Teamwork Masterclass - Extended Versionorganisationalmisbehaviourists.com/images/Masterclasses/...Mastering skills that build Psychological Safety and drive stellar Team Performance

Mastering skills that build Psychological Safety and drive stellar Team Performance

Teamwork Masterclass

Photo: Beyond MagazineClaydon & Dobbin // Organisational Misbehaviourists

“Psychological Safety is by far and away the most important team dynamic. It underpins everything else.”

Claydon & Dobbin // Organisational Misbehaviourists

Good teamwork is the heart of successful business. But what is a good team? Many teams are riven by dysfunctionality, poor leadership, groupthink, and in-fighting. Research across 180 teams and 37,000 employees at Google has identified the core component of high-performance teams — psychological safety. This is a collaborative, customer-focused and civil environment in which creativity, critical thought and cognitive flexibility can flourish.

But drop the smallest amount of toxicity into the team and everything can quickly become poisonous and low-performance. Informed by years of cutting-edge management research and decades of practical experience in organisational transformation, this Masterclass explains how to deliver a high-performance, psychologically safe environment and how to quickly identify and eliminate the various toxic processes, behaviours and people that destroy the core of a great organisation.

Result of Google’s two year study of 180 teams across 37,000 employees into what makes a “dream team”

Psychological Safety in teams is built through the everyday practices and behaviours of its members.Our Masterclass takes a “soil and seed” approach. In humans, some people who get cancer see it spread so fast that saving them is almost impossible. For others, the cancer’s spread is slow and easily treatable. The nature of the “soil” or the physiology of the body enables or disables the speed at which the poison spreads.

So it is for organisations. In some companies, toxic behaviours spread rapidly, infecting the company from top to bottom, with predictably terrible

bottom-line results or social reputation costs. In others, they are isolated and cut away quickly and relatively painlessly. Our Masterclass helps you develop a soil that disables the spread of toxicity and find ways to eliminate its poison at the source.

We use storytelling, videos, group exercises and a heavy dose of humour to deliver knowledge and skills that participants will remember and be able to apply for the rest of their lives.


TWO DAY PROGRAM


• Psychological Safety is not for Wimps

• Be that Kind of person

• Everyday Civility

• Dependable Candour

• Diagnosing Toxicity

• Dicks & Dickheads

• Confronting Terrorism

Psychological Safety is not for Wimps How psychological safety drives high performance teams and why it is absolutely not about Kumbaya circles.

Fear, anxiety, a desire to belong and to find purpose — these are central characteristics of the modern human. At work, this manifests through weak impression management (Wimp). People do not want to appear ignorant, so they ask no questions; don’t want to appear incompetent, so they admit no mistakes; don’t want to appear intrusive, so they offer no ideas; don’t want to appear negative, so they don’t challenge the status quo.

These inactions cause performance and productivity problems. Errors and mistakes escalate into disaster, with significant bottom

line and social reputation impacts. Pent up fear and frustration results in toxicity, bullying and mental anguish at work and at home. Confronting this is tough but necessary. People must be psychologically safe to produce the creativity, critical thought and cognitive flexibility necessary to high performing teams.

In this opening session, we unpack the research and data informing psychological safety for high performance teamwork in an accessible and entertaining manner.


Be that Kind of Person An exploration into the courageous heart of kindness.

Most companies have diversity programmes. They focus on differences, which, ironically, often cause division rather than collaborative acceptance. We take a different approach. Drawing from Brene Brown’s world-leading research on courage and vulnerability, we examine what makes us human. We all share the same fears and worries about belonging and purpose. We just have different tactics towards achieving them.

Being creative, critical and cognitively flexible takes great courage. Helping others to do the same takes great kindness. By examining what it means to be kind to yourself and kind to others in the pursuit of courage, this interactive session opens the door to psychological safety.


Everyday Civility What ought civility look like in your organisation?

Much influential popular thought suggests that a great culture is the answer to all behavioural problems. That all bullying and toxicity will dissolve once it is in place. But is it? Human cultures have never been kind to creativity, critical thought and cognitive flexibility. Those who challenge its norms are ostracised and exiled — the scapegoats for all the culture’s problems.

A civilisation, in contrast, enables diversity and its associated benefits through civil rules. Different perspectives coexist side-by-side in harmonious celebration of a greater purpose. But what might that look like in your organisation? In this session, we examine and identify a set of civil rules to help govern psychologically safe behaviours.


Dependable Candour Good teamwork depends on radical candour. Are you up for it?

Kindness and civility are all well and good. A bit Kumbaya, though. In many workshops, the touchy-feely nature of such fluffy positivity clashes against hard-nosed business realities. And so they should. They are just the path leading to the environment we have to deliver. One of dependable, radical candour.

