An Alternative to “Positive” Team Culture
This is the time of year many leaders are thinking about the kind of culture they want to build on their team. We’ve worked with nine different teams this summer to help them get more deeply connected and more aware about what’s really happening with each other. And in some cases, that’s meant helping them unlearn some of the previous ideas they’d internalized about what “good teams” are and feel like.
One of the biggest ideas to “unlearn” is one that I spent most my career propagating: that good teams are “positive” – all the time.
The research is really clear - and there has been a LOT of it - that effective teams are not positive all the time. Dr. Ron Friedman alone looked at over 1,000 teams across industries and found that the highest performing teams are significantly more likely to express their emotions – both positive AND negative. Why would expressing negative emotions at work yield more positive performance? “It’s because the alternative is suppressing them, and suppression is cognitively expensive … the resources spent to hide the emotions from others left less mental firepower for doing the work.”
In other words, the highest functioning teams aren’t positive. Or negative. They are just more honest. And if an “honest” culture appeals to you, embracing these words and behaviors might help you get there.
Vulnerability. Honesty without vulnerability is never true honesty. For example, full honesty is not “This plan sucks.” True honesty usually sounds more like this: “I see this plan and feel ignored by our team.” Or “This plan makes me scared that people are going to blame me if this goes wrong.” Getting to say how we really feel actually helps us feel better. And teaches us so much about where people really are.
Calm and lucid. As humans, we perform at our best when we’re relaxed, open, and unguarded. Let people be honest about how they feel in their heart – but don’t try to immediately fix it. Give them space, let them have their feelings (it’s theirs, not yours), and help them move beyond that to also engage their head.
Safe. When people feel safe and empowered to be honest and vulnerable, then you may sometimes hear things that are hard or that hurt – but you will also hear things that humanize and connect people. Either way, you can feel pride in knowing that you’ve created the single most important condition that a team can have: psychological safety.
Creating conditions that are vulnerable, calm, and safe is not easy. But if the alternative is trying to get people to feel a certain way (e.g., positive) all the time … that ain’t very easy either. And it’s also counterproductive.
Ironically, when we remember what real honesty and vulnerability feel like, we instantly know: it’s a truer and deeper kind of “positivity.”
