How To Build Team Rules And Agreements Without Inhibiting Creativity
November 17, 2020
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January 14, 2021
The thing I want to talk to you about this week is trust in teams. I did a quick Google search over this idea, and it’s crazy, like most typical articles that you see out there say that your team got to trust one another, trust is critical to performance. If you don’t have trust then you know you’re not going to do well, and it’s going to undermine the team and all these problems.
You would have guessed from my title, I think it’s unrealistic, trust costs a lot and it’s not what we need all the time in a team. It’s going to go up and down, that’s perfectly normal. So what I want to share with you this week is a way of thinking of trust and those connections between people in your team, so that you know when it matters and when it doesn’t.
Consensus and Agreement
So where this came about was when I was doing a session yesterday with a team. I was talking to them about the difference between consensus and agreement. So they are a project team that are being brought together from all sorts of different companies, and they’ve got to work together.
Now the thing I was talking about consensus, was that in a complex human system, think about all teams as a complex human system, so think of your family at Christmas. I think that’s the right analogy, so imagine you’ve got all these different people from different situations who are trying to work together.
They’ve all got their own personalities, they’ve got their own desires, wants, needs, problems, challenges, idiosyncrasies, and your job is to get them to perform individually, but also perform collectively.
How to move forward
Now in that environment my point of view is true consensus where you get 100% alignment on something hardly ever occurs, and it’s probably unrealistic.
1.And the reason that we get so negative about our teams is because we expect it. Instead what I would argue in a complex system is that what we’re after is enough agreement to move forward.
There are some cases where consensus is absolutely critical. To give you an example, if you’re on a jury the way that system works and the way the legal system is set up is that you need a hundred percent of people to agree that someone is guilty or not guilty.
But in an organisational setting. No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t require that 100% consensus. We just need enough agreement to move forward. And these two things make agreement variables – the first one is context, so think about the ability for your team to reach agreement or consensus depending on the issue going to go up and down.
I’ll give you an example, in “anyone” meeting you may have to make a decision about where to invest money in a project or not, depending on whether that project relates to the individual’s KPIs so there’s putting forward that project they going to have an agreement or non agreement and that debate is going to go up and down and that’s all part of it.
2. When it comes to people’s potential and their focus forward, people are going to have different positions on various people. We just need enough agreement to move forward, and we need to get to stuck on consensus.
3. The third variable here is Cost, consensus cost a lot of time and a lot of money to get there. So it’s not always the goal.
So what I want to talk about is the idea of sufficient trust in the team, and if you think about the whole idea that trust is so hard to define, I would just define it as the absence of distrust or dysfunction because everything else is positive, and that’s the best way to think about it.
What you need in your team is enough trust to create what Google says, in Google’s great research that comes up that term of psychological safety. We need enough of that to produce innovation to manage the risk and the creativity that you need.
Summary
Just a really quick one for your team, don’t get caught up on the idea of everyone needing to trust one another, you need enough agreement, enough trust to move forward on the issue that you’re talking about and you need enough trust to create psychological safety, so that innovation and creativity can occur.
Leave me a comment or Get in Touch
Hope that’s been useful for you. If you want to talk about your team. Send me a message or leave me a comment down below. I would love to know what you do in your team to build trust and psychological safety.
Talk to you soon.
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