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The Future of Teams

Sally Thornton�Founder + CEO, Forshay

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WTF matters?

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WTF matters?

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Our stories.

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For me – my entrepreneurial story was born out of my personal experience, and I share it because the cultural view about what is valued at work shaped me and it may help you see your own cultural conditioning with a new light. Also because when I share the science of teamwork, the data only have a fighting chance of being remembered if we surround it with a story – our brains are wired for story….

My brother had leukemia when I was in the 7th grade, and he learned the fancy phrase “carpe diem” (which I had heard zero people use in Minnesota where we grew up). So when my brother called me while I was working in Silicon Valley, aged 31, to say get on the plane to celebrate our mom’s 60th birthday, I didn’t think I had the time (because I was “dedicated” to my work), but I did it, because on top of being the baby in the family who listens to her older brother…I was on a team – and had an executive (who decides my promotability!)– who told me that I should go.

I was 6 months pregnant, and this is us – my brother Will, me at 6 months pregnant, my sister Ann Marie, my mother Judith, and my dad Steve is taking the photo. We are in a rented limo against all of our midwestern instincts of frugality. Two months later and 8 months pregnant, I got the call from my dad to sit down. My dad told me my brother had been killed in a plane crash. He was 37. This was the last time I saw him.

My “dedication to work” – what social scientists call the strive to be the “ideal worker” who puts work above all else…almost stopped me from seeing my brother for the last time. I felt broken. As I talked to other women, many of whom were rising in their careers, I saw this collective pressure that was especially felt by women in making decisions about their careers and their personal lives. So what do we do in Silicon Valley when we have a breakdown? We start a company (probably too many…). And I named it after my brother ….

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Creativity

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Creativity

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Original ideas = teams who co-create

• Jobs

• Goals

• How they collaborate�

https://hbr.org/2020/03/what-job-crafting-looks-like

How creativity shows up in “everyday work” can include making work ORIGINAL by Co-creating….

How are you creativing thinking about jobs you’re hiring for, the goals of your team, the norms in how you collaborate (which overlaps with that learning mindset – allows teams to shift!)

On our team at Forshay, we rarely get a job description that we like - and it’s not a judgement on our clients’ ability to write a fantastic job description – it’s that the TEAM CONTEXT and goals of the role are always a work in progress…and we find co-creation essential to craft jobs with candidates (and there is solid science on the upsides of job crafting).

And my company didn’t even start in Executive Search…it was actually Pixar who saw that the way we approached recruiting was novel and suggested we expand. Forshay started as an interim (or fractional) executive firm, offering companies access to talent who wanted something in between working the 80-hour Silicon Valley workweeks and caring for kids or aging parents. Pixar saw that the way we approached building teams had creativity built into it that we didn’t even see at the time. So co-creation and fostering original ideas can come in so many variations.

******

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053482221000024

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Optimize timing for creativity

Levav and Danziger PNAS 2011, www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889

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Teams: Interrelating Parts

Well-being

Learning

DEIB

Creativity

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Team Wellbeing + Creativity:

Avoid Collaboration Overload

Perlow, 2012

It may feel counter-intuitive, but it’s actually to embrace constraints.

I had the joy of working with Dr Leslie Perlow of HBS, who has longitudinal research on the benefits of working with team collaboration constraints.

If you wondered WHY “flex work” was almost a universal failure for decades before the pandemic – it’s because individual flexibility would violate that “dedicated worker – or the “ideal worker norm” – but Dr Perlow has been running experiments for over a decade pre-pandemic, and shows that when you experiment with time off that that is PREDICTABLE and used by all the team members (even though different members can have different times off) teamwork improves.

She’s done work across all kinds of companies – global, tech, pharma, professional services…and she consistently finds that when teams have time CONSTRAINTS on how much they collaborate:

— Overall Work hours down, Burnout down, turnover down

— Creativity Up, Impact Up (why? Clarity of thinking, better communication, planning)

And she was just on Adam Grant’s podcast on WORKLIFE for those of you who want more insights on teamwork – they are both brilliant researchers.

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Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education,

2012, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Joanna A. Christodoulou, Vanessa Singh

Sense-making: Rest is crucial for consolidating memories, reflecting on past experiences, and planning for the future

Divergent thinking: Ability to generate and make sense of novel ideas

Neuroscience: Wellbeing + Creativity

YOUR

TURN

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New Superheroes: Well-rested teams

Behavioral Science

Neuroscience

+

Naps?

“Not a wasted opportunity for productivity”

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Discover

Prefrontal Cortex

Defend

Flight, Fight, Freeze

Nervous system

Sympathetic + Parasympathetic

Exhaustion also means that we’ll be more emotionally irrational (with our amygdala 60% more reactive), according to neuroscientist Matthew Walker.

Yet The future of teams will call for even greater TEAM ATTUNEMENT with Emotional regulation skills….do you notice when you or someone one your team is tense? In the back of their brain? You can use the power of curiosity – when you ask a question it helps move someone (or yourself) in your prefrontal cortext….

Additionally, When you take slow breaths – try box breathing, you can move intentionally into your highest thinking when things get messy….

Being exhausted has a huge cost to NOT JUST to your teamwork (with higher emotional irrational behavior) - but to YOU: your LEARNING is compromised (down 40%), you’re more likely to get Alzheimers, AND you look worse (beauty sleep is real!

