Improve your team by talking about fears and feelings
Randall Smith | November 2022
This is an excerpt from Breadth and Depth, the PowerLabs newsletter. Sign up below to get the next edition in your inbox.
The research professor, author, and podcast host Brené Brown says in Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts,
Leaders must either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behavior.
I agree and think it's not just something leaders must do. Teams also need to invest time in discussing fears and feelings.
One of my favorite methods of doing this is a project pre-mortem.
When someone dies, there might be a post-mortem or autopsy to determine the cause. A pre-mortem is about looking forward and envisioning what might cause a project to fail and identifying actions to reduce the risk of failure.
The basic process is to:
Review the project plan
Tell the participants that you have a crystal ball and that the project was a disaster—a fiasco so bad they are embarrassed to say they were part of the project.
Ask the team members to reflect and jot down the causes of the failure.
Put participants in breakouts of two or three people to discuss the causes of failure and identify additional causes.
Have each team member share a cause of failure, with the team leader going first to set an example of being candid. Do one or two rounds with everyone contributing one idea and then open the floor for anyone to add additional ideas.
Ask team members to reflect and jot down ideas on potential actions they and the team can take to reduce the risk of failure. It's important to identify both personal actions and the actions for the team as a whole.
Put participants in breakouts of two or three people to discuss ways to reduce the risk of failure and identify actions for the team and for them personally to take.
Repeat step 5 with each person sharing one idea in a round, conduct a second round, and then open the floor for additional ideas.
Prioritize the list with dot voting to identify 2-3 things the team must do.
Discuss the next steps.
This can be done in as little as 30 minutes for a small team that has run pre-mortems before. I usually schedule 90 minutes for a pre-mortem with one hour for steps 1-9 and 30 minutes to discuss the next steps and put tasks in the team's project management software.
If the project team is eight people or greater, I often use the 1-2-4-all discussion format instead of pairs or trios because it can equalize participation and give people an opportunity to try out their ideas with others. 1-2-4-all is particularly helpful when there's a wide difference of rank in the room.
Get detailed instructions on running a project pre-mortem.
Team members often feel relieved at the end of a pre-mortem because they realize they aren't the only person with doubts and fears about the work ahead and have action steps to reduce the risk of failure.
Teams that set aside time for pre-mortems to discuss fears and feelings strengthen trust, head off relationship conflict, increase learning and improve project outcomes.
Another benefit of conducting a pre-mortem is that it increases psychological safety, facilitating greater team learning and performance. Psychological safety is the belief a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Psychological safety consists of taken-for-granted beliefs about how others will respond when one puts oneself on the line, such as by asking a question, seeking feedback, reporting a mistake, or proposing a new idea. Teams with high psychological safety are likelier to learn, adapt, and achieve remarkable outcomes, especially in complex, uncertain, and interdependent environments.
If you want to learn more practices that improve team performance — especially teams of members or activists, sign up for the We're a Nerdy Movement Study Group. It's a six-week program for organizers that want to use evidence-based approaches to build high-participation, high-commitment, people-powered organizations. If you join the study group, you'll learn:
how to effectively recruit and retain members or volunteers,
how to ensure that teams produce excellent work and get stronger over time,
how to ensure that teams learn and adapt in complex, uncertain, and interdependent environments,
how to increase people's commitment, leadership capacity, and ability to act in the face of uncertainty, and
other practices that develop leaders and build the power of your organization.
If you'd like support for improving a team or how your organization approaches teamwork, get in touch. We're booking coaching clients now for projects. More info on our approach to improving team performance is here. We work with volunteer teams, staff teams and senior leadership teams.
This webinar recording is an example of how we helped Sunrise improve the eight volunteer teams that ran one of the largest youth-led voter contact programs in the 2020 elections.