Episode 252: The Science Behind High-Performing Teams (with Colin Fisher)
Why do some teams click while others struggle, despite having top talent?
That’s exactly what our host David Green explores in this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, with guest Dr. Colin Fisher - PhD Programme Director at UCL School of Management and author of The Collective Edge.
With a background in organisational behaviour, Colin brings a fresh lens to one of the most critical - and misunderstood - aspects of modern work: how teams are structured, and how that structure shapes everything from communication to creativity to performance.
Join them and learn more about:
Why the seeds of team success - or failure - are planted before Day One
The 60-30-10 rule for high-performing teams (and why most leaders focus on the wrong 10%)
How to design work that kills free-riding and boosts engagement
Why psychological safety is a non-negotiable - and how to build it fast
How AI and team design intersect, and what leaders need to do right now
This episode is sponsored by Valence.
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This episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast is brought to you by Valence.
[0:00:09] David Green: Every organisation wants high-performing teams, but what are the dynamics that really make a team work? Because let's be honest, great teams aren't built by chance, they're built by design, through clear structure, trust, and conditions that encourage healthy debate and shared accountability from day one. My guest today is Colin Fisher, PhD Programme Director at UCL School of Management, and author of the fascinating book, The Collective Edge, which explores how groups collaborate, make decisions and turn individual expertise into collective strength. Colin has spent decades studying how these dynamics form, evolve and impact performance. And today, we are going to explore his research on how to transform how teams work. We'll talk about the non-negotiables every leader should set from day zero, the conditions that help prevent poor communication and conflict before they start, and how team design, size, structure, and even the rise of AI can shape the way people connect and create together. So, if you're someone who wants to understand what really drives performance, this episode will give you a whole new way of thinking about collaboration. And with that, let's get the conversation started.
Colin, welcome to the show. Please, could you start by introducing yourself, your work, and your new book, The Collective Edge, to our listeners, and your journey that led you to researching group dynamics?
[0:01:41] Colin Fisher: So, as you said, I'm a professor at UCL School of Management, and technically I'm in a field called organisational behaviour, which hopefully will be familiar enough to HR professionals. So, as my colleague and friend, Adam Grant, likes to say, "We study how to make work suck less". I found my way into organisational behaviour. I have a very typical background for this, which is that I was a professional jazz trumpet player before I did this. What happened that led me to be so interested in group dynamics, that I've really devoted a better part of my life to it, wandering around the world, playing jazz music with a lot of different people. And obviously, I'm kind of an academic type, otherwise you wouldn't survive in a PhD programme and spending almost my entire life in universities.
So, I was really curious about why it was that some groups really just seemed to click, while others, no matter even when they had really talented individuals. And so, I was down in New York and I was lucky enough to be part of a master's degree programme where they basically let you make up your own master's programme. And I studied improvisation across different art form. And I ran across this research on the social psychology of creativity by a woman named Teresa Amabile. And it turned out that she taught at Harvard and was in this field called organisational behaviour. And I said, "I want to study the conditions under which teams can improvise creatively, no matter what setting they're in, whether it's music, whether it's in business". And for whatever reason, she thought that was a good idea, and then they make you a business school professor at the other end of that.
But Over the decades I've been working on this, I've studied groups and teams from kind of all walks of life. I've done a lot of work with design teams, I've seen teams in government agencies, I've worked with teams in all different kinds of businesses. And I really wrote this book because, even though my passion is trying to help teams improvise more creatively, that a lot of the most common things that they needed to do first were to structure themselves in a way that was conducive to teamwork, and that so many of the problems that I was encountering in my work with teams and in decades of teaching this stuff were really these basic things that people need reminding of, and they need reminding because our psychology is really not set up for us to think in terms of managing at the group level. And so, that's really how I ended up writing this particular book at this time, because I really want groups to work better, I want them to be able to learn, to perform well, to improvise, but that we need more systematic thinking about how we can organise for group and teamwork, because that's what's going to solve the biggest problems in your organisation and really in the world.
[0:04:56] David Green: Through all the research that you've that you've done over the years, what have you found, firstly, that that makes a really strong group dynamic?
[0:05:04] Colin Fisher: So, most of what's going to shape your group dynamic isn't the stuff that's happening when you're meeting all the time. It's the stuff that happened before the group ever existed, in that so much of what shapes group dynamics are what I call the structure of the group, which are like the bones that underlie what the group dynamic's going to grow into. By structure, I mean, the composition of the group, so who's on it, how many people, what's the mix of knowledge and skills; the goals that you have for the group and whether those really are well-designed team goals; the task that the group is given, so what work is the team even asked to do in the first place; and then, the invisible one are the social norms of the group, the sort of taken-for-granted expectations about how we're going to behave. And those four things that make up the structure of the group, these bones that really determine and shape group dynamics more than anything else.
