Kim Mills: Very few people do their jobs entirely on their own. For most of us, our work is enmeshed with other people’s work and doing our job well often means being part of a well-functioning team. The stakes of teamwork can be high, especially in workplaces where errors have dire consequences, such as emergency rooms or air traffic control towers. In those settings, a breakdown in teamwork can be the difference between life and death.
Over the past decades, psychologists’ research has helped organizations from hospitals to military units to airlines develop better functioning and more effective teams.
So what does good teamwork look like? What are the key ingredients of a highly effective team versus one that’s a dysfunctional mess? And what does good team training include? Do you have to like your coworkers to function as an effective team? Is it possible to make any team work together? Also, what are the differences between working on remote versus in-person teams? Or are teamwork issues the same whether you’re seeing each other in person or on Zoom?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association, that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.
My guest today is Dr. Eduardo Salas, a professor and chair of the department of psychological sciences at Rice University. He is an industrial/organizational and human factors psychologist whose research focuses on understanding how teams work and how to design and implement effective team training strategies. Dr. Salas has coauthored more than 600 journal articles and book chapters, coedited 33 books and authored two books on team training and the science of teamwork. His most recent book is Teams That Work: The Seven Drivers of Team Effectiveness. Dr. Salas is an APA fellow and won APA’s 2016 award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology.
Thank you for joining me today, Dr. Salas.
Eduardo Salas, PhD: Thank you for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.
Mills: You relate an anecdote at the beginning of your book where a business leader you were working with said, “We don’t have time for teamwork here. We have a business to run.” Why is it important for organizations to think about teamwork and do you find that particular perspective is common?
Salas: Yeah. So that’s one of the myths out there, right? So in going around the corporate world, especially most CEOs, most leaders think that they’re doing a great job with teams and that they’re good team players. However, when they learn about the science and the principles that we have to offer, all of a sudden they say, “Oh, wow, I didn’t know that. Oh, I didn’t think about that.” And then they try to do something different. So some CEOs and some, again, corporate executives really don’t have a good grasp about the science of teamwork and what the science of teamwork can offer.
Mills: So what makes for a good, highly effective team? What have researchers found are the key ingredients needed for a team to function well?
Salas: So in a simple way, we look for three kinds of things, the ABCs: What are the attitudes, what are the behaviors, and what are the cognitions? So the attitude is the mindset, how the team members think about the collective activity and their motivations in their goals. The behaviors is about the role clarity. Who’s responsible for what? Who’s going to back me up? Who is going to do what when? And the cognition is in general about a shared understanding of the task, a shared understanding of the goals, a shared understanding of the mission. What is it that we’re trying to accomplish? So under the ABCs, there are a set of competencies that effective teams essentially master. And that’s what team training does, or teamwork training, for some time. And so we know what are the ABCs now. In our book with my colleague Scott Tannenbaum, we outline seven drivers. We invoke the seven Cs of teamwork in that book.
Mills: So is any one of these factors more important than another? And what happens if a team is missing one of these drivers?
Salas: Well, they’re all interrelated and they build on each other. So you can, in a way, can compensate one for the other. But at the end, in order to be a well-functioning team, a team that is resilient and that has good performance over time, you need all these ingredients.
And so what are these ingredients? So let me go through the seven Cs real quickly and so that the listeners can understand. So the first C is a capability. This is about having the right people in the team. It’s about having talented, competent team members. And the first rule of teamwork really is, or one of the rules of teamwork, is you cannot be a good team member if you don’t know your job. And so you have to have the capability and you have to have the right mix of people.
The second C is cooperation. Cooperation is about the mindset. It’s about, “I’d like being in a team. I want to be in a team. I seek the input from others and I value the input from others.” The third C is coordination, and coordination is about the behaviors. Again, “Who is going to back me up? Who’s going to help me? And who’s going to do what?” And it’s really about role clarity. The next thing is about cognition, and cognition is about the shared understanding of the task. So the shared knowledge that we have as a team in order to execute a task.
Then we have communication. Communication is, the way we describe it, is really about the information exchange protocols. It’s about the terminology, the clarity of the terminology, the timeliness of the information. And then you have coaching. The way I describe this is coaching is about the team leaders. And what we want our team leaders to act in a sense is good coaches. So what are good coaches do? They promote teamwork. They care about the team members. They develop them. And so that’s what we want team leaders to act as good coaches.
