What Is an Effective Team?

Years of psychological research has demonstrated the importance of trust in building effective teams (Breuer, Hüffmeier and Hertel 2016). Because teams often need to come together in a hurry, building trust quickly among members is essential. A team of strangers who are brought together to complete a task in three months can't draw on the wellspring of interpersonal knowledge and loyalty that might exist among people who have worked side-by-side for years. So as a team leader, you need to focus on establishing trusting relationships at the outset. Your ultimate goal is to encourage an overall sense of psychological safety, which is "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking". Teams that do their work under the umbrella of psychological safety are more effective, in part because they are willing to take the risks required to learn and innovate.

Let's look at a few important traits, techniques, and behaviors that can help you build trust and a sense of psychological safety.

Reliable Promising

Nothing erodes trust like a broken promise. We all know this. As Michelle Gielan explains in a blog post for Psychology Today:

Unfortunately, in fast-moving, highly technical projects, breaking ordinary, everyday promises is inevitable. In living order, it's just not possible to foresee every eventuality, so the task at the top of today's To Do list, the one you promised to complete before lunch, might get swept aside in the flood of new tasks associated with a sudden crisis.

That's why it's important to distinguish between an ordinary promise, and a reliable promise. In Lean terminology, a reliable promise is an official commitment to complete a task by an agreed-upon time. In order to make a reliable promise, you need to have:

• Authority: You are responsible and accountable for the task.
• Competence: You have the knowledge to properly assess the situation, or you have the ability to engage someone who can advise you.
• Capacity: You have a thorough understanding of your current commitments and are saying "Yes" because you are confident that you can take on an additional task, not because you want to please the team or the team leader.
• Honesty: You sincerely commit to complete the task, with the understanding that if you fail, other people on your team will be unable to complete their work.
• Willingness to correct: After making a reliable promise, if you miss the completion date, then you must immediately inform your team and explain how you plan to resolve the situation.

Not every situation calls for an official, reliable promise. John Nelson estimates that, on most projects, no more than 10 to 20 percent of promises are so important that they require a reliable promise (2019). As Hal Macomber explains in a white paper for Lean Project Consulting, you should save reliable promises for tasks that must be completed so that other work can proceed. And keep in mind that you'll get the best results from reliable promises if they are made in a group setting, where other teammates can chime in with ideas on how to complete the task efficiently or suggest alternatives to the proposed task. Finally, remember that people tend to feel a more positive sense of commitment to a promise if they understand that they have the freedom to say no:

The practice of reliable promising was developed as a way to keep Lean projects unfolding efficiently in unpredictable environments. Ultimately, reliable promises are an expression of respect for people, which, as discussed in Lesson 1, is one of the six main principles of Lean. They encourage collaboration and help build relationships among team members. In Agile, the commitments made in every Scrum are another version of reliable promises. And the sincere commitment offered by a reliable promise can be useful in any kind of project. Here are some examples of situations in which reliable promising could be effective:

• For a product development project, when will an important safety test will be completed?
• For a medical technology project, will a report required to seek regulatory approval be completed on time?
• For an IT project, will the procurement team execute a renewal contract for the maintenance agreement before the current agreement expires? If not, the organization risks having no vendor to support an essential software component.

Using Emotional Intelligence

As a manager of technical projects, you might be inclined to think that, as long as you have the technical details under control, you have the whole project under control. But if you do any reading at all in the extensive literature on leadership, you'll find that one characteristic is crucial to building trusting relationships with other people: emotional intelligence, or the ability to recognize your own feelings and the feelings of others.

High emotional intelligence is the hallmark of a mature, responsible, trustworthy person. In fact, a great deal of new research suggests that skills associated with emotional intelligence - "attributes like self-restraint, persistence, and self-awareness - might actually be better predictors of a person's life trajectory than standard academic measures". An article in the Financial Post discusses numerous studies that have tied high emotional intelligence to success at work:

According to Daniel Goleman, author of the influential book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, it's well established that "people who are emotionally adept - who know and manage their own feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people's feelings - are at an advantage in any domain of life, whether romance and intimate relationships or picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics". In all areas of life, he argues, low emotional intelligence increases the chance that you will make decisions that you think are rational, but that are in fact irrational, because they are based on unrecognized emotion. And nothing erodes trust like a leader who imposes irrational decisions on a team.

