Speaking of Psychology - How do you build a successful team? With Eduardo Salas, PhD

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

Very few people do their jobs entirely on their own. For most of us, doing our job well means being part of a well-functioning team. Eduardo Salas, PhD, of Rice University, talks about the key ingredients of highly effective teams, the difference between team training and team building, what to consider when working on a remote team, the role of team leaders, and how industries such as aviation and medicine – where breakdowns in teamwork can have dire consequences – have evolved in their approach to teamwork. Please help us know more about you and what you would like to hear more of from Speaking of Psychology by filling out our 2023 Audience Survey. For transcripts, links and more information, please visit the Speaking of Psychology Homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So if you could, please go to our show notes at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to Speaking of Psychology, or go to our website at www.combeatingofpsychology. And look for the link to the listener survey. We'd really appreciate it. Now, on to the episode. Very few people do their jobs entirely on their own. For most of us, our work is enmeshed with other people's work, and doing our job well often means being part of a well-functioning team. The stakes of teamwork can be high, especially in workplaces where errors have dire consequences

such as emergency rooms or air traffic control towers. In those settings, a breakdown in teamwork can be the difference between life and death. Over the past decades, psychologists' research has helped organizations from hospitals to military units to airlines develop better functioning and more effective teams. So what does good teamwork look like? What are the key ingredients of a highly effective team versus one that's a dysfunctional mess? And what does good team training include? Do you have to like your coworkers to function as an effective team?

Is it possible to make any team work together? So what are the differences between working on remote versus in-person teams? Or are teamwork issues the same whether you're seeing each other in person or on Zoom? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association, that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Eduardo Salas, a professor and chair of the Department of Psychological Sciences at Rice University. He is an industrial organizational and human factors psychologist

whose research focuses on understanding how teams work and how to design and implement effective team training strategies. Dr. Salas has co-authored more than 600 journal articles and book chapters, co-edited 33 books and authored two books on team training and the science of teamwork. His most recent book is Teams That Work, The Seven Drivers of Team Effectiveness. Dr. Salas is an APA fellow and won APA's 2016 Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology. Thank you for joining me today, Dr. Salas.

Thank you for having. I'm thrilled to be here. You relate an anecdote at the beginning of your book where a business leader you were working with said, we don't have time for teamwork here. We have a business to run. Why is it important for organizations to think about teamwork and do you find that particular perspective as common? Yeah, so that's one of the myths out there, right? So in my going around the corporate world, especially most CEOs, most leaders think that they're doing a great job with teams and then, and that they're good team players. However, when they learn about the science and the principles that we have to offer, all of a sudden they say, oh, wow, I didn't know that. Oh,

I didn't think about that. And then they do, they try to do something different. So, so some CEOs and some, again, corporate executives really don't have a good grasp about the science of teamwork and what the science a thing we can offer. So what makes for a good, highly effective team? What have researchers found are the key ingredients needed for a team to function well? Yeah. So, you know, in a simple way, we look for three kinds of things. You know, it's the ABCs.

What are the attitudes? What are the behaviors? And what are the cognitions? So the attitude is, right, the mindset. how the team members think about the collected activity and their motivations and their goals. The behaviors is about the role clarity, who's responsible for what, who's going to back me up, who is going to do what, when. And the cognitions is in general about a shared understanding of the task, a share understanding of the goals,

a sheer understanding of the mission, what is it that we're trying to accomplish? So under the ABCs, there are a set of competencies that affected teams essentially master, and that's what team training does or team work training or some kind.

And so we know what are the ABCs now. And you noted in our book with my colleague Scott Tannenbaum, we outline seven drivers, right? And we invoke the seven Cs of teamwork in that book. So is any one of these factors more important than another? What happens if a team is missing one of these drivers? Well, they're all interrelated. and they built on each other, right? So you can, in a way, can compensate one for the other.

But at the end, in order to be a well-functioning team, a team that is resilient and that has good performance over time, you need all these ingredients. So what are these ingredients? So let me go through the 70s really quickly and so that the listeners can understand. So the first C is a capability, right? This is about having the right people in the team.

