting. What do we discuss? What actions do we take? Who's accountable? Who's responsible? Use a RACI, whatever you want to do, just to keep everyone involved and up to speed., 

But also it means we're making progress. Life of work feels quite relentless at the moment. If we never feel as if we make progress because we don't measure it, then the work feels relentless and that helps you become motivated as well. 

Dani Bacon 35:36

And I think it's Chair of the meeting is it's your responsibility to hold people accountable for delivering on the actions that they agree in a meeting.  There's nothing worse than agreeing a load of actions and then nobody does them the week after. And then you let that drift and then you end up in a really ineffective cycle where you’re agreeing actions but nobody really believes that you have to do them so they just get left, and that creates frustration and it's ineffective, you don't get anywhere

Garin Rouch 35:57

And it erodes over time. And then people's engagement goes down, and then you just get what you get.

And then a good foundation that is number three which is setting team norms.  Ruth Wageman and J Richard Hackman did a lot of research at Harvard on the performance of teams, and they found that teams actually had a really clear norms of conduct - that was one of the greatest predictors of team effectiveness.

There's all sorts of bad habits that are just creeping their way in at the moment. People are distracted, they multitask. They don't look at their screen when they look away, all kinds of things. And that really creates some bad habits.  Also it’s about how people need to be engaged with each other, how they need to be feeding back, what they need to be involved in, , do they talk about topics outside of their own domain of expertise?  all those kind of things really good to have nice and clear upfront. 

And also think about how you want people to be feeling and thinking that the end of the meeting. We don't think enough about that. As a manager this is one of your primary platforms to inspire engage and motivate your team for the rest of the week and to focus them, yet your meetings often kind of fizzle out. Okay, so that's that. Okay. 

You want you guys to go back to the workspaces, to their busy homes or wherever they're working, and you want them to be inspired and focused and part of a team So think about how you structure it as well. 

And also, make use of technology. You may have some shy members of the team, use technology just to nudge people in private as you know you’ve primed them to say something in this meeting. It's a really good practice to do.

Number four is basically using good facilitation techniques to encourage engagement. And, often teams are too big, the optimal number, I think, is about 4.6 for Team size.  Teams often quite a lot bigger than that -  people get lost, or people come to the meeting and they haven't had a chance to develop a point of view about the agenda or it's outside of their expertise. So you can use some really good facilitation techniques to actually get people to develop their thinking in the room, to build social connections with other people are actually then to articulate it and socialise it,  critique each other's ideas, and you can use lots of things on Zoom which is like breakout rooms. 

I'm a big advocate of Liberating Structures. A really good body of work. That's kind of brought together lots of really good activities and activities as simple as 1-2-4-All are a great thing if you're going to make a decision. So the way it would work is one is each person individually thinks about the question that you're asking them or the decision to be made. Then once they've done that they then go into pairs, and they share what they've been thinking with their colleague, and their colleague asks questions and develops their thinking. And then you start to bring them back into bigger groups. And what that does is that when you do actually have a group discussion, everyone has an opinion. Everybody feels more comfortable sharing it. And it's so much richer, rather than it really being led by the manager.

And often you'll see when things are out kilter because often when I'm doing observations. I'll take a time segment the meeting and make a mark of how many contributions are made by people. And often 50 to 60% of the time, the person is talking is the chair. And that means that you're not utilizing the team and you're not using the collective IQ of the team as well. 

And then the last one. And this is top level A, quality research, and that's the importance of, doing debriefing sessions and lessons learned sessions. That’s where as a team, you take a step back and you review a decision that's been made, and you take the learning out of it.  Rather than just constantly careering into new actions to be taken, we're thinking about what needs to be done for us to improve.

And it needs to be done in a certain way it's not finger-pointing and being judgmental. It's what are the lessons, what can we do. And one of the things I often encourage teams to do is, at the end of a meeting, is spent five to 10 minutes just reviewing how was the meeting for them. What worked well? What didn't work so well?  What can we do next time? And that can have quite a big impact on the performance of the team overall can’t it Dani?

Dani Bacon  40:12  

It can be really transformative in the way that the team works and learns from how it's working. But I would say, be aware, the few times you do it, it will be uncomfortable.

Garin Rouch 40:20

Oh, it’s clunky. It’s horribly clunky.

Dani Bacon  40:24

But it’s worth persevering. As the manager or the chair of that meeting, you have to make sure that you don't let yourself and the team off the hook after one meeting because it felt awkward and uncomfortable, so you never go there again. Keep pushing and making it kind of formal part of your agenda and you'll find once you’ve done it 2, 3, 4 times it becomes a much more natural part of the meeting and people be ready for it and they'll be much more willing to share and contribute their thoughts,

Garin Rouch  40:48  

And they'll share things like, “on that particular point I don't really feel as if I shared my opinion as much as I could have,” and then you say “well what did you want to share?” and they say “well this piece of information”. All of a sudden the quality of your solutions just double down because you really are leveraging that collective IQ, and that's what teams are all about.

