One of the critical elements of creating functional teams is building teams that work well and happily together. I was once given a test of a happy engineering team: “If you buy them pizza in the evening, will they stick around and socialize together, or will they race out the door as quickly as possible?”
I have some quibbles with that. Employees with obligations that take them out of the office at a strict time every day are no more or less engaged than those who are willing to stand around and chat. The larger point, however, is still a good one. Most gelled teams have a sense of camaraderie that makes them joke together, get coffee, share lunch, and feel friendly toward one another. They may have obligations they respect, and passions outside of work, but they don’t view their team as something they’re eager to escape every day.
The real goal here is psychological safety — that is, a team whose members are willing to take risks and make mistakes in front of one another. This is the underpinning of a successful team. The work of gelling a team begins by creating the friendliness that leads to psychological safety. You can encourage this by taking the time to get to know people as human beings and asking them about their extracurricular lives and interests. Let them share what they feel comfortable sharing. Ask how their child’s birthday party went, how their ski trip was, how their marathon training is going. This is more than empty small talk; it fosters relatedness, the sense of people as individuals and not just anonymous cogs.
Beyond you personally cultivating relatedness, you want your teams to have their own relatedness among themselves. When companies talk about hiring for “culture fit,” they often mean they want to hire people they can be friendly with. While this can have some unwanted consequences, such as discrimination, it comes from a wise place. Teams that are friendly are happier, gel faster, and tend to produce better results. I mean, do you really want to go to work every day with a bunch of people you hate?
This is why those who undermine team cohesion are so problematic. They almost always behave in a way that makes it hard for the rest of the team to feel safe around them. We refer to these employees as “toxic” because they tend to make everyone who comes into contact with them less effective. Dealing with them quickly is an important part of managing well.