Some people are born with high emotional intelligence. Others can cultivate it by developing qualities and skills associated with emotional intelligence, such as self-awareness, self-control, self-motivation, and relationship skills. Of course, it's no surprise that these are also useful for anyone working on a team. Treating others the way they want to want to be treated - not how you want to be treated - is a sign of a mature leader, and something that is only possible for people who have cultivated the emotional intelligence required to understand what other people want.

Cultivating a Realistic Outlook

You might have had experience with an overly negative project manager who derailed a project with constant predictions of doom and gloom. But in fact, the more common enemy of project success is too much positivity, in which natural human optimism blinds team members to reality. That's a sure-fire way to destroy painstakingly built bridges of trust between team members. In her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, social critic Barbara Ehrenrich explains the downside of excessive optimism, which, she argues, is a special failing of American businesses. The optimist clings to the belief that everything will turn out fine, even when the facts indicate otherwise, and so fails to prepare for reality. The optimist also has a tendency to blame the victims of unfortunate events: "If only they'd had a more positive attitude in the first place, nothing bad would have happened".

In the planning phase, an overly optimistic project manager can make it difficult for team members to voice their realistic concerns. In a widely cited article in the Harvard Business Review, psychologist Gary Klein argues that projects fail at a "spectacular rate," in part because "too many people are reluctant to speak up about their reservations during the all-important planning phase". To counteract this effect, Klein pioneered the idea of a troubleshooting session - which he calls a premortem - early on in a project in which people who understand the project but are concerned about its potential for failure feel free to express their thoughts. This widely used technique encourages stakeholders to look to the future and analyze the completed project as if it were already known to be a total failure:

Communicating Clearly, Sometimes Using Stories

Reliable promises, emotional intelligence, and a realistic outlook are all meaningless as trust-building tools if you don't have the skills to communicate with your team members. In his book Mastering the Leadership Role in Project Management, Alexander Laufer explains the vital importance of team communication:

Unfortunately, many people think they are better communicators than they actually are. Sometimes a person will excel at one form of communication but fail at others. For instance, someone might be great at small talk before a meeting but continually confuse co-workers with poorly written emails.

This is one area where getting feedback from your co-workers can be especially helpful. Another option is taking a class, or at the very least, consulting the numerous online guides to developing effective communication skills. 

Telling stories is an especially helpful way to share experiences with your team. Indeed, stories are "a form of communication that has been used to entertain, persuade, inspire, impart wisdom, and teach for thousands of years. This wide range of uses is due to a story's remarkable effect on human emotion, experience, and cognition".

You've probably experienced the way people lower their defenses when they realize they are hearing a tale about specific characters, with an uncertain outcome, rather than a simple recitation of events, or worse, a lecture. Master storytellers seem to do it effortlessly, but in fact they usually shape their stories around the same basic template. Holly Walter Kerby, executive director of Fusion Science Theater, and a long-time science educator, describes the essential story elements as follows:

• A main character your audience can identify with - Include enough details to allow your audience to feel a connection with the main character, and don't be afraid to make yourself the protagonist of your own stories.
• A specific challenge - Set up the ending of the story by describing a problem encountered by the main character. This will raise a question in the minds of the audience members and make them want to listen to the rest of the story to find out what happens.
  • Can Sam and Danielle recover from a supplier's bankruptcy and figure out how to get three hundred light fixtures delivered to a new office building in time for the grand opening?
  • Can Hala, a mere intern, prevent seasoned contractors from using an inferior grade of concrete?

• Satisfying Ending - Explain how the events in the story led to some kind of change in the characters' world.
  • Sam and Danielle learned to focus on building relationships with reliable, financially stable vendors.
  • Hala learned that even an intern can safeguard a project by speaking up when she sees something wrong.

Keep in mind that in some high-stakes situations, the last thing you want is more tension. In that case, you want the opposite of a story - a straightforward recitation of the facts. For example, when confronting a team member about poor work habits, or negotiating with an unhappy client, it's best to keep everything simple. Draining the drama from a situation helps everyone stay focused on the facts, keeping resentment and other negative emotions to a minimum. For more on good techniques for difficult conversations, see Trevor Manning's book Help! I need to Master Critical Conversations.