CHAPTER 7

Creating Caring, Trusting Teams

Chapter 6 introduced the principles of a New Way of Working. In this chapter, we explore what that New Way of Working looks like in practice. We are not going to focus on efficiency, processes, system thinking, infusing technology into the business, or utilization of social media to connect better with customers.

Instead, we are going to focus on care, trust, and collective intelligence because they will be the secret sauce of personal and organizational success as the digital age advances.

Earlier you learned that according to the science of adult learning, no one—not me and not you—can achieve Hyper-Learning alone. We need others to help us get beyond our cognitive biases and our innate tendency to favor confirmation, affirmation, efficiency, and cohesiveness in how we think, perceive, and experience emotions. We need others to help us become our Best Selves in order to be Hyper-Learners. Remember Dr. Bourne’s statement to me: “All learning comes from conversations with yourself (deep reflection) or with others.”

You also learned that the value humans can add in the digital age increasingly will come from areas where smart technology will continue to be deficient: higher-order critical, creative, imaginative, and innovative thinking and high emotional engagement with others. Those activities can only be accomplished with others—either in small work teams and/or in daily interactions with colleagues, customers, or other stakeholders.

Team structures will come to dominate the digital age, and only a special kind will make the most effective team performance more likely.

That structure is a Caring, Trusting Team. It comprises a small group of people who truly care about each other as unique human beings and who are invested in each other’s successes and happiness.

That mutual caring enables two integral and interdependent factors necessary for the highest levels of human collaboration: trust and feeling safe.

This chapter is about how to excel in small work teams and explains why team excellence requires the right diversity of people on the team (backgrounds and capabilities), agreement by those people on a common purpose, common values, and rules of engagement, and most importantly (arguably), high-quality emotional connections among those people.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DIVERSITY

You have learned that we humans are very biased toward confirming our mental models about what we think we know. My mental models are different from yours. People’s mental models are influenced by their gender, where they were raised, how they were raised, the type of education they’ve had, their life experiences, and their work experiences. Clearly more diversity enables a team to “see more” and generate different views or perspectives concerning a particular project or activity. Diversity of background, training, and education is very helpful. Later in this chapter you will learn from research on collective intelligence that gender diversity is particularly important to team high-performance.

COMMON PURPOSE

This is achieved when each team member has “bought into” the purpose of the team and the importance and relevancy of its objective. That comes about by having meaningful team conversations. There needs to be a common why that has been openly and freely discussed and agreed upon by all team members. High-performance teams have a specific purpose that every team member believes in and is committed to achieving.

COMMON VALUES

Here I am are talking about common values such as integrity, truthfulness, respect, and human dignity. We often take values for granted, but in a multicultural world, having a conversation about values is so critical because the same words might mean different things to different people. Definitions may differ among people because of generational, cultural, or experiential differences. As a result, teams need to make meaning of the values they want members to abide by.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Teams need to create rules of engagement that define how team members agree to behave toward each other and identify behaviors that are encouraged and those that are unacceptable. There can be many reasons why a behavior is unacceptable or inappropriate. For example, the behavior might be personally dehumanizing or offensive or it might impede exploration or debate. The behavior might encourage competition rather than collaboration or minimize or intimidate participation by others.

Common good behaviors that teams should explicitly encourage include:

   Candor

   Open-mindedness

   Permission to speak freely

   Psychological safety

   Critiquing of ideas, not people

   Listening to learn, not to confirm

   Collaboration over competition

   Saying “Yes, and” as opposed to “Yes, but”

   Not rushing to judge but engaging in exploration and discovery

   Valuing and ensuring the equitable participation of all team members

   Mitigating against domination of conversations by only a few people or the highest-ranking people

Some companies I have worked with have codified their rules of engagement, posting them in every meeting room. Their teams grade themselves after each meeting and note areas of needed improvement. All of that data is logged and continually reviewed to improve the quality of team collaboration.

HIGH-QUALITY HUMAN CONNECTIONS: TEAM EXCELLENCE IS EMOTIONALLY BASED

High-performance collaboration and team effectiveness require high-quality emotional connections among team members. Professor Jane E. Dutton’s work in the area of high-quality connections is foundational. I highly recommend her book Energize Your Workplace: How to Create and Sustain High-Quality Connections at Work. High-quality connections between people are based upon mutual positive regard and mutual trust. High-quality connections engender positive emotions that enable learning and well-being. For example, people who trust each other will be more candid with each other and feel safe in exploring their views with each other, all of which can lead to better learning. Professor Dutton offers “five strategies for creating respectful engagement: being present, being genuine, communicating affirmation, effective listening, and supportive communication.”¹⁰⁰

Now let’s look at the science of how high-quality positive connections happen.

