Secrets to successful teamwork

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0:43And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, teamwork. So I grew up in Tripoli, Libya. This is Hajar Sharif. And when she was a kid, her parents would gather her and her siblings together every Friday night. We've all heard of family meetings, but these were a little more intense. This was a very formal process. People think like, yeah, it's a family, you come together like sometimes, you know, and I'm like, no, you don't understand. They were called Friday democracy meetings.

1:31At 7 p.m., everyone would convene on the floor in the living room. So we would be sitting down on mattresses. There was a formal agenda, an appointed secretary. My mom would likely be the one taking notes. And of course, there were snacks. Like we would always have like fruits and like nuts. So like, you know, the meeting would start, there was like a proper structure. The point was to bring all of the family's issues to the meeting and decide collectively how to proceed. Topics ran the gamut from negotiating bedtimes to what food to have in the house. Like, we need more Nutella at home, you know?

2:18Navigating sibling disputes. Yeah. So this is about solving a disagreement before it escalates to a fight. And how each member of the family could pull their weight, including when her youngest brother was a toddler. That he should tidy his toys every time he plays. And if he forgets, we need to remind him. So these meetings were fair and collaborative. But outside, it was Libya in the 1990s. The country was under the authoritarian rule of Muammar Gaddafi, and gender roles were very traditional. The woman is still the one that has to like cook and clean the house, even if she works, you know. So there is like gender inequality to a very great extent.

3:06And we didn't have a democracy. So my dad wanted to have that for my family. So inside Hajir's home, things were different. Everyone had a voice. I still very clearly remember him saying, this is like a safe space for you. And if you say anything to us as a form of criticism, we're not going to like hold this against you outside of this meeting. What happens at Friday democracy meetings stays at Friday democracy meetings. I love it. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I mean, what we discussed in these meetings were family affairs. But this system really challenged the traditional family structure. There were no power dynamics of like parents and kids.

4:02And that really made us understand every problem also have a solution if everyone comes together on equal basis. And if it's a safe space where there is trust, then we can really solve these issues. Even in a country whose citizens had no voice, those family Friday democracy meetings made Hajer feel like she had a say in her life. Which brings us to today's show. How teams work. Ideas about changing group dynamics and building trust in families, between colleagues, and even in entire institutions. When Hajer became a teenager, she realized there was one topic that had never come up in those family meetings.

4:58The fact that every night, as the only girl in the family, she had to do the family dishes. I was always the only one who was asked to wash the dishes while my brothers didn't have to do anything about it. Here's Hajar Sharif on the TED stage. I felt this was unjust and fair and discriminatory, so I wanted to discuss it in the meeting. As you know, the idea that it's a woman or a girl's role to do household work is a rule that has been carried out by many societies for so long. So in order for a 13-year-old me to challenge it, I needed a platform. In the meeting, my brothers argued that none of the other boys we know are washing the dishes, so why our family should be any different.

5:45But my parents agreed with me and decided that my brothers should assist me. However, they could not force them, so the problem continued. Seeing no solution to my problem, I decided to attend another meeting and propose a new system that would be fair to everyone. So I suggested instead of one person washing all the dishes used by all the family members, each family member should wash their own dishes. This way, my brothers can no longer argue that it's not within their responsibility as boys or men to wash the dishes and clean after the family, because the system I proposed was about every member of the family cleaning after themselves and taking care of themselves.

6:32Everyone agreed to my proposal, and for years, that was our washing the dishes system. After my TED Talk, you can't believe the number of messages and emails I got from all around the world of women who said, that story about the dishes, you have no idea how it resonated with us. And every time I talk about this story, I feel like one important thing to say is that, you know, this is not about who's washing the dishes. This is like an example of like how a structural issue would make someone not as equal to others. And like, I understood where they came from. my brothers because it's true because like in Libya like it is the woman and the girls who does the dishes now maybe things has changed a bit but like 24 years ago like this was like a no-brainer right so why out of the thousands and thousands of young boys and the thousands and thousands of young girls who accept to do the dishes every day why am I the only one who's challenging this, right?

7:53So this is the structural issue I was talking about. What strikes me about that, though, is in some ways, your parents were very clever in that they stopped you from being a rebellious teenager, because you were given parameters, you were motivated to change the system from within because you had some power. Yeah, very true. And you know, also about this like childhood experience, how it impacted me and my siblings growing up, you know, once we became also like young adults and wanted to experiment with life as well, right? Like, we had this trust relationship with our parents, that we would literally tell them everything.

