Closing Keynote: From Solo to Symphony: Building High-Performance Advocacy Teams

This collaborative team building session will be led by Mary Crannell, Founder and President of Idea Sciences and adjunct professor at George Washington University, where she teaches courses on Cultural Aspects of Global Advocacy and Principled Political Leadership. Mary specializes in mapping strategy, leveraging talent, and transforming organizational culture. In this session, we will break the code on cultivating creative, innovative, and high-performing teams in our current work climate.

Notes:

• Hiring amazing solo talent doesn’t lead to success – you need to move the solo talent to a symphony by gelling your teams for success 

• In a show of hands, no one in the room works with a fully in-person organization or team 
• Goal of the presentation: to help you leverage your advocate teams 
• Elements of a high-performing team 
  • Activity: Please describe a high-performing team with one word
    • Efficient 
    • Collaborative
    • Trust
    • Responsive
    • Respect
    • Communicators
    • Empathetic 
    • Supportive
    • Complementary 
    • Clarity of Purpose
    • Competence
  • Effective Google teams have five dynamics or elements for a high-performing team 

• Psychological safety
  • This is critical and the most important element
  • Team psychological safety means there’s an understood shared belief that the team is for interpersonal risk-taking and that team members are confident that it is safe to be vulnerable, admit mistakes and raise unpopular views
  • How do we encourage our teams to take risks and foster psychological safety with our teams? 
  • If teams aren’t psychologically safe, then you are sub-optimizing the team’s abilities 
  • Why does it matter?
    • Accelerated learning
    • Fosters creativity
    • Improves efficiency 
    • Creates conditions for teams and individuals to grow
    • Nurtures innovation 
  • Example of what can go wrong when an environment isn’t psychologically safe: by evaluating the black box transcript of an Air France flight, the two young co-pilots didn’t have a psychologically safe environment to wake their captain and ask for help when things turned bad 
  • How to assess psychological safety in your organization: 
    • 1. If I make a mistake in this team, it is held against me.
    • 2. Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
    • 3. It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
    • 4. It is safe to take a risk in this team.
    • 5. People in this team reject others for being different.
    • 6. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.
    • 7. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
• Dependability 
• Structure and clarity
• Meaning
• Impact 

• Generate a healthy failure culture
  • What do you hear in meetings? 

• ***Healthy failure culture

• When people say all is well, ask a follow-up question to encourage more sharing
• Dissent is immensely important

