CHAPTER ELEVEN

INSPIRING TEAMS

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

—Aristotle

Traditionally, we’ve evaluated team success based on output: Is the team producing what it’s supposed to produce? But a more modern way to think about teams is in terms of inspiration: How much potential do they have if they are motivated to produce and achieve more? Specifically, how inspiring are they? Inspiring teams collectively share possibility and invincibility to own and drive high performance. When they are inspired and inspiring, they achieve more than they ever thought possible. In the process, they make one another better, braver, and more confident.

Inspiring teams are comprised of inspiring individuals, but they are more than that. The team is its own entity, separate from the individual members, with its own identity, energy, dynamics, and norms. It has meaning and impact in and of itself, beyond each of its individual members. The team entity has influence over each of the team members in the same way a leader does.

Cliff Bogue, MD, chair of pediatrics, Yale School of Medicine, and chief medical officer, Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital, says of inspiring teams he’s seen in action: “[In the] intensive care unit when you have a very difficult life-and-death situation and everyone is in there, they’re ready to go, they’re working together. They’re very focused; there’s not a lot of extraneous chitchat. There’s all hands on deck, let’s focus, let’s all work together. Everyone [is] contributing; if we need an idea, who’s got an idea, let’s deal with this. And they’re just totally laser focused. And that’s very inspiring to see a group like that come together and pull together for the patient. And being willing to do the extra work, stay the extra hours. There’s not a lot of bickering; there’s, ‘We’re focused here on this child.’”¹

Inspiration at the team level is more complex than it is for individuals. Teams are about sharing and coordinating inspiration across individuals. The team should be inspired and inspiring itself, as an entity with its own identity, values, and purpose.

Richard Hackman’s research on teams² shows that team functioning can spiral—upward or downward—as individuals on the team react to and assimilate team experiences and results. The same is true for inspiration. You can get greater gains from positive inspiration spirals, just as you can also get a negative drag on team performance from a negative inspiration spiral where levels are low or lacking. Specific attention to the team’s inspiration level and trend is critical. If teams are not aware of or attuned to this, they miss an opportunity to both create upward spirals of inspiration and prevent downward spirals.

Everyone on the team has a responsibility to be aware of their own inspiration level as well as the team entity’s inspiration level. Building team self-awareness of inspiration levels and proactively taking steps to spark and sustain it is a responsibility they share. As Helen Russell, chief people officer at Atlassian, told us: “While a leader is key, team members need to be equally capable of inspiring one another. Leaders aren’t always there, and you need the team to pick one another up when they fall and inspire one another to higher performance. A simple example is instead of just reading an interesting article over the weekend, you’re the person that shares that article with the team because you want all boats to rise and inspire others’ learning and growth, along with your own.”³

To contribute to inspiration for the whole team, individual team members must grant power to the team entity, recognizing that, as Aristotle said, “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”⁴ Teams have to actively monitor inspiration levels and take responsibility for fueling them.

CRACKING THE CODE ON INSPIRING TEAMS

Google embarked on research to better understand teams. Specifically, its Project Aristotle dissected what makes effective teams tick. Looking at roughly 180 teams, Google researchers found that the most successful and productive ones demonstrated psychological safety—referring to teammates’ comfort and security on the team. The researchers describe: “In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.”⁵ Two related concepts to psychological safety, namely social sensitivity and equal talk-time during meetings, emerged in another study by scientists from Carnegie Mellon⁶ as critical aspects of high-functioning teams. Social sensitivity is the intuitive ability to sense how others are feeling, often based on nonverbal cues; equality of talk time during meetings means that every voice is heard—people feel confident using their voice on the team. On the best teams, team members sensed what others on the team needed emotionally and restrained themselves from dominating discussions. Their findings align with leading academic researchers of teams, including Amy Edmondson at Harvard ⁷ and Jane Dutton at the University of Michigan.⁸ A team that focuses only on production and loses sight of human connections, specifically the sense of safety and the importance of every member’s voice, will inevitably suffer. They may achieve short-term results, but they do not build stronger capability in the process.