There are real Benefits to reading neuroscience…!

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Teams: Interrelating Parts

Well-being

Learning

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging

Creativity

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Diversity

WORKFORCE DEMOGRAPHICS

“representation”

Inclusion

ORG CULTURE

“Invited to the party”

Belonging

FITTING IN + CONTRIBUTING

“Choose the DJ”

Female peers in engineering: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1422822112

A lot has been said on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion…so I want to highlight today the BELONGING element.

My favorite descriptor came from a graduate student who studies Belonging at Stanford who said: When I’m invited to the team party (inclusion), Belonging is contributing to the setting – it’s I’m “choosing the DJ”. Our brains are wired to look for “do I belong or am I excluded?” (neuroscience, tribal)

So whether you’re at a party…or at your team meeting…the question we ask ourselves is “Do I Belong Here”?

It’s feeling accepted, included, respected AND contributing in a setting (are you encouraged to contribute)

And we always want to stay grounded in the science….where we see a need for CHANGE in the future of teams is how Women engineers working in male-dominated settings report lower sense of belonging because of the pressure to “represent” their group well. This is “stereotype threat”.

Our team at Forshay worked on Belonging with Airbnb and Professor Greg Walton from Stanford, and for those who can join us in the DEI panel tomorrow we’ll go deeper into that work.

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2016 Fortune 500 CEOs

http://www.catalyst.org/media/despite-modest-gains-women-and-people-color-see-little-change-representation-fortune-500�

https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-candidate-pool-theres-statistically-no-chance-shell-be-hired

Board Members and Executives who are white men

CEOs who �are women

CEOs

named David

CEOs

named John

85%

4.1%

4.5%

5.3%

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The myth of �meritocracy

2010 Emilio Castilla & Stephen Barnard, MIT

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Energy Wasted By “Covering”

SOURCE: ”UNCOVERING TALENT: A NEW MODEL FOR INCLUSION” BY KENJI YOSHINO AND CHRISTIE SMITH, DELOITTE UNIVERSITY | HBR.ORG

Percentage of employees who reported covering �at work:

83% of LGBT individuals

79% of Blacks

67% of women of color

66% of women

63% of Hispanics

45% of straight White men

61%

Even 45% of straight white males report downplaying their differences

There is no doubt that your dream team needs to be fully charged with their best energy.

If you or someone on your team has a stereotyped identity, you might cover or hide aspects of yourself at work in order to fit in (e.g., not talk about “your partner” if they are same sex).

For me, I used to wear my hair back in a ponytail to look less femine, an oversized jacket to cover my bust and and I wore glasses (but I could see perfectly fine) to UNSUCCESSFULLY TRY to fit into the Big Accounting firm I worked for in NYC. I remember one partner asked if I was trying to look like a librarian. YUP, I guess I was. At age 24 in NYC – a librarian look felt to me like a better route to promotion. (I didn’t know I should have changed my name to David or John).

Here’s what’s surprising, even if you’re NOT in a stereotypyed identity – in fact 45% of straight white men, REPORT covering part of their identity at work. They report covering up things like a health condition, growing up low income, have a learning difference.

How much energy are we wasting covering up parts of ourselves? The future of teams is about fostering inclusion & belonging where we are spending all of our brilliant creative energy ON. THE. WORK. Being just as we are.

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Optimum Teaming

Dr Amy Edmondson, 1999

The last piece of science on DEIB is the critical role psychology safety play in both performance AND learning (which is our next focus).

Psychological Safety was popularized by Google as they sought to understand why certain TEAMS were high performing, but it was anchored in longitudinal research by Dr Amy Edmondson from Harvard.

Psychological safety is when someone can speak up on a team and will not be embarrassed, rejected or punished. Their idea can be debated, but not who they are as a person…so the team demonstrates:

– Interpersonal trust

– Mutual respect

– People being comfortable as themselves

The right norms can raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could sabotage a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.

The highest performing team cultures have:

– 1) members speak in roughly the same proportion. If only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declines.

– 2) empathy – at least ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — meaning they are skilled at intuiting how others feel based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.

To perform our best as a team, we need to safely talk about what’s messy or sad. We need to listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs. If we’re not able to be ourselves on our team (and are “all armored up” as Brene Brown calls it), are we fully living?

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Teams: Interrelating Parts

Well-being

Learning

DEIB

Creativity

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Longitudinal Study - Intelligence

GROWTH MINDSET

FIXED MINDSET

“Failure is an opportunity to grow”

“I can learn to do anything I want”

“Challenges help me to grow”

“My effort and attitude determine my abilities”

“Feedback is constructive”

“I am inspired by the success of others”

“I like to try new things”

“Failure is the limit �of my abilities”

“I am either good at it or I’m not”

“When frustrated, I give up”

“My abilities are unchanging”

“I stick to what �I know”

“I don’t like to be challenged”

Feedback and criticism are personal

VS.

Carol Dweck

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Design Thinking: rapid prototyping

Improv/Humor/Creativity: requires you listen to your partner, teaches “yes, and…” (builds on ideas)

Gaming: immersive, low-risk learning environment

Learning

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Hero/heroine = you

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Sally Thornton�Founder + CEO, Forshay

Thank you

SallyThornton

@SallyThornton

@ForshayTalent