The Calm-and-Connect Response

In her book Love 2.0: Creating Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection, positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson explains how the neuropeptide oxytocin plays a key role in social bonding and attachment. Oxytocin is sometimes called the bonding hormone, cuddle hormone, love hormone, or trust hormone, and it’s associated with the calm-and-connect response—a distinct state of the body and brain in direct contrast to the fight-or-flight response, which is associated with high stress and arousal.

The calm-and-connect response is what sets you up physiologically to trust and bond with others, and the presence of oxytocin affects connecting behaviors (such as facial expressions, smiling, and making eye contact) and heightens your awareness of others’ behavior and the physical cues and body language that indicate whether or not they are willing to connect with you. The fundamental question is, how do teams cultivate environments that facilitate calm-and-connect rather than fight-or-flight responses?

When a new team is formed, it’s common for some team members to be unfamiliar with each other. Think about when you’ve had that experience. What were you thinking about in that first team meeting? My hypothesis is that some of you had self-talk like this: “Hmm. Who is that person? What is his agenda? Is she a nice person or is she full of herself? I think my friend said she was very competitive. I heard he is very smart and lets you know that. How am I going to fit in? Maybe I should be quiet until I figure out everyone’s personal agenda. Wonder why this team leader was chosen?”

That is why before you actually start working on a new team project, the team leader should engage members in making-meaning conversations that allow them to learn about each other before going through the process of creating a common purpose, common values, and rules of engagement.

Trust and Psychological Safety

Trust is foundational. Without trust you cannot reach the higher levels of human connection and team performance necessary for Hyper-Learning. One of the leading researchers of trust is Paul J. Zak, who described how to build a culture of trust in Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies. Zak says, “Trust requires viewing those with whom one works as whole and complete human beings, not as pieces of human capital.”¹⁰¹

Google has studied what makes certain teams effective in the search for the “secret sauce” of high performance. The most important factor it discovered was psychological safety, and the company learned that the safer team members felt, the better.¹⁰² I suggest that the precondition for feeling psychologically safe with others is trusting that other team members will do you no harm. What do you think?

When I have discussions about trust with business leaders, what do you think is their reaction? Well, of course, no one is against trust. Most people I have worked with assume they are trusted. The first reaction of many leaders is to assume they have already garnered trust in their organizations. The second reaction is a concern about time. It takes time to build trust, and time is a precious commodity when you are running a lean efficiency machine. Many leaders are not willing to free up the time necessary for their people to build truly trusting relationships. However, every company that I know of that has invested in trust, giving people time during the work day to build trusting relationships, has found the ROI far exceeds their expectations.

I believe trust serves as a strategic advantage for organizations in the digital age.

Positivity Resonance

As I mentioned in chapter 2, Barbara Fredrickson has found that positive emotions enhance our abilities to learn, be creative, positively connect with others, and grow as people. Positive emotions free us to be more open to the world and more able to embrace life and opportunity. Positive emotions draw us out of our self-focus. Negative emotions exacerbate our self-focus.

Positive emotions are associated with the release of oxytocin, which I previously mentioned is associated with a calm-and-connect response within the brain and body. According to Fredrickson, oxytocin can “jump the gap between people such that someone else’s oxytocin flow can trigger one’s own. A biochemical synchrony can then emerge that supports mutual engagement, care, and responsiveness.”¹⁰³

When you combine this synchrony with shared positive emotions and mutual care, you get what she calls positivity resonance or Love 2.0, which is not about romantic love or sex, but what she defines as a “micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being.”¹⁰⁴

Let’s slooow down and think about the phrase a micro-moment of warmth.

What is a micro-moment?

Have you ever felt warmth with a work colleague?

What did it feel like? Did you feel relaxed? Did it feel good or bad? Did you respond more expressively or did you respond by playing it close to the vest or cautiously?

Micro-moments of warmth and connection are the building blocks of caring, trusting relationships. They are integral to the calm-and-connect response, which can lead to mutual caring and interest in helping co-workers be successful in ways that are meaningful. Internal competition goes away. You feel safe with that other person. You do not have to be worried about motives or hidden agendas. You can be totally focused on being your Best Self at work because your colleagues, or at least some of them, want you to succeed because you want them to succeed. Reaching that stage is heavily influenced by the cultivation of positive emotions and the syncing up with others emotionally and biochemically.

Isn’t it fascinating that our bodies and emotions can link up with another just like two railroad cars can link together? Being in sync can mean lots more than just agreeing on the right answer to a work issue.