[0:06:10] David Green: Great, and we will dig into some of that. I'm already thinking about the role of the leader of the group in that as well. And I mean, what would you say in connection to that, and maybe it's very much connected to those four things, Colin, what would you say are the non-negotiables on day zero? Is it establishing norms effectively?
[0:06:30] Colin Fisher: Yeah. I mean, on day zero, you want to have at least given these things some thought. And I would say the number one mistake I see people making at work is that they just don't think about these things. They don't think very hard about matching the knowledge and skills that they're putting on that team to what the task demands are. And instead, we compose a team based on who's available at that time; we compose a team based on political considerations about who's going to be upset if they're not included on the team. And when we sort of strip away those things and we just do a really careful analysis and say, what is it we want this team to do; what are the skills we're going to need; what are the different perspectives of the different stakeholders that we're going to need; have we got those things on this team; then on that day zero, we're doing a lot better than most teams are.
My mentor, Richard Hackman, and my collaborator, Ruth Wagman, talk a lot about what they call the 60-30-10 rule. And what that means is that 60% of how a group is going to perform is determined by these structural factors that we're talking about, by stuff that's happened before the team ever meets. But 30% of how a team is going to perform is established on day one, on the launch. And that's because these norms that we're talking about are really, really sticky. And the kind of tone that we set on that first day, the way that we engage people with a really clear, important, challenging goal, the way that we encourage people to contribute, we establish a climate of psychological safety, all those things happen really mostly on day one. And then, only about 10% of the variance in how a team performs is determined by these kind of adjustments that tend to happen while the team's in flight.
This is really important because most leaders spend their time in the completely inverse way, that they spend most of their time looking at the in-process group. They're trying to manage problems after they've already emerged. But we'd be so much better off if we were in the business of preventing those problems by creating a healthy structure for the group and spending more of our time on that. But there's no leader that spends 60% of their energy on the group on that day-zero stuff. But that's sort of what the research suggests would be the most profitable way for us to think about managing our time and energy in leading groups.
[0:09:18] David Green: Which is quite frightening because as she's saying, if leaders don't traditionally do that, 60% about the structure, 30% about the norms on day zero, on day one, and if people aren't doing that effectively, that suggests that most groups are going to fail.
[0:09:35] Colin Fisher: It suggests that if we don't pay attention to these things, groups are going to underperform. And I think most of us do find groups to be very challenging. And when I say, "Oh, you're going to be on a committee or you're going to do a group project", for a lot of people, they'll kind of recoil in horror when we tell them they've got to work in a group. And the reason is that we do groups kind of badly, that even though we've matured a lot in the world of business and organisations, we still fundamentally design organisations to manage individual performance. It's the rare, rare organisation that is structured to manage group performance. And yet, most of the important work that we're doing is in groups. And there's research to suggest that the important new knowledge, the important innovation, the really tricky problems and complex problems that need to be solved, groups actually do better than individuals at those. And yet, again, we're still kind of stuck in this mindset of really trying to maximise individuals rather than maximising group performance.
[0:10:48] David Green: Which, I mean, having spoken to some of your peers who are also organisational behavioural scientists, as you said, the group will tend to achieve more than individuals anyway. And in some respects, it's common sense, isn't it? A group of people can surely achieve more than an individual on their own. It suggests that the way we structure, if we look at it from a business perspective, the way we structure our organisations, the way we put teams and groups together is flawed and leads to most groups underperforming.
[0:11:22] Colin Fisher: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a fairly normal thing because we didn't evolve to think about groups and organisations. We really evolved to experience the world, of course, as individuals, but there's something in social psychology that's called the fundamental attribution error. And the fundamental attribution error is about how we figure out what caused somebody to do whatever it was they did. So, why did David show up to this meeting late? Is it because he's flaky and he's lazy, or is it something about the situation? And our brain defaults to things about individuals, to things about personality, and it tends to systematically underweight things about the situation and the context. And unfortunately for us, our brains perceive groups as context, they perceive them as situations, and we really struggle to see a group as the protagonist of a story. It's the rare fairy tale that has a group as the hero or villain, but we're used to individuals in those roles, and that's because that's how our psychology works, that that's how we understand the world. And then, that extends to the way that we understand other people at work, the way that when we're in positions of power, we start to structure organisations.