8:42So I want to understand the cultural difference right now, because here in the United States, we we talk a lot about how young people are more politically motivated than ever. You know, not all young people, obviously, but there is a sense of wanting to have your voice heard. But we have to recognize that is not necessarily the case in many countries around the world. What is it that you feel a lot of young people need to hear in order to feel more motivated? Yeah. You know, I think regardless of where it is geographically around the world, I think the one thing that anyone who wants their voice to be heard should be willing to hear someone else's voice as well.

9:44especially when this other voice is not aligned with your political thinking and maybe even not aligned with with one's values and principles you know it also means to have a system in place that would treat everyone's voices equally and at least in terms of like having an opportunity to be heard without being judged, but also having a safe space to be heard. And I think in our societies now, especially now with social media and everything, you know, it's becoming more and more difficult for people to hear each other. So if someone listening to this conversation, a parent, is thinking, I want to do this, I want to have democracy meetings with my family.

10:45How should they go about doing it? How should they get started? I think a first thing is really to believe in it, because it's a foundation that's going to help the kids when they grow up, you know. So there is also an aspect of self-development there. And I see this a lot in me and all my siblings, where we're never afraid of confrontation. But it's also about how you ask questions. It's also about how you discuss things that bothers you or even point out to things that you disagree with in a way where you're not judging the other person or the other group, but you're really trying to understand.

11:36Right. And I think this is a skill that we need in life. Every family is its own mini-political system that is usually not democratic, because parents make decisions that affect all members of the family, while the kids have very little to say. Similarly, politicians make decisions that affect the whole nation, while the people have very little to say in them. We need to change this, and in order to achieve this change systematically, we need to teach people that political, national, and global affairs are as relevant to them as personal and family affairs. So if we want to achieve this, my proposal and advice is try out the family democracy meeting system because that will enable your kids to exercise their agency in decision-making from a very early age.

12:32Politics is about having conversations. including difficult conversations that lead to decisions. And in order to have a conversation, you need to participate. If you include your kids and family conversations, they will grow up and know how to participate in political conversations. And most importantly, most importantly, they will help others engage. Thank you. That was Hajar Sharif. She's a human rights activist and the co-founder of the Together We Build It Foundation. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, how teams work. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

13:18We'll be right back.

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14:54because with all you've done to find your rich, they'll do all they can to help you keep enjoying it. Edward Jones, member SIPC. This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash podcast. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, what makes teams work when the stakes are low or incredibly high? In a hospital setting, care is provided 24-7. And there are shifts of people coming and going.

15:41So communication is critical. Julie Marath worked in hospitals for 40 years. First as a nurse and then as a hospital administrator. And different disciplines that are involved in the care of patients have different vocabularies. So it's learning to talk to one another. Physicians, nurses, pharmacists, there's surgeon and anesthesia. And so the ability to listen, respect, talk to one another, and not around each other, is absolutely critical. And while that kind of open back and forth between colleagues might sound obvious and very much expected now, Julie says when she got her first nursing job in the 70s, that kind of communication just didn't exist.

16:34She didn't even know it was possible. And she found her job very isolating. Doctors talked to doctors, nurses to nurses, and people interacted around tasks, but not as a cohesive team. So asking questions, raising concerns, speaking up about mistakes, it didn't really happen. Each person was kind of on their own. It was lonely, you know. There's a lot of responsibility when you're caring for people. And I think that was the predominant feeling, that if a mistake was made, if an error occurred, people went underground. They didn't talk about it. They didn't learn from it, but rather saw errors and failure as an inevitable part of providing highly complex interdependent care.

17:39She soon learned that this culture could lead to catastrophic results. And a warning here, Julie's story includes details that are upsetting. A really early experience that I had was a child going for an operation, and the child died. and the nurse caring for the child never came back to work. Julie says that maybe there had been an accident, maybe an issue with anesthesia. There were rumors, but only rumors. No one knew for sure what happened. And no one ever communicated what happened to the child or to the nurse. It's haunting even after all this time that secrecy is so damaging. What Julie saw was actually indicative of what was going on in hospitals all over the country.