It's about having talented, competent team members. And the first rule of teamwork really is, or one of the rules of teamwork is you cannot be a good team member if you don't know your job. And so you have to have the capability and you have to have that right mix of people. The second C is cooperation. Cooperation is about the mindset. It's about I like being in a team.

I want to be in a team. I seek the input from others. And I value the input from others. The third C is coordination. And coordination is about the behaviors. Again, who is going to back me up? Who's going to help me? And who's going to do what?

And it's really about role clarity. The next thing is about cognition. Cognition is about the sheer understanding of the task. So it's the sheer knowledge that we have as a team in order to execute a task. Then you have communication. Communication is the way we describe it. It's really about the information exchange protocols. It's about the terminology, the clarity of the terminology, the timeliness of the information.

And then you have coaching. The way I described this is, you know, coaching is about the team leaders. And what we want our team leaders to act in a. sense, it's like good coaches. So what do good coaches do? They promote teamwork, right? They care about the team members. They develop them. And so that's what we want team leaders to act as good coaches. And the final C is conditions. This is about the organizational conditions. It's a similar work, similar term to culture. So this is about the incentives. the reinforcements that leadership, that top leadership,

puts in the organization to support teamwork. So, you know, in this seven C is, it's a, it's really not a model or a theory, just a heuristic to organize the body of knowledge that we have under these things. So effective teams have, in a sense, manage the seas, especially the first six Cs, right, the last one being conditions. So, you know, they have the right people, they have role clarity, they have a shared understanding of the task,

they have robust information exchange protocols, and they work under conditions that are supportive of teamwork. So in general, that's how this works. So what happens if you, you are handed a team or you are put on a team and you don't really have a lot of power around the selection of who the team members are. What can you do as a person who either inherits or is placed on a team if you're seeing that some of these Cs are not being followed to the letter, so to speak? Yeah, so, you know, there are a number of tools that you can use. you know, in our science, we have uncovered the teams that pre-brief, pre-brief perform and debrief outperform those that don't. So pre-briefing is basically, you know, you just join this team or this team is a little de-jointed. Then, okay, before we perform, before like pilots do,

before they go to the cockpit or before the flight, they pre-brief. And they talk. And they about, okay, where are we headed? You know, how are we going to communicate? Who's going to do what? So, you know, this pre-briefing, if you have the chance to do that, allows you to clarify roles, to get an idea who's going to do what, who has what knowledge, who has what expertise, how we're going to communicate, and then you perform, right? You do the task.

It could be an hour, three hours, a few days, a month, or whatever. But at some point, you need to debrief. And debriefing, like my colleague, Scott Tanenbaum says, you know, is the most powerful, simple intervention yet underutilize to learn and to improve. So the debriefing is a reflection on what just happened. And in that reflection, usually you need to use, what usually happens is you try to understand what things you need to improve, what things didn't go well, and what things you need to change. And so this cycle, again, of pre-briefing, performing, debriefing is usually a good

discipline that allows you to, even when you have a bad team or you just inherit a team that is not so good, it gives you the opportunity if you can do this discipline, if you can, this cycle, allows you to learn and to improve and to get the team in line. Now, you've worked in some industries where it's been a challenge to get the leaders to embrace your scientific theories around teamwork. I'm thinking whether that's pilots or in hospitals and emergency rooms, places like that. And then you've run into resistance. How have you dealt with that? Why have some industries been more resistant than others?

So I started working in aviation a long time ago, 30 years or so ago. And at the beginning, pilots were resistant as well, right? You know, in the early 80s, it was about the right stuff, right? You know, and pilots were more egotistical, to some degree. However, they soon realize that when the plane goes down, they go down with the plane. And so they had to engage. And so 30 years later, I mean, just about all the airlines, whether they're passenger or cargo, really embrace team training and teamwork.