So, I'm not saying that anybody's doing something that is completely illogical. It's just if we take a step back and we say, in this modern world, we're going to have to collaborate now more than ever. And we have to collaborate outside of these silos that we're more evolved to work in. So, to the extent that we do think about groups, we think about them in really tribal ways where it's like, "Oh, people who are part of my tribe, I really like them and I understand them and they're good". But people who are outside of that, we tend to stereotype or bias against them. We tend to view them as a more homogenous group, where we don't individuate people and understand their differences quite as well. And that goes over into organisational life, where when we're organising these functional silos, it's harder to collaborate across them. And this applies to all kinds of things where we need to get across these parts of our group psychology, and we struggle to do it because we don't pay attention to it until these problems emerge. We don't invest in the kind of prevention and structuring of the group that's going to make it less likely that these problems emerge. And then we spend all our time putting out fires.
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Leaders often try and coach away things like poor communications, free riding or messy conflict. Now, let's say you were given a CHRO's job, and again, I know all organisations aren't the same, so we have to take that as well, but if HR could only set three conditions up front so these problems barely appear, what are they and why?
[0:15:43] Colin Fisher: So, if I could wave the magic wand and create better structured groups in three ways, the first one, this is actually an easier question than you might think, because the most common problem is that groups are too big. And the research suggests that the ideal size where the people involved feel like the group's not too big and it's not too small, and if you kind of measure where everyone said the group was too big and everyone said it was too small and you see where those lines cross, they cross at 4.5 people. So, we feel like we can connect with everyone in the room when we're at that kind of 4 to 5 range. And when we look at research on group performance, it kind of extends out to anywhere from 3 to 7 people, depending on what kind of work you're doing. But there's just a limit when you get 10, 15, 20 people all trying to collaborate synchronously, like everyone's in the room trying to make a decision or we're trying to brainstorm or do something like that. You're doomed. If you've invited 20 people to a meeting like that, there's just no way.
So, the first thing would be when you're doing real work, that you do it in these units of 3 to 7 people, ideally 4 or 5, and so that that's number one. Number two is that we're going to do whole tasks. So, in other words, when we give a group a task, we're going to have them go from a real beginning point, so they get to contribute actual ideas, they have input into what even the final conception of the problem or the goal looks like, all the way to seeing it have impact on the client. And the client could be internal in the organisation, right, it doesn't have to be an external client. And I say that because so many teams, like if you're on a committee and your challenge is to write a report and put it up to your Executive Vice President, but then you file this report and you don't know what happens, right, you don't you don't know the outcome, you don't know how it affected the business, you don't know how it affected the world or the client, those kinds of tasks are inherently demotivating. And if you want to say, "Oh, we've got free riding, we've got people who aren't coordinating very well, they're not communicating as much as you can", well, if you give them work that they don't understand why it's important, if they don't understand what they have uniquely to contribute to it because they can't see its impact, then it's no wonder that you get free riding.
Then, I'm going to actually skip ahead to something we haven't talked as much about, which is psychological safety. And psychological safety is this climate in a group that it's okay to take interpersonal risks. So, it's okay to experiment, make mistakes, to ask questions, to challenge the status quo and offer up ideas. And this is important, because even if we get everything else right that we've talked about, we get the right group of people, they've got the right skills, they have the right perspectives, they've got the right information, but if they're afraid to share that, it doesn't do any good. And leaders are quite powerful in shaping the climate of psychological safety. And that's because in our brains, we have this unfortunate quirk that was good for keeping us safe when we were hunting and gathering and so forth, which is that bad is stronger than good in our psychology. And so, when something negative happens, we remember that about five times more strongly and more vividly.
[0:19:51] David Green: If you're a leader building a team, and you're forming a team together, you mentioned the number, but who should you think about who's on the team? And obviously, you talked about a 3 to 7 number. How do you decide how to put that team composition together?
[0:20:09] Colin Fisher: Primary thing is still the knowledge and skills necessary for the task and getting different perspectives. And as you said, of course, if everyone knows the same thing, is good at the same thing, the chances that that team can be more than the sum of its parts are much less. The same way, a band of all drummers can be interesting for a little while, but that's not usually what we're looking for. We want people who play different instruments to come together and make music together. And that's the same in organisations, that we're going to get the best results if we have these different skills, these different perspectives on things. So, first and foremost, a good mix of different knowledge, skills, perspectives.
