How do you build a successful team? With Eduardo Salas, PhD

Before we get started today, I'd like to ask you to take a moment to fill out our listener survey. We want to know more about you, what you think of this podcast, and what you'd like to hear more from us. 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.speakingofpsychology.org 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 unmatched 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 more places 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, psychologist 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 co-workers to function as an effective team? Is it possible to make any team work together? Also 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 me. 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 is 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 they're good team players. However, when they learn about the science and the principles that we have to offer, all of the sudden they say, "Oh, wow, I didn't know that. Oh, I didn't think about that." And then they try to do something different. So some CEOs and some, again, corporate executives really don't have a good grasp about the science of teamwork and what the science of teamwork can offer. So what makes for a good, highly effective team? What have researchers found or the key ingredients needed for a team to function well? Yeah, that's 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 attitudes is, right, the mindset, how the team members think about the collected activity and their motivations and their goals. The behavior 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 shared understanding of the goals, a shared understanding of the mission, what is it that we're trying to accomplish. So under these, under the ABCs, there are set of competencies that affected teams, essentially master, and that's what team printing does, or team work training, it was on time. And so we know what are the ABCs now. And you know that in our book, with my colleague Scott Tanembaum, we outlined 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, 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. And so what are these ingredients? So let me go through the seven Cs very quickly, 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. So you have to have the capability, and you have to have the right mix of people. The second C is a cooperation. It's about the mindset. I'd like being in a team. I seek the imperfect from others, and I value the imperfect from others. The third C is coordination. 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. And cognition is about the sheer understanding of the task, right? So it's the sheer knowledge that we have as a team in order to execute a task. Then we have communication. Communication is, the way with this private is 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 describe this is coaching is about the team leaders. And what we want are team leaders to act in a sense is like, good coaches. So what 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. And this is about the organizational conditions. 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, and this even sees that it's really not a model or a theory, it's just a heuristic to organize the body of knowledge that we have under these things. So effective teams have, in the sense, managed the C's, and they, especially the first six C's, 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 the team work. And in general, that's how this works. So what happens if you are handed a team where 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 are not being followed to the letter, so to speak. Yeah, so there are a number of tools that you can use. In our science, we have uncovered the teams that pre-brief, pre-brief, perform, and the brief outperformed those that don't. So pre-briefing is basically, you know, you just join this team or this team is a little disjointed. 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 about, okay, where we're 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 of who's going to do one, 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 Tanemboun says, you know, is the most powerful, simple intervention yet underutilized to learn and to improve. And 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 team, or you just inherit a team that is going to do that, that is not so good, allows you, it gives you the opportunity if you can do this discipline, if you can recycle, allows you to learn and to improve and to get, you will 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. And I think that's a great way to think about thinking, whether that's some 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 in working in the innovation long time ago, 30 years or so ago. And at the beginning pilots were resistant as well. In the early 80s, it was about the right stuff. Right? And pilots were more. more egotistical, to some degree. However, they soon realized 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. And the FAA supports that and so forth. But 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 healthcare, it's taking healthcare a lot longer to engage. And the pressure really has come from the patient safety movement, the number of errors, medical errors that we still have. And really a bottom's 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 healthcare. Now, well, 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 for worry about this. If I'm going to invest in team training, what is it that I'm going to get for that investment? And it wasn't until the reason that we were able really to answer that question when we've done a number of team training evaluations, meta-analyses, the 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 between team work 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 that 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 cognations, in attitudes that the staff just got. And so, you know, it takes them. And sometimes to get traction to create the conditions, one of the things to create the conditions such that people perceive teamwork is important is reinforced. It, you know, it improves patient safety, it improves patient care and so forth. So there have been those two lines, you know, it's, it's the, what's the ROI return on investment from team training. And then, and how do we roll this out so that it's sustainable over a period of time and not just, you know, 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, that the medical community created a team training program called PIN steps with double P one word together. And to simplify any, any training, not only team training, but any training at the end of the day does four things. It gives you information, and then you know, 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 we that are out there by and large have those four components. Right. 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 get extract what good and better about each of these are very very important is to practice you my role play, you may use a simulation and so on and then you get feedback on that. So training or team training that has those four elements have a higher probability of or transfer of training. And I was the people will apply the skills that just learn back back back to the job. However, you know, just deploying team training, you know, it's it's 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 things. So before the you deploy the training, you need to prepare the organization for the training. You train supervisors, you mature everybody's on board to that and actually most team training or most training fails because the organization is not ready to receive the training. So and then you have to worry about afterwards, right. I use support of all the skills that the competencies that the people just got. The you reinforce that you give an opportunity to perform do you, you know, measure them that this new company. So long story is good team. training you need to worry about things that you do before that in training things you do during that in training which I just explained the information of training and things that you after training. Now there have been many evaluations of medical training and other training and two or three meta-analyses and for the audience meta-analyses and integration of many findings, a quantitative integration of many findings. This meta-analyses clearly show the benefit of team training. It boosts performance, reduces errors, people are more engaged, people are more satisfied, it creates innovation and things of that sort. How important are individual differences such as personalities in determining how well 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 this is an example I have is most of us, well not most of all of us have a disposition 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 egocentric 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. I give you an example that I love to use, I love to use so Michael Jordan, one of the greatest basketball players ever, in his biography he acknowledges that when he was part of the Chicago Bulls it wasn't until he says until he wasn't until we got a scotty pippin in the pools that we began to win championships. In the audience who doesn't know about scotty pippin 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 he was collective oriented so the star for 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 disposition that you need to have. Now there's some research however they chose that egocentric individual and there's some synchrostances engage in collective activity and they won though 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 remote setting or even in Zoom you know how do you keep those connections the behaviors, the cognitions and the attitudes. It's quite challenging and how do you keep the trust right? So in a sense the science helps you, helps co-locate teams and distribute the teams or teams that don't see each other in a way. It's just that sometimes some of the sees are more important and more challenging when you are distributed. The bigger the biggest problem or the biggest challenge that the teams have or hybrid teams is trust. How do I, how do you, this mutual trust? A mutual trust is needed so you can have some psychological safety which is psychological safety is a 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 with this psychological safety you have to be able to have hard difficult conversations about something without any repercussions. So that's the difficulty in in in in in distributed teams or teams that don't see each other. How do they create this little trust so they get to know each other? I've seen examples where in banks for example when they have teams that are distributed over 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 you know a 10-5 minute conversation with your team mate about something they have time to do the job maybe right you know what did you do this weekend my kid is doing that I kind of think so this 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 around the team in each one of the members always takes about five minutes and that's all five minutes to talk about their kids or what did they do what did they do during the weekend something when I start to kind of like to break the ice a little bit but also to learn about you and and then over time it creates the 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 sound 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 co-workers 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 that we 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 is about getting team competencies you know the C's or the ABC's that I talked about so it's about team competencies team building is like you just described you know you you want to the wilderness of North Carolina somewhere and you're wine and dine for three days and you do tarts and that's with the job that's really about role clarity that the biggest benefit of that because during those three days again you wine and dine 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 didn't like 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 tool 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 in the military influence 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 of my career over the last almost 40 years now is that when I go try to help organizations I embed myself in my colleagues in the context and learn, you know, we sweat with them, we wake up early, we stay late, whatever the demands. And I learned that in the military, early on that when 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 the working for the Navy in 1999, or so, I took that with me and say, you know, if I'm going to learn, I've done work with aircraft controllers, I've done work in healthcare for banks, for NASA. I mean, you know, oil and gas, you know, I'm better myself and then learn. And then you can contextualize 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, got across all these industries, by the way, it's just a you contextualizing. So that's what I learned in the military. It's, you know, I call it sweating, 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, but that's what the another way is, you know, I learned this from my colleagues, caught an amount again. You know, there's a technique. If you can engage in a technique to self-diagnose, right? So you usually ask maybe three questions, you know, as a team, what things we need to stop doing as a team, what things we need to start doing and as a team, what 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 continuing. You'll find out what, what's wrong and what created the conflict and what things we need to do. To ensure that we don't get into this mode. So there are techniques. Again, you have to have the discipline of, of, of, okay, let's talk about this. Let's get serious that the team is not functioning well. We're not taking care of the patient. We're not doing whatever. We're exhibiting unsafe behavior. Let's, we need to do something. So time out. Let's talk about this. 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 ORs is one example of that, right? At one point, the anesthesiologist is leading, then it might be the technician and they might be the surgeon, and then back to the anesthesiologist. So it wrote, so no, I don't, you know, more and more gops 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. So last question, what, 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 the years is, what are the organizational conditions that are needed so that the, the, the behaviors, cognitions, in attitudes are sustained over time. So how do we create organizations? How do we design organizations? How does the leadership, the, the, the sea suite needs to act and what things they need to do in order to ensure that. The team that team work is sustained over time and it becomes part of the DNA of the organization, right? It gets in green. So I think that's that the one of these challenges. But these days, I mean, there's all kinds of technologies going on. There's, you know, there's human automation teams, the human robot teams. And so now there are other, you know, I'm not an expert in those, but there, I know there are other, 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 call us are trying to answer, you know, how do you mimic? How do you do you mimic? How do you do robot to mimic team work? All the things that I talked about to some degree. And so, but to me, my, the things that interest me is are those conditions and it translate the science, the psychological science that we have, the principle that we have. So that people can use them and apply and improve their teams and their lives and so forth and so on. So that's what turns me on this day, the translation. Well, this is all really interesting. I very much appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. Thank you, Dr. Salas. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.Speaking of 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, Speaking of Psychology.org and look for a link to our listener survey. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at Speaking of Psychology at apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Winerman, our sound editor is Chris Cundin. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills. (upbeat music)