They call it the CRM crew resource management. The FAA supports that and so forth. So this generation of pilots completely embraces in general the concept. In healthcare, for example, you don't have that hook, right? So when the patient goes down, unfortunately, only the patient goes down. And so it's taking the health care is taking health care. a lot longer to engage. And the pressure really has come from, you know, the patient safety movement, the number of errors,

medical errors that we still have. And really a bottoms up approach, you know, the nurses, the technicians, the people who really quote-unquote touch patients see the need to do. things better for the patient. And little by little, kind of like one team at a time in health care, now, while there's still some resistance, it's a lot less than it was 20 years ago. And the resistance comes from, I see it from two angles. One angle is a financial angle, which most CEOs, chief financial officers and so forth worry about this. If I'm going to invest in the in team training, what is it that I'm going to get for that investment?

And it wasn't until a little recently that we were able really to answer that question when we've done a number of team training evaluations, metanalysis that really show the boost that you get out of team training. And so now we can answer that. So we say there's value and there's a performance improvement if you deploy teamwork, this is the benefit you get. And in healthcare, we have been able to show that, to some degree, that hospitals that deploy teamwork training versus those that don't,

medical error is reduced and mortality is reduced. So there's a link, you know, between teamwork and saving lives. So that has been one. And the second, my opinion, at least in my experience of doing this for a long time now, is if they buy it, they have to deploy teamwork training, they don't know how to do it. They don't know how to implement it. They don't know how to make sure that the, there's so sustainability of the behaviors that the people, the new behaviors and cognitions and attitudes that the staff just got.

And so, you know, it takes them some time to get traction to create the conditions, one of the disease, to create the conditions such that people, perceive, teamwork is important, it's reinforced, it, you know, it improves patient safety, it improves patient care, and so forth. So there have been those two lines, you know, what's the ROI return on investment from team training? And then how do we roll this out so that it's sustainable over a period of time and not just a, you know, a one-time event? So what does effective team training look like and how can a company or another organization tell if the team training is actually working? Yeah. So first of all, there are several models out there in the industry.

You know, the medical community created a team training program called Team Steps with DoubleP, one word together. And to simplify any training, not only team training, but any training at the end of the day, does four things. It gives you information, demonstration of good behaviors by behaviors, give you opportunity to practice, and you get feedback. So information, demonstration, practice, and feedback. So these team steps and in other systems that are out there, by and large, have those four components, right? And so you learn about the team principles. You look at videos of good teams and bad teams and you can analyze them and, you know, and extract what good and bad about each of these video tapes, for example. then you get opportunities to practice,

you might role play, you may use a simulation, and so forth, and then you get feedback on that. So training or team training that has those four elements have a higher probability of transfer or training.

In other words, that people will apply the skills they just learn back to the job. However, you know, just deploying team training, you know, it's really not enough. There is a science of training as well in the science of training tells us that there are things that you need to worry about after you, before you deploy the training, after you deploy the training thing.

So before you deploy the training, you need to prepare the organization for the training. You train supervisors. You make sure everybody's on board. to that. And actually most team training or most training fails because the organization is not ready to receive that training. So, and then you have to worry about afterwards, right? Do you, are you supportive of the skills that the competencies that the people just got? Do you reinforce that?

Do you give an opportunity to perform? Do you, you know, measure them this new new competence? So, long story is good team training. You need to worry about things that you do before the team training, things you do during the team training, which I just explained the information of the training practice, and things that go after training. Now, there have been many evaluations of medical team training and other team training

and two or three meta-analysis, and for the audience, a meta-analysis and integration of many findings, a quantitative integration of many findings. This meta analysis clearly show the benefit of team training. It boosts performance, reduces errors, people are more engaged, people are more satisfied. It creates innovation in things of that sort. How important are individual differences such as personalities in determining how well a a team works together. I mean, are there really some people who just aren't team players or can

pretty much any group of personalities be instructed, taught how to work together? Yeah. The easiest example I have is most of us, well, not most of us, all of us, have at this position. Either we're collective oriented or we are egocentric. If you're collective oriented, you like being in teams, you want to be in teams, and again, you seek and value the input from others. The ego-centric disposition are the long walls, people who don't engage in collective activity, no matter what you do.

