Creating a Thriving Community When We’re Supposed to Be Distancing and Surviving
Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash
It’s hard to think about last week, much less last year at the moment. COVID-19 seems to have so holistically upended our operating assumptions about work, life, relationships, physical space, money, and health that it no longer seems strange to wonder whether any recent or ancient wisdom still applies. And yet, four weeks ago, we found ourselves wondering if we could apply the lessons from a cool study from 2015 to help move us beyond survival mode in these uncertain times.
Amidst the chaos and uncertainty unleashed by the coronavirus, we were facing the same stark choice so many people around the world were facing – the need to cancel. In early 2020, we’d organized a cohort of 15 friends and colleagues spanning a broad range of professions (real estate, law, data science, medicine, nursing, policy, history, education, advocacy for the homeless, nonprofit philanthropy) to be part of a professional development program, based on leadership workshops we’ve run together for the past decade. As it became clear that gathering our group in person was off the table and spending time on personal development was not a priority, we wondered whether we should do anything at all, or simply give these extraordinarily busy leaders back the time they would need to navigate COVID-19 and its attendant disruptions. Instead of cancelling, we decided to try something new, an uncertain attempt to apply the powerful lessons of one of our favorite culture studies (done by Google) to a very different and unprecedented context.
In 2012, Google set out to do what Google does best: use data to create better predictions and turn those predictions into an algorithm. In this case, it wasn’t about search results or ad placement, but rather about the conditions that drive optimal culture and performance in teams. The initiative, called Project Aristotle sought to use Google’s own data on team performance to predict what made teams at the company great. Despite working with one of the best data sets in history and some of the brightest researchers, none of the factors the company expected to find panned out. As Charles Duhigg wrote in the NYT article above,
“No matter how researchers arranged the data . . . it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference.”
What did emerge from Project Aristotle was evidence that three of the most human actions set the best teams apart:
Conversational turn-taking (i.e., inviting everyone to talk and giving everyone roughly equal air-time)
High “average social sensitivity” (i.e., intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions, and other nonverbal cues)
Vulnerability modeled by the team leader that produces a high degree of psychological safety (i.e., a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, as described here by Amy Edmonson )
For many years, we’ve taught courses and workshops that help teams and leaders apply the lessons of Project Aristotle to their typical work routines. The goal has been to support the creation and sustainability of high-performance teams in ways that promote effective work outcomes in parallel with human and organizational thriving. But would this work in a time of chaos, unpredictability, and international crisis? Could the 3 legs of the Project Aristotle stool bring nourishment and a sense of thriving beyond a traditional team structure? We decided to find out.
We invited participants in our leadership cohort to forgo in-person sessions, and instead lean in, learn from each other, and create a thriving community over Zoom, even while coronavirus was driving everyone into survival mode. We set-up once weekly Zoom meetings, invited people to come if they could, and laid a few ground rules designed to foster the factors Google uncovered:
If you join, be all in and attuned to others in the group – have your camera on and don’t multitask: either be on the call or off the call, doing what you need to do (enhance social sensitivity to how people are feeling and thinking)
Everyone is invited to speak whenever s/he is ready, and anyone can pass (conversational turn-taking)
Come prepared to share your own stories, struggles, and insights related to a weekly question or “leadership challenge” we posed to the group (vulnerability that enhances psychological safety)
Listen to your colleagues – the goal is to hear and share, not solve anything (vulnerability that enhances psychological safety + conversational turn-taking)
Our weekly questions include things like, “What have you done or seen other leaders do that you perceive as acts of positive leadership in the past week?”, “How have you or leaders you admire helped people find something to look forward to?”, and “During this particularly stressful time, how have you navigated self-regulating your responses to those around you in order to show up in the way that you intend?”
We have held four sessions thus far, with 75% or greater attendance each time, despite the fact that our gatherings are entirely optional and distinctly removed from the act/react cycle of daily work and life that feels more urgent and, perhaps, more relevant every hour of the week for this group. The dialog has been profound, and the comments we’ve heard about the value of the session content, the community (i.e., team) that is developing, and our collective ability to influence people’s daily work and life suggest this IS a way to create meaning, purpose, emotional connection, equipoise, and higher performance in a time of survival. Multiple participants have shared that the hour is the highlight of their week, has provided immediately relevant leadership tactics to use in their daily work, and has given them greater resilience as they face the challenges imparted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
So, what does this teach us? In a time when so many well-settled assumptions are being challenged, the findings of Project Aristotle seem as relevant as ever. Perhaps more important, the principles--taking turns to share and really listen in a group, paying close attention to how people feel, and creating a safe space for vulnerability with regularity--are helpful to our collective learning, adaptation, and ability to manage our individual and collective distress. Finally, doing this doesn’t have to wait until the dust settles or we anticipate space in our lives to gather for a pause, after the coronavirus passes. All of us can gather a group, pose a good question, and practice our own Project Aristotle.
Patrick Kneeland, MD
Vice President of Medical Affairs, Dispatch Health
Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine
Adjunct Associate Professor, Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine
Read G. Pierce, MD
Associate Professor of Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine
Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Colorado, Denver School of Business
Adjunct Associate Professor, Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine