Transforming Teamwork

Cultivating Collaborative Cultures

Diane P. Zimmerman, Jim Roussin, Robert John Garmston

• Editorial: Corwin
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781544319865
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Liderazgo en educación

Discover how psychological safety, constructive conflict, and actionable learning creates a powerful triple helix to transform teams! In this ground-breaking resource, three experts in the field of education and teamwork each present one of three strands that, when woven together, support teamwork and forge collaborative interactions into a transformative way of working. Drawing on research and practical experience the authors identify strategies and tools that show how to:

• Build psychological safety, where teams work towards resilient interpersonal relationships
• Use constructive conflict as a powerful catalyst for team learning and transformation
• Inquire into problems of practice to transform capabilities and produce actionable learning

Part I Psychological Safety: An Overview

Lead Author Robert J. Garmston

Psychological safety describes individuals’ perceptions about the consequences of interpersonal risks in their work environment. It consists of taken-for-granted beliefs about how others will respond when one puts oneself on the line, such as by asking a question, seeking feedback, reporting a mistake, or proposing a new idea (Edmondson, 2004).

As seems evident, even as filaments on a spider web are connected, social sensitivity, safety in team learning, and interpersonal trust are inextricably intertwined. Each is necessary in harmony with the others for psychological safety; pluck one and the others reverberate. In groups enjoying safety in team learning, each element affects the other and in turn is affected by the others. Team members set aside judgments about others and are open to asking for help. Leaders support safety in team learning when they model public learning, transparently thinking their way through issues and new understandings. One of the authors observed a head of school in India take long silent pauses—even sometimes as long as ten seconds—while his administrative team sat silently, respecting the way he processed information.

Displaying uncertainties, asking questions, experimenting, seeking help, and requesting feedback are behaviors associated with innovation and high performance. But those very behaviors put team members at risk of being seen as less than competent. Edmondson (2002) notes that humans are sensitive to the impression others have of them, so small interpersonal risks are associated with these behaviors.

To remain adaptive as an organization capable of continuously bringing the best possible instruction to students, leaders need to understand the deep interweaving of three elements of team learning.

1. Safety in Team Learning
2. Social Sensitivity
3. Interpersonal Trust

We end this chapter with a brief description of each; then a full chapter is devoted to each element.

What Is Psychological Safety?

Psychological safety is essential to innovation, to problem resolution, to managing differences, to introducing bold ideas, to bucking the status quo, to standing alone for a keenly felt principle. Team members in psychologically safe teams are more likely to experiment, discuss mistakes, share ideas, ask for and receive feedback (Frazier et al., 2017). Because subterranean currents of group dynamics encourage sameness, the behaviors that bring change are normally resisted.

From the very beginning of the decades-long group adventure that brought Cognitive Coaching to maturity, such safety existed. Each was perceived and appreciated as an individual. One showed card tricks at break time. Art drove us all crazy with his questions. Some thought slowly and took eons to get thoughts out. Others were rapid thinker/speakers. Some thought out loud; literally hearing their own words brought personal understanding. Some found holes in our thinking. Some were great summarizers. Norms emerged. Each speaker would be fully heard. Pausing became common. Listening was intense and active, and paraphrasing was extensive. We were passionate about our work and its value. We disagreed freely and without danger to the group or ourselves.

We are seeing similar descriptions in research about effective teams. Frazier et al. (2017) conducted a meta-analysis of 117 studies and 5,000 groups. The study found that psychological safety is strongly linked to information sharing and learning behaviors. Google spent 2 years studying 180 teams (Duhigg, 2016). Findings from this effort to identify successful teams resulted in a universal set of understandings about what leads to productive endeavors. Certain norms, they determined, were what made the difference between successful and unsuccessful teams.

Members were sensitive to nonverbal communications, which even extended to understanding the motivations of others. They felt strongly about their work and the impact it could have in their particular areas of responsibility. On some teams, members knew one another outside the workplace; in other teams, members were social strangers to one another. Trust existed among members. Goals were clear. Leadership was not fixed. An equity of talk time and turn taking existed. If an individual or small group dominated the talk, the teams were less successful. These were high-performing teams even though the processes with which they did their work might differ. Intelligence did not matter, group composition did not matter, organizational position did not matter, nor did the way in which groups made decisions matter. These patterns were described as work groups with social sensitivity, safety in team learning, and interpersonal trust. While team member dependability and clear group goals also contributed to the performance of the teams, we have selected the former three norms to explore because sensitivity to others and creating safe learning environments are common points of reference for all teams and can be studied and improved.

