Now let's talk about why team misalignments happen and why they can be so hard to notice, much less actually fix. Remember we said that your team culture is the rules you make that guide how your going to work together and solve problems. As we learned in the last module, when a group first forms, they start creating these rules whether they realize it or not. It's what we do as humans. The minute we have to collaborate with someone else, we start figuring out what they're like, how they'll respond to us, what they're good at and how they tend to communicate. The message of the last module was that high performing teams make these rules clear. The lesson of this module is that even if you do that you can still have a harmful team dynamic. Let me explain why. Once you make the rules and begin following them, over time they turn into habits. And habits are things we do all the time, without even thinking about why, or without noticing that we're doing them. Now think about the last time you got on an elevator by yourself, really think about every step of it. What happened when the doors opened? You probably walked in, hit the button for your floor, turned around to the front of the elevator, and either looked down, or looked up at the numbers. Now there are good reasons you took these steps. What if instead you had gone to the back of the elevator and faced the wall? What if you stood in front of someone else and stared at them? Everyone would think you are crazy, right? You would make them uncomfortable. But did you have to consider any of that when stepping into the elevator? Probably not, you knew exactly where to go and how to behave without even having to think about it. These rules get so ingrained that they become second nature. That brings us to the double edged sword of culture. It's a good thing that team culture moves to the back of our minds, because it makes our interactions more efficient. For example, if at our team meetings you begin by going over the agenda. I don't have to ask you at every meeting how we're going to start, because we've already established that routine. In this way, culture helps us work together seamlessly without having to constantly renegotiate the rules every time we interact. The problem is that people in organizations are dynamic, and they're constantly changing. The rules that may have made sense for our team when we first created them might not be helpful anymore, and in fact, they could hurt. But we don't notice this because we stop thinking about the rules over time. Think back to the financial services company I talked about in the first module when we were learning about rules. The leadership team asked for my help, because they had found that things that made them successful as a company with less than 50 people wouldn't work in the company with hundreds of employees. It wasn't that they have been bad leaders all along, but the informal style and the fluid roles that worked well for a small company had to change for a large company. It took a lot of exploration to figure out exactly what parts of their culture were causing these problems, it was hard for them to see. This blindness to our team's bad habit happens for two reasons. First, it's hard to have self awareness about our own tendencies and this is wired into us. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes how our brain engage in two types of thinking, what he calls system one and system two. System one thinking is fast and reactive. In the elevator example from earlier, this is the part of you that just walks through the doors hits the button and faces forward without even considering it. System two thinking is slower and it's more reflective, when I was talking through these rules this is the part of you that might have wondered, why do we all act the same way on elevators? System two thinking is inefficient, but it's necessary for us to occasionally observe our own behavior, and think about whether we're acting in ways that hurt the team. Like the construction company CEO I told you about, who said to his team that they had bad ideas. Unfortunately, we live in an age where we're bombarded by information from all sides. We have iPhones and email apps that are constantly demanding our attention, distracting us, and forcing us more into reactive system one thinking. This makes it harder to reflect and harder to be aware of our own habits. It also turns out that we are way over-confident at our ability to understand other people, so we don't have great situational awareness by default. A group of psychologist demonstrated this with a really insightful study that was similar to the newlywed game from TV. They recruited couples in long term relationships as subjects and had them separately answer a questionnaire. The questionnaire had them rate their attitudes toward a number of statements about personal traits, like I'm good at making new friends, or I prefer to spend the evening at home with a great book. They then had the couples guess each other's responses. Now the good news is they were right a good amount of the time, about twice as often as they would have been right about a random stranger. The bad news is they thought they would be right almost all of the time, they were way over-confident about how well they understood their partner. And this tends to be true in our working relationships as well, we think we understand other people's motivations and beliefs way better than we actually do, so we don't try. And then we get confused when a colleague acts differently then we think they should, this causes all kinds of misalignments on teams. To sum up, the same thing that makes culture beneficial for teams is also the source of problems, that it becomes second nature. Unless we really work at it we tend to not have very much self awareness or situational awareness. Because of this we don't notice when our team culture no longer works and some of the rules need to change. Next, we'll look at some of the specific types of misalignments that come up on teams, so you can start paying attention and building greater awareness.
