What to Do When Personality Differences Hinder Teamwork

Dear Crucial Skills,

In my experience, it is easier to work on teams with people who are alike. When people are really different, it seems like there is much more friction on the team. I am now a manager of a team that has a lot of different types of people, and I don’t know how I can create a cohesive, well-running team with this group. It seems like it might be easier to change out some of the team members, but that doesn’t seem right or fair. How can I get everyone to work well together?

Signed,
Dilemma of Differences

Dear Dilemma,

It can be hard to interact with and meaningfully connect with someone who is different from us. The more we differ, the further apart we are, the harder it is to build a bridge. Why? Because most of our relationship skills are grounded in finding commonalities. When those commonalities are subtle or scarce, we struggle to connect.

So, if difference is hard and commonality is easy, why choose hard over easy? There are several good reasons, but here are two:

Values: We choose diversity because we believe in human dignity and equality. You hint at this yourself when you mention that it doesn’t seem right to let someone go or transfer them simply because they are different. You are right. It isn’t right.
Results: We choose difference because there is good research that shows that when a team brings different perspectives, experiences, and approaches together with respect and care, we get better results than we would from a homogeneous team.

Of course, there is a major qualification on that last statement that is also at the heart of your question – how the diverse team comes together is crucial to tapping into the power of our differences.

Amy Edmonson and a legion of other scholars have convincingly shown that the key ingredient for a team coming together well is psychological safety—not liking, not socializing, not commonality (although all those factors can help create psychological safety).

As Dr. Edmonson defines it, psychological safety is “the belief that work environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” It is “the experience of being able to speak up with relative ideas, questions, or concerns. It is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able—even obligated—to be candid.” Our work over the last 30 years has shown us that teams with high psychological safety get better ideas on the table, creating a smarter group and better solutions.

One of the interesting characteristics of psychological safety is that it is inherently a team dynamic. It doesn’t exist in any meaningful way at the individual or organizational level. It lives and breathes (and dies) at the team level.

So, if you want your team to work together well and you accept that psychological safety is the key, how do you build it? Here are three things to do to get started.

Measure

When interviewing Dr. Don Berwick, former CMS Administrator and CEO of IHI, for Crucial Influence, he taught us that “a measure is the shadow of your heart.” If we sincerely care about something and want to change it, we will measure it. So, start by assessing where your team is in terms of their level of psychological safety and then decide on what would be a reasonable level of improvement. Surveys are an effective way to assess how psychologically safe people feel, and I have included some questions you could use at the end of this article.

Continue to measure through regular pulse surveys. This is not a one-and-done. You need to evaluate whether what you are doing is increasing psychological safety (in which case, keep doing it!) or not (in which case, you need to try something else).

Choose a Generous View

At the very heart of psychological safety is the belief that I won’t be judged negatively for being me. Unsurprisingly, it is the negative judgments we make about one another that, more than almost anything else, destroy psychological safety.

To create psychological safety, we need to consciously and consistently choose a more generous view of others. This isn’t an exercise in imagination or a rationalization of bad behavior. I am not advising we simply pretend that everyone and everything is great. Rather, I am suggesting that if we can suspend judgement and replace it with curiosity, we will be better able to hold space for the universal contradiction that good people do bad (or even just annoying) things.

At Crucial Learning, we use insights from the Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) delivered through the Crucial Teams course to help people choose to see one another more generously. The SDI provides a framework to help team members look beyond people’s behavior and see how three primary motives (performance, people and process) are driving that behavior. When we see in this way, it’s easier to choose a generous view because people often have a rational motive even if their behavior is frustrating for us.

Maintain Good Intent

In our book Crucial Conversations, we make this audacious claim: people never become defensive about what you are saying; they become defensive because of why they think you are saying it.

Said another way, psychological safety is neither created nor destroyed by the content of our conversations. It is entirely dependent upon the perception of intent in the conversation.

If you want to create safety in a conversation, a relationship, or a team, start by cultivating good intent and then sharing it. Sharing your good intent out loud can have a powerful positive impact on those around you. It lets them know what your motives and intentions are. It also helps you stay accountable to and connected with that good intent even when issues pop up that might otherwise irritate or frustrate you.

Your team may never become “besties.” But that shouldn’t be your goal. Solid friendships don’t always equal high performance; people may love being on a low performing team with high comradery. Building a high-performing team that learns together, achieves results, and respects one another is a much more worthy goal and one that is within reach of all teams.

Good luck,
Emily

Questions you can use to measure psychological safety:

If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you. (R)
Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
People on this team sometimes reject others for being different. (R)
It is safe to take a risk on this team.
It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help. (R)
No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

*Use a seven point Likert scale. Reverse scores for the three items noted (R).
*Credit: Amy Edmondsen, The Fearless Organization