“Why is being ‘heard’ so important?”

I mean, research time and time and time again—from psychologists and sociologists and statisticians—has really pointed to the ways team members interact as being far more important than who’s actually on the team in the first place. So feeling heard is actually more predictive of success than personality types or skills, or even the backgrounds that they bring to the conversation.

And we see that research, probably one of the best known pieces of research around this in the last few years, has been Google’s project Aristotle, where they conducted a study that illuminated the core attributes of high performing teams within organizations. The project evaluated teams across the organization—across Google—and found five factors that were the most important for successful collaboration.

And the top one, no surprise here, probably, at this point in time, is psychological safety. Team members feeling that they can safely share their ideas and take risks in conversation emerged as the most important component of a high performing team.

So in other words, people could feel comfortable… or maybe there’s discomfort, but they can allow their voices to be heard and they know that they will all be included and accepted as part of that conversation. And, of course, there were other factors that came out from the study as well, like dependability and structure and clarity, the meaning behind their work and their perceived positive impact.

And, one of the managers from Google who was featured in this study suggested that who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work and view their contributions.

I think that the more that leaders can learn from studies like this and really take them to heart, recognize that—and this is a big fear that I often run into with leaders—a lot of times leaders feel like if they ask for everyone’s opinions, it means they have to take everyone’s opinions. And that’s not the case at all. I think it’s more important for people to feel like they have a voice and can share their opinion, but ultimately understand who the decision rests with.

But just knowing that, “yeah, they listened to me, they actually paid attention, they brought curiosity to the conversation,” that goes a long way in creating a psychologically safe environment that people can really thrive and perform in.

“How can we make people feel heard in practice?”

I think it really starts with everyone contributing equally and for their contributions to be heard as we’ve been talking about. So, on some teams, this might mean that everyone contributes to a particular task or every decision. And on others it might mean that members just take turns leading certain parts of a project.

And actually, when one person in a small group of team members speaks more than the rest, this collective intelligence of the group can decline. It’s important to be aware of that as it can really enforce a hierarchy that reduces psychological safety.

So on the practical side, some things that leaders can do to support this environment are to—and I mentioned this before—set clear expectations about how team members are expected to contribute.

And that includes, if you have a meeting, I mean, how many people in organizations now say there are just too many meetings, right? I mean, there are so many meetings, and they can question the productivity of it. So even a simple thing like setting a meeting agenda in advance. If you actually have items on the agenda that you want their input on, give them that information upfront or in advance so that when they come to the meeting—especially for those who are really thoughtful and might need to think and process before the meeting, in order to voice their opinion—give them that time that they need to do that before the meeting so you’re not putting them on the spot and asking them for their opinions when, for some, they just haven’t fully formed them yet.

I think leading meetings is a real skill, and it shouldn’t always be the leader of the team or the project that should be the one to lead the meeting. So you could rotate the task of facilitating meetings. Because it not only gives the meeting a new voice or tone, but also can build important skills for people on the entire team, not just having them with the leader.

And then, we’ve talked about a couple of these, but create multiple options for input. So you could have a shared document or a shared spreadsheet. There’s all kinds of collaboration tools that you can use electronically that [00:05:00] can allow that collection of ideas and synthesize them in a meaningful way.

“Are there things we should avoid?”

I think to start, you really need to understand the culture of your team, and understand that bias can really lend itself to those heavy handed approaches like taking turns around a table. You sort of get into the “groupthink,” you get into the halo effect, all those different, psychological biases that we can run into.

I think that the key here is to really stress the importance of not forcing the “when” and the “how” we participate and also expect others to participate. Sometimes people will listen, or they might not feel like they have anything to contribute to a particular point. So don’t force it, just create the space. I always like to say, the role of someone who’s leading a meeting is to create the space, to create the container for the conversation, and to encourage as many voices as you can in different ways that you can, but not to force people into that.

Team members really have to understand when they have that personal responsibility to sign off on whatever the group decides or they produce. It’s important because something called “risky shift” can happen or can affect collaborative processes, and everyone thinks that someone else knows better and has got it under control.

How many times have we all sat in meetings where we come to some decisions and no one actually takes accountability for putting that decision into action. We all think somebody else is responsible for it. This happens all the time with groups, decision making, and teams.

So at key decision points in a project or when “deliverables” are created, every person should be invited to think “am I willing to sign off on this personally if my name was the only one attached to it?” Or “can I speak to this deliverable and stand behind it?” And everyone should take responsibility for that, not just the person who it’s “assigned to.” And so, by doing this you’re creating opportunities for people to expose flaws or challenges, avoiding that risky shift and strengthening the team’s work and cohesiveness.