An example of social sensitivity comes from Julia Balfour’s organization. Balfour’s social sensitivity is based on love, which shows up in a number of ways, including their original Valentine’s Day tradition.⁹ She describes it as follows: “Three years ago we devised a plan for Valentine’s Day… I had noticed that no matter your significant other situation, the office energy always seemed sad or tense. So I decided that every Valentine’s Day I’d bring in a dozen roses for everyone on my team, and then the team (because they are wonderful) decided they’d all bring in a special dish to share with one another… and Lovesgiving was founded. Today, we have too many treats to count—tacos, pasta, homemade bread, chocolate-covered strawberries or bananas, and the list goes on and on. We may all need a nap after that, but it’s all worth it because love makes the day great. Whatever your situation is today, throw a party and celebrate!”¹⁰

Inspiring leaders ensure all voices are heard in inspiring commitment. Steve Squinto, cofounder of Alexion, built teams where, as he described to us, “everybody leaves their ego at the door. This is not about ego, this is about solving problems and every voice counts. This is how the toughest problems will be solved.” In Squinto’s case, solidarity and social sensitivity were critical to his team’s capabilities. He explained that his team, “data-driven guys,” believed that “if you can understand the information, there is generally a solution around it. When there isn’t a solution, it’s because you haven’t looked hard enough at every angle.” So when things were really stressful, and people were losing hope, Squinto would physically gather his team in the conference room to pore through information and talk out ideas and concepts together. He recounted, while laughing, that, without fail, there would be a crisis that generally occurred when he was on a two-week vacation in Nantucket. The key to the team’s success was Squinto’s ability to help his team separate their personal identities from their ideas so that they could truly leave their egos at the door and work collaboratively, in solidarity and above individual positions and needs, to find a solution.¹¹

“My team gets inspired in several ways, and I think some of it comes from me. It’s my job to inspire them; I encourage them to be the best versions of themselves as a whole people. I’m interested in what they did this weekend, what interests them, what they care most about. Somebody’s planning a wedding—how’s the planning going? Those things all matter… I really try to make genuine relationships with each person and always foster that relationship… I always try to have the appropriate pulse or connection level with each person in terms of frequency and depth. Not because I need something from them right now, but because it’s the right thing to do.”

—Brian Douglas, Chief Operating Officer, Graham Capital

When there is safety on the team, with social sensitivity and value for every voice, sometimes the leader’s role is to step back a bit and let the team perform. Shea Gregg, MD, a trauma doctor who creates high-functioning operating room teams, told us, “I know the team is highly functional, productive, and engaged when I am not saying a word and our meetings are collaborative.” Through open discussion, trust building, and compassion, he helps his team develop solutions that no one would have come up with on their own. “You open a discussion with a question,” he says, “and they lead the conversation. Then you know you’re successful. Then you throw out another question, and they go.” He explains that on “the most successful teams, the leader says the least.”¹²

Yes, a leader needs to be present, he says, and team inspiration can be sparked by the leader, but then it’s the team and their questions and probing dialogue among themselves that fuels the inspiring discussion and results in inspiring solutions.

SPARKING INSPIRATION ON TEAMS

Inspiration on teams starts with the engines, which function both at individual and team entity levels. To find the right engines for the team, you first need to know the team members and what inspires each of them. If your team members find inspiration in “vulnerability and transparency,” a meeting in which you share the truth about strained finances may generate helpful discussions about how to do things differently that could boost the business’s bottom line. If shared experience is important and sparks inspiration, you could encourage more collaborative work or conduct an off-site meeting and keep a pulse on how much members are working remotely.

All the engines—sparked by you, sparked by others, and sparked by situations—work for teams, in general (see the Work It at the end of this chapter for ideas on each of the engines to apply at a team level). However, some engines are especially important to build team inspiration. These include

• Using your strengths. Identify and acknowledge one another’s strengths regularly and the strengths of the team as a collective.

• Connecting to and voicing your values and purpose. Clarify the purpose of the team and align it to the higher purpose of the organization and each individual’s role in it.

• Belonging. Make sure each team member feels a connection to the group, understanding his or her role and opportunities for contribution.

• Sharing group mission. Teams are on missions every day to accomplish goals: ensure that the missions are shared ones, cultivating an esprit de corps to achieve them together.

• Being vulnerable and transparent. Cultivate a team culture of trust through social sensitivity and encouraging one another to share openly about their goals, progress and achievements, obstacles and struggles.

• Sharing experiences. Share experiences together, especially inspiring ones, whether it’s team development, travel, meals, volunteer work, important project milestone celebrations, and so on; build a collective memory and connection to one another.

• Seeking out environments that move us. Finally, we have found in our own company and with many of our clients that many people are sensitive and responsive to their environment. While people’s preferences for work environment and what constitutes an inspiring work space differ across individuals and teams, we know that being in emotionally moving environments can make a difference. For some, this is a more open working space, while for others this has to do with color, art, windows, and exposure to nature. Be willing to try things out, assess impact, and refine.

