The Unspoken Rules: How Expectations Make or Break Teams

Dr. Nate Meikle:

So as I was thinking about the best teams I've been a part of, I thought, "Well, what's one of the worst teams I've been a part of?" One of the worst teams I've ever been a part of was in 2004, I joined the BYU football team. The BYU football team had three losing seasons for the first time in 40 years, but not only were they performing poorly, a number of players had been arrested, multiple serious accusations for which people went to prison, the offense and the defense hated each other. There were rumblings that the university was considering just dropping the football program because it was such a disaster.

Well, what BYU did is they hired a great leader, Bronco Mendenhall, one of the greatest leaders I've ever known and worked with and played for. So one of the first things we did is instead of having a practice, we drove up the canyon and we built a bonfire and Bronco said, "I want you to write down all of the things that are wrong with the program." Well, as a player, this was fantastic because I didn't feel like we had a voice before. The program was a disaster. We all had a lot to say. So we spent 30 minutes, 45 minutes writing all the things that were wrong with the program. And then he had us share them and then he had us throw those into the fire and said, "We're done with that." And then he said, "Now write down what we're going to do to make it better."

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

Welcome to The Whole Brain at Work podcast, where we explore the science and the stories behind how people think, work, and lead. I'm your host, Karim Morgan Nehdi. In this episode, we're talking about one of my favorite topics, team effectiveness, or team dysfunction. We'll explore the science behind why some teams outperform others, the organizational design principles that can help set the right conditions for success, and the role of cognitive adversity in shaping those outcomes.

My guests for this episode are Paul Gustavson and Dr. Nate Meikle. Paul is a longtime friend, an author, consultant, an expert in strategy and high performance team design. His book, A Team of Leaders, was rated one of the top 30 business books of the year, and his work's been featured in Business Week, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and many others.

Nate Meikle is an assistant professor at the KU School of Business who researches social perception and its implications for organizations. And his work's been published in Harvard Business Review and lots of other prestigious journals. Nate's background, very interestingly, spans from Stanford Law School to college football, both as a player and as a sideline reporter, and he hosts the great podcast, Meikles and Dimes, which I highly recommend for real practical advice on a whole host of topics from leadership to teamwork to life.

Paul Gustavson:

Thank you very much for inviting us. This is a terrific subject and we love what you're doing.

Dr. Nate Meikle:

And any chance I have to spend time with Paul, I accept, so great to be here.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

I want to take a moment to introduce Ann Herrmann. Ann is Herrmann's chairwoman and chief thought leader, and she spent decades helping executive teams and the boards and organizations that they're a part of apply whole brain thinking to solve some of their most complex challenges. Around here, we like to say that she's our executive whisperer.

Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:

Thanks, Karim. I am so excited to be here.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

Paul, what are some of those effective teams that you've been a part of? What key patterns did you observe that made them stand out from your run-of-the-mill average team?

Paul Gustavson:

It's a great question. I'm influenced heavily by my mentor, Bill Dyer, who was known as the father of team building, and I was his teaching and research assistant. One of the things that he taught was he said that frustration is almost always a result of a violation of expectations. And most violated expectations are implicit, meaning, "I keep it inside myself rather than explicit."

So really great teams make sure that they are constantly talking about expectations. "What do I need from you? What do you need from me? How are we going to work together?"

So that clarity of expectations because the frustration just drains energy. But if you've got this energy, and the principle is people bring so much energy into the work setting, right? And that energy can either go in a positive or negative direction.

So clarity of expectations. So those expectations could be a sense of purpose. Teams that I've worked with that have a clear purpose in terms of why they're doing that, that they understand what the objective is that they're trying to produce. They're clear about their work processes and their roles and how they do that, and they have an opportunity to participate in decisions that affect them. So I think that those are things that are really important.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

I guess I'm curious, Nate, from your perspective and also your research, but also your experience as a sports team member, what patterns have you observed in highly effective teams and how do those align with or maybe differ from Paul's experiences?

Dr. Nate Meikle:

So as I was thinking about the best teams I've been a part of, I thought, "Well, what's one of the worst teams I've been a part of?" And this is relevant because that's where I met Paul. One of the worst teams I've ever been a part of was in 2004, I joined the BYU football team. The BYU football team had three losing seasons for the first time in 40 years, but not only were they performing poorly, a number of players had been arrested, multiple serious accusations for which people went to prison, the offense and the defense hated each other. There were rumblings that the university was considering just dropping the football program because it was such a disaster.