Teams that facilitate these kinds of physiological and emotional human connections have built the foundation for what the next chapter discusses: having High-Quality, Making-Meaning Conversations and attaining the highest state of collaboration that is reflected in what I call collective flow.

Connecting with People

How about you make tomorrow a Smile Day?

Try to put yourself in a positive emotional state, and whenever you walk by someone at work, slow down and give her or him a big smile. Then say something positive like “Have a nice day” and see what happens. If you genuinely mean it, you should feel good doing that every time.

So how did it feel? Did you experience a warm feeling?

And how did other people respond? Did they smile back?

What did they say?

Why not adopt that behavior every day if it feels good?

Now, think about how you engage at the beginning of a meeting or while you are with others waiting for the meeting to begin. Do you smile at people and say something positive? What effect would it have if you did?

If you were leading a meeting, how could you start the meeting in a way that helps people be in a positive emotional state?

Here is what I do at the beginning of every class I teach and every workshop I do with clients: First I ask everyone, “Are you really here?” Then I ask them, “Why did I ask that question?”

Next, I ask, “Are you in a positive mood?” Then I ask them, “Why are positive emotions important?”

Finally, I ask them to turn to the person sitting on their right side and smile at him or her. Genuine smiles begin the emotional connection process just like making eye contact does. Combine them and you are off to a good start.

Another way to begin the connection process is to ask people questions that indicate you care about them as individuals. That usually means asking specific questions about a person’s family or hobbies or last trip or outing. Detailed questions demonstrate that you care enough about someone to remember important things in that person’s life.

In chapter 9, you’ll learn about the process that EnPro Industries uses to begin each meeting. That process is designed to enable a calm-and-connect response, presence, and caring.

Caring

John Bogle is a legendary entrepreneur and founder of Vanguard Mutual Funds, which today has over $5 trillion of assets under management for over 30 million investors. Bogle and I crossed paths one time and his kindness and generosity of spirit was front and center. He built his organization on several rules and Rule #1 according to his book Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life was:

“Make Caring the Soul of the Organization—Caring is a mutual affair, involving: (1) Mutual respect from the highest to the humblest among us: Each of you deserves to be—and will be—treated with courtesy, candor, friendliness, and respect for the honorable work you perform and (2) Opportunities for career growth, participation and innovation.”¹⁰⁵

Collective Intelligence

Another key collaboration principle is collective intelligence. Some of the best work in the area of collective intelligence has been done at Carnegie Mellon University and at MIT. Here is a synthesis of the key research findings that I believe are relevant to the New Way of Working.

Collective intelligence is defined as a group’s ability to perform well on a wide variety of different tasks, and it extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the group’s members. Having a group of very skilled people is not enough. We’ve already discussed the need for a diverse group of people—people with different experiences, backgrounds, cultures, and thinking styles.

The research on collective intelligence suggests that diversity of gender is particularly crucial. In fact, research suggests that the greater proportion of women you have on a team the higher the group’s collective intelligence.¹⁰⁶

The reason is that collective intelligence is based on how people collaborate—how they relate to and behave with others.

Specifically, a group’s level of collective intelligence is correlated with (1) the social sensitivity of team members, (2) conversational turn-taking, and (3) the proportion of women in the group.

Social sensitivity involves perception of social cues, reading others’ emotions, and empathy. Research shows that on average women are more socially sensitive than men.

In team activities, men are found in general to be more autocratic and transactional and to exhibit socially dominant behaviors while women are found to be generally more interpersonal and democratic and to smile more.¹⁰⁷

Let’s take a moment to reflect on the research that shows how men and women in general approach collaboration differently. If you, like me, are a man, what do you think it says about how we are at collaborating?

I believe it says we are SUBOPTIMAL!

I believe it means that we need to learn to change our behavior.

WHY CARING, TRUSTING TEAMS?

Based on your reflections and doing the above exercises, why do you think the New Way of Working needed for Hyper-Learning requires Caring, Trusting Teams?

I find it very interesting that according to Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, effective counseling requires the same type of environment that I submit is needed for excellent collaboration in the workplace. Rogers said that to have an effective, growth-producing counseling relationship, the following was necessary:

   Transparent honesty between the parties

   Genuine caring for the client

   Empathetic understanding of the client

   Mindful presence and listening

   Mutual trust¹⁰⁸

Everybody I meet tells me they are good collaborators. I am beginning to believe that just showing up at a meeting that goes okay is good enough for many people.

