(Forbes) -- Collaborative work is the new normal.
The amount of time we spend teaming has increased by 50% and takes up approximately 80% of our time on the job according to a recent Microsoft study.
So, it’s important that we get it right. In earlier posts, we’ve introduced a model for high-performing teams that focus on head and heart and explored the importance of trust in driving team performance.
This one sheds light on a related but distinct element of the model: social cohesion, which means authentic, caring relationships shared between team members.
If the idea of building emotional bonds with your colleagues sounds a little mushy to you, you’re not alone.
However, the strength of the connection between social cohesion and team performance is backed up both by both real-world experience and research.
Stories + Science: Why Social Cohesion Matters
James Somer’s The Friendship that Made Google Huge cites the relationship between Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemewat -- the engineers responsible for developing much of Google’s core software -- as a critical factor contributing to the organization’s exponential growth. Dean and Ghemewat coded together in real time, an approach known as pair programming.
By all counts, Dean’s creativity perfectly complemented Ghanewat’s focus on sustainability, resulting in blockbuster innovation that was built to scale. Less well known was the duo’s almost brotherly closeness.
Dean’s family referred to Ghanewat as “Uncle Sanjay” and he joined them for dinner every Friday night.
Decades of experience collaborating with one another combined with their blurring of professional and personal lines resulted in a kind of mind-meld.
Despite differences in strengths, personality, and style, Dean and Ghanewat brought out the best in one another, making work more self-satisfying, efficient and productive.
Human beings are inherently social.
We crave intimacy with the people we like and suffer loneliness and are more susceptible to illness when isolated from friends and loved ones.
Despite this, many professionals approach getting too close with colleagues skeptically.
- Won’t it be harder to share critical feedback?
- Couldn’t friendships at work result in perceptions of favoritism?
- Might informal relationships distract us from getting work done?
While these questions are valid, the benefits of strong social cohesion between teammates far outweigh any risks. One of the most controversial items on Gallup’s widely used employee engagement survey is, “Do you have a best friend at work?”
According to Gallup, “Those who [have a best friend at work] are seven times as likely to be engaged in their jobs, are better at engaging customers, produce higher quality work, have higher well-being and are less likely to get injured on the job.”
James Coan, a neuroscientist from the University of Virginia, suggests that our brains rely on relationships to steer our cognitive energy and focus our attention on shared goals -- critical elements of team success.
According to Coan, we are at least in part hardwired to cooperate.
Friends help us defend ourselves and are therefore inherently linked to survival. So, attempting to maintain a level of distance from our colleagues is actually fighting against our natural impulses.
Going deeper into the science, engaging with people with whom we share an emotional connection is associated with the release of oxytocin, which is informally referred to as “the love hormone” given its connection to empathy, generosity and pair bonding.
When we feel isolated our brains release stress hormones like cortisol, acerbating social inhibitions and disrupting the kind of free flow of ideas and psychological safety necessary for teams to perform at their highest levels.
Ironically, as we have continued to learn more about the interrelatedness of social cohesion and team performance, the general mood about investing in team and relationship building at work has soured.
Critics of traditionally organized experiences featuring trust fall, ropes courses or rounds of golf characterize them as expensive and disconnected from business results.
Beyond their somewhat dubious ROI, physical activities like these have the potential to make those who are less athletic, less fit, or older feel left out.
Undoubtedly, not all efforts to facilitate bonding between team members are effective, but there are practices that are more likely to result in professional friendships that are good for our mental health and for the success of our teams and organizations.
How to Build More Authentic Connections Between Team Members
Full disclaimer: building more authentic, caring relationships on your team is challenging work that will make many people uncomfortable -- and for good reason.
It demands a level of introspection and emotional transparency that most of us are not used to practicing, particularly at work.
However, if you are willing to push outside your comfort zone, there are two high-level approaches to cultivating social cohesion among team members.
- Structured experiences are intentional, designed interventions that strengthen authentic connections. These include off-sites or retreats, facilitated dialogue about team dynamics, and peer-to-peer coaching programs, among many others.
- Unstructured experiences are informal, unplanned opportunities to build meaningful relationships. Some examples are team lunches, coffee dates and impromptu “watercooler” conversations shared throughout the day.
Unstructured and structured experiences are not mutually exclusive, but rather fall along a continuum. In other words, some of the greatest relationship-building exercises combine both.
It’s important to recognize that neither approach is sufficient on its own.
Great leaders recognize the importance of strong bonds shared between team members and strike the right balance of facilitating planned, organic, and “in-between” experiences.
The key to getting the most value out of structured relationship building exercises is to create the context for people to expose their inner selves and vulnerabilities to one another.
In a study about how to quickly create what he calls “interpersonal closeness”, psychologist Arthur Aron invited pairs of strangers to ask one another a series of 36 increasingly personal questions and then rate the degree of intimacy they felt for one another.
Compared to those who shared small talk, the people who discussed Aron’s questions reported feeling a significantly greater degree of closeness to their partners.
We used a variation of Aron’s questions to guide conversations between our colleagues and they too perceived a new level of connection to the people they worked with -- some for many years.
If you accept that the intent of structured team building exercises should be to help people build a deeper level of mutual understanding that you’ll never approach their design the same way. Instead of asking, “What would be something fun for us to do together?” you’ll start asking questions like:
- How can I help my team to share our hopes and dreams with one another?
- How might I facilitate a conversation about our greatest fears or challenges?
- How could I initiate a dialogue about the things in life that we cherish most?
Note that your role as a team leader is not to play therapist, but rather to help your team to connect with one another as human beings.
Nor is your job to coax those who are inherently more private people to divulge their darkest secrets. Meet people where they are. Encourage them to push the edge of what is comfortable in terms of sharing their whole selves with their colleagues without going over it.
And make it clear that it is perfectly acceptable to demur from total personal transparency -- no one should feel like they have to be an open book to be a valued member of your team.
While unstructured experiences are by nature unplanned, leaders still have a role to play in setting them up for success.
For example, consider the design of office spaces like WeWork, whose comfortable, central common spaces are specifically oriented around encouraging connectivity among community members.
Lighter interactions don’t often result in relationship breakthroughs, but they do serve an important purpose by helping colleagues to develop a common language, identify shared interests and break up the intensity of the workday.
Not all people have the power to reshape office designs, but anyone can take the time to chat with a colleague about their weekend adventures, invite team members for drinks or take a walk around the block in between meetings.
One client we worked with, whose team had recently grown exponentially, invited interested colleagues to be paired with one another for coffee dates. While the matching was organized, the rest was up to the individuals to figure out.
The key to making unstructured experiences work is for leaders to model the kind of behavior they want to see.
Show that spending time engaging with colleagues is important and valued -- even when you’re not talking about “the work.”
As our workplaces grow increasingly collaborative and their success more intertwined with team effectiveness, how are you building the social cohesion necessary for your team to thrive?
To what extent are you blending planned and organic experiences to support strong, trusting relationships? Creating the kind of family-like intimacy the Google programmers Dean and Ghemawat enjoyed may be ambitious.
However, there is room for all of us to grow closer, more open and more emotionally invested in our teammates to support our collective success.