But the kind of fascinating thing that we've seen from research by Anita Woolley and her colleagues on collective intelligence, is looking at which traits do we want in our team members? And although there's a lot of folk wisdom about, you know, you want to mix introverts and extroverts or even some people who are out there still using the Myers-Briggs type inventory, which you should absolutely not do because there's no scientific basis for that, but Anita and her colleagues, they measured every personality trait that they could find. So, big five, a whole bunch of other traits. They also measured actual intelligence. And surprisingly, none of those things predicted the team performance, and collective intelligence is this kind of team performance across a variety of different kinds of tasks.
The only thing that they measured that was predictive was something called social sensitivity. And social sensitivity is our ability to intuit the emotions of others without being told. And it's assessed using this kind of fun test called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, where you're given these pictures just of somebody's eyes, and you have to guess what emotion that person was feeling just from a black and white picture of their eyes. And the average level of social sensitivity on a team does predict performance across tasks. And when you think about it, that makes sense, because that's what's allowing us to kind of adjust on the fly. It's reducing the communication load on the team, where if somebody is excited, I can reinforce what they're doing; if somebody is struggling, I can offer help and not rely on questions and things like that.
Now, the thing I always get a little nervous about when I tell especially HR professionals about this finding is that everybody's going to go out and now add the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test to their battery of assessments and compose teams that way. And again, I want to underscore that should be secondary to knowledge, skills, and perspectives, because the amount of variance explained by those two things, knowledge, skills, and perspectives is way more important. So, you can be as socially sensitive as you want, but if you don't know what you need, if you don't have the expertise to do the task, that's not going to make that much difference. And the second thing is, there's also easy ways to compensate if you, as an individual, are not that socially sensitive. And the secret superpower, if you don't know what other people are thinking and feeling, then you ask. And that asking questions is the super-compensator for social sensitivity, and it has almost as many benefits. If you ask questions, you're also setting these norms that maybe they're creating more psychological safety. Maybe you're surfacing information and perspectives of others in the team that otherwise wouldn't come up.
So, if you feel like, "Oh, gosh, I'm not socially sensitive. Now I'm not going to be seen as a good team member", don't worry, there's an easy way to fix that, and that's by asking more questions.
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Organisations grow, they sometimes scale back or change their mission. It has been known. I can imagine the dynamics and conditions between teams must also change as well. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, and what the research has found around those kind of changing dynamics as well.
[0:25:52] Colin Fisher: I mean, I think we have to be prepared for teams to change. And a lot of this investment in the structure of a team is setting it up to be adaptable and resilient. And I mean, I think the most important factor in that is often psychological safety. So, if we can speak up, if we're regularly checking and saying, "All right, how has the environment changed? What are we doing that used to work that's not working anymore?" We're actually pretty good, when we reflect and when we talk about these things, at coming up with ways to cope with that. But it's in the teams that don't have those conversations, either they're just go, go, go, focused on performance so much that there's no time and space for this reflection, or that there's not this sense of psychological safety, where people feel like they can't experiment, they can't try something new. And of course, if you can't try something new, you're not going to learn to do anything new.
So, most of the kind of stuff that we would prescribe for keeping up with a changing world, a changing environment, a changing mission, are the same things we would do for learning anything. But on top of that, I would also put in a plug for research by MIT professor, Deborah Ancona, and Henrik Bresman, who's now out at INSEAD, in that they did a lot of work on making sure that your team doesn't get too insular. I've put a lot of plugs for these stable, bounded teams that are really looking kind of inward over time. But it's equally important that we have people with connections to others in the organisation, outside the organisation, people who are talking to people next level up, people who are talking to customers to people next level down, and that we have a team with a variety of different kinds of connections to these external sources. And they call these sort of boundary-spanning individuals or, externally-facing teams or X teams. And that that is also essential to keeping up with the changing world. Because if we're not looking outside our boundaries, we're not going to know if we should be changing our mission, if stuff's not working.
So, making sure that we have almost, it doesn't have to be an official role, but we do have to make sure that this is getting done, that there's somebody whose job it is to check with the key external stakeholders of the team, the person who's going to go out and learn from some other team and some other part of the organisation, or even another organisation, and make sure that we're taking the lessons from what they're doing.
[0:28:51] David Green: Yeah, I think in network analytics, they talk about those people in bridging connections between different teams and organisations, which leads on nicely, I think, to the next question, Colin. I wonder if network analytics might feature as part of this answer. We've talked about if you're a CHRO or HR professional or an OD professional, perhaps, that when you're designing groups and teams, think about the number, make the work interesting and think about, particularly with the leaders, think about how you can foster and develop psychological safety. But if you're a CHRO or a head of people analytics and you want to track and measure team effectiveness, what would be your recommendations around that?
[0:29:34] Colin Fisher: Yeah, measuring team effectiveness, so I think this research is really interesting and it's really underappreciated. I'm first going to tell you what not to do.
[0:29:43] David Green: Okay, good.
[0:29:47] Colin Fisher: So, there was a great study where the researchers use kind of state-of-the-art measures of team cohesion, communication quality, decision-making quality, all these things kind of about the climate and internal state of the team. But then they did something interesting in the experiment. They had a task where you couldn't really tell how you had done on the task, but it was like a financial estimation and there was a right answer and you didn't know how close you were. And they randomly told some teams that they had done really well and some teams that they had done really poorly. And what do you think happened to all these metrics of communication and cohesion and all these things? Well, they followed performance. So, when you were told you did really well, everyone said, "Oh, yeah, we communicated great, we had great cohesion, we really enjoyed being a part of this team". And when they were told they did poorly, even though this was just random, they said, "Oh, no, we had terrible communication, bad cohesion, we didn't get along at all".
So, the danger here is when you try and use these kinds of more detailed measures of group dynamics, and the team has a sense of how it's already performing, which usually teams do, usually we know as we're doing the work, what you end up picking up on is the team's perception of their performance, rather than the actual processed data that you want. Now, the exception to that does tend to be psychological safety, and that's why when Google was trying to do this work, they end up sort of rediscovering what Amy Edmondson had discovered 30 years ago, which is that this is one of the most reliable measures of the kind of in-process team that's going to actually be forward-looking and tell us how the team is going to do in the future, especially because it's tapping something that's really about learning. So, if you're going to measure these kind of in-process things, a global measure that says, "Hey, how happy are you with your participation in this team", and then psychological safety stuff that usually taps into whether they feel like they're able to contribute individually, and their own just kind of estimate of performance, that's going to correlate so highly with all these other kinds of measures of cohesion and communication and everything else that in my view, it's usually not worth measuring other stuff.
Now, if you're talking about measuring the performance of the team after the fact, the classic definition of team effectiveness is both, do the stakeholders or the clients of this team's work think it did good work? And so, ideally you would want whoever is consuming that work to assess how the team did. And then, is this team a net positive in the life of its members? Can this team work together again effectively, or have we burned out our relationships as a consequence of working together? And again, general measures of satisfaction do correlate pretty highly with other kinds of measures of satisfaction. So, just asking people, "How satisfied were you with your membership in this team?" is going to get you 0.6, 0.7 of the correlations with any other more subtle measure that you might do. But I think just assessing people's satisfaction is generally about all you can do.
So, usually I advocate pretty simple measures of team effectiveness. I think if you have external metrics, especially of performance, that tends to be good because otherwise, you tend to get these big halo effects around your measures of effectiveness and satisfaction. But by and large in organisations, most people like to be on teams that perform well. And so, it's assuming again, people are being given important work that they care about. It's rare to find a team that's really, really satisfied and is seen as doing really bad work by their clients, but it's not unheard of, right? There are definitely times that there's a disconnect between those two things. Beyond that, I think investing in trying to measure team performance with conventional methods is probably not the best use of your time. But if you do have really subtle analytics, the other thing I think that's really helpful is participation balance.
So, there was great work, it was a while back. It was in Sandy Pentland's lab at MIT in the Media Lab. And Joan DiMicco, that's her name. So, she did this work where it was an intervention into meetings. And all she did was give these bubbles that showed how much somebody was talking in the meeting. And as you talked, your bubble would grow and other people's bubbles would shrink. So, showing the real-time balance of participation. And as you might expect, groups with more balanced participation tend to perform better, but that people self-regulate. If all you have is this display that's saying, "Hey, you're dominating discussion right now", you'll tend to pipe down a little bit. And if you have a bubble that says, "Oh, I'm not contributing much", that will lead you to contribute more. So, if I were adding something a little more subtle to the mix, it would probably be something that's just balance of participation. I wouldn't base anything on it, I would just make the data available to the team and say, "Hey, this is your balance of communication and participation right now. Here's who's communicating the most, here's who's communicating the least. Do with this what you want". And my read on this research is that teams do productive things with that data, that they self-regulate and they change their behaviour in response.
[0:36:22] David Green: So, in terms of the measurements, it sounds like if you've got business performance data that you can use, great, because as you said, really ineffective teams probably aren't going to achieve high performance, and they're probably going to know that they're ineffective as well. Mix of surveys, I guess, understanding the team, the way they work together, the stakeholders that they're servicing, particularly if they're internal stakeholders, the quality of the work. Have you seen, and I know Sandy Pentland's lab at MIT, I think they did quite a lot of network analytics as well in terms of understanding, I don't know, influencers within teams, who connects teams or groups to other groups within the organisation that they need to work with, and stuff like that; have you seen good examples of that work as well, helping understand the team effectiveness piece as well?
[0:37:15] Colin Fisher: Yeah, I mean I think from a network perspective, the thing that I use the most is shared leadership. So, to sort of say, if you ask everyone, "Who's providing leadership for this team?", and then you can create these network measures, like the density of leadership ties where more of us feel like we're providing leadership to others. Teams that share leadership more do tend to perform better, and teams that are more centralised or more hierarchical in their informal leadership structure tend to perform a little bit worse. So, that is something to watch out for. Of course, the classic research on networks, which is kind of what you were alluding to earlier with these kind of bridging ties or brokers, as Ron Burt calls it, that's always going to be helpful. And that's inherently a powerful network position. And that's very similar to this idea about boundary-spanners that we were talking about earlier, where if you find people in your group who are connected to other groups that no one else is connected to, so you're the only way to get information perspective from that, that's always going to be a powerful position, regardless of if we're talking about the group level or we're talking more about the organisation. And so, having brokers is always good.
But the problem with sort of reporting this as an organisational level is when you start saying, "Oh, it's really good if you're a broker", then other people want to make that same connection. And then, they're not a broker anymore by the same metric, because it's you're only a broker if you're one of the only ties to that group. So, if other people start making that same tie, you have this structural hole, as they call them in network parlance. So, I think that's useful for understanding who's likely to be powerful, who's likely to be influential, where new ideas are likely to come from. It's not quite as helpful from a systematic perspective over time, because as an organisation, you want to have brokers connected to other people in the industry outside your organisation. But theoretically, you don't want to have a ton of structural holes in your organisation. You don't want to have a whole bunch of unconnected groups that require brokers to get across. So, I think the fact if you have a whole bunch of them and you're like, "Oh, let's put that person on every team", that's going to end up putting a lot of a lot of weight on that one person.
So, I think again, it kind of depends relative to who and what you're going to do with that data. Whereas I think when you're just looking inside the team, you sort of find some easier stuff that's a little more actionable.
[0:40:25] David Green: Yeah, it's interesting what you said about if you try and stretch those brokers too far, I think Rob Cross's research suggests that those are people most likely to suffer from burnout, which clearly isn't good. Colin, we've got three areas I want to talk about as we come towards the end. One is around AI. We've done pretty well, not to mention it so far, actually. Then we're going to look about maybe some practical steps for companies that maybe want to do something in a short period of time, we'll call it 90 days. And then, we've got the question of the series as well. So, obviously, there's more AI tools becoming integral parts of working teams now. How are you finding that that is changing team dynamics, if it is, as we've known in the past?
[0:41:14] Colin Fisher: So, I think that what I've seen with AI tools within teams is right now, it's sort of like any new technology, that some people know how to use pretty well and some people don't. And so, it's valuable for almost any team to have at least somebody who really knows what tools can do, how to use them, which tool is best for what. But in terms of using them at the team level, I think that part, I don't think has changed team dynamics any more than saying like, "Hey, there's a new software programme that makes it faster to do something that we used to have to do", and to have somebody who knows how to do that. So, from that perspective, in the book, I don't talk explicitly about AI. But the process of a team learning a new technology, especially one that changes their communication patterns or changes how they're going to coordinate, that's always just going to be a learning process. And even if we tried to say like, "Here's a set of rules today", how long is that set of rules going to last you with a technology that's changing so fast?
So, I think the best advice is really to invest in psychological safety, embrace this kind of culture of experimentation, where you try something, you reflect on how it went, and you try to then improve on what you did last time; but at a more organisational level, that we're sharing information between teams that are doing this. And I think this is where we're probably under-investing right now, where we have some pockets of real deep expertise. We have some individuals and we have some teams that are doing some really cool stuff with this, and the key then is to find them and to lift them up and for other people to be able to learn from what they're doing, and that we're sharing this information across. And this comes back to this idea of these boundary-spanners or these brokers who are going to help spread information through the organisation.