Dani Bacon  41:08

And you don't leave the meeting with people with stuff they haven't said and then they're not really bought into what's, what's been decided because they didn't say what they thought.

Garin Rouch 41:18  

So that's for that virtual teams, Dani, what's our number five, please?

Dani Bacon  41:22  

So last but not least is all about developing conflict resolution capability,

Garin Rouch 41:24

So we’re going there with conflict? Okay.

Dani Bacon  41:29

So some level of conflict is necessary for the successful functioning of teams, especially around tasks. It’s really good to have different perspectives on how to deal with problem or make the most of an opportunity.  But when you get relationship conflict around, interpersonal issues or process conflicts or disagreements about how you're going to delegate resources, both of those things can be detrimental to team effectiveness. 

So, why does it matter? So the research shows that there’s actually little difference in the sorts of conflict that virtual teams experience compared to co-located teams.   Conflict around the task – what’s the right thing to do or relationship conflicts are not more likely or less likely to happen in a virtual team versus a co-located team. But you've probably got greater likelihood of process conflict in a virtual team. Probably because it's just more complicated to work remotely and virtually so you're more likely to run into problems. 

So whilst interpersonal conflicts and task conflicts aren't necessarily more likely in virtual teams there are some specific things about how conflict shows up in virtual teams that are worth being aware of if you're managing a virtual team. 

So the first one is that conflict maybe hidden longer in virtual teams. So, people aren't raising questions quite so early or putting their challenges out there quite early when you can solve them. And when relationship conflict does arise in a virtual team it is much more likely to be negative for team performance. And in fact, affects team satisfaction to even greater extent as virtuality increase.  Conflicts are more likely to escalate more quickly in a virtual setting as well. So there's a risk that individuals take disagreements, or are more likely to take disagreements personally because they can't see the context or the nuance or the facial expressions of the other party, they're more likely to create negative attributes about the other person. And then if you take something personally, you're more likely to respond in a more emotional or aggressive way and that, that just makes things escalate, more likely. 

Garin Rouch 43:24 

Yes, it's interesting as well because I think people have got a lot of stresses on them at the moment, haven't they, and you can't always guarantee what place that person is going to be in when they receive your message for example. So it may well be the your email or whatever you say is totally innocuous but you're the 14th person, or theie child has kept awake all night and it's just yours as the trigger. Because you've not set up the context, or not done some natural kind of greeting on it, “how are you? “ you just get straight to task. That's the thing that sets off.

Dani Bacon  43:56  

Absolutely, there's a really interesting research about the problems caused by electronic communication, and they are all linked to the fact that the message gets separated from the context, separate from the person sending it, separated from their body language.  So a study in 2016 found that people tend to interpret emails as more negative that the sender intended and they were also more overconfident in their ability to understand what others meant by the emails they've sent you. 

And then, 2019 study found similar results so our capacity to interpret the emotional content of an email or a chat platform message is really low.  And by email people tend to interpret positive emotions as more neutral and neutral emotions are more negative. 

And there's more research in 2015 that found that over 1/3 of employees receive at least one email a day, they would class as impolite or rude. So, that's a lot of emails flying around that have got the potential to upset people.  All that said, we know we have to find more effective ways to manage conflict in our teams if we want effective and happy teams and people. 

So what can we do? So the first piece of advice is deal with it and to spot it. So, we know, even if we don't always want to admit it that the least successful technique within the conflict is avoiding it. Pretending it’s not there, ignoring it, unfortunately, won't help. It's not going to go away.

Garin Rouch  45:21  

Or it will present itself in surprising ways. Won't it? So this particular issue may not be the catalyst but there'll be like something down the line when because it's not been dealt with here, it will come up with something else won’t it?

Dani Bacon  45:34 

Absolutely. There's very few problems that get better by ignoring them. Yes, and the first thing is deal with it, as a manager. Be on the lookout for it. You have to identify conflict, before can start to address it so it's about prepping ourselves to be a bit more vigilant, and trying to spot signs of conflict early and intervene when we can.

Garin Rouch  45:57  

So conflict has got such a negative connotation around it but it's actually, it's really healthy, isn't it?  I think Patrick Lencioni puts it really well when he talks about productive conflict.  

Teams have different people with different professional background,  different professional lenses, you will have differences of opinion. As teams we have to come together and stay with those differences and work our way through it to come to the best quality solutions but, often, teams sit at the other end which is artificial harmony which is, even if we see something that upsets us we'll just try and keep this veneer of niceness going, or we'll have destructive conflict, the teams can actually stay in the middle, but quite often quite rare, aren't they?

Dani Bacon 46:38  

Yes, they are but there's things you can do. There's techniques you can draw on. So one that a lot of people have heard of is DeBono’s 6 hats.  It just encourages team members to put aside their functional role or their own personal views on a problem and look at the problem from a different perspective. And techniques like that can really take the heat out of the problem.

Garin Rouch  47:01  

It's a classic isn't it?  It's an old-time management classic  and it works, doesn't it?  Because it makes people more rounded because it helps invites them to look at it from the devil's advocate perspective, or it will work perspective? We may not have been in that role before.

