How to identify the next step that accelerates your team’s growth

In 1965 a psychologist called Bruce Tuckman was working for the U.S. Navy. He was a member of a small group of researchers at the Naval Medical Research Institute. Their job was to study small group behaviour.

How to Design Better Teamwork

Research into what motivates teams

In today’s issue, we explore recent research into what motivates teams. This research can help us design better teamwork by understanding team dynamics and what motivates different people.

It got me thinking about a group or teamwork in a school or academic setting, so I have shared some guidance and thoughts about that.

An essential affirmation I had was the critical nature of the design of teams and what they do.

Photo by Daniel Larsen on Unsplash

Together, everyone achieves more — or less?

A team at TU Dortmund University in Germany have published an interdisciplinary meta-analysis on effort gains and losses in teams.

You can access either the academic paper or a summary blog post from the researchers on Aeon.

From the beginning, the authors highlight the importance of intentional design.

Our analysis of the data shows that whether teamwork boosts motivation or saps it strongly depends on how the work is designed.

And it looks like one of the keys to boosting motivation is how we perceive our contribution. As educators, facilitators, and designers, we need to ensure each team member can make a meaningful contribution to their team’s performance.

when people perceive their contribution to the team’s outcome as indispensable, they tend to show greater effort than they would when working alone. These ‘effort gains’ can be due to team members aiming to be prosocial: they care about others and want to make a difference to the team.

You might apply dispensability in a range of ways, such as:

  • What roles do people take on in a meeting?
  • What do people do during a breakout in a workshop?
  • What specific tasks are assigned during a discussion session in a class?
  • Do people understand how their workshop contribution is integral to our collective success?

On reflection, the level of dispensability is a proxy for what we value. You would hope anything we design is worthy of the learner’s time.

Social Comparison

One of the critical factors that impact motivation for team members is social comparison.

The desire to evaluate oneself is a basic one, and when working in a team, individuals commonly compare their own performance with their teammates’ performances.

The researchers discovered this comparison could go in different directions. If a team member displays significantly superior abilities, it leads to demotivation, frustration and feelings of failure.

Team membership is most beneficial when it creates a visible, proximal, and relative advantage.

People often strive to match or exceed the performance of others, which makes working with slightly better teammates a very motivating experience…it is advisable to compose a team such that members are similar in their abilities, but with some of them being somewhat superior to boost the others’ motivation.

Some thoughts from a different direction.

I struggle identifying the ‘slightly superior’ teammate — how do we measure this?

We are also assuming we have an accurate understanding of our ability. The Dunning-Kruger effect often masks this. This cognitive bias leads us to mistakenly assess our abilities as being much higher than they are.

I am also thinking about mixed ability grouping in schools, but I need to read further into the collision of that strategy with these ideas.

Collaborative Learning

When we consider these findings in relation to schools and student learning, it is clear that collaborative learning is an essential part of the educational process.

The Evidence for Learning summary on Collaborative Learning is an excellent overview. It explains that collaborative approaches have a consistently positive effect on learning.

I noticed the emphasis on intentional design, which aligns with the research analysis from the team at TU Dortmund University. Here’s a further passage from the Evidence for Learning summary:

[Collaborative learning] requires much more than just sitting students together and asking them to work in a group; structured approaches with well-designed tasks lead to the greatest learning gains.

Some other key considerations are:

  • Students need support and practice to work together; it does not happen automatically.
  • Tasks need to be designed carefully so that working together is effective and efficient, otherwise some students will try to work on their own.
  • Competition between groups can be used to support students in working together more effectively. However, overemphasis on competition can cause learners to focus on winning rather than succeeding in their learning.
  • It is particularly important to encourage lower-achieving students to talk and articulate their thinking in collaborative tasks to ensure they benefit fully.

Your Talking Points

Here is a range of key takeaways and provocations from today’s issue:

  1. Design teams that create a visible, proximal, and relative advantage.
  2. How intentional are we in the design of our group or team activities?
  3. How dispensable is their contribution? Is this worthy of their time?

🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

Complement this issue with Create Safety and Togetherness #249, Willful Blindness — Medium article, If You Are The 1st Responder To New Ideas, You Have A Critical Job #243, The Three Pillars of Powerful Team Collaboration — blog, Successful Teams Are More Open About Their Mistakes — blog

5 Questions For Team Leaders To Challenge Willful Blindness And Create An Open Culture

Willful blindness is a cognitive bias that explains ‘the deliberate avoidance of knowledge of the facts.’

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Closed minded? Photo by Bart Christiaanse

if there’s information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law deems that you’re willfully blind. You have chosen not to know.

What are you wilfully blind to? — Forward Institute

What Harm Might We Cause

Just recently, I learned of a school leader pushing the idea of learning styles. They used the flawed concept and strategies to frame student needs.

Readings and examples that explained the issue were ignored. They chose not to know.