The responsibility for sparking inspiration on a team does not rest with the leader alone. Team members focused on sparking inspiration in their own work can and should think about ways to bring these practices and ideas to their teams. Just like at the individual level, teams need to be attuned to their collective emotional vibe. All team members should take part in monitoring the inspiration level of the team and sparking new inspiration when needed—or resparking and combining engines, one of the key ways to sustain inspiration over time (Chapter 6). As team members, individuals are attending to themselves and to the team as an entity.

SUSTAINING INSPIRATION ON TEAMS

RESPARK THE ENGINES

Resparking and combining engines is always a source of sustaining inspiration. On teams, there is often an opportunity to pack extra punch by organizing an event or experience that taps into multiple engines at once. We do this at InspireCorps by designing live team events and retreats that intentionally activate many different engines at once. As our team has multiple ties to the Cincinnati and Kentucky areas, one year, our team combined our quarterly live meeting with a trip to the 142nd Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs racetrack. We chose this timing and venue intentionally as we knew that Churchill Downs, as an inspiring event and place in and of itself, would activate many different engines of inspiration for our team, including

• Activating body movement and presence. The hats, the hats, the hats! Presence at the Derby is all about the hat you sport. The more elaborate the better. Making a stunning fashion statement was a way to make yourself seen and admired. That sparked inspiration on our team, especially for Jen who specializes in presence.

• Seeking environments that move us. The longest continuously running sports event in the United States is run at the beautiful and historic Churchill Downs racetrack, where over two hundred thousand people descend from all across the world. The crowds, the sounds, the stunning celebration of southern culture and traditions that date back to 1875 are emotionally moving.¹³

• Witnessing excellence. Known as “the most exciting two minutes in sports,”¹⁴ America’s great race draws the most elite horses and jockeys. The relatively young three-year-old horses have only one chance to run this race, so every team is giving their all to win. It’s a breathtaking performance.

• Values and purpose. Our company values include “enjoy the ride,” “be bold,” and “relationships first.” We activated all of these by flying our whole team out for the Derby. We had great fun; we were bold in our wardrobe. We advanced our relationships on the team both at the event, through placing bets and exploring the amazing Churchill Downs, and in the hour-plus drives in a big van to and from.

• Sharing experiences with large groups of people. Attending the Derby had been a collective dream of ours since all three founding partners have familial and professional roots in the Bluegrass state and we even incorporated our company there. We dreamed of attending this important cultural event as a part of our Kentucky-based company experience.

Not only did this event spark inspiration for us at the time, reflecting back on it revs these engines again and again. For example, we created a video that logged our experience and watching it brings us back there, reminding us of this shared experience that moved all of us. To the extent that teams can find ways to tap into engines of great meaning to them, the payoff comes in newly sparked inspiration both at the time and, sometimes, going forward. Efforts like these to respark engines are able to inform your team of which engines are most potent. Over time, each team learns its own, specific set of go-to engines for the greatest sparks of inspiration, which then makes sustaining them over time ever more easier.

DIRECT INSPIRATION TO POSITIVE OUTCOMES

Another powerful way to sustain inspiration is to direct it toward performance and positive outcomes. When team members are collectively focused toward specific goals, they can better sustain their inspiration.

The question then becomes: How best to direct inspiration on teams toward desired positive outcomes? An illustration comes from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, known best because they are conductorless.¹⁵ The group has been the subject of a Harvard Business School case study, featured in articles ranging from The Economist to the New York Times and Fast Company,¹⁶ among many others, and dissected by business school professors as a model of great teamwork. Rather than having a conductor, Orpheus uses a shared leadership model with collaborative decision-making and self-governance to provide the best possible performances for their domestic and international audiences attending their seventy annual concerts.

“We were really committed to wanting to serve this rather extraordinary collection of outstandingly brilliant and gifted students… There was a shared acknowledgment of the thing that most mattered. And so, with that, in full view of everyone’s sight, everyone could train their sight to that thing and then bring not only the fullness of their gifts, but of their time, their energy, their effort to just serving these extraordinary students.”

—Nicholas Lewis, Associate Dean of Student and Academic Affairs, Curtis Institute of Music

As you read previously, there are four key categories of behaviors that, when you take action within and across them, drive positive outcomes. The same holds true for teams, as we will show with Orpheus in the examples below. Teams can best drive positive outcomes when they collectively direct sparks of inspiration to behaviors across the four categories:

1. When using inspiration to drive to results, team goals and roles are clear and agreed upon and members are held accountable to them. Roles reflect team member strengths and aspirations. All team members are focused on achievement and task completion. At Orpheus, being conductorless doesn’t mean that no one is in charge. Their drive to achieve results is evident in the roles they assume and share: each musician has the opportunity to step into a leadership role at various times during the year, whether it’s to lead a rehearsal or to direct a performance or to serve as one of three performers on the board of trustees. The group selects the leader based on that member’s interests, strengths, and level of expertise.

2. For teams, intentional alignment involves adopting practices that support coordination, high-integrity commitments, and communication and information sharing. The team is also self-regulating, including declining opportunities or pursuits that don’t align to the larger vision and goals. Orpheus maintains alignment to its mission through clearly defined roles, where members understand and accept their personal responsibility for helping the group achieve the best sound possible. There is no conductor up front offering feedback and guidance regarding how to improve; it’s up to each musician to identify how he or she can improve and help enhance and increase the orchestra’s results. All the members are passionate about refining their skills and evolving and improving collectively. Musicians are encouraged to speak freely about their frustrations with themselves and one another to avoid pent-up emotions that could cloud the performances.

3. When teams are focusing on building connection and trust, members ask for and offer help regularly. They show concern for one another as whole people and are willing to sacrifice for others if needed, and they celebrate one another’s differences. Teams high in connection and trust share love and enjoy play, thereby advancing their collaborative abilities. Orpheus members advocate for themselves and one another, requiring consensus regarding decisions before making changes or trying new approaches. The musicians decide together on who will lead them in performing a particular piece, which piece they will learn, and which guest musicians may be invited to perform with them. Using collective listening, they take individual responsibility for matching their own level of play to everyone else’s, for a more harmonious sound that enhances the overall effect. But they are also responsible for helping one another improve their respective performances, offering feedback to any musician using a two-way communication system admired by many orchestras and teams.

4. Teams that advance vision and innovation embrace change in the name of progress or growth, always looking for a better way or a greater opportunity. They have an impatience with the status quo and are always working to stay ahead of the curve. Visionary and innovative teams understand that experimentation is an essential part of risk management. At Orpheus, the orchestra’s structure of going conductorless is an example of innovation. The innovation has caught on, so much so that companies began asking for coaching from the group, and so the Orpheus Process was trademarked and marketed to organizations seeking leadership training. Organizations ranging from IBM, Kraft Foods, Goldman Sachs, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Morgan Stanley have turned to Orpheus for consulting.¹⁷

For teams, activating the four categories of behavior means coordinating across the team to make sure all four are utilized. Here again this involves team members being both self-aware and attending to team-level activity. Operating within the four key areas brings most teams to successful outcomes, which naturally sustains inspiration. Doing great work together and enjoying the successes that ensue keeps the flame of inspiration burning bright.

GIVE YOUR TEAM’S INSPIRATION A BOOST: ACCOUNTABILITY, SOCIAL SUPPORT, POSITIVE RITUALS

Accountability, social support, and positive rituals sustain inspiration on teams just like they do for individuals. In fact, teams offer more opportunities for accountability, support, and rituals as they are comprised of multiple people, each bringing his or her own desire for the team to succeed and history of best practices.

A great example of using accountability to boost and sustain team members’ inspiration comes from Bill Jennings, president and CEO of Reading (Pennsylvania) Hospital. Jennings said in a town hall meeting at Bridgeport Hospital where he was CEO prior to Reading, in response to a question about accountability or lack thereof, that he would work with people, give people resources, give them a try, but he added, “in the end if somebody’s not able to succeed with our vision [then] we would help them find success elsewhere. That day, it became the tagline for Bridgeport Hospital: ‘If you’re not accountable, we’ll help you find success elsewhere.’”¹⁸

He showed us how this worked in a story about his ER department: “Our ER was broken. So I started paying attention to it. I would swing by every morning and ask the charge nurse or one of the doctors on duty to show me this board in the control room [a real-time video monitor of ER traffic]. It started with me bringing my attention to the work happening on the ground and getting curious. I’d walk over and ask, ‘What’s going on with Ms. [Smith]? Why has she been here for eighteen hours?’ I’m not a doctor, so I can’t diagnose these things, but I can ask silly questions like that, and I started doing it every morning. This practice of being in the work with them every morning was the start. Then I got the idea to have a monitor in my office… This allowed me to plug in, every morning, to what was happening there. I was not meddling, just being interested and asking questions.”¹⁹

Putting the video monitor that showed ER turnaround times in his office and watching it first thing each morning allowed Jennings to ask questions and learn from his team about what he saw. It quickly became clear to him that turnaround times were a most relevant metric to indicate how well the ER was running. Then other leaders began following suit, with the chief nurse having a monitor installed in her office. Then the chief operating officer had one put up. Everyone started watching ER wait times, which caused them to improve—dramatically.²⁰

Improving ER wait times turned into a competitive advantage for the hospital, thanks to Jennings’s leadership. He didn’t diagnose the problem or dictate solutions, which could have jeopardized psychological safety. Instead, he immersed himself in their world and asked questions to understand what was going on, bringing their voices into the conversation, and worked closely with the team on the ground to help them fix the problem. Inspiring leaders help their followers feel more confident, even invincible. They help others recognize the possibilities the future has to offer. They empower their teams to achieve more, together and individually.