[0:43:32] David Green: Those looking maybe to change the dynamics of their team to deliver better outcomes in the next, say, 90 days, where should they start?
[0:43:41] Colin Fisher: So, I would just start with an audit of the structure of your teams and the psychological safety. And the one thing we did not talk about was the kind of availability of help and expert coaching for these teams. And so, there are six things I talk about in the book, which again, I think you can kind of ask teams to self-assess and get a reasonably idea about how things are going, you know, "Do we all feel like we have a clear, important goal? Do we have these norms that are promoting good communication and coordination? Do we have psychological safety?" And there's a lot of very simple survey instruments. If I'm in a hurry, I often just ask people to rate literally what it says on the book on a 1-6, or 1-7 scale. So, I like 6 a little better because there's no midpoint there, and then you've kind of forced people to choose if it's trending good or trending bad.
I would put out a guide to launching teams effectively, because again, what's really important to do in that first meeting? And I think so many people, we get overwhelmed by the task itself, by the fact we've got a new team, new task, and we don't take a moment to think about, "All right, these are the things I need to get done in that first meeting". And I would make everybody schedule at least one reflection meeting during the task. And I recommend people do that at the midpoint between when you launch and when your deadline is, say, "Halfway through, we're going to reassess all these things. We're going to make sure that the goal is still the goal that we want to be working towards; we're going to reassess our norms; we're going to have a real deep talk focused on group process and group dynamics". And then, if you don't have debriefs and are really capturing the learning from each team doing their tasks, I would make sure that you have kind of a formal tool that you're capturing this. And I think the problem you've kind of maybe detected already, I think that a lot of tools that we use in HR and in research get a little too baroque and complex for our own good, and then people don't use them.
The biggest problem is, if people start to find that they don't understand the usefulness of the tool and they can't put the information they want in, I think it's difficult. So, even if it's just saying, "All right, have a debrief meeting, talk about what went well and what went poorly. And summarise that and send that to us". Even if you have AI summarise that, it's better than what a lot of people are doing. So, I think just making sure you have something where you're capturing learning and saying like, "Here's something that we did that we're really proud of. And if some other team wants to ask us about how we did it, please have them do that. And here's something we tried that really didn't work, and nobody else in the organisation should try that, and we want to make sure that we stop doing this". And if all we did was that, boy, I think most organisations would see a lot of improvement really fast, if all they were doing was kind of mandating these reflections and learning, capturing them and making sure that everybody knew about them.
[0:47:11] David Green: Yeah. Because if you know the problem or what's working well, then you can address it or carry on, I guess, depending on what that is. Colin, before we get to the question of the series, what's one team meeting norm you wish every team tried for a week?
[0:47:27] Colin Fisher: The first one would be, cancel your meetings! So, I mean in the UK, I think the sort of ethos of 'meeting because that's what we're supposed to do' is quite strong. But it's strong in a lot of organisations. So, I actually did put together a meeting guide that's kind of in the bonus materials for early readers and stuff. But the first piece of advice on meetings is really ask yourself, do you need this meeting? And cancel it if you can.
[0:48:03] David Green: And, "Do we really need to invite 20 people to it?"
[0:48:06] Colin Fisher: Yeah, and don't, yeah, don't invite 20 people. But in terms of the actual running of the meeting, I think meetings do run better when you have facilitators who state what the purpose of the meeting is, have an agenda, and I think the best meetings are in organisations where they have the norms, again, kind of before the meeting. So, one is that we have an agenda. If we've got information that we just need to share, we write it down or at worst, we record an audio note or a video, and we send it everybody before the meeting. But the norm is that everybody does the prep. And if everybody does the prep for meetings, then we have better meetings. And then, we can really focus on doing the stuff that we have to be in the same room to do. And in today's world, that's not information-sharing. Information-sharing is not something we need to be in the same room to do at all. We can do it asynchronously. So, we should do as much of that when we're not in the same room, and save when we're in the same room for really important discussions that require us to have deep discussions to challenge each other to learn what one another knows.
So, if you have a meeting where one person's up there talking for a half an hour, you're already doing it wrong, right? That's not the optimal way to be having meetings. And I think really rethinking this is going to be the one of the next revolutions in work, where organisations, and they're already out there, are like, "No, we're not doing meetings this way anymore". I think Google does some of this. I understand, I can't remember if it's -- yeah, I don't want to say the wrong company, but I know there's another really big company that has very, very strong norms about this and is like, "We are going to do all information-sharing asynchronously, but that means that everybody's got to come prepared when they come into the room".
