Team-X Videos
Video 1
Hi, I’m Rajesh Anandan, one of the founders of Ultranauts and Team-X.
I’m so excited that your team has joined Team-X.
The fact that you’re here means that your organization wants to support you, your manager wants to set you up for success, and your team wants to figure out ways you can work better together.
If you think about your team - every person you work with is unique. You each have distinct ways you process information, react to feedback, communicate and collaborate. It can be tough to uncover these differences, and near impossible to figure out how they all fit together.
How can you build a more cohesive group? Have more effective meetings? Improve your team’s productivity?
This is where TeamX comes in, by helping you understand what your teammates need to do their best work, and identify the highest impact actions you can take as a team to communicate more openly, collaborate more effectively, and achieve peak performance.
Understanding Your Teammates
Understanding your teammates’ habits and preferences and knowing what they need to do their best work is vital to creating an inclusive work environment that sets your team up for success.
[Inclusion is the feeling of belonging. True or False]
If you guessed True, you’re not alone.
Feelings of belonging and psychological safety are often used as synonyms for inclusion. This is not helpful because the only way to achieve an inclusive work environment is to focus on actions that remove barriers preventing teammates from fully participating in their work.
Over time, those actions can lead to feelings of belonging and psychological safety, but it’s important to focus on the cause, i.e. barriers to performance, not just the effects like feelings of belonging.
5 Inconvenient Truths
[Inconvenient Truth #1. Inclusion leads to feelings of belonging… but not right away]
This is one of the inconvenient truths about inclusion in the workplace, that inclusion can lead to feelings of belonging, but not right away. There are four other inconvenient truths that are important to consider as you think about ways your team can work better together.
[Inconvenient Truth #2. Inclusion can’t exist without exclusion]
Inclusion can’t exist in a workplace without a degree of exclusion. Some exclusion is unavoidable. In fact, it can sometimes be desirable.
E.g. including everyone in every decision would quickly cause your operations to grind to a halt.
[Inconvenient Truth #3. Inclusion is conditional]
Inclusion does not necessarily mean you’ll be included under all circumstances, for all time. Rules of engagement or other social contracts define what’s acceptable for a particular group.
E.g. Maybe freely expressing your opinions is encouraged, but ad hominem attacks on a teammate’s character are not OK.
Knowing what you can expect from each other can prevent misunderstandings.
[Inconvenient Truth #4. Inclusion is not conflict-free.]
An inclusive environment is rarely a conflict-free social utopia.
E.g. Conflict can also arise when someone shares advice in an area where they are not accountable, or have little expertise, and their advice isn’t heeded.
Inclusion doesn’t mean everyone’s input will be acted on, or that people will have control over things they’re not accountable for.
Teams can avoid some of these conflicts by making sure that roles and responsibilities are clear and decisions are made transparently.
[Inconvenient Truth #5. We don’t see all the ways we are already being included.]
Inclusion may already be happening, but we may not see it that way.
Imagine a colleague asked for your input into a decision, but you didn’t have time to respond. The decision is made without your input. You don’t feel included, when in reality you were.
We need to challenge ourselves, and each other, to appreciate the many ways our teammates may already be including us.
OK, let’s get to work. Take the next 20-30 minutes to reflect on these inconvenient truths, review your
Video 2
To achieve peak performance, you’ll not only need to understand each other’s work styles and preferences, you’ll also need to make some changes in the way you work as a team. Making those changes will require a shared commitment from each of you, because improving how your team communicates, collaborates and performs is not something your team leader or any one individual can “give” you, it’s something you have to work on as a team and achieve together.
First, we need to be aware of some things we can’t change.
Things We Can’t Change
[#1 Thing We Can’t Change: Our psychological base state as individuals]
No one is a blank slate. Your past experiences, good and bad, coupled with the natural way you approach setbacks form your psychological base state. Your base state colors your day to day experiences and influences your reactions at work.
E.g. If you've rarely felt respected in the past, it may take you longer to open up to that feeling even if your current teammates are consistently behaving in respectful ways. This is a perfectly normal response.
[#2 Thing We Can’t Change: Dominant people or groups]
Regardless of how egalitarian a team is supposed to be, there will always be people or subgroups who carry, or appear to carry, more power.
Dominant groups are a fact of life within every team, including yours. By being more aware of the power dynamics on your team, you can shift those dynamics to be more productive, e.g. aligning decision making authority with accountability or expertise.
[#3 Thing We Can’t Change: Stereotyping]
Stereotypes can affect how you interact with someone, interpret their actions or evaluate their performance. This can be unproductive, but it’s human nature to stereotype and you can’t avoid it.
The solution is to explore your assumptions. Think about each person on your team, and the first labels that come to mind for them. That’s where your danger zones lie with stereotyping.
[#4 Thing We Can’t Change: Unconscious bias]
We’d all like to believe that we can just turn off our unconscious biases, but we can’t. They’re unconscious!
While we can’t debias humans, we can debias our work practices, e.g. by being explicit about what good looks like or being transparent about how decisions will be made.
While there are things we can’t change, like our psychological base state and unconscious biases, we can change the way we work, in ways that allow each of us to use our unique strengths and collaborate with our teammates to do great work together.
Collaboration and Safety
Collaboration is at the heart of what it means to be a team, and fostering collaboration requires a work environment where every team member feels safe to express themselves, take risks and make mistakes, without fear of negative consequences.
Fear, whether it manifests as silence, avoidance or aggression, can impair a team's performance by inhibiting open communication and genuine collaboration.
There may have been times in the past when you thought:
“If I ask a question, they might think I'm not capable.”
or
“If I speak up and share what I really think, I might get fired.”
As an individual, realizing you’re in control of your own reactions can empower you to engage in difficult but necessary conversations, and contribute to a culture of open feedback and growth.
And as a team, establishing fair, transparents processes for making decisions or resolving conflicts, can ensure that everyone is able to bring something to the table.
Proactively driving out fear, as individuals and as a team, is vital to creating the context for peak performance.
Achieving Peak Performance
Even the very best teams rarely achieve peak performance. It’s a destination we’re all working towards, that requires continuously improving the ways we work together.
This means adopting practices that ensure every teammate has access to the resources, information and interactions they need to do their best work.
But which practices should you adopt as a team? Instead of general advice or training, e.g. on "good practices for effective teams", your Team-X Playbook includes recommendations that are tailored to your team’s unique chemistry and context.
Those recommendations draw from a catalog of proven neuroinclusive team practices, mapped and prioritized based on your team’s unique chemistry. That chemistry is modeled using 75 variables for each member of your team, consisting of your stated preferences and predicted traits, and points to the most important areas you need to focus on as a team.
OK let’s get to work. Take the next 20-30 minutes to reflect your team’s base state, review the recommendations in your Team-X Playbook, and decide on which actions you can take as a group to unlock your team’s full potential.