If you don’t understand, you must question. If you have made a mistake, you must admit it. If you have an idea, you must offer it. If the solution seems inadequate, you must critique it.

Drawing on the work of Ray Dalio and Adam Grant, this session injects the complex problems of modern teamwork back into the Masterclass and examines how a psychologically safe environment produces a wealth of useful potential solutions.


Dicks & Dickheads A review of 2,500 years of behavioural research, in language that we can all understand.

Why, despite all our best intentions, do toxic people appear and stupid decisions get made? This is one of the oldest questions in human history, debated from the civil forum in Socratic Athens to the neuroscientific research labs of the 21st Century. But it is often accompanied by glassy-eyed stares. Alazons and eirons, ethicism and authenticity, EQ and SQ, the limbic system, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex — they hinder rather than help understanding.

We do the opposite. By stripping back discussions to commonplace language — dickish behaviours (from fiddling with your phone during a meeting to signify boredom to full-blown pyschopathy) and dickheadedness (enforcing a stupid decision through aggressive behaviours to save face) — we illustrate how toxic behaviours have accompanied human organisation throughout history and why they continue to require constant attention in today’s organisations.


Diagnosing Toxicity A brief introduction to Narcissism, Machiavellianism, Sadism, Psychopathy and other interesting personality types.

Are you worried you might be a dick or a dickhead? Don’t be. We all have narcissistic, Machiavellian, and psychopathic traits. Without them, we wouldn’t be human. We require them to survive and thrive in our everyday working world. The key is managing them so they don’t become dysfunctional.

Once you hear about these Dark Triad traits, you’ll tend to look outwards to label people who possess them instead of evaluating your own performance in context.

In this session, we examine how we cope with these dark traits through telling heroic stories about our actions. We look at why we must become reflective to prevent these stories from delivering dysfunction and injecting toxicity into the kind and civil candour of the high performing team.


Confronting Terrorism What happens when “organisational terrorism” arrises? It needs to be dealt with. Urgently!

Despite all the above knowledge, your organisation is still vulnerable to the lone “terrorist”, who can sow seeds of discourse through poisonous toxicity. You have created a soil that prevents it spreading quickly, but you’ll still need to cut out the cancerous growth as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Our last session provides you with a set of tools to identify such people and prevent them from causing chaos.


30 years leading technology-driven transformation. Entrepreneur. Social Ecologist. MBA Mentor. “We are living in a time of unprecedented change and technological innovation. Organisations that fail to adapt will die. In times of great uncertainty, agility and collaboration are essential. Mastering collaboration is the single most important job to be done. It simply can’t wait.”

John DobbinDr. Richard Claydon

Globally recognised thought leader on modern organisational life and how

original thought emerges in relentlessly changing, highly uncertain and often

toxic environments. “Growth of knowledge expands the field of

ignorance, so with each step towards the horizon new unknown lands

appear. We know the journey has no clear destination — and yet we

persevere in the travel.”

The Organisational Misbehaviourists

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Hochschild, A. R. (2003). The managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley, Calif. ; London, University of California Press. Kunda, G. (2006). Engineering culture: control and commitment in a high-tech corporation. Philadelphia, Pa., Temple University Press Lasch, C. (1978). The culture of narcissism : American life in an age of diminishing expectations. New York, Norton. March, J. G. (1976). "The technology of foolishness." Ambiguity and choice in organizations 69: 81.March, J. G. (2006). "Rationality, foolishness, and adaptive intelligence." Strategic Management Journal 27(3): 201-214. Morgan, G. (1993). Imaginization: The art of creative management, Sage Newbury Park, CA. O'Reilly, C. A. and J. A. Chatman (1996). "Culture as Social Control: Corporations, Cults, and Commitment." Research in Organizational Behaviour 18: 157-200. Pfeffer, J. (2015). Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time. Harper Business Popper, K. R. (1966). The Open society and its enemies. (Fifth edition, revised.). London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ronson, J. (2012). The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. New York. Penguin. Sennett, R. (1998). "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New capitalism." Sloterdijk, P. (1988). Critique of cynical reason. London, Verso. Sue, M. P. (2007). Toxic people: decontaminate difficult people at work without using weapons or duct tape. John Wiley & Sons. Willmott, H. (1993). "Strength is Ignorance, Slavery is Freedom: Managing Culture in Modern Organizations." Journal of Management Studies 30: 515-552. Zyglidopoulos, S. C., P. J. Fleming, et al. (2009). "Rationalization, overcompensation and the escalation of corruption in organizations." Journal of business ethics 84(1): 65-73.


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Teamwork Masterclass - Extended Versionorganisationalmisbehaviourists.com/images/Masterclasses/...Mastering skills that build Psychological Safety and drive stellar Team Performance