Unfortunately, that kind of collaboration will not be enough as the digital age advances and the New Way of Working requires environments characterized by an idea meritocracy and lots of innovation and exploration into doing business differently. As you’ll learn in the next chapter, those conversations require people to challenge others’ thinking or engage in emergent thinking, which requires people to trust the spontaneous and imaginative processing of their subconscious minds and put forth “wild” ideas. For the reasons I’ve outlined, those activities require a high level of participation from Caring, Trusting Teams.

Caring, Trusting Teams are built upon emotionally positive human connections.

Historically in the business world, logic, linearity, and operational excellence have been the dominant themes.

Bringing your Best Self to work (Inner Peace) and building work relationships based on emotionally positive connections with others and syncing up with others biochemically will be quite a change, but it will be a change for the better—it will humanize the workplace and allow people to become much more than breathing robots.

WORKSHOP: BUILDING THE TOWER OF CARE AND TRUST

You know by now that I am big on behaviors. In this chapter, you’ve learned about the power of Caring, Trusting Teams in the workplace, and the underlying importance of genuine human connections to building mutual care and trust. Please reflect on the following Tower of Care and Trust, which presents the building blocks of care and trust starting from the bottom of figure 1.

What does this Tower of Care and Trust say to you? Reflect and please write down your answer in your Learning Journal.

What would you do to begin building the Tower of Care and Trust with a colleague?

Figure 1: Tower of Care and Trust

Here is what the Tower of Care and Trust says to me:

“Building trust and care takes time, and I earn that by how I behave. It all starts with connecting to someone through eye contact, smiles, and exuding positive emotions and positive body language followed by exploratory talk.

“Once I’ve made a connection, I have to try to relate to that person in a manner that opens up the conversation. I might ask, ‘How is your day going?’ If I’d engaged in small talk with the person before, I might further ask about the person’s family and say, ‘I hope they are doing well.’ If the person seemed rushed or busy, I might make the conversation short but leave the person with a positive thought, such as ‘I hope you have a great day!’ or ‘We should do coffee or lunch soon,’ and then follow up later that day to schedule coffee or lunch.

“To make a genuine connection, eventually one of us will have to take a big step and be totally vulnerable with the other. The highest-ranking of us has to be vulnerable first. Being vulnerable sends a message that I trust the other person enough to share something I wouldn’t share with everyone. An example of vulnerability would be asking the other person for help or advice with a difficulty.

“With vulnerability comes more emotional engagement. That engagement can’t be judgmental or hierarchal. It has to be human-to-human, and each of us must exhibit positive regard for the other through our behavior and words. The next stage is feeling safe with each other, and at some point, we have to ask each other, ‘Do you feel psychologically safe with me?’ If one says, ‘No,’ then the other has to ask, ‘What can I do to help you feel safe with me?’ When each of us feels safe, we are in trust mode and we can continue to build trust with every interaction. If after building trust, I do something that makes the other person start to question that trust, I have to invest in earning it back. Not surprisingly, rebuilding trust takes a lot of effort and time. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.”

Okay, let’s move on. I hope this exercise helped you think about how to build trust.

WORKSHOP: YOUR PERSONAL CARING, TRUSTING TEAM BEHAVIORS CHECKLIST

Let’s assume you want to be a more caring team member and you want to behave in ways that make it more likely that team members will trust you. What are seven behaviors you could engage in more frequently to make other team members more likely to perceive you as a trustworthy person who cares about them individually?

Sometimes people find it easier to first identify behaviors that would evidence not caring about the other person and then invert those behaviors.

I suggest you take some time with this. Consider doing a couple of drafts over the next week in your Learning Journal and then creating a checklist on your phone that you can review before each team meeting and use to grade yourself after each team meeting.

My hypothesis is that if you choose relevant behaviors and start engaging in them more frequently, your interaction with your team members will become more meaningful and fruitful. And you may make a few new friends.

WORKSHOP: TEAM RULES FOR COLLABORATIVE ENGAGEMENT

Make believe that you have been asked as a member of a team to list the seven most important Team Rules for Collaborative Engagement considering the learnings of this chapter. How will your team members strive to behave in your meeting?

Write down your list in your Learning Journal. (For assistance with this exercise, consider reviewing the Hyper-Learning Behaviors in chapter 3 because rules of engagement are all about behaviors.)

I hope you found this chapter meaningful and helpful. One key learning for me has been that I need to SLOW DOWN to be more caring and take the time to build more trust. This requires spending time at the beginning of every meeting allowing people to connect, being more fully present, and cultivating positivity toward the meeting and the people participating. Once people buy in to the story in these chapters and create their Team Rules for Collaborative Engagement, it does not take a lot of time to reach the desired starting environment.

It does take time to build that capability.