Why actors know the secret to building high performing teams – and what we can learn from them
By Robbie Byrne & Liza Michael at Momentum Interacting Skills
In 2016 the New York Times published the result of an exhaustive study from Google into what made teams effective.
Google’s assumption was that the composition of the team would determine its success. They were wrong.
Researchers found that what really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together.
They found that the key characteristic of effective teams was ‘Psychological Safety’ where “team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other”.
Amy Edmondson a Harvard organizational behavioral scientist defines a psychologically safe team as one with “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking”.
In other words, a high-performance team can only be built when each of the team members feel confident enough to ask a question, suggest a new idea, or own up to a problem without fearing judgement or negative consequences from other team members.
Asking a basic question like “what’s the goal of this project?” may make you sound like you’re out of the loop. It might feel easier to continue without getting clarification in order to avoid being perceived as ignorant. How many times have you been in a meeting and not understood an acronym but let it go, or not questioned an unfounded assumption? Chances are you didn’t feel psychologically safe to do so.
So how do you create psychological safety?
The answer is that we need to start by making authentic connections with others. No learned verbal formulas, practiced body language maneuvers or superficial strategies to interpret personality profiles will cut it when you’re building a high-performance team.
We need to allow ourselves to be vulnerable in the presence of our team. Rather than focusing on making an impression, we should focus on making an authentic human connection.
Professor Brené Brown described vulnerability as ‘the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.’ And that’s a key to developing psychological safety during collaborative phases of work.
Momentum in psychological safety
It’s also the focus of a new training course ‘Active Presence’ being launched by Momentum Interacting Skills - a Dublin based training company who connected the dots between the human interaction training they delivered to actors and the skills needed to build high-performance teams in organisations.
For an actor to deliver their best performance, they strive to authentically connect with other actors. Momentum have worked with and trained actors over the past 20 years to use their vulnerability to make authentic connections, and when they do, they create a psychologically safe environment and a heightened state of collaboration.
Momentum has distilled their 20 years of training into a methodology adapted for corporate teams to maximise collaboration and build high-performing teams.
There’s no roleplaying, singing or dancing at these workshops, and even if there was, you couldn’t be in a safer place.
If your organisation could benefit from developing high performing teams, contact Robbie Byrne on +353 86 359 0969 or at info@momentuminteractingskills.com or visit momentuminteractingskills.com for more details.