Well, what BYU did is they hired a great leader, Bronco Mendenhall, one of the greatest leaders I've ever known and worked with and played for. He worked with a great organizational design consultant, Paul Gustavson, who helped implement the five-stage leadership model, among other things, but they ran the football team like any great CEO would run a great business and they were exceptionally skilled at turning that program around through things like, Bronco had a mantra: accountability, discipline, and effort. So that was foundational. The program was going to be built on accountability, discipline, effort. Great start for a football program. And then I'll just briefly mention a couple of things they did. They made use of the HBDI.

And one of the things that Paul and Bronco really excelled at was using great metaphors to capture the hearts and the minds of the players. So one of the first things we did is instead of having a practice, we drove up the canyon and we built a bonfire and Bronco said, "I want you to write down all of the things that are wrong with the program." Well, as a player, this was fantastic because I didn't feel like we had a voice before. The program was a disaster. We all had a lot to say. So we spent 30 minutes, 45 minutes writing all the things that were wrong with the program. And then he had us share them and then he had us throw those into the fire and said, "We're done with that." And then he said, "Now write down what we're going to do to make it better."

Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:

That's fascinating, Nate. We've talked a lot about what effective teams look like and to some degree, what ineffective or dysfunctional teams look like, but how do you actually define team effectiveness? Nate, from your academic perspective and also some of your practical lived experience, what does it really mean for a team to be effective? And does that definition change or evolve as a team matures?

Dr. Nate Meikle:

When I think about team effectiveness, I go to the academic definition. And when I think about teams and groups, I think of Hackman, one of the great researchers on groups and teams, and I like his definition of team effectiveness. It's the degree to which a team meets its objectives while satisfying member needs and maintaining group cohesion.

So there's a few things that are really important there. When I think about this definition, it reminds me of a colleague of mine. When I was doing my PhD, my colleague, David, was researching negotiation. And in much of the negotiation research, certainly for decades, it was focused on outcomes, meaning, who won the negotiation or how far did they win? How much value did they create?

And by adopting that premise, using that assumption that whoever got the most value is the one who won the negotiation, so much of the literature on negotiation was ignoring how people felt about negotiation, which in the real world, that's an important part of negotiation. It's not just how much you win, it's whether or not you want to negotiate with that person again, whether or not you've captured hearts and minds and you're able to actually implement the negotiation that you've come to.

So what I like about the Hackman definition is it isn't just about a team meeting its objectives, because it's easy to say team effectiveness is like, "Okay, whatever objective we have, we accomplish that, we're an effective team."

But the Hackman definition says it also matters that you satisfy member needs and that you maintain group cohesion. So I think it's shortsighted for leaders to just say, "As long as we accomplish our goal, no matter what the cost, no matter if we like each other, no matter if we've satisfied member needs, no matter if we want to work together again, as long as we accomplish a task, we've been successful."

So I really appreciate Hackman's approach of it is also about satisfying member needs, and you can go on and on about how to do that, and then also trying to maintain group cohesion so that we actually value each other and appreciate each other.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

That's fascinating, Nate. And actually, it makes me think of your research, your work on amplification publicly endorsing colleagues' ideas. How do you think this relates to the different ways that we think on teams? Does amplification work differently with a different thinking style from your own? And as a leader, how might we deliberately use amplification to ensure that all the different cognitive perspectives get heard, not just the dominant ones?

Dr. Nate Meikle:

Let me just go back a little bit on this amplification research and where this came from. Years ago, there were some female Obama staffers that felt like they weren't being listened to. They felt like they didn't have the influence and status that they should have. So they decided to start amplifying one another. Somebody would say something and Joanna would say something and Susan would say like, "Hey, Joanna, that was a really good idea. I think we should consider that."

And they started amplifying each other's ideas and they felt that enhanced their influence and status within the organization. So my colleagues and I at the University of Utah, we decided to empirically test this to see if this actually did hold consistent with the female Obama staffers' intuition. We rigorously tested it to see if it worked.

And what we found is that when you amplify other people, it does enhance their status, maybe not surprisingly, but we felt it was worth an empirical test. It can enhance their status and influence.