Ideology powerfully masks what, to the uncaptivated mind, is obvious, dangerous, or absurd and there’s much about how, and even where, we live that leaves us in the dark. Fear of conflict, fear of change keeps us that way.

Why We Ignore the Obvious: The Psychology of Willful Blindness – Brain Pickings

Every minute counts with students; that is why these mental models are essential. We have to peer into our gloomy thinking shadows and ask:

Conscious Avoidance of the Truth

According to Margaret Heffernan, as much as 85% of employees report people are afraid to raise issues at work.

This compulsion not to rock the boat is a survival impulse that protects us from conflict and confrontation. “We can’t notice and know everything”.

We mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves, while conveniently filtering whatever unsettles our fragile egos and most vital beliefs. It’s a truism that love is blind; what’s less obvious is just how much evidence it can ignore.

How many issues and negative work habits in schools are ignored? Perhaps wellbeing and health are where willful blindness in education is most prevalent.

Your Talking Points

  • How might we be wrong?
  • What process might surface any negative work habits?
  • How might we reduce the discomfort and fear of change?

This is a snippet of my Dialogic Learning Weekly. ⚡A weekly email designed to build your cognitive toolkit and enhance your practice. It saves you time and provokes your thinking.

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The Three Pillars of Powerful Team Collaboration

One of the perennial challenges I come across in my work in schools and other organisations is the ability of a team to collaborate well. Put simply: to create something together.

This piece from Harvard Business Review highlights a number of issues related to the success of a group working together. They drew upon a range of research meta-analysis and raise some good questions about group creativity.

I thought I would spend a short while exploring my take on those most related to learning.

A Compelling Vision

Teams are more innovative when members have a common understanding of team objectives and are also committed to them.

Most schools have the trifecta of a Vision, Mission and Values. They may also have the Whole School Pedagogy statement thrown in there too. But admittedly I have rarely come across a vision that is Compelling.

They shouldn’t be trophy statements that only provide us with useful brochure-ware. A vision statement is a chance to compel a group of people forwards in terms of innovation. An opportunity to challenge and create excitement about what the future might hold.

When we are excited about that future direction and we share it with others innovation and creativity is more likely to flourish. I suppose it helps us all understand ‘the why’.

Support for Innovation

Teams are more innovative when managers expect and approve of innovation, support members when their attempts to innovate are not successful, and recognize and reward new ideas and their implementation. This means encouraging risk and expecting failures.

The interesting part here is the support team members receive when things go wrong and when ideas are not successful. At first, I thought this might just relate to the work of teachers as they develop new ideas for their work, but it is also an issue for students too.

Generating a bunch of ideas is one step but trying them out is another. When leaders and managers give us agency and license to mess stuff up we are much more likely to create and implement more ideas. This is linked to how high or low stakes the learning environment is. You might ponder on that for a second and try to settle on an aggregate sense of what the wider school or organisation environment is.

When a school has a generally high stakes environment students and staff don’t feel safe enough to try things out. Failing is not seen as part of the learning process and it is likely that there is an emphasis on the end product or outcome and not the path a student takes.

As you probably can tell when we start talking about “stakes” we quickly bump up against the assessment system, process and environment in a school. If you really want to have a creative, innovative school start by looking closely at your assessment culture.

A Cohesive Team

Cohesion represents commitment to the team and a desire to be part of the team. Researchers see cohesion as creating a psychologically safe environment that enables members to challenge each other and the status quo.

Related to my previous point about creating a safe enough culture for taking a risk is this interesting definition of “cohesion”. When we are united together behind a common goal there is a degree of comfort, that comfort stems from the acceptance of others around us. It is this acceptance that creates a desire to be together in a team and commitment to work successfully together.

When we have this sort of team baseline in effect we are much more likely to challenge the world around us. This includes our propensity, within that team, to provide critique or feedback to each other. We know that feedback is a key element of the process of learning that has a significant impact. But the success of any feedback interaction relies on the cohesion of the people who create that interaction.

No surprise that cohesion is synonymous with relationships. This is especially true in the classroom and in terms of learning. A useful reminder for us all that building stronger relationships with our colleagues and students will help feedback to be more successful.

The other element referenced here by HBR is the ability of a team to challenge the status quo. I often say that “assumptions lead to mediocrity”. I have worked with teams where challenging long-held beliefs within an industry is a bridge too far. It loops back to the relationships we have with those working around us and of course vertically throughout an organisation. When there is little cohesion or support for change the well-worn path is a safe and predictable choice.

If we want to develop the creative capacity of our teams, our students or those we are leading we must challenge the status quo. We all did this well as 6-year-olds. It would help if we enabled those around us to ask more questions and challenge the long-held practices of our industries.

Re-build our individual capacity to challenge assumptions, within a culture of “yeah let’s try it!”, under a compelling banner for what might lie ahead, and we all may be on to something.