Psychological safety is essential to team effectiveness, because it both determines how much team members are willing to contribute and impacts general well-being. Team leaders should understand and measure psychological safety and other critical factors to build great teams.-BY INGRID JOHNSON

Team effectiveness refers to more than meeting goals, though that is certainly one element. How the team reaches those goals is also important, because effectiveness includes elements such as resilience, sustained performance, interdependency, team culture, and psychological safety. A team model that creates an effective team leads to consistent results, engaged team members and team members who experience personal well-being, a sense of belonging, and an understanding of how their contributions contribute to organizational success. There are different team models, but they all have basic elements at their core. Google’s re:work project, conducted by the Project Aristotle team, did an excellent study on what makes an effective team and the team behaviors that lead to high performance.

Team vs. Work Group: Getting Down to Basics

Managers lead teams, but how many have really thought about the difference between a team and a work group? A work group can consist mainly of employees doing independent work, meaning each individual does not have to coordinate with others to meet work goals. A team is a group of employees with a shared goal, so the work is interdependent. Teams are only sometimes determined by organizational structure nowadays, because there are cross-functional teams and teams consisting of internal employees and external members, such as a supplier. There are communities of excellence (CoE), communities of practice (CoP), specialist teams, project teams, department teams, innovation teams, and silo teams. Teams are also made up of people who work in different locations and geographies, utilizing various communication technologies to achieve team cohesion. There is not one ‘team’ in today’s organization. There are many teams, and they all should have one thing in common – effectiveness. Before discussing the model for team effectiveness, it is beneficial to understand the dysfunctions that hold teams back from being effective. In the book The FIVE DYSFUNCTIONS of a TEAM, Patrick Lencioni discusses the main characteristics of unhealthy teams. They are the absence of trust among team members, fear of conflict that leads to artificial harmony that stifles productive conflict, lack of clarity and/or buy-in that prevents solid decision-making, avoidance of accountability to avoid interpersonal discomfort, and inattention to results in which team members pursue individual goals and protect personal status.

Elements of an Effective Team

The Google re:work project studied 180 teams in engineering and sales, and the teams were a mix of high and low-performing teams. The study evaluated four significant variables. One was group dynamics, which explored how safe team members felt expressing divergent opinions. The second evaluated skill sets that identified how good an employee felt about navigating roadblocks and barriers. A third set of variables was personality traits based on a Big Five personality assessment. The fourth area researchers analyzed was emotional intelligence, measured using the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire.

Project Aristotle collected a large amount of data, and ran 35 statistical models to understand which inputs impact team effectiveness. The data analysis revealed five factors that mattered most regarding how well the team worked together. Psychological safety, or the person’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk, was of most importance. Remember, Lencioni dysfunction number one was an absence of trust among team members. Team members who experience psychological safety believe the team is safe for risk-taking. They feel safe presenting new ideas, asking questions, and admitting to mistakes - and are not worried about being embarrassed or seen as incompetent. Psychological safety is crucial to developing trust.

The next factor was dependability, referring to team members completing quality work in a timely manner. Third was structure and clarity, which refers to each person's understanding of job expectations, including goals and objectives. Goals are established at the group and individual levels, and should be SMART (which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). The fourth factor identified for effective teams is meaning, which is finding a sense of purpose or meaning in the work or the team outcomes. Meaning is different for each team member.

The fifth and last factor was the impact - the personal judgment that the work is important to the team and makes a difference. Notice that the five effectiveness areas of measurement will identify both a dysfunctional team and a high-performing team.

The re:work researchers emphasize that psychological safety is the most important dynamic of an effective team. In an example re:work researchers gave of workshops run by the research team, scenarios based on real-world situations were presented with role players followed by a group debriefing. A scenario concerning psychological safety had a long-time team manager called Uli running a large project. He had become intolerant of mistakes, challenges to his way of thinking, and ideas he considered “under par.” Uli publicly spoke negatively about an experienced team member’s idea to other team members behind the back of the person presenting the idea. The other members thought the idea was well-researched, strong and worth pursuing. The result was that the team members quit suggesting ideas. Uli’s project proposal was submitted to executives and was rejected due to a lack of creativity and innovation.

Google’s re:work offers a downloadable tool that can be customized to help managers think about psychological safety and take action to create a psychologically safe team.

Measuring Effectiveness Elements

The Lencioni Model and the re:work models of team effectiveness are just two models. Another popular model is the GRPI Model, which considers four elements of team effectiveness. They are goals, roles, processes, and interpersonal relationships. The main point is to choose a model, understand the elements, and develop a measurement method.

Measuring team effectiveness includes measuring performance, process, and individual well-being. KPIs are used for performance measurements, such as productivity tracking of the quantity and quality of work within a timeframe and how well goals are met. However, it is just as essential to measure process and individual well-being, and these are areas that managers may fail to assess. What contributions do individuals make to the team? Is there high trust and mutually accountable working relationships? Do pulse surveys provide feedback on whether employees feel a sense of belonging, psychological safety, and well-being and are personally engaged in team success? The measurements should address team effectiveness at the team performance and individual levels, but also should assess factors such as psychological safety and trust. People who fear speaking up can never be fully productive team members who work interdependently with others.