Category Archives: Team development

Psychological safety and team effectiveness

Back in 2012, Google conducted some interesting research into team effectiveness. The initiative was named ‘Project Aristotle’ in honour of his famous quote: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts“. This article summarises Google’s findings, and explains some of the simple, clear and practical things you can do with your own teams.

Google’s researchers looked at academic research on team effectiveness, and studied 180 of their own teams. They concluded that understanding and influencing group norms is key to improving team performance – that is, rituals and rules about ‘how things are done in this team’. This was more important, they found, than who was on the team and the team mix (e.g. gender balance, personality type and skill-set).

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How improvisation helps with innovation and team effectiveness

Companies are becoming interested in using improvisation as a way to unleash creativity, and to help people become comfortable working in a more fluid environment. In this issue, we explore the main principles and show how you can apply them in the workplace. This links to last month’s article on managing disruptive change, because you can’t always plan, or depend on the past, to build your future.

“We can’t solve problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Albert Einstein 

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Introducing Appreciative Inquiry

Change can be difficult because it is often being done TO us rather than WITH us, which drains our energy. Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a way to involve as many people as possible in the change process, collaboratively, and in a way that develops the future based on what is already working. This article explores the principles of AI and provides you with some practical tips.

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Leading global teams

When you lead a global team, you can’t have informal conversations in the corridor or over coffee. It’s therefore important to put time and effort into having clear goals and governance and to build good relationships and formal communication channels.

See below for some tips from my experience of working with global teams including two suggestions for further (short!) reading.

Many of my previous articles touch on this month’s topic in various ways, especially ‘The role of the leader‘, ‘Emotionally intelligent teams‘, ‘High performing leadership teams‘ and ‘How to build trust‘.

I hope you find these ideas useful and welcome your feedback.

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Emotionally intelligent teams

Last month, we looked at high performing leadership teams. Emotionally intelligent behaviours underpin successful teams – they are the glue that enables teams to consistently achieve their purpose. So, this month, we build on the six main behaviours displayed by emotionally intelligent teams.

As you’ll see, one of the points is about being open to feedback, so I welcome any comments you may have.

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