How to Build Trust and Create Open, Successful Teams | Chris Strouthopoulos | TEDxGeorgiaTech

so my first job right out of college was teaching 14 through 30 day long mountaineering courses for outward-bound our goal was climbing 13 and 14,000 foot Peaks just like mountain opals and if you think about it our bounds business model is pretty wild let's take a group of random completely inexperienced strangers let's give them ice axes and heavy backpacks let's venture deep into Colorado's Rocky Mountains and then let's tie into some ropes and climb to some pointy summits so essentially the customer you are paying them to help you face down but for many people is the hardest physical and emotional challenge of your life now on one of my early courses I had the student let's call her Barbra middle-aged from the Midwest never done anything like this before in her entire life and we're coming down from this 13,000 foot peak and we get to an area where the rock is really fractured it looks sort of like this I mean basically the mountain summit is a giant pile of chassis rubble you know and everything Barbara touches Wiggles every foot she places wobbles and she freezes I mean she's too afraid to take another step too afraid to even sit she's totally paralyzed with fear it was her instructor I'm trying to help her but I'm just 22 years old and I have no idea what I'm doing I mean like none right so I'm throwing the kitchen sink at her I'm dropping Martin Luther King quote I am doing anything I can to help this woman and it's not working and then the other students they see what's going on right so they start coming over and they start helping her encouraging her believing in her and their fright in front of us Barbara has this beautiful beautiful moment where she closes her eyes she takes and holds this deep breath and we just see her absorb all that feedback wrestle with her fear and then she lets it all go when she opened her eyes she was able to take a step and then another step and roll like yeah you know like cheered her on you know it was absolutely incredible you know so looking back instructing for outward-bound was incredible teacher about the power of fear and how the right teams can help us push past limits of what we believe possible limits that are usually self-imposed and Barbara I gotta tell you at the end of that course when she came down from those mountains she was totally transformed she was physically fit mentally strong and excited to tackle any challenge that life put in front of her and just like Barbara when I came down from those mountains at the end I too was transformed because my time without rebound teaching for them was the first time I felt truly connected with the people around me was the first time I felt that what I did truly mattered and ever since then I've been obsessed with creating those feelings in every group I belong to from my personal life to my professional life but as much as I cherished my time without rebound I know it couldn't spend my entire life up in the mountains so the day came when I traded my ice axe for a college classroom now we all know America's K through 12 educational system is struggling but higher education is to approx colleges and universities approximately 40% of freshmen don't graduate in a community colleges the rates are even worse graduates they're in the minority so being in the trenches with literally thousands of students has shown me that fear helps explain why now every teacher I work with has been in this situation every teacher I know not just work with they you're about to hand out an exam and you ask the class are there any questions no hands go up sir like yeah they got this yet when you're grading the exams you're like huh you know it's a significant portion of the class underperforms or fails and that's so discouraging for the teacher so I spent so much time asked myself why why why are these students raising their hands why aren't they asking questions and what I came to realize is that for many students the answer is fear just like Barbara they're anxious and hesitant to act but instead of the mountains they're worried about being judged and punished because if you stop and think about it if you raise that hand and say hey teach I don't get it you risk the other people in that room judging you and thinking wow you are stupid I mean stop and really think about that many students would rather underperform on an exam than risk being perceived of as ignorant so I started asking myself how do I take what I learned about here up in these mountains down into our everyday lives and I've been wrestling with that question for almost 20 years now as a college professor as a corporate trainer and consultant and meanwhile still mountain guiding on many weekends and what I've discovered and develop some tools that really work and I'm on the stage today because the need for these tools is enormous dysfunctional groups they're everywhere let's look at the business world for example just like students if employees are worried about being judged or punished for what they say or do they'll hold back they'll only share the ideas they feel most comfortable with I mean I've ever noticed that how it meetings people are hesitant to bring up their concerns yet afterwards behind closed doors they freely do so at length fear and fear impacts innovation as well because innovation by its very definition requires risk-taking requires putting out half-baked ideas that maybe with a little work could be the next artificial heart iPhone or YouTube now classrooms workplaces and the mountains are three very different contexts where I've experienced group dynamics and their challenges may look different but they feel the same and that's why these tools to overcome these things are so Universal now the tools themselves aren't revolutionary there's things you intuitively know work but here's the challenge there's this fascinating gap between what we know and what we do so let's close that gap so I'd like to start with this story of inspirational leadership a few years ago Volkswagen decides it's going to dominate the car market in the United States by developing a diesel engine that sips gas like a Prius it accelerates like a performance car do you know what they got those of you familiar with this story now one of the largest buybacks in automotive history and an estimated loss of 30 billion with a B now I owned one of those Volkswagens and personally I thought this buyback was awesome cuz I made thousands on that car I mean who makes money buying a car I wish I don't two of those things but truth is I was angry at Volkswagen and I want to understand why this happened according to New York Times reporting the group of engineers in Germany whose job it was to create this miracle engine felt like they'd been given an impossible task and they worried about their job so much they collectively decided as a group it was better for them to cheat the admissions test and break the law then disappoint corporate leadership so the root cause of the scandal here now academics have been studying this fear for a while and they even have a term for it they call it psychological safety and the most established definition