Along with accountability, giving and receiving social support is another way to sustain inspiration on teams. Marisa Thalberg, global chief brand officer, Taco Bell, told us in our interview with her about how her organization focuses on building strong bonds among team members so they naturally support one another.

She told us: “Laughter and having fun is really important… to have a dynamic team that feels happy and comfortable coming to work… It’s hard to sustain the energy and enthusiasm when you are in a constant state of standing in quicksand, unpredictability; it is destabilizing. We need to keep the team feeling secure and genuinely appreciated.”²¹

Similarly, positive rituals on teams are supported by a strong sense of belonging and commitment among team members. As they do for individuals, and especially for athletes, positive rituals evoke positive emotions and give us more focused energy—both of which help sustain inspiration. A famous ritual Duke’s basketball team holds dear provides an example. It started in the 1980s and is still current today. Mike Krzyzewski, their coach at the time, insisted that his players bend down and literally slap the floor when they go on defense. Krzyzewski told them slapping the floor would demonstrate their commitment to defensive intensity. It would affirm their pledge to one another. It would prove their readiness.²²

Teams are so unique that each has to find the rituals that will work best for them, but we have seen examples of rituals that range from the small and playful (like sixty-second dance parties, happy hours, or dress-down days) to the more hefty in meaning (like commencement ceremonies, promotion or retirement parties, celebrating sales triumphs, or employee-of-the-month designations). Whatever the origin or nature of positive rituals, they bring positive energy and spirit to the team, boosting esprit de corps and sustaining inspiration.

MANAGING ENERGY (PHYSICAL, COGNITIVE, AND EMOTIONAL) ON TEAMS

Just like individuals, the team entity has its own physical, cognitive, and emotional energy. When one or two members of a team start to burn out, the whole team can feel the weight of it and experience the same. Likewise, when a team successfully bounces back from a setback and cultivates learning from it, they share the benefits of their collective growth mindset. Emotions, too, are shared at the team level. High-energy, positive emotions on a team go far to sustain the team’s inspiration going forward.

As contagion on teams can exaggerate the impact of the energy, whether high or low, it is critical for team members to attend to their own and the team entity’s energy on all three of these fronts, especially if inspiration starts to wane.

We’ve also covered resets as a powerful way to manage all three kinds of energy. Resets can be practiced both individually and on teams to monitor team energy and inspiration. The same resets that exist for individuals relate to teams. Below are a few examples of how resets can be applied at the team level:

• General energy resets can take place at the start of a meeting, especially after lunch or during the wicked 3:00 p.m. slump. They can be a pick-me-up to renew energy across the team. For example, one of our clients starts meetings by having everyone share a win or something they are grateful for. This simple, quick check-in can refresh the team’s energy.

• Pivotal resets are useful when the team needs to shift its energy. Perhaps there’s been a setback or a delay that has left the team wanting verve and inspiration. Taking time to disrupt the negativity spiral can be simple and quick. For example, just taking a few moments to have everyone stand, breathe, and listen to calming music when things are heated can change up the energy to be more supportive of inspiration.

• Pregame resets help teams prepare for upcoming situations that they know will be challenging or that especially need inspiration. The haka dance one of our clients created to their favorite song applies here. They performed it before every significant team event. It got them fired up and ready to meet the challenge in front of them.

In many ways sparking and sustaining inspiration on teams mirror the same processes for individuals. But healthy teams may have an advantage: the multiple members that comprise a team offer more opportunities to recognize, monitor, and pump up their collective inspiration.

Activating Inspiration on Teams

All teams can all be inspired through the inspiration engines. Yet, each team entity will likely lean on one or two more naturally than others. Use the tool below to take stock of how these engines operate on your team. Consider suggested ways and write in some new ways that your team can tap into each of the engines more often. Then indicate the extent to which each one sparks inspiration for your team.

Next, choose a few of the engines that are most inspiring to your team and design a reset ritual based on these to renew your energy and sustain your inspiration.