• Pick-up teams 
  • Paris Olympics 2024
    • These are the best basketball players in the world, but they haven’t played together before and they aren’t the best team 
  • Airline Crew
    • They all work with different teams all the time so it’s important to set an environment where people can gel quickly as a team 
  • U.S. Army
    • The U.S. Army has to be well-trained to meld quickly and easily into a pickup team in high-intensity situations 
  • Eurostar 2024
• Successful team ingredients (you need all three of the below to be successful)! – this is what a cell does, too!
  • Clarity of purpose
    • Have a clear, well-defined and aligned purpose 
  • Communication
    • Teams can’t have people going rogue – they need to clearly and comfortably communicate across the team to ensure they maintain their alignment 
  • Reinvention 
    • Reflect, learn, and adapt your strategies to keep moving and innovating 
• Team challenges
  • Team operating in silos
  • Leaders of different groups do not collaborate
  • Intergenerational differences
  • Team burnout
    • ⅔ of senior leaders at Deloitte were ready to leave due to burnout – and we don’t handle it as well in the U.S. 
    • Fun fact: they get a year of paid leave in Germany if employees are burnt out 
    • People are our best asset 
  • High turnover in the team 
  • Teams with related missions unwilling to collaborate and share information
    • Sharing information and collaborating is better for all!
  • Not assuming positive intent with your colleagues and coworkers 
  • Operating in small teams without a natural leader
    • How to maximize your small team 
      • Clarity of roles and responsibilities
      • Knowing when to help your teammates 
      • Established communication norms 
• What can organizations do?
  • They need to create and build aligned systems to support their employees
    • How aligned are our systems? How are we supporting our teammates?  
  • Develop leaders
    • Katie Ledecky has coaches even though she is the best to ever compete in her sport 
    • It’s not a cost, it’s an investment 
  • Uphold values
  • Declare and foster organizational culture 
    • We outwardly need to state who we are and what we do – it sets expectations for people right off the bat 
  • Support traditions and rituals 
  • Excommunicate talent that doesn’t align with your values
    • It’s also important to outline what you say no to and what you’re not willing to accept
• What can leaders do?
  • Listen attentively
  • Know team members 
  • Invite feedback 
    • AND make sure the organization learns about it, records it, and implements it 
  • Provide structure for learning from mistakes (for example, after action reviews)
  • Be vulnerable 
    • The more leaders expose vulnerability, the more willing others are to be vulnerable
• Know your team members: User Care Manual
  • Conditions I like to work in 
  • Times/hours I like to work 
  • Best ways to communicate with me
  • The ways I like to receive feedback, and the feedback I usually find helpful
  • Things I need (from my team, from the workplace, from my environment, etc.)
  • How I learn best
  • Things I struggle with 
    • This will showcase how high the psychological safety is within your organization
• What can you do?
  • Take a risk 
    • Be brave to say what others won’t, and be open to inviting others to speak 
  • Be vulnerable 
  • Play a different team role
  • Ask questions
  • Invite others to speak
  • Reflect 
• Book Recommendations
  • Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well by Amy Edmondson
  • Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure by Maggie Jackson 
  • Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono 
• Six Thinking Hats of Edward Debono
  • Six team roles for thinking 
    • Uncouple convergent and divergent thinking (it’s like putting your foot on the gas and the brakes at the same time
    • Blue organizes all the thinking – it takes the thoughts from the other 5 hats and puts them into a process 
    • The more we understand ourselves and our roles, the better we fit into our teams 
• TLDR:
  • A group of talented soloists does not mean the team will be optimal. Building an enduring high performing team takes leadership fostering psychological safety. Leaders, organizations and team members have a role to play to leverage the combined talents of a team to change the world.
• What are good questions to ask to identify if an individual will fit into your high-performing team and assess whether or not you’ll be a good cultural fit? How do you know if you’ll be a good fit in the organization?
  • How you fit: 
    • Watch how others are seen in the hierarchy 
    • How is the humor in the organization 
      • Humor that’s about the person rather than the situation says a lot about the organization 
    • Look at the benefits and the alignment of the benefits 
    • Do the HR people look hassled? 
    • Look for kindness, gentleness, and the willingness of people to speak up 
  • Questions to ask to identify a fit:
    • Tell me what it was like when you were 15 
    • What are you curious about?
      • What questions do you ask yourself?  
• How do you know people aren’t aligned with your values?
  • Sit them down and talk to them about it 
    • Say: this is what we do here and these are our values and you haven’t been fitting into them – here’s how we can fix it
• What do you do when you’re looking at your hats, and you have people who aren’t fitting into one of them? 
  • Point it out and align as a team to ensure that someone can step up and fill that spot 
• Do you have recommendations for speed-running cultural formation when you’ve been assigned a pick-up team? 
  • Bring the team to the clarity of purpose 
    • Reiterate it
  • Identify and outline the roles and responsibilities 
    • Make sure each team member knows their superpowers 
  • The worst mistake leaders make is thinking they’re starting with a clean slate 
    • Ask each team member how their personal mission aligns with the goals of the team 
  • No one wants to be on the losing team – it ripples throughout your life 
    • It’s worth the investment to build the culture and build the values/goals to alignment 
• Millennial’s values (such as work/life balance) don’t align with some older generations and now they’re taking on more and more leadership roles within organizations, how long do we have to wait until we start to swing those values within our teams?
  • Start making them happen now
  • It is swinging in the direction of increased work-life balance, and organizations are going to start focusing more on their talent and providing more guidance and outlines for benefiting their talent
  • On the flip side, from an older generational perspective, it’s most important to be able to have honest conversations and have your leadership team be empathetic 
    • Communication about individual values will help align your team’s overall goals 
• Team Operating Principles
  • How we will operate – how we will share information – how we will resolve conflict – how we will define success, how we will support one another
  • METRICS OF SUCCESS FOR THIS TEAM (SAMPLE FROM A TEAM)
    • Openness of this team to raise challenges
    • How well this team works together to share best practices
    • Degree of trust this team forms
    • How much we check out different perspectives and information with each other