18:45Widespread medical errors. But it wasn't until the 90s that researchers began looking into why these mistakes were happening. One Harvard researcher in particular. I mean, if you really stop to think about it, we're dealing with very vulnerable people in very complex situations. So, of course, things go wrong. You know, the only question is, do we catch and correct them quickly enough to save lives? This is Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson. Back when Amy was a graduate student in the 90s, she was studying organizational behavior, specifically teams and how they work. And her first project was to pinpoint why hospital errors happen, the kind of errors that Julie had seen.

19:31I was invited to go into a couple of our teaching hospitals here at Harvard to study as part of a larger study of coordination breakdowns. And so I was, as a budding social psychologist, I was going in, observing patient care units, joining meetings where people were talking about how they worked together, what worked, what didn't work, and all the rest. She wanted to understand why some teams seem to make more mistakes than others. And my hypothesis is, I think this is obvious, I meant it to be obvious, was that the better teams, better coordination, you know, better leadership would have, ta-da, fewer error rates.

20:17But that is not what the data were saying. I had a reverse result. The data were saying that better teamwork was associated with higher error rates, not lower. That must have seemed really strange to you, that the strongest, most motivated teams had the most errors? Oh, yes. And my thinking starts literally spiraling out to, what will my next career move be now that I'm going to have to drop out of graduate school? So I calmed myself down and I thought about it. Well, what might explain this result? And of course, one possibility is that good teamwork really is problematic, but I just couldn't get my head around that explanation.

21:08And the more I thought about it, I was suddenly struck by a possibility. And the possibility was maybe the better teams don't make more mistakes. Maybe they're more willing and able to report the mistakes that happen. You know, most of us don't like admitting mistakes, and I don't think they did either. But they were more committed to the idea that only by their willingness to admit mistakes could patients get the best possible care. And later I was able to show some evidence that this was likely the case, you know, that they were more open, they were more honest, they were more sensitive to the nature of the work that they did.

21:54Amy didn't end up failing graduate school. She actually went on to do decades of research and is now one of the world's foremost experts on teamwork. Her research is perhaps one of the main reasons why workplace culture has shifted its focus from individuals to teams. And decades after her first hospital study, Amy still says good teams talk openly about their mistakes, even if it goes against our natural instincts. It turns out that no one wakes up in the morning and jumps out of bed because they can't wait to get to work today to look ignorant, incompetent, intrusive or negative. No. Here's Amy Edmondson on the TED stage.

22:38No, on average, we'd prefer to look smart and helpful and, you know, positive and helpful. So the good news about all this is that it's very easy to manage. Right. Don't want to look ignorant. Don't ask questions. Don't want to look incompetent, don't admit weakness or mistake. Don't want to look intrusive, don't offer ideas. And if you don't want to look negative, by all means, don't criticize the status quo. Now, this strategy, the good news about this very successful strategy is that it works for self-protection. The psychologists call this impression management. And there's a great deal of evidence that we're quite good at it.

23:18We learn how to do this sometime in grade school. By the time we're working adults, it's all but second nature. Have you ever had a question and you look around and you don't ask it? No one else seems to be asking. Maybe you're supposed to know. You think, I'll figure it out later, right? So why does this matter? It matters because every one of these moments, every time we withhold, we rob ourselves and our colleagues of small moments of learning. And we don't innovate. We don't come up with new ideas. We are so busy, unconsciously for the most part, managing impressions that we don't contribute to creating a better organization.

24:04Nurses don't call. The pilot doesn't speak up. The executive doesn't say anything. So the good news is that not every workplace is in fact this way. There are some workplaces where people absolutely wake up in the morning, if not eager, at least willing and ready to take the interpersonal risks of learning. I call these special workplaces ones that have psychological safety. Now, I'll define psychological safety as a belief that it's absolutely okay. In fact, it's expected to speak up with concerns, with questions, with ideas, with mistakes. So can you tell me more about psychological safety? You know, radical candor was in vogue for a little while where you said whatever comes to mind, you put it out there.

24:53Yes. Kind of. Sort of. Yep. But are there some sort of real basics that you think are crucial to creating that psychological safety in a team? Yes. And in defense of radical candor. OK. I think Kim Scott is very clear that she's not talking about brutal candor. Like what makes it radical is how unusual it is, but it matters to the quality of our interactions and ultimately the quality of our work. Now, part of the way you build it is you call attention to attributes of the work that require us to be this way. Like if you're in a healthcare context, you say, you know, the complex interdependent nature of the work we do means that we are vulnerable.

