Readers of this column know I frequently encourage managers, above all else, to build trust among their teams and with their performance management systems in order to achieve high performance and innovation. (As one of my readers told me, “You write about trust all the time.”) Other team traits are also critically important, such as team operating and decision-making norms, clarity on roles and responsibilities, open communications, inclusion, and the ability to have a healthy and vigorous debate to get to the truth and the best way forward.
In working with innovation teams at Honeywell and Medtronic, my HR team learned that the above traits were highly critical to the success of innovation teams. The top two were trust, so team members could suggest new ideas without criticism or backlash and having a “great conflict,” which was defined as challenging ideas on the merits of suggestions and supporting data, free to pursue all angles—but resisting the need of individuals to dominate the team and not getting personal or vindictive.
A study that INSEAD published a year ago supports my HR teams’ observations. The study sheds critical insight on the importance of having both psychological safety (trust) and intellectual honesty, defined as proactively voicing disagreement rationally without getting personal or mean-spirited (and what my HR teams called “having a great conflict,” for high-performing innovative teams.
INSEAD’S study identified several critical principles for fostering an innovative, high-performance team culture that balances intellectual honesty and psychological safety. The authors are Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University, Curtis Lefrandt from Innovator’s DNA, and Taeya Howell of Brigham Young University, and wrote that striking the right balance between psychological safety and intellectual honesty is crucial but challenging. They studied more than 60 start-ups and established firms in various industries. They found that many teams prioritize psychological safety without realizing that it can sometimes undermine intellectual honesty – and vice versa.
The authors identify four team cultures with varying levels of psychological safety and intellectual honesty and the strengths and weaknesses of each one. They also identify four principles for building innovation culture teams, the ones that have the highest performance.
Four team cultures identified by the INSEAD study
The INSEAD study also identified four typical team cultures with varying degrees and combinations of psychological safety and intellectual honesty, and how these team cultures facilitate or hinder innovation and learning. Greater awareness of a team’s culture could help leaders improve team performance.
The four team cultures identified by the INSEAD authors are Distressed, Anxious, Comfortable, and Innovative. They are describe below using the authors’ words.
Distressed teams lack both psychological safety and intellectual honesty. As a result, they struggle with learning and innovating. Such teams are common in organizations where individuals lack emotional intelligence. In such environments, leaders often can’t admit that they are wrong, and no one is willing to acknowledge that the company itself is under threat.
Anxious teams score high on intellectual honesty and moderate to low on psychological safety. Team members are encouraged to be brutally honest even if it harms their relationships. In interviews, people on teams with an anxious culture told us that they often don’t feel safe or respected. They worry that they are in constant competition with their colleagues and what the team thinks of their ideas. Anxious cultures have high turnover rates.
Comfortable teams are the opposite of an anxious culture, a comfortable culture is characterized by high psychological safety and moderate to low intellectual honesty. Team members are typically agreeable, need to be liked and are less assertive or proactive. They feel safe speaking up but choose not to, believing that avoiding potential negative conflict is better for morale and the productivity of the team in the long run. They may not care enough about the mission of the team or organization to rock the boat. Comfortable teams tend to perform consistently, but they rarely produce pioneering innovations because members don’t push one another to improve.
Innovative teams have a balance of psychological safety with intellectual honesty. Members feel safe to voice their opinions and openly debate ideas. They take decisive action, but they do so in ways that maintain respect among team members. In contrast to people in distressed cultures, they can swallow their pride and accept another viewpoint.
Principles for building innovative culture teams – the ones with the highest performance
The authors identify four principles for building innovative culture teams, which they found in their study to have the highest performance. The are described below in the authors words:
Principle 1: Foster emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the mortar that binds psychological safety with intellectual honesty. It includes self-awareness (awareness of your emotions), self-management (regulation of your emotions), social awareness (empathy and the ability to see others’ viewpoints), and relationship management (the ability to find common ground and build rapport).
Leaders should be particularly skilled at social awareness and relationship management. By listening with empathy, seeing others’ perspectives and defusing conflict, they are more likely to foster intellectual honesty while preserving safety. They are also able to engage in self-reflection, show humility, use humor to relieve tense situations, and tell people they are valued.
Principle 2: Hire and develop proactive employees. Research shows that personal initiative is more than twice as important as psychological safety in predicting whether someone will offer their ideas or raise questions. The study learned that it is often better to encourage leaders to make decisions swiftly with the best information available and to change course quickly when new information emerges.
Principle 3: Legitimize and encourage honesty. Organizations can address employees’ fear of retribution for speaking up through management principles or processes that legitimize and encourage honesty. The authors cite research that suggests that task conflict – or disagreement about work – within teams leads to more entrepreneurial strategies, more innovation, and higher performance.
Principle 4: Subordinate egos to unifying goals. When employees feel engaged with and responsible for the team’s or organization’s mission, they are more likely to speak up about problems and issues that could jeopardize the mission. This sense of working towards a common goal is stronger than psychological safety in driving intellectual honesty.
The authors conclude that psychological safety and intellectual honesty can sometimes work against each other. The challenge for leaders is to promote candid debate that is focused on the problems the team needs to solve and defuse interpersonal conflict. By doing so, they can nurture a culture that leads to higher performance.
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