[2022-07-12] A great team
As I was tidying up yesterday, I came across a card from my son. I'm not sure when or why he gave it to me—perhaps for Valentine's Day. It reads:
Of your many wonderful qualities, the one that stands out most to me is patience, a seemingly inexhaustible resource for the many times I've struggled with school or have acted like an entitled brat. Despite this, you have always been fair and even-handed with me.
If I do in fact take after you, I hope to be even half as wonderful as you: To be loving, kind, mindful, and self-sacrificing.
I pulled the card out again this evening after having spent the day with Shane, working on an organizing project in his apartment. As we assembled a dresser, I noted how well we work together. We listen to each other, check that the other is reading the instructions correctly, collaborate efficiently. It's a pleasure to set our sights on a common goal and to achieve it in harmony. We never argue. Though we have differing views, we are able to express them to each other respectfully, and to settle on the best option. Sometimes we go with my proposal, other times, with Shane's. In short, we make a great team.
In fact, some of the qualities we have in common are similar to those of successful teams, as discovered by Google through a multi-year research project. In What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team: New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter, journalist Charles Duhigg explains what Google found to be the secret to successful teams:
[T]hey noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as "equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking." On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. "As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well," [lead author Anita] Woolley said. "But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined."
Second, the good teams all had high "average social sensitivity"—a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.... They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast...seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
When Shane and I work together, we talk in equal measure, throwing out ideas, building on each other's contributions. Sometimes he's in charge (for example, I leave it to him to read the IKEA instructions, as he's better at interpreting them than I am); other times, I'm in charge (for example, when we would cook together). We are also similar in knowing how the other is feeling: Shane has always been good at perceiving and responding to my emotions, and I believe that I'm equally competent at sensing how he's feeling.
As Duhigg points out, group members who take turns in conversation and display sensitivity to each other create psychological safety, in other words, "a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up." This results in "a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves."
This dynamic is at play in my relationship with Shane. We both feel comfortable being ourselves around each other. We never worry that we'll look stupid in front of the other. We can be honest about our hopes and doubts without fear of being judged.
Duhigg notes one other important factor in feeling psychologically safe: the ability to bring our whole selves to work and not just put on a so-called "work face." He writes that to feel psychologically safe, "we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations" or to talk to a teammate about what is driving us crazy.
Shane and I can bring our whole selves to any conversation. When we speak, it is—as I've written before—like what English novelist and poet Dinah Maria Mulock Craik described:
Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
This is especially important for someone like Shane who is an extroverted thinker: he figures things out by speaking. I do the same, though perhaps to a lesser extent.
If I were to write my own card for Shane, it might go like this:
Of your many wonderful qualities, the one that stands out most to me is cooperative, a quality I have valued during the many times we've worked together on projects. You have always been respectful and courteous to me, which makes it a pleasure to collaborate with you.
If you do, in fact, take after me, I hope you will always remember how wonderful you are: loving, kind, grounded, easygoing, honourable, just and wise.
Shane and I will have another chance to work together tomorrow when we resume our organization project. I look forward to it.