25:39You know, breakdowns will happen. If you're a team leader, medical director in a setting like that, you are frequently making reference to the vulnerability of our processes to break down, not because we're not any good, but because it's literally the nature of the work we do. If you're an innovator in a tech company, you're saying, you know what? No one has ever done anything like this before. So we're trying something new here. All ideas welcome. and all critiques and concerns are doubly welcome. Let me just suggest three simple things you can do so that that nurse does make the call, the pilot does speak up, the executive even reveals his concern about the takeover.

26:25First, frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem. Recognize, make explicit that there is enormous uncertainty ahead and enormous interdependence. We can't know what will happen. We've got to have everybody's brains and voices in the game. That creates the rationale for speaking up. Second, acknowledge your own fallibility. You know you're fallible. Say simple things like, I may miss something I need to hear from you. This goes, by the way, for subordinates and colleagues, peers alike. That creates more safety for speaking up. And third, model curiosity. Ask a lot of questions.

27:13That actually creates a necessity for voice. And so these three simple things can go a long way toward creating the kind of workplace where we can avoid the catastrophes you saw coming. So that is how to approach a high-stakes project. But what about when things go wrong? What is the best way to give feedback to maintain that psychological safety? You write in your latest book that leaders should be kind, but not nice. Please explain. What is the difference there? Right. You know, when we say we're being nice, I'm not going to criticize you because it wouldn't be nice. I'm going to say, oh, that's, you know, really very good work when I actually don't think so.

27:56And the point I'm trying to make is that's not necessarily kind, or at least it's certainly not caring. Because if I cared enough about you and your future, I'd care enough to give you more honest and constructive feedback. And nice is the easy way out. And nice takes care of me, makes me comfortable in the moment. But it doesn't take care of you and it doesn't take care of the future. I mean, that kind of stunned me a little bit. In your new book, you talk about one way of diagnosing a healthy failure culture. You say, how much of this do you usually hear? And the list is, do you usually hear good news?

28:32Do you usually hear progress? Do you usually hear agreement? Do you usually hear all's well? And then you say, if you do, that's terrible. Yeah. And again, context matters, right? Because if you're on the Toyota production line, that's probably okay, right? Because 99.9 % of the time, it is all going according to plan. But if you're in a scientific laboratory, and you're hearing, yeah, every single experiment is working just great. And I agree with you, boss, on every idea you had, you should be disappointed at that because that's not what a good lab looks like. Now, most of us are neither on the assembly line nor in the scientific laboratory.

29:13We're somewhere in between. And yet, even in the middle, I would argue that if you're only hearing the green and no red, it's probably suboptimal. It's probably a sign that people don't feel comfortable enough to say what's really going on. Now, at this point in describing and teaching about these things, most managers I talk to start to get a little nervous, right? They say, I get it. I understand how this could really help people learn. I understand, and I want to hear about errors. But are you saying I have to dial back a little on excellence? Is it no longer possible to hold people accountable for great results, to hold their feet close to the fire?

30:01And I say no. In fact, when I'm talking about psychological safety, I'm essentially talking about letting up on the brakes. I'm not talking about the gas. I'm not talking about motivation. There's a lot out there on motivation, and it's really important, and it's important to understand it. But it's equally important to free people up to really engage and not be afraid of each other. If you're only talking about people's accountability for excellence and not making sure they're not afraid to talk to each other, then they're in the anxiety zone. And that's a very dangerous place to be. Yeah. And some people might say, well, you know, I've got college tuitions to pay.

30:47I just want a job. I don't really care about the end product. I'm fine with this. I'm fine with phoning it in. It's fine. Yes. And I think that's a shame for two reasons. If I'm a customer, I'm thinking, this product's fine, but maybe it could have been even better. And organizationally, it's a real shame because what that points to is a leadership and management deficit where the organization's leaders or managers have failed to inspire you enough for you to want to give it your all. And they have failed to clarify that that's what good looks like, right? That there is almost no such thing as just play it safe around here.

31:33We're more disappointed in you if you're someone who never has a failure than if you're someone who has intelligent failures and learns from them and helps other people learn from them also. Right. So it's, you know, it's, it's, you know, I think it's kind of a profound thing that is often not communicated. I want to make sure I ask you, you know, somebody listening is thinking, am I doing this right? Am I running my family, my work team, my pickup softball team? Well, what are some questions they should ask themselves when it comes to taking the team forward for the win, you know, for the joyful win?