But the other thing that it did that surprised us or that we weren't expecting is it actually enhanced your own status as well. As an employee, when you're constantly drawing attention to the good contributions that others make and giving them credit, "Karim, that was a really good idea. I like that." And not stealing the idea for yourself, but actually giving credit to people, that really helped satisfy member needs.

To your point about HBDI thinking preferences, it can be easy for somebody in the blue quadrant to just praise the blue quadrant ideas because it feels comfortable. It's natural, right?

But I think the best leaders, again, going back to adopting the appropriate style for the situation, the best leaders are able to pull out all the different types of thinking preferences. So I really like this approach of thinking, not only as a leader, "How can I encourage all of the different people in the quadrants to share their ideas?" but, "How can I then make sure I'm amplifying and drawing attention and giving credit to each of the people who are sharing ideas that are grounded in the different quadrants?"

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

Really fascinating. Paul, your quote, which I've heard many times over the years, and honestly, every time I hear it, I think it's more profound than the last, but that observation that organizations are perfectly designed for the results that they get, I think about that a lot and especially coupled with that striking data point that I've heard you share that 70% of strategies actually never achieve their objectives, that really speaks volumes to me about effective and ineffective teams. You mentioned that failure often happens because the people implementing the strategy aren't actually bought in on the strategy itself.

It's that whole hearts and minds piece. And this, for me, raises a pretty provocative question, are we measuring the wrong things when we evaluate a team's performance? In sports, it's really easy, you can see whether you won or lost, but in the real world of work, there's so much more information and we may often focus on some of the wrong stuff.

If we understand how thinking shapes how people take in information, how they make decisions, how they communicate, should we be mapping some of that knowledge about the way that people think as deliberately, perhaps as we map out technical skills when we're putting together a team?

Paul Gustavson:

Yeah, I think that's a great question. The principle there that we think about is hearts and minds, right? The people who actually have to implement it are the ones who need to buy in. And since they all have different learning preferences, to what extent is the messaging and the involvement in a way that they can get buy-in?

So there are those that love the burning platform. They want to know, "Okay, how bad is this or how good could it be?" They want to know where we're going. Is there a metaphor or analogy that would say we're moving from the horse and buggy to the Tesla S, or do they know the steps? And have we done an adequate amount of time around buy-in?

I remember one of my early projects, which was an amazing project with a semiconductor company, Harvard came out and interviewed Jerry Robinson, who is the plant leader, and they said, "Well, what's different about this plant?" And he said, "In terms of decision-making, our job is to explain what's important and why that's important and provide people the opportunity to then participate in how that actually happens."

And he said, "The notion of involvement is with respect to them, not us." For example, a leader might say, "Well, I've spent enough time on it." So you just said the measure. The measure may be, "Have we spent enough time in the team discussing this so that we can move forward?"

Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:

That's such a powerful shift from telling people what to do to truly inviting them to shape how things happen. Once you've got that kind of buy-in, in my experience, it opens up the door to bigger questions about how teams are structured and supported to succeed.

Paul Gustavson:

The other thing that I have found is a notion of stages of development of a team. I've identified five distinct stages. One of those is where the leader interacts with each of the individuals. Stage two is where the leader pulls the team together, runs the team meeting or whatever the activity is, the team's there.

Stage three is a great stage where somebody in the team steps up and begins to do what the team leader does. Stage four, many can do what the team leader does, which frees the team leader to be a coach and to do higher order things in stage five where they're really self-managing, the leader is there.

So my experience is that as you go up those development stages, the higher-performing teams are at the higher stages. Another thing that I found with the semiconductor facility that you referred to was where a team understands its clear input and its output, and it's responsible for all of the work within that and they know how that impacts the customer, great things happen.

So oftentimes people ask me, "Well, can you come in and look at the team and what's happened?" And the team might be just doing the same task, and that's what they were organized around as opposed to the conversion process, identifying transistors, connecting transistors, protecting them, singulate, so that the team has all of the expertise.

So I think the design, and I love the quote, perfectly designed, the design of the team on one hand makes so much sense in terms of what it does. But then once you have the right design is making sure that all of the things inside the team are working, like the expectations, like the Google research on psychological safety, making sure that there are clear norms within the team.

Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:

Paul, you've outlined both the structure and the internal dynamics that help a team move up those different stages of development, but I want to zoom in now on how leadership itself evolves alongside the team and how we equip leaders to share in some of that responsibility.