So in teams, you need people who are collective-oriented. You know, I give you a sports example that I love to use, love to use. So Michael Jordan, you know, one of the greatest basketball players ever. In his biography, he acknowledges that you know, when he was

part of the Chicago Bulls, it wasn't until he says until he wasn't until we got Scotty Pippen in the pools that we began to win championships. In the audience who doesn't know about Scott Pippen, he's a retired player

now, but he was a great defensive player. not a high score, but he had the most assists. He passed the ball a lot. And so he, in the sense, it was collective oriented. So the star or the team needed somebody that would pass the ball. In teams, you need that. You need somebody who's going to be passing the ball. And so that is a, that is a.

a disposition that you need to have. Now, there's some research, however, that shows that egocentric individual under some circumstances engaged in collective activity. And when those factors are no longer there, then they go back to being egocentric. So you just have to find what are those conditions. Now, many people have made the switch to working remotely in the past three years, are there big differences between working on remote teams versus in-person teams?

Yeah. The biggest challenge is making connections, in my views, to simplify things. So, you know, we started this discussion by talking about the ABCs, right, the attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions. So in remote, in a remote setting, or even in Zoom, in. You know, how do you keep those connections, the behaviors, the cognations, and the attitudes? It's quite challenging. And, you know, how do you keep the trust, right? And so, in a sense, the science helps you, helps collocated teams and distributed teams or teams that don't see each other in a way.

It's just that sometimes some of the Cs are more important and more challenging when you are distributed. The biggest problem or the biggest challenge that distributed teams have or hybrid teams is trust. How do I, how do you, this mutual trust is needed so that you can have some psychological safety, which is psychological safety is the license that you have to speak up. Right. And very quickly, you know, all teams sooner or later engage in conflict. In one way to resolve conflict is this psychological safety. You have to be able to have hard, difficult conversations about something without any repercussions. So that's the difficulty in distributed teams or teams that don't see each other.

How do they create this little trust so they can get to know each other? I've seen examples where in banks, for example, when they have teams that are distributed over all over the world, they try to create events. They call this the water cooler event, right? So when you go to the water cooler, you have a 10, five-minute conversation with your teammate about something that had time to do with the job maybe, right? You know, what did you do this weekend? My kid is doing that, that kind of thing. So these teams try to create this water cooler event. I've seen them, for example, when they, one of the banks that I've helped,

Monday mornings when they have the first meeting, they take turns around the team. And each one of the members always takes about five minutes. And that's all, five minutes to talk about their kids or what they, do what did they do during the weekend, something else. That's kind of like to break the ice a little bit, but also to learn about you. And then over time, it creates the stress. What about there are places, for example, where you can go and do team building exercises, ropes, courses, things like that.

I mean, are those that sounds similar to the water cooler idea, but a little different in that you're really outside of the workplace and you might be doing something that looks like it could be a little bit perilous and you might have to depend on one of your coworkers to make sure that you don't fall on your face. Does that make for a more effective team or is this just sort of, you know, we're really just having fun and then we're going to go back and be a bad team, the same that we were before? Well, let me tell you the story. So there's a difference between team building and team training in my mind. Team training. It's about getting team competencies, you know, the C's or the ABCs that I talked about.

So it's about team competencies. Team building is like you just described. You know, you go into the wilderness of North Carolina somewhere and you're wine and dine for three days and you do tasks and I do with the job. That's really about role clarity, the biggest benefit of that. because during those three days, again, you're one and nine with your teammate, and along that way, you're going to talk about what each other is what you do, and you're going to learn about that. So about almost 20 years ago, maybe it needs to be updated. I did a meta-analysis of, again, a quantitative integration of team building, and I found very little correlation with performance, which a lot of consultants did. didn't like. But, but, but there's a benefit of team building. You know, you get this role

clarity, you learn more about your teammates and so forth. But team training is about competencies. It's very different. So that the two have a place. It's just that you need to make sure that you understand the benefits of each one. I want to ask you how your background and the military influenced your work as a psychologist and in your interest in teams? Sure. So I worked for the Navy for 15 years and I was hired to develop a team performance laboratory at that time. And interestingly enough, in order to do that with my colleagues that I recruited, and students, what we needed to do is immerse ourselves in the context where the Marines,

airmen, women were performing. So what I learned working for the military was that in order to help, in order to understand what the teams do and the help they need, I needed to learn the context. embed myself in what they do. So the beauty, one of the most satisfying things on my career over the last almost 40 years now is that when I go and try to help organizations, I embed myself and my colleagues in the context and learn, you know, we sweat with them, we, you know, we wake up early, we stay late, whatever the demand is.

