Antonia Bowring, principal ABstrategies LLC, MBA. What are your strategic coaching and facilitation needs?
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As philosopher Theodore Zeldin famously said, “When will we make the same breakthroughs in the way we treat each other as we have made in technology?”
Teamwork defines today’s work culture. According to a 2018 Microsoft survey, collaborative work takes up 80% or more of our time, and we’re on twice as many teams compared to 2013. Team leaders are constantly looking for new ways to improve the way people work together, and this has only become more important during the Covid-19 pandemic when many teams have become 100% remote.
Seminal work on team success factors was done by Google in the mid-teens. At the same time, the growing body of social neuroscience research is helping build our understanding of what threatens and rewards psychological safety — the number one determinant of a successful team, according to Google.
Google set out in Project Aristotle to understand the key determinants of a successful team and discovered these five: 1) psychological safety, 2) dependability, 3) structure and clarity, 4) meaning of work, and 5) impact of work.
Psychological safety was dramatically more important than the other four determinants. The researchers’ identified two key drivers of psychological safety in a team: First, everyone had a chance to talk, and second, team members were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on nonverbal cues such as voice tone, facial expressions and body language. It’s worth noting that these team norms are expressed differently across teams: On some, everyone interrupts each other during meetings, and for others, there is an orderly “sharing of the mic.”
Social neuroscience seeks to understand the drivers of human social behavior. The SCARF model is built on two themes. First, much of the motivation for our social behavior (how we relate to one another) comes from the brain’s need to minimize threat and maximize reward. Second, our brains treat our social needs similarly to our primary survival needs such as food and water. The SCARF framework captures five domains that can activate inside us a reward or threat response in social situations:
• Status is about our relative importance compared to others;
• Certainty concerns our ability to predict the future;
• Autonomy is our perception of having a sense of control over events;
• Relatedness is a sense of safety with others, deciding if others are “friend” or “foe”;
• Fairness is our perception of whether exchanges between people are fair or unfair.
We each respond differently to social situations partially based upon which of these domains are most important to us. In the workplace, someone who prioritizes certainty will respond favorably to clear business strategies and processes. Someone who values status is likely to enjoy additional learning opportunities and positive feedback.
Managers who recognize that their team members have different reactions to different social drivers are better positioned to create the circumstances that deliver positive social interaction rewards, which contribute to psychological safety.
Here’s one example based on my application of these psychological drivers in my strategic coaching work. I have co-founder clients and one of their key stakeholders wouldn’t sign a funding document. I suggested that they utilize the SCARF framework to identify what this person might be perceiving as “threats” and “rewards.” Upon reflection, they realized this person perceived a threat to his status, and they then successfully remedied the situation and he signed.
When someone feels threatened, the person’s critical-thinking capabilities (cognitive performance) are reduced; the increased activation of the brain also reduces the ability to pick up on subtle cues so fewer insights occur and, with the amygdala activated, they are likely to respond more defensively to others. In this threatened state, they are less likely to successfully collaborate with and influence their team members, reducing psychological safety across the team.
The impact of our social pain should not be underestimated. Research from Dr. Lieberman and Dr. Eisenberger at UCLA highlights how social pain (e.g., exclusion from a group) and even social “pinches” (e.g., unfair treatment) cause similar reactions to how we experience physical pain. The same regions of the brain, the insula and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, are activated. For instance, if a team member driven by fairness believes that they are being treated unfairly compared to a colleague, they may experience that social pain as a threat and therefore feel less psychologically safe. In other words, team leaders may need to focus more on resolving that person’s pain for the good of the individual and the team.
When our basic social needs such as status and relatedness are met, we feel pleasure, similar to when our basic physical needs are met. This experience of feeling rewarded may also help us better understand how someone can feel psychologically safe. According to Lieberman, being treated as a valued team member may activate the brain’s reward systems that will promote future behaviors that we anticipate will deliver more social rewards.
Valued team members have the opportunity to participate in meetings, have their opinions considered in decision-making and feel comfortable enough with colleagues to admit mistakes and to ask for help. As a practical note for team leaders, providing social rewards is a highly cost-effective motivation and retention strategy for your teams.
The key takeaway for team leaders is to become familiar with the five domains of the SCARF model to gain insights on how to maximize individual team members’ perceived rewards and decrease their perceived threats. These insights will help your team develop norms that encourage everyone to have a voice and a sharper awareness of nonverbal social cues. These are the building blocks of psychological safety so that your team can truly flourish.
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