Five Simple Practices to Build High Capacity Teams

Have you ever walked into a team meeting and immediately felt that something was wrong and you were somehow unsafe?

When this happens we normally do a mental check, “Do I have food in my teeth? Is my zipper down? Am I in the right meeting? Have I done something wrong?” Automatically our reptilian brain kicks in to insure our safety. We seek this safety in one of three ways that might look something like this:

• Fight – boldly monopolizing the conversation or defending our actions.
• Flight – looking for a way to hide or leave, either physically or mentally.
• Freeze – tacitly agreeing with the consensus of the group even when we might have better ideas.

How we show up depends on the context in which we find ourselves.

New scientific discoveries about the human brain reveal that our nervous systems are not self-contained. Rather, our brains energetically link with the people that are closest to us and can affect our mood, determine our health and actually change the neuro-pathways of our brains. This happens in our limbic brain, the seat of our emotional connections.

If we want to create high capacity teams we need to be aware of these automatic survival dynamics and intentionally build containers of belonging.  Creating a sense of safety helps us move from our fight, flight or freeze responses to the seat of our rational brain, the neo-cortex. This frontal lobe part of the brain allows us to strategically imagine and innovate. But we can only get there by acknowledging our need for connection and belonging.

Google conducted a comprehensive study in 2015 and discovered that people work best when they trust their coworkers and feel like they can take risks, depend on one another and understand the team’s goals. These are the key building blocks to a high capacity team.

The Google study found that “the safer team members feel with one another, the more likely they are to admit mistakes, to partner, and to take on new roles.” They found that the more psychological safe the members of the teams felt, the more effective the teams became. There was more retention and diversity of ideas that, in turn, led to more revenue.

How do we create working environments that allow us to build trusting high capacity teams?

The simple answer is that we need to sync our neuro-pathways through connecting on an emotional level with others.  This is not a one and done process that can be accomplished with a bowling night or happy hour. Rather, it is a daily practice of building healthy connections that literally help our brains to sync.

Some of these practices can include the following:

1. Break the ice by beginning every meeting with a simple question that everyone on your team can easily answer. Some ideas include,
   • What is your favorite… comfort food, book, movie, song? etc.
   • What is one thing on your bucket list and why?
   • What brings you joy?
2. Begin with one minute of guided breathing, pausing between the inhale and exhale. This calming practice stimulates the vagus nerve giving us greater access to our intuition and creativity.
3. Add simple movements like shoulder rolling or neck rotation with a breathing practice.
4. Use a BRAVING Inventory with your team and then go over each team member’s response. Brene Brown offers a printable worksheet to begin the process.
5. Create a process with your team to address tension or conflict that comes up when people work together and then commit to practice it.

These suggestions may seem silly or time consuming but they are all about creating a culture of relational trust that is key to high functioning teams. These simple practices in the long run will save you time and lots of potential miscommunication and drama within your teams.