Eliminating Mini-Fears For Effective Teaming

Are we a team in the business world? All of us? What about “in tech”? Are we trying to solve problems and advance? Are we having a common goal to grow and achieve more? How safe are we to do so? Is there any Psychological Safety at the level of the larger business team context?

Probably not and you’d be justified not to see why there should be one. When we think of teams we tend to believe they ought to be immediate, close to us, tightly knit, small. The size, the connection, the proximity, this is what gives them much of the foundations of their team dynamic. They’ve normed, stormed and performed as per Lencioni at a natural pace. Established, known, existent and well defined teams, they have tested boundaries and established what’s safe to trust and they have a certain level of Psychological Safety reflected in positive behaviours that they can -ideally work on-.

But what of the teams that are not that but instead, products of “teaming” - a term coined by Prof Dr Amy Edmondson in “Teaming: How Organisations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy” and then brilliantly taken further by Heidi Hefland in “Dynamic Reteaming” - people who have come together momentarily around a certain immediate purpose - instant, un-labelled, informal groups irrespective of size (2 people putting their heads together to solve a common issue can be a team as can 200 in a conference room working around a joint challenge) how can they be safe and open? And should they?

Of course, just as their counterparts, the well-established teams, they need Psychological Safety as much as everyone else to be open. Then the question becomes -should we be consciously teaming and think of every interaction in our business lives as an opportunity to do so? I put it to us that they absolutely should.

Excepting the evident exclusions where we should be proprietary, closed off and protective for competitive reasons, we are all teaming at all times whether we acknowledge it or not.