Dani Bacon  47:09  

So, there's other things you can do but I think if your team is struggling to have a healthy productive discussion about something, then find a tool like that just to give them a different way of engaging with a discussion. 

The second thing around, conflict is, defining from rules of engagement upfront. So, it's inevitable, you're going to run into some sort of conflict in the team so have a conversation with your team before you run into those problems about how you're going to deal with conflict when it arises.  Put some protocols in place about how you're going to handle those discussions. So do you use a particular technique. Get them to commit if they sense a conversation is going to be difficult or an online email discussion starts to go off track or starts to get bogged down, then agree you're going to move it to a video conversation or a phone conversation where you can bring more nuance to the conversation.  Or  you might  you want to agree that when things get difficult you're going to take a timeout and allow people to go away and calm down, but you must also agree to come back to it, It's not an excuse, just to take time out and we’ll never mention this again.  As it will pop up at some point.

And then thirdly, there's an element of upskillingf and training your team how to deal with conflict. especially, when we look at virtual settings. It’s about recognizing that skill in face to face communication and conflict management doesn't necessarily map onto skill in virtual communication and managing conflict. So just because you’re great at defusing stuff or  having the difficult conversations face to face, it can feel really different when you're in a virtual environment. 

So it's about opening ourselves up to the possibility that we're misunderstanding someone’s meaning when we read their email, It’s about, understanding that we might be communicating unintentional emotions when we're sending our own emails. And it's one of the techniques is stating your interpretation of somebody else's message. Don't make assumptions, don’t leap to conclusion.  Just explain what you think you understood from their message and give them a chance to explain what they meant and you might diffuse some stuff before conflict even arises. Sharing your mental models with each other and really over-explaining your thinking in a way that you might not be used to.

Garin Rouch 49:28  

It's a skill isn't it? And it just takes practice and level of comfort with it. It’s part and parcel of a good healthy functioning team is it?

Dani Bacon  49:42 

And then there's been several studies showing that emotional regulation training - so short sessions teaching people how to identify and be aware and manage their emotions can really impact the likelihood of conflict and how well it's handled when it does arrive.

Garin Rouch  49:49  

Yes, people can be very, don't necessarily feel able to articulate the emotions that they're feeling at any one time. So if someone's carrying the general mood of frustration from something else they made not be able to differentiate that this particular task area is not the source of the frustration, this is the source, but people sometimes have to work on unpicking that don't they?,

Dani Bacon  50:18  

Absolutely. And then the last point for handling conflict brings it full circle back to the first point which is if you can build trust and create psychologically safe teams, you're much less likely to have issues with conflict. If you've got a team where there is trust it comes with other opportunities. You’ll be able to notice conflict, because you the people and how they normally work and function.  You’re more likely to be willing to address the issue or conflict early, you more willing to be open and feel comfortable speaking up about difficult issues, and when conflict does occur, it's much, much easier to resolve because if there's trust in the team, you won’t automatically assume that the conflict is about a kind of relationship issue, you'll see it for what it is it is just a disagreement over a task, rather than kind of blowing it up into something around, that person doesn't like me or I can't work with that person, you see is just a narrow kind of task issue you need to have a conversation about.

Garin Rouch  50:55 

There’s so much good research that you are sharing there isn’t there? So we’re going to share with you the references, some signposts there to help you take your reading a little bit deeper as well. 

Okay, so let's just summarise the key points from today. So number one, Dani? Trust. Number two was cognitive load. Number three social cohesion. Four was virtual teams. And number five was developing, conflict resolution capability

Garin Rouch 51:30

Right so we've given you a whole load of content today for you to think about and you might want to re-watch this a couple times to get all the value from it. But what we want to leave you with is three specific actions from today, that you can take away and apply immediately. So what's the first one for you Dani?

Dani Bacon  51:43

So the first one is go and look at, kind of what opportunities you've created for informal social interaction in your team, are opportunities there? and are they inclusive? Do they play to the different personality types?

Garin Rouch  51:54  

Number two is look at your team meetings and what it does is? Is it consequential? Is it challenging? is it clear? Does it fully leverage the collective IQ of your team?

Dani Bacon  52:04  

And then number three is mine for conflict. So there will be conflict bubbling away in your team. So, be proactive and look for it and try and surface it and address the issues before they may get more complicated and more difficult to unpick.

Garin Rouch  52:21  

Brilliant that’s the end of our session. So that's optimizing team performance for leaders with remote teams.

We'd love to hear your feedback. If there's any specific areas that you would like us to do a longer session on we'd love to hear that as well. The next session is looking at decision making.  What we ask of you is if you're watching this on YouTube and we really appreciative it if you can just give it a like and if you'd like to follow more videos that come from us, which should be out really shortly. Just hit the subscribe button and if you click the bell that basically what happens you'll get a notification, and when the next video is out as well but a huge thanks for watching with us today and we look forward to the next one and thank you.

Dani Bacon  52:56  

Thanks for joining us.