Month: September 2024

Another thought on listening

I wrote about listening a few days ago. Then yesterday, I came across this paper by way of HBR. The paper studies psychological safety and its correlation to how teams learn and adapt. Unsurprisingly, the study finds many positive correlations between psychological safety and team performance. I list a few below.

  1. Direct relationship with performance. Team psychological safety was positively associated with team learning behavior (seeking feedback, discussing errors, experimenting, adapting, improving).
  2. Reduced friction caused by power and team dynamics. Teams with higher psychological safety give back greater returns to their employers in the form of learning, adaptation, output, and feedback to upward feedback.
  3. Teams that are high in “team learning behavior” have high psychological safety and perform better… in fact, it reshapes our earlier thoughts on efficiency.
  4. Team efficiency may be less important for helping teams learn than we thought. Psychological safety may be the friction reducing mechanism that enables more learning and productivity.

You saw the concept “team learning behavior” a few times. The concept describes how a team works. Seeking feedback, continuous improvement, and shipping work are all hallmarks of high performing teams and teams high in “team learning behavior.” It just happens to follow that teams that demonstrate high team learning behavior also are more likely to be high in psychological safety.

One Useful Thing

As a savvy leader, the best thing you can do is create space and time to get better at interpersonal communication.

  1. Listen more and better.
  2. Wait a beat before decision.
  3. Ask more “what if” and “how might we” and “ooh, that’s interesting, how did that…” style questions.

These behaviors act as signals that communicate your desire for more openness. When your team perceives openness, they’ll begin feeling confidence to be more generative. Generative teams ship work. You only grow if you ship.

I hope I’ve shown that three simple behaviors above can start you on a path to increasing team learning behavior and improving the psychological safety of your team.

Photography and problem solving

Stanley Kubrick, famed film director, once said (edited for clarity):

I had one thing I think that perhaps helped me get over being a school misfit. I became interested in photography.

I started out by getting a camera and learning how to take pictures, and learning how to print pictures, and so on and so on, and finally learning how to sell pictures and would it be possible to be a professional photographer.

And it was a case of over a period of say from the age 13 to 17 of going through step by step without anybody really helping me the problem solving of becoming a photographer.

This particular thing about problem solving is something that school’s generally don’t teach you. If you can develop a generalized approach to problem solving it’s surprising how it helps you in anything.

I think that photography might have been more valuable than doing the proper things in school.

If you didn’t know, Stanley directed “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Dr. Strangelove”, “Eyes Wide Shut”, and other fantastic films. In spite of his fame, he started out a misfit.

Stanley didn’t care for school. If we look at him through a modern day lens, we might not consider him a high achiever. Perhaps we might think he doesn’t sit still and pay attention. If you reviewed Stanley’s early career resume, you might pass over him. Why would you hire someone interested in photography?

Stanley got into photography later. He became fascinated with picture taking — everything from framing, production, and how markets value photographs. Ironic given that his films were often capital intensive.

Looking at Stanley later in life, we see he produced 13 featured films in 46 years… relatively low productivity by a traditional metric. However, if we consider the long run impacts of his work, it’s hard to quantify — Stanley changed the form of film in such a way that many great directors, such as Spielberg, claim Kubrickian influence on their work.

So What

When we look at talent by traditional or conventional metrics — schooling, short run productivity, or other their conventionalness — we may be missing out on the gains from hiring the Kubricks of the world. And there are Kubricks out there and in your industry and function.

As a director, Kubrick became well known for giving the actors a blank page from which to create against. Stanley himself spoke about the nature of talent, letting it express itself, and putting talent in positions that play to their strength.

As an executive, I would love a team that included a Kubrickian manager. And, I would watch the direct reports that report to that manager closely for succession planning purposes.

One Useful Action

In this post I describe my process for hiring people who might not fit the pedigree. Give it a read. It might work for you, and it might be a bit on the margin.

Car parts for resumes.

I read Alex Perry’s piece in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ link) documenting the “The American Solar Challenge“. Engineering students design, manufacture, and race solar powered cars. General Motors started the competition back in the 90’s; it served as a way to identify talent that would play a role in the solar/electric car markets.

These types of events have been around since the late 80s, like The American Solar Challenge, served as a vehicle build a pipeline of talent. Perry writes:

“Such racing events for years have played a key role in training engineers and even laying the groundwork for new technology in the auto industry. A solar car race across Australia in 1987 helped GM develop one of the earliest mass-produced electric vehicles, the EV1. The Darpa Grand Challenge, a race sponsored by the Defense Department in 2004 and 2005, helped accelerate the development of autonomous driving technology.” — click for full WSJ article

My Take

Find creative ways to build a pipeline of talent. These “hackathon”/race style events are not new to the culture. It’s clear that some firms and government agencies utilize this event as a marketplace to identify and retain talent.

I do not use a hackathon event for hiring now. Instead, I give people a data set and ask them to prepare business reviews. It’s not nearly as cool… however… when I’ve designed and executed these events in the past, it’s been through tech/innovation accelerators or schools.

One Useful Action

Identify a talent/startup/tech incubator in your community. Invite them to help you design a challenge that may attract and open the door for talent. It’s my experience that leaders of these groups are creative, and incentivized to help their communities.

What have you to lose?