Here is a very important observation about teams and team behaviour, which tends to lead to challenges and burn-out in teams. Daniel Goleman, a team and leadership expert, researches and helps to build focused teams in all kinds of organisations, including militaries. He discusses the importance of having many connections and also being able to see things ‘through multiple lenses’, as he calls it. This enables team members and their leaders to have multiple perspectives.¹

A really important point he makes is about the emotional health of teams. He begins with highlighting the importance of collective self-awareness.

Think back to your observations of ‘noticing’, of patterns and of habits.

Go back to our conversation about ‘the close, the many, the powerful’. We learned that we want to fit in, we want to get along, and we also want to stand out. Lost in all this, is being aware of the overall well-being of the team in its pursuit of project successes.

In teams we often try to ignore or brush over disagreements and conflict. Collective self-awareness also requires us to be aware of these episodes and emotions within teams.
It is crucial that teams deal with their emotions. They need to make time and space to talk about ‘what’s on people’s minds’, both in a personal sense and importantly in a team sense.
Researchers note that many teams don’t make the time to ‘check in’, and they are the worse for this lack of focus on the team’s well-being.¹

Clearly this is one direct and effective way to build the team, team awareness and team resilience. There is a huge benefit to doing this. It builds a sense of presence and also safety in the team. In other units you will explore the concept of psychological safety.

Think of a time when perhaps the team was feeling dispirited, flat, or there were signs that ‘things were not quite harmonious’. Perhaps in this situation some of the team, or yourself, ‘showed up’ in ways that were not aligned with the team ‘best selves’. Take a moment to check on the lead-up to the moment when the team began to realise that there was something not quite right.

Did you or anyone take the time to ‘check in’, to ask ‘what’s on your mind’, to make a positive comment about the ‘team’s well-being’, its ‘ok-ness’? If some did, what was the effect? If no one did, when would have been the best moment to ‘check in’, and what would have been a good way to do this?

As an outcome of this activity, try to make the check-in, an ‘everyday habit’. There are some useful hints next, on how to make this happen.

Here are three useful tools to use to clear the air and focus on collective awareness, and achieve success in situations where you need to perform very effectively.

Find a symbol, word or phrase, or even an object, that the team can use to bring up something that needs to be addressed. Any team member can ‘raise the elephant’, meaning that they can bring up something that is bothering them. This brings team members to attention, and it is a good cue for team check ins.

Some teams are so focused on ‘what went wrong’ that we call it a focus on ‘criticisms and total discrediting’.² At some point, the focus on the ‘wrongs’, the ‘school of hard knocks’, takes its toll.

Let’s explore that in more detail. Up to a point, criticisms and ‘calling things out’, increase team performance and quality of outcomes. At some point however the criticisms start to be distracting and they take away from the focus on performance.

Discrediting is the process of questioning what we know and what currently works. Too little, and we start of believe ‘our own stories’. Sadly, statistics suggests that as teams and team members become too confident they don’t do enough ‘discrediting’, and they move into the complacency phase. In some organisations this can endanger team members. Think back to your reflections on HROs.

Too much ‘discrediting’ and teams and team members throw out all that they know, and they again lose capability and can endanger themselves. Lessons from the right level of discrediting are that as things change, we need to question whether what we knew and what worked before, will continue to work.

There is an interaction effect and some irony. Too much criticism and too little discrediting leads to poor performance, lower quality of outcomes, wasted energy, AND a lack of focus on what is important and also an overconfidence in routines.

A really healthy approach to criticism and discrediting, is what we call an error-friendly learning culture. These are built on healthy after action reviews (AARs) and situations where teams seek feedback, share information, ask for help, talk about errors, and they experiment. They are open and they know that errors happen and they are learning moments. A word of caution. There is a difference between errors that might be classified as ‘small things’, and those that are immediately catastrophic. Next we explore ‘small wins’, which might help you here.

There is a philosophy in HROs that small wins can help teams build an awareness of the possibility of failure!

First, what is a ‘small win’? These are ‘small, cumulative, changes that build team capability to better manage the unexpected’.³ Small wins are specific, complete and implemented outcomes that have moderate importance to a project outcome. They allow for change without being confrontational or challenging. They let teams test and experiment and they promote learning.

These are different to the idea of breaking a big project into smaller chunks. They are steps that help move the team in a new direction, or away from something that is not useful.

Small wins can be really important in situations where there is high risk and a danger of failure. And they work in situations where success leads to better outcomes.

A ‘small wins’ focus in such situations works like this:

Now, to bring these concepts together, here is a process. The Elephant tool helps the team to develop productive ways to raise important issues and have a shared understanding that this is for the benefit of the team. Error-friendly learning is a constructive way to explore actions that have led to unwelcome outcomes, significant performance issues, or worse. Recall your observations about behaviours in the HRO contexts. The small wins approach is a useful way to think about the steps and actions that could go wrong and require specific focus.

Identify an upcoming activity or project. If it is a large project, choose a manageable section of the project, ideally one that you are familiar with.

Using the ‘small wins’ table above, break the activity or section into the ‘avoid failure’ and ‘find success’ columns. You can list several ‘wins’ in each cell of the table.

Ideally, share your observations and allocations with someone who has a shared interest in the team’s success.

What did you learn? What are the ‘elephant’ issues? What are the ‘error-friendly learning’ opportunities from this exercise?

These reflections helps us to prepare for the next section, where we encourage you to stop for a moment, and look carefully at the way that you and your team deal with the important issues that help or hinder a team’s effectiveness over the long term.

1. Goleman, D. (2013). Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. Harper.
2. Weick, K. E. (1979). The Social Psychology of Organizing. McGraw-Hill.
3. Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2011). Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty. Wiley.