Paul Gustavson:

Over the four or five decades that I've been thinking about teams, I identified 12 leadership activities that I think can be shared. For example, running a team meeting, whether you call it a huddle, a scrum, whatever it is, that's a leadership activity. I think leadership is a set of activities. I don't think we're born with leadership. I think we learn what leadership activities are.

Think of it as having anchors on a number of different things. So just go down and you can think about your own organization. Running a team meeting, setting objectives, reviewing performance against those objectives, teaching new skills, selecting and onboarding new members, developing a budget, involved in sizing the team and scheduling work that people might be involved in.

So there were 12 leadership activities. And the important thing is that a team can actually be at a stage five in certain of those, but may not be in some others. For example, a leadership activity is giving feedback, performance reviews. Well, I've seen teams where they said, "We're really good at running a team meeting, coming up with strategic initiatives, but this feedback, we're not that good at that."

Think of it this way, you have the five stages, you have the 12 leadership activities, and you can begin to say, "Well, where are we on each one of these? And how do we move from here to there in terms of that?" Now, let me kind of anchor why I am passionate about that.

Let's go back to this semiconductor facility that had a 255% performance improvement, same equipment, same steps, but we organized people differently. One of the things that we did, which is at the heart of what you guys do, is learning. We selected people on ability to learn.

So people had said when we built this facility, "Well, you need people with 10, 15 years experience." And we said, "Actually, if they had that, they're going to bring the old way of doing in that." What we really want to do is we want to select people who love to learn.

We're not hiring you just for your hands. We're hiring you to learn and apply and share that knowledge, not only here at work, but also outside.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

I love that notion that one of the most important determinants of effectiveness for a team is their ability to learn. We've recently been doing some in-depth analysis of data from thousands of teams who have completed Herrmann's team effectiveness dashboard diagnostic.

And when we analyzed what really differentiates high-performing teams from average ones and being able to realize their maximum potential, the analytical factors like objectives and metrics and financial considerations were actually much less important in that high-performance team.

Once you've established that basis, that foundation of psychological safety, the next most important factors were actually related to the experimental thinking, that kind of D-quadrant and the whole brain model, strategy, synthesis, ideas, risk-taking, those factors surge in importance for teams in the upper echelons of performance once that foundation of psychological safety in the practical and relational parts of our brains is established.

So this seems to suggest to me, Paul, that as teams evolve towards your sort of stage-five model, where everyone is stepping up another level in terms of shared leadership and where the needs of the team as a whole, as well as the needs of individual team members are being addressed through, again, those relational and practical components, the way that they think together becomes fundamentally different, more creative, more integrated, more willing to take intelligent risks.

Paul Gustavson:

You nailed it. If we have our processes right and we know what we're all about and we have deep collaboration, the whole idea is, "How can we get even better?"

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

To your point earlier about effective teams being those that can learn individually, but learn together, how do you take all those different insights and learn about applying it to the situation that you have at hand?

And the situations that we have at hand, switching gears a little bit here, seem more uncertain than ever, given that we're living in a time of incredible uncertainty and change from remote and hybrid work transformations to AI integration and economic and geopolitical volatility.

Nate, I'm curious, your perspective, and your research touches a bit on social perception and leadership and organizations, and I'm curious what you think about how uncertainty affects how leaders and how team members perceive each other and their collective work.

What insights can you share about how teams can maintain effectiveness during uncertainty, during constant change?

Dr. Nate Meikle:

I really love Don Moore's work. Don Moore is a professor at UC Berkeley, and he's one of the main researchers working on research around confidence, and he wrote a book called Perfectly Confident. So the idea isn't to fake confidence. The idea is to be accurately calibrated at all times.

I'd never encourage somebody to be fake confident during times of uncertainty, but I would encourage people to rely on the fundamentals and the principles that Paul talked about, knowing that you can be confident in that approach, whether in uncertain times or not.

Paul Gustavson:

To build on what Nate said, some of the earliest work on the question that you had, which isn't new, was done by Dick Beckhart, and he wrote a book called Managing Transitions. Another fellow, Bill Bridges, which is an appropriate name for talking about life's transitions, but both of them simply said that there's where you are, there's where you're going, and there's an in between state.

And one of the things that they talk about in that in between state is exactly what Nate had talked about is people are uncomfortable. They're uncomfortable in terms of that. Even as far as they'll long for the way things used to be, even if the way things used to be weren't very good, but they seek for stability.

So in the situation that you're talking about where there isn't stability, what is it that you do? Well, the point that you and Nate have said is a leader needs to step up and needs to exude that confidence that says that there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are going to work a process that will get us through. This too shall pass so that people say, "Oh, well, at least Raymond knows where we're going in this."

The principles I think in terms of that is that you do understand that when you're in that in between, that it is instability, that people are longing for the way things used to be, that they just want something to hold onto. And it is the point where leaders need to step up and say, "Okay, we're not there yet, but here's the plan that we have to get there."

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

And another thing we know about change is that different thinkers need different things during change, right? So being able to provide that right signal around, "Everything's going to be okay. We've been here before. We know what this movie looks like," or, "Hey, we're seeing these signals in the data that are going to really guide us towards a little more certainty in the weeks or months or quarters or years to come."

And again, it comes down to that leader being able to situationally apply the tools, the motivators, the thinking approaches that meet the needs of their individual team members while still maintaining that overall team cohesion.

Let's look towards the future a little bit. Nate, as someone studying and researching leadership and team dynamics, organizational dynamics, what shifts do you see on the horizon for team effectiveness and where might today's conventional wisdom be heading for a correction?

Dr. Nate Meikle:

Everybody's talking about AI, right? You've got an AI company. We know it's important, but what I think is going to be especially important for teams is, "Okay, how can you incorporate AI?" But I think at a more foundational level, it's going back to a little bit what Paul was talking about is, "Do we have people on our team who want to learn?"

Because ultimately, I think the teams that can use AI effectively can be at a massive advantage, depending on the company. And the teams who use AI the best are the ones who are going to be able to learn to use AI the best in a world that is changing exponentially in a lot of ways.

The ability for people to just figure things out, I think is a differentiator. And then the other thing I think when it comes to prediction of what will make teams effective in the future, I think of purpose, kind of going back to the relational aspect that I've been talking about a lot today.

In the past, 80, 90% of people were employed in agriculture and you knew the point of your job, it was to make food so you didn't die. It was to feed yourself and your family, right? But I feel there's a lot of work today that can feel disconnected from purpose. If managers and leaders can help people find purpose, I think that is going to help teams be more effective in the future.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

The need for purpose feels more relevant than ever. I completely agree with you. Paul, same question to you. What's your prediction for what will make teams effective in the coming years?

Paul Gustavson:

My own perspective is that AI is going to help more the basic operating system than it is the strategic thinking. The epiphanies and ahas in terms of knowledge work, it is still going to be humans taking the capabilities that they have.

And certainly, there will be information that will be provided for them, that they will have insights, but it won't tell them what it is. So I think as we think about teams and we think about knowledge, we need to have people in teams and organizations who are thinking about the future, seeing around corners what's happening.

We need to have people who are paying attention to the day-to-day and how we can improve that. And I think AI is going to do amazing stuff in taking the business essential or compliance work and simplifying that so it's not human beings doing that.

But the notion of planning and managing change, human beings kind of thinking about that. So I think that construct will become even more important as we go forward and we use the tools that we have.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

Paul, your five-stage model offers leaders a clear pathway to develop more autonomous self-leading teams. Nate, thank you for sharing your lived experience and your research. You've provided some really valuable insights into the interpersonal dynamics that can make or break team effectiveness.

What stands out to me is how these perspectives compliment each other. Paul, your framework shows us the structural evolution teams can undergo towards shared research. Nate, your research reveals the micro interactions that enable that journey, right?

How team members can amplify each other's contributions, how confidence was perceived, how the role of the leader can ultimately impact and have a big bearing on what that team is able to achieve.

And both of those perspectives align really well with what we're seeing in our research at Herrmann, that team effectiveness isn't just about results, but about creating an environment where there is that foundation of psychological safety, where the relational aspect, in particular, is emphasized and where diverse thinking styles, where different points of view can be expressed, heard, and valued.

So if you enjoyed today's discussion, please subscribe, share with your network, leave us a review. Until next time, I'm Karim Morgan Nehdi, and you've been listening to The Whole Brain at Work podcast. Thanks for putting your whole brain to work with us today.