And I learned that in the military early on that when you, you know, we wake up early, you. sweat with them, then they listen to you. And they respect you. You're not this ivory tower professor or whatever researcher doing things. And so when I left working for the Navy in 1999 or so, I took that with me and said, you know, if I'm going to learn, I've done work with the air traffic controllers, I've done work in health care, for banks. for NASA, I mean, you know, oil and gas, you know, I've embedded myself and then learn. And then you can contextualize then the interventions and then use the psychological principles that we know to adapt to their environment. And it has a tremendous impact because they get it.

it's their context. But, you know, but the psychological principles that we use kind of cross all these industries, by the way, it's just a you contextualizer. So that's what I learned in the military. It's, you know, I call it sweating with them. What happens if a team falls into conflict and gets stuck? And it really doesn't seem to be working effectively.

Are there some techniques that can be applied? to fix it or do you just blow it up and say this team is just not going to cut it? Well, coaching is one of the, you know, if you can get an external view, that's one. Another way is, you know, I learned this from my colleague Scott Annamar again. There's a technique, if you can engage in a technique to self-dict. So you usually ask maybe three questions. You know, as a team where things we need to stop doing, as a team where things we need to start doing,

and as a team where things we need to improve. So if you have psychological safety and you can speak up, then you do this diagnosis of your team, stop, start, continue, you'll find out what's wrong and what creating the conflict and what things we need to do. to ensure that we don't get into this mode. So there are technique. It's just, again, you have to have the discipline of, of, okay, let's talk about this, right?

Let's get serious. The team is not functioning well. You know, we're not taking care of the patient. We're not doing whatever. You know, we're exhibiting unsafe behavior. Let's, we need to do something. So time out. Let's talk about this.

And then you say, okay, we need to stop doing this, start continuing. Does every team to be effective have to have a designated leader, or is that a role that can shift as the team does its work? Yeah, no. Actually, I've seen in healthcare, share leadership is probably, it's a way to function in some teams. you know, if you get, you know, the OR is one example of that, right? At one point,

the anesthesiologist is leading. Then it might be the technician and then might be the surgeon and then back to the anesthesia. And so, so no, I don't, you know, more and more jobs

and more and more teams have shared leadership. You know, somebody with, with the, right expertise steps in at the right time to lead, to facilitate and into the last question. What are you working on now? What are the big questions you still want to answer? What motivates me now after doing all this work for all these years is

what are the organizational conditions that are needed so that the behaviors, cognitions, and attitudes are sustained over time? So how do we create organizations? How do we design organizations? How does the leadership that the C-suite needs to act and what things they need to do in order to ensure that the behaviors, that teamwork is sustained over time? And it becomes part of the DNA of the organization, right? It gets ingrained. So I think that's one of the biggest challenges.

But these days, I mean, there's all kinds of technologies going on. There's human automation teams, they're human robot teams. They're robot-to-robot teams. And so now there are other, you know, I'm not an expert in those. But I know there are there, there's a lot of interesting in this kind of teaming, right? with AI, with automation, with a robot. And so that's also the kind of questions that other scientists, scholars are trying to answer,

you know, how do you mimic, how do two robots mimic teamwork, all the things that I've talked about to some degree? And so, but to me, the things that interest me is, are those conditions in, And it translates the science, the psychological science that we have, the principles that we have so that people can use and apply and improve their teams and their lives and so forth and so on. So that's what terms me on this day, is the translation. Well, this is all really interesting.

I very much appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. Thank you, Dr. Silas. Thank you for having me. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www. speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And again, we'd like to hear from you about what you think of this podcast and what you'd like us to talk about more than we are now. So please go to our website, speakingof psychology.org, and look for a link to our listener's survey. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts,

you can email us at speaking of psychology at a.pa.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Kondyyan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.