And the final C is conditions, and this is about the organizational conditions. It’s similar word, similar term to culture. So this is about the incentives, the reinforcement, that leadership that top leadership puts in the organization to support teamwork. So in this seven Cs, it’s really not a model or a theory. It’s just a heuristic to organize the body of knowledge that we have under these things. So effective teams have, in the sense, to manage the Cs, especially the first six Cs, right? The last one being conditions. So they have the right people, they have role clarity, they have a shared understanding of the task, they have robust information exchange protocols, and they work under conditions that are supportive of the teamwork. So in general, that’s how this works.
Mills: So what happens if you are handed a team or you are put on a team and you don’t really have a lot of power around the selection of who the team members are? What can you do as a person who either inherits or is placed on a team if you’re seeing that some of these Cs are not being followed to the letter, so to speak?
Salas: So there are a number of tools that you can use. In our science, we have uncovered that teams that pre-brief, perform, and debrief outperform those that don’t. So pre-briefing is basically just – join this team or this team is a little disjointed. Then, okay, before we perform, like pilots do before they go to the cockpit or before the flight, they pre-brief. And they talk about, “Okay, where are we headed? How are we going to communicate? Who’s going to do what?” So this pre-briefing, if you have the chance to do that, allows you to clarify roles, to get an idea of who’s going to do what, who has what knowledge, who has what expertise, how we going to communicate. And then you perform. You do the task. It could be an hour, 3 hours, a few days, a month or whatever, but at some point you need to debrief. And debriefing, like my colleague Scott Tannenbaum says, is the most powerful simple intervention, yet underutilized, to learn and to improve.
So the debriefing is a reflection on what just happened. And in that reflection, usually you need to, what usually happens is you try to understand what things you need to improve, what things didn’t go well, and what things you need to change. And so this cycle, again, of pre-brief, performing, debriefing is usually a good discipline that allows you to, even when you have a bad team or you just inherit a team that is not so good, allows you, it gives you the opportunity if you can do this discipline, this cycle, allows you to learn and to improve and to get, if you will, the team in line.
Mills: Now you’ve worked in some industries where it’s been a challenge to get the leaders to embrace your scientific theories around teamwork. I’m thinking whether that’s pilots or in hospitals and emergency rooms, places like that. And then you’ve run into resistance. How have you dealt with that? Why have some industries been more resistant than others?
Salas: So I started working in aviation a long time ago, 30 years or so ago. And at the beginning, pilots were resistant as well. In the early '80s it was about The Right Stuff, and pilots were more egotistical, if I may, to some degree. However, they soon realized that when the plane goes down, they go down with the plane. And so they had to engage. And so 30 years later, I mean just about all the airlines, whether they’re passenger or cargo, really embrace team training and teamwork. They call it the CRM, crew resource management, and the FAA supports that and so forth. But this generation of pilots completely embraces in general the concept.
In health care, for example, you don’t have that hook. So when the patient goes down, unfortunately only the patient goes down. And so it’s taking health care a lot longer to engage. And the pressure really has come from the patient safety movement, the number of errors, medical errors that we still have, and really a bottoms-up approach. The nurses, the technicians, the people who really “touch” patients, see the need to do things better for the patient. And little by little, like one team at a time in health care now, while there’s still some resistance, it’s a lot less than it was 20 years ago. And the resistance comes from, I see it from two angles. One angle is a financial angle, which most CEOs, chief financial officers and so forth worry about is, “If I’m going invest in team training, what is it that I’m going to get for that investment?”
And it wasn’t until very recently that we were able really to answer that question, when we’d done a number of team training evaluations, meta-analyses, that really show the boost that you get out of team training. So now we can answer that. So we say there’s value and there’s a performance improvement that if you deploy teamwork, this is the benefits you get. And in health care, we have been able to show that to some degree that hospitals that deploy teamwork training versus those that don’t and medical error is reduced and mortality is reduced. So there’s a link between teamwork and saving lives. So that has been one.
