What a Beatles cover band can teach us about psychological safety

I went to see a Beatles cover band on Saturday night (they were very good). I got there early as their support crew were setting up. Clearly, they had worked together for a long time as it was like watching a well-oiled machine in motion. It got me thinking about the conditions for effective teams. It was clear the team had worked together for some time, they trusted each other to deal with their area and their responsibilities, where there were problems they quickly came together a tried different options until the problem was fixed, all with a smile on their face and a focus on the shared goal of getting all equipment set up and working.
In all our engagements with teams we first spend time on establishing trust amongst team members. This appears in several ways:

Getting to know more about each other as a person – their hopes, fears, lived experiences etc.

Being able to ‘buy in’ to a shared goal (equipment set up correctly)

Being able to quickly offer options, evaluate them and reach agreement on the course of action to be taken.

Understanding the operating constraints, they are under

Teams that trust each other are better performing. Using Patrick Lencioni’s approach we find that this allows a more meaningful conversation to be had when disagreements arise, as they inevitably do. We also draw on Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety to help teams establish the guardrails of how they will operate. This allows for healthy discussion and disagreement and encourages higher performance standards since the conditions are established to tackle the issue rather than attack the person.
We have found that teams that spend time on this formation stage tend to be better set up for success. Equally we know that it is not always that neat. With the band support crew, I have no idea what their journey to high performance was, it may have been clean, or it may have been messy. However, what I saw in practice was a team that had arrived at a state of trust, psychologically safety and high performance.
We can help your teams get there, so for a no obligation discussion please get in touch!