of psychological safety comes from the Harvard Business School's Amy Edmondson and notice her definition look at these words confidence embarrass reject punished these are about emotions these are emotional words and then psychological safety is about a feeling that feeling that Barbara and I and so many others felt at our bound that empowered us to be our best selves so question is how do we create that feeling this is our first tool now our bound does an amazing job with this and here's one way to take it down from the mountains you know I spent the first seven years of my college teaching English classes and at first day one you know felt like meeting with your lawyer I mean it had out all these documents you know of course God syllabus you know grading rules policies and then I found myself wondering why some students didn't come back for day two I mean right so I threw that all out now day one is about relationship building I get students talking to each other not about high fear topics about low fear stuff you know like for example was your favorite restaurant and you know if you could wake up with any superpower what would you want and why because once you get them talking about low fear stuff it's so much easier to transition to the high fear stuff you know where they're asking hard questions taking risks and giving authentic feedback interestingly Google discovered the same thing they spent five years and twenty million dollars trying to perfect the perfect team Charles Duhigg has done some fabulous reporting on it and their methodology was to analyze the personal data of their employees and nobody is better at finding patterns and big data than Google and what they discovered mattered is not the stuff you would think the number one thing that determined a team success regardless of what the team did is psychological safety is this and that makes sense because these are fundamental human needs so now at Google according to Duhigg when they have a meeting they don't just launch right into the issue at hand they spend a few minutes relationship building you know for example if folks might share a risk they took this week so what do these have in common every year people die in avalanches people I've known I had a sobering close call myself and it's really interesting we used to think of avalanches as a physics problem why did the snow slide down the mountain now we think of avalanches it's a group dynamics problem how did a group of people incorrectly assess the risk and make bad choices because it turns out in most Avalanche accidents there's several common behavioral patterns and a researchers call one of those patterns the expert halo if you perceive that somebody in your group is an experts and knows more than you you're much more likely to not ask questions to not express your thoughts you hold back just like these silent students looks different feels the same so the question is what do we do to combat the expert halo how do we get folks to speak up psychologists have an answer for us and it comes out of research called the Asch conformity experiment and in the experiment they show a group of people a slide similar to this and they ask them which line on the right is the same length as the line on the left seems simple right but here's the trick everybody in the group are paid actors except for one there's only one test subject and these actors they lie the first actor says oh yeah number two is the same length as a line on the left and the next actor goes oh yeah line two in down line two two two two until they get to the test subject and then what the question is what will the test subjects say the conclusion 32 percent of test subjects will conform and say number two as well stop and think about that 1/3 of people will publicly state something that is obviously blatantly not true why you guessed it fear so interestingly they've done variations on the test and in one of those variations one of the actors just one will tell the truth and in that case they found that almost all the test subjects will say that you have the courage to say the truth as well conformity drops to almost zero so here's what we need to do have the courage to speak your truth when you do you give others the courage and permission to do the same they will follow your lead conformity drops to almost zero and that responsibility lies on all of us to be that first person in leaders you have an especially important role here because your choices either create that culture of fear think Volkswagen or that culture of psychological safety and openness so when that first person speaks up or ask that question don't punish them because if you do there won't be a second person instead celebrate that person that brave soul you know Thank You Johnny I'm so glad you asked that question final tool it seems so simple but the one of the most toxic things to group performance is to silence the voice of its members and it happened so unconsciously nobody intends for the expert halo nobody intends for the Asch conformity effect nobody intends for the natural dominance of extroverts but we've all been there hearing Jonny talk a lot go on and on and on so we need to be incredibly intentional here and one of the ways to do this is called conversational turn taking some folks at outrebound use a talking stick you know I in class debates often use a duct tape ball of power you know turns out the Supreme Court does the same thing they believe in conversational turn-taking I don't know if they use a prop but according to Justice Stephen Breyer when they adjourned behind closed doors to deliberate a case they have a rule nobody speaks twice until everyone has spoken once and if that helps the Supreme Court decide the most controversial legal issues of our day I guarantee it will help it your meeting too so stepping back it's often said that fear is a powerful motivator but if we stop and think about it that's a word of caution because what fear motivates is holding back and poor team performance you know so we need to be intentional about creating psychological safety you know we need to you know because our default mode is fear of judgment and Punishment our default mode is holding back in conformity our default mode is a group being dominated by a few experts or extroverts our senior members that gap between what we know and what we do we need to close it personally I'm forever grateful for my time without rebound it showed me how powerfully fear holds teams back holds us back holds me back and because of the teams I've found and cultivated my life has been filled and blessed with these amazing experiences you know climbing Denali creating transformational experiences for students and outfitting Buddhist monasteries in Tibet with solar empower I invite you to do the same because through your power to choose which groups you belong to and influence how those groups are function you can create any life you want the one that feels right to you thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 43,332

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Social Science, Fear, Leadership, Psychology

Id: hf1r7Yum0Z4

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Mon May 21 2018