team behavior — Teaming With Ideas

Psychological Safety

“If I could help every leader learn how to practice self-coaching instead of self-criticism, we could change the world…There’s tons of research on loneliness, the stressors of being a leader, ways in which we bring our own biases to the workplace. If, instead of negative self talk, I focus on speaking to myself with kindness, I’d change the structure of my brain and how I respond to challenges.

“I am better able to support others and have more citizenship behavior, caring for others, when I practice self-compassion. How? How do I create psychological safety as a leader AND maintain my boundaries, take care of my needs, listen to myself?”

That’s what Dr. Polizzi and Verdant Consulting starts with when working with their clients: start with yourself first.

Team LeadershipCarlos Valdes-DapenaOctober 22, 2022psychological safety, team behaviorComment

Emotional Freedom at Work

I think the place for emotions is two-fold: one is a guidance system so that you know when it’s time to clean up your thinking. If you’re feeling a negative emotion like embarrassment, anger, resentment, frustration, irritation, they all feel bad, don’t they? So really there are only 2 emotions: one feels good, one feels bad: there are just lots of names for them. If you’re feeling bad, you know that you’re focused on something negative, fearful, lacking, contracted. So, it’s time for you to reassess and ask different questions. That’s number one: knowing that you alone have the power to determine what something means.

The second one is it’s a reminder for you to intervene consciously, because so many of the emotions that we experience are just patterns. We are triggered by something.

[Listen to ore read the full transcript.]

Team LeadershipCarlos Valdes-DapenaMarch 29, 2021team behavior, emotional toxicityComment

Team Power, Hierarchy Flexibility...and Hippos with Dr. Lindy Greer

Dr. Lindy Greer, U Michigan Ross School of business, has done a lot research on how organizations’ power hierarchy affects team operations and collaboration. She found that the net effect of hierarchy on teams was negative. Small, but negative. Listen or read this interview to find out when hierarchy flexibility of power can be applied to enhance trust, participation, collaboration and when the hierarchical power structure enhances a team’s effectiveness. Then hear how her brilliant hippo analogy can apply to your team.

Team LeadershipCarlos Valdes-DapenaMarch 15, 2021Trust, team behaviorComment

Micro-behaviors Can Determine Team Effectiveness

Bobby Parmar, U Va professor and team behavior researcher, discusses results from his escape room study. “Teams relate through behaviors, even micro-behaviors. How a team communicates is highly predictive of their success. For example, one of the things that we find is the amount of humor, laughter on a team is highly predictive of the number of hypotheses that a team throws out when they're solving these puzzles. Laughter is one potential way of getting to psychological safety, but there's lots of ways of getting it. Psychological safety, being inclusive, being trusting, having integrity: all of those things are mechanisms by which we can draw others out and say, "your ideas matter. And I want to hear from you how to make things better.

“We found that people who spoke with certainty, struggled in the escape room. Even a little bit of certainty from someone made it a lot harder for me to say, ‘Nope, that didn't work’ because it feels like I'm judging that individual or I'm going to cause a negative emotion in that individual. And that makes it harder for the team to provide that disconfirming data and makes it difficult for the team to be effective.”