And the second, my opinion at least, in my experience of doing this for a long time now, is if they buy that they have to deploy teamwork training, they don’t know how to do it. They don’t know how to implement it. They don’t know how to make sure that there’s sustainability of the new behaviors and cognition and attitudes that the staff just got. And so it takes them some time to get traction to create the conditions, one of the Cs, to create the conditions such that people perceive teamwork is important, is reinforced, it improves patient safety, it improves patient care and so forth. So there have been those two lines, “What’s the ROI, return on investment, from team training?” And then, “How do we roll this out so that is sustainable over a period of time and not just a one-time event?”
Mills: So what does effective team training look like and how can a company or another organization tell if their team training is actually working?
Salas: So first of all, there are several models out there in the industry that the medical community created a team training program called TeamSTEPPS—with double P, one word together. And to simplify, any training, not only team training but any training, at the end of the day does four things. It gives you information, demonstration of good behaviors by behaviors, gives you opportunity to practice, and you get feedback. So information, demonstration, practice, and feedback. So these TeamSTEPPS and other systems that are out there, by and large, have those four components. And so you learn about the team principles, you look at videos of good teams and bad teams and you can analyze them and extract what good and bad about each of these videotape, for example. Then you get opportunities to practice. You may role play, you may use a simulation and so forth. And then you get feedback on that.
So training or team training that has those four elements have a higher probability of transfer of training. In other words, that people will apply the skills they just learn back to the job. However, just deploying team training, it’s really not enough. There is a science of training as well. And the science of training tells us that there are things that you need to worry about before you deploy the training and after you deploy the training. So before you deploy the training, you need to prepare the organization for the training. You train supervisors, you had to make sure everybody’s on board to that. And actually most team training or most training fails because the organization is not ready to receive that training.
And then you have to worry about afterwards. Are you supportive of the skills, the competencies that the people just got? Do you reinforce that? Do you give an opportunity to perform? Do you measure them? So long story is good team training, you need to worry about things that you do before the team training, things that do you during the team training, which I just explained, the information of practice, and things that you do after training. Now, there have been many evaluations of medical team training and other team training in two or three meta-analyses. And for the audience, a meta-analysis is an integration of many findings, a quantitative integration of many findings. This meta-analysis clearly show the benefit of team training. It boosts performance, reduces errors, people are more engaged, people are more satisfied, it creates innovation and things of that sort.
Mills: How important are individual differences such as personalities in determining how well a team works together? I mean, are there really some people who just aren’t team players or can pretty much any group of personalities be instructed, taught how to work together?
Salas: The easiest example I have is most of us, well not most of us, all of us, have a disposition. Either we’re collective oriented or we are egocentric. If you are collective oriented, you like being in teams, you want to be in teams and, again, you seek and value the input from others. The egocentric disposition are the lone wolves, people who don’t engage in collective activity in no matter what you do. So in teams, you need people who are collective oriented. I’ll give you an sports example that I love to use. So Michael Jordan, one of the greatest basketball players ever, in his biography he acknowledges that when he was part of the Chicago Bulls, he says, “It wasn’t until we got Scotty Pippen on the Bulls that we began to win championships.” And those in the audience who doesn’t know about Scotty Pippen, he’s a retired player now, but he was a great defensive player. Not a high scorer, but he had the most assists. He passed the ball a lot. And so in a sense he was collective oriented.
So the star of the team needed somebody that would pass the ball. In teams you need that. You need somebody who’s going to be passing the ball. So that is a disposition that you need to have. Now there’s some research, however, that shows that egocentric individual under some circumstances engage in collective activity. And when those factors are no longer there, then they go back to being egocentric. So you just have to find what are those conditions.
Mills: Now, many people have made the switch to working remotely in the past 3 years. Are there big differences between working on remote teams versus in-person teams?
Salas: Yeah, the biggest challenge is making connections, in my views, to simplify things. We started this discussion by talking about the ABCs, the attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions. So, in a remote setting or even in Zoom, how do you keep those connections, the behaviors, the cognition, and the attitudes? It is quite challenging. And how do you keep the trust? And so in a sense, the science helps you, helps colocated teams and distributed teams or teams that don’t see each other in a way. It’s just that sometimes some of the Cs are more important and more challenging when you are distributed. The biggest problem or the biggest challenge that distributed teams have, or hybrid teams, is trust. This mutual trust. And mutual