[0:50:21] David Green: Question of the series. So, this is a question we're asking everyone in this series of podcasts, which is five episodes. And you might apply some of your research and work on this. It's a bigger question for Chief People Officers. How can Chief People Officers influence leaders, business leaders, to use AI to augment rather than replace talent?
[0:50:45] Colin Fisher: I mean, I think the biggest thing with using AI productively is transparency. And I think you've heard, this kind of coming out in how I'm talking about a real culture of learning is powerful for a wide variety of different kinds of learnings. And one of those is using AI productively. I think the problem right now is that we've created a situation where there's a lot of fear around AI, and that's creating a lot of shame for people in talking really honestly about how they're using it. People are afraid it's like, "Oh, some people are going to judge me if I tell you I'm using it for my emails or I'm using it for this or I'm using it for that". And so, that's creating a situation where we're all using it kind of surreptitiously instead of actually talking about, "Hey, what's working? What's really made the difference in my productivity? What hasn't?" And I think, again, most of us are relatively aligned that we're not looking for AI overlords, we're not looking for AI to replace human creativity and human generativity. And therefore, just knowing what people, at every level, at all different business functions that you have, and all your different roles, what they're doing.
Unsurprisingly, I think teams are a great vehicle for this, right? Because it's not, "Oh, here's an organisation-wide survey where everybody's going to honestly tell me what they're doing with AI". I don't have a lot of faith that's going to work. But if we have these well-structured teams of four or five people, I have a lot more faith that maybe you're going to say, "Oh, yeah, here's how I'm using it. I found that really helpful". And then, if we then take those teams and say, "Hey, look, that team is doing really great. How are they doing it? Well, this is what they're doing with AI", then we're going to start to see more and more of that result. And I think that's always augmenting talent, if what we, as organisational leaders are trying to do, is to allow people to kind of recraft their jobs and recraft their role descriptions at the same time.
But if we're really married to what used to be these role descriptions and you had, whether it's a technical writer or a translator or something on the team that AI does really well, yeah, those roles are going to have to change. But, "Those roles are going to have to change", is a different question than, "Oh, let's fire all the technical writers", which I think is generally a bad solution. If you've got talented technical writers, you should find something for them to do. And if they're using AI to be more effective in some way, then you're going to have to start to morph that job description into something else. And they know better than you do, as a leader, how that change should happen. And to me, again, the barrier with this is psychological safety, communication, and that we simply don't know. The people at the top of the organisation don't know how people at the lower levels of the organisation are using AI productively or not.
[0:54:22] David Green: Colin, it's been an absolutely fascinating conversation for me. I'm sure listeners will have enjoyed it as well. Can you share how listeners can follow you, I think you have a Substack, for example, find out more about the book, as well as all the great work that you're doing in your research?
[0:54:41] Colin Fisher: Yeah, you can follow along with the newsletter and the book and everything I'm doing at colinmfisher.com, and that'll have links to the newsletter and how to buy the book and fabulous conversations like this one that I've been a part of.
[0:54:56] David Green: Great. Well, Colin, we will put that in the show notes, colinmfisher.com. I was checking it out actually earlier. Lots of great stuff to read on there. So, thank you so much for being a guest on the show. And hopefully at some point, we'll come across each other at an event or a conference as well.
[0:55:14] Colin Fisher: Absolutely. Thanks so much, David.
[0:55:17] David Green: Thank you again, Colin, for joining me today. It really was a hugely enjoyable conversation. Honestly, there were so many key takeaways. But what stood out for me most was that team effectiveness isn't just about having the perfect mix of skills or personalities, it's about the conditions you create. I'd love to hear your thoughts. What stood out for you most? You can join the discussion on LinkedIn. Just find my post about this episode and share your thoughts there. I always enjoy hearing what you, our listeners, take away from these conversations. And if you found today's conversation valuable, be sure to subscribe, rate, and share the episode with a colleague or friend. It really helps us keep bringing these kinds of thoughtful, forward-looking conversations to HR leaders, and professionals around the world. To stay connected with us at Insight222, follow us on LinkedIn, visit insight222.com, and sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter at myHRfuture.com for the latest research tools and trends shaping the future of HR and people analytics.
That's all for now. Thank you for tuning in and we'll be back next week with another episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Until then, take care and stay well.