The Context for Psychological Safety: Why and How

Actionable learning should be a primary mission for universities, teacher training centers, and K–12 schools. We say this for three reasons. First, when teachers develop, teach, and field-test instructional activities, the transfer to teaching is high and gains in student learning are considerable, bypassing traditional forms in learning effectiveness. Second, this cycle of planning, applying, assessing, and gleaning what teachers have learned leads to continuing education for students and teachers in unending cycles. Third, teachers reap rich professional satisfactions and experience renewal as a by-product of these interactions.

In order that psychological safety can exist, leaders set environments in which risk behaviors can flourish. They assure that members are clear about roles and responsibilities and how they support the full team. They model desirable team qualities like asking questions, being curious, and admitting mistakes (Frazier, Fainshmidt, Klinger, Pezeshkan & Vracheva, 2017). They impose structures for regular reflection in which members critically assess their own performance, they provide periodic sessions for exploratory and innovative thinking, and they share leadership functions like meeting planning and facilitation. Leaders introduce conversational formats to explore understandings (dialogue) and for decision-making (discussion), and they present structured strategies for innovative thinking, managing differences, and conflict. They sometimes impose goals in addition to engaging goal development by the team. Leadership becomes a sophisticated and challenging role.

Psychologically safe teams are socially sensitive, attending to the verbal and nonverbal communications from one another; they feel safe to learn together, to admit mistakes, acknowledge uncertainty, and ask for help; they trust colleagues and are trusted in return, and they know they will not be belittled by others in the team.

Members of psychologically safe teams provide explicit verbal and nonverbal acknowledgment of one another; they share and invite questions; they manage their own emotions and behavior as they seek to communicate productively to the group. Members seek feedback from others and value curiosity and interdependence. Leaders of psychologically safe groups seek a variety of viewpoints, model vulnerability, and admit uncertainties. In these groups, members’ perspectives are heard, valued, and perceived as important. In these groups, members seek feedback from each other, and there is freedom to learn from errors or small failures by talking about them. High interpersonal trust exists among members, and members feel safe to learn together.

For example, imagine you are witnessing, as did one of the authors, a high school department meeting. You are pleased when you hear a non-tenured teacher say he is troubled because he does not understand why other teachers seem to have no discipline problems in their classes when he has many. You know that in other settings he would not share his thinking because he doesn’t have tenure. This team enjoys psychological safety.

Safety in Team Learning

Safety in team learning is a primary element of psychological safety and is directly related to the mission of transformative teams—actionable learning, which we will address. Leaders provide containers for conversations that allow safety in public learning; divergent views that are considered, not resisted; conceptually challenging conversations; differences to be managed; and for out-of-the-box thinking to occur. The behaviors that produce candid examination of practices, innovation, and individual thought are those that risk social disapproval from peers. Leaders share leadership functions like meeting planning and facilitation. Leaders impose structures for regular reflection in which members critically assess their own performance.

Social Sensitivity

In groups with social sensitivity, members understand one another and presume positive intentions as they intuit the motivations of others. They are aware of, control, and express emotions, and handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. In short, they practice the attributes of emotional intelligence. Social sensitivity is a key feature in psychological safety. It interacts with and contributes to two additional features of productive groups: safety in team learning and interpersonal trust. The more accomplished groups in the Google study of 180 teams were socially sensitive. Sensory sensitivity was also found to be the dominant characteristic of groups with high levels of collective intelligence (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi & Malone, 2010).

Interpersonal Trust

Interpersonal trust is developed through the social exchanges that take place in a school community. This trust is built on four perceptions of others: respect, competence, personal regard for others, and integrity. Respect is valuing the role each person plays in a child’s education and being genuinely listened to. Competence is how well a person performs a role. Personal regard is the perception of how one goes beyond what is required of his/her role in caring for another person. Integrity is the consistency between what people say and what they do.

Common facets of trust across the literature include confidence, vulnerability, benevolence, reliability, competence, honesty, and openness. Bryk and Schneider (2002), Rock and Page (2009), practitioners, and other researchers describe relational trust as the “glue” that binds people together when deciding what to do for the benefit of children.

A Leadership Example

I became principal of an oversized elementary school that had absorbed students from a nearby-shuttered school. Our school was “on the wrong side of the tracks,” morale was poor, and teachers felt the district office consistently ignored them. Looking back on this experience, I now realize that I was “setting the stage” (Edmondson 2018) for a different type of relationship with my first two initiatives. At the first faculty meeting, I presented a brief model for problem solving and invited clusters of teachers to bring solutions to a half dozen decisions that needed to be made early in the year. Before they set about their task, they were assured that the staff would support their decisions. By the end of the day, teachers had made decisions, and they had experienced using their collective experiences to forge sound practices. As the school year began, substitute teachers relieved each teacher for a 30-minute confidential interview with me. Three questions were asked: What are you feeling good about at this school? What concerns do you have? And what recommendation do you have? The stage had been set for being listened to, valuing teacher ideas, and participatory leadership.

Edmonson (2018) offers a model for how leaders initiate and support psychological safety. Unwittingly, I was working within her three-stage model in this situation: (1) setting the stage, (2) inviting participation, and (3) responding productively. A summary description follows.

Set the Stage: Frame the work by setting expectations about failure, uncertainty, and interdependence, creating expectations for the ways in which members will work together. Emphasize a compelling purpose, and within that, aim to achieve goals that “seem ambitious if not impossible to achieve at the outset” (Edmonson, 2002 p. 26.) Communicate about what’s at stake, why it matters, and to whom. Set effective goals for learning that balance radical and incremental goals used to measure progress along the way.

Invite Participation: Demonstrate humility. Be clear you do not have the answers.

Ask safe but penetrating questions. Model intense listening. Authentic listening communicates more than anything else that member voices are valued and heard. Set up structures and processes within which difficult and psychologically safe work can be done. Aim to have a growing set of learning containers and protocols that can become a toolkit for the team. Provide guidelines for conversations. In our work we have found the following to be instrumental to achieving effective interactions: 1) distinguish between discussion (to decide) and dialogue (to understand), 2) provide guidelines for effective meetings and most especially designate the profound role of group members, and 3) establish patterns of reflection so that collective learning is gleaned from experiences.

Respond Productively: Create an orientation toward continuous learning. Express appreciation, listen, acknowledge, and thank. Destigmatize failure. Own mistakes. Convey that errors are a source for learning. Offer help and focus on what can come next.

Application Instruments

No doubt readers will have access to many tools to support teams as they plan, implement, assess, and use what is used for further refinements, all of this in the context of sufficient safety for the very best work and learning to occur. Additionally, we offer a set of tools we have found effective in working with groups. These immediately follow each chapter.

1 Safety in Team Learning

. . . as adults, we orient differently to collaboration and its inherent opportunities and challenges, and need different kinds of supports and stretches to really make the collaborative shift from “I” to “we” in our work.

—Ellie Drago-Severson (2018)

While individual learning is complex, collaborative learning is much more so and is essential to actionable learning, a primary mission of transformative teams. Applying plans, assessing results, and then extracting what’s been learned to apply to further work require conceptual vulnerability as members exchange ideas and test theories. Since the processes of learning and creating are individually distinctive, nuances complicate the ways team members understand and process information. Collaborative learning makes public the conceptual, emotional, and interpersonal work of both the individual and the team. This public exposure reveals vulnerabilities that will threaten team learning unless safety is present. Consider the dimensions of actionable learning that require thinking postures to become public: envisioning, assessing, planning, critiquing, analyzing, admitting mistakes, constructing, disagreeing, and predicting. Interpersonal trust and social sensitivity establish the foundation for safe learning, but they are not sufficient. How leaders structure learning environments will mitigate personal vulnerabilities and set the bar for achievement.

Two simultaneous conditions permit safety in actionable team learning. First, team members need to believe they will not be rejected for their ideas, for their insecurities, or for revealing mistakes. For example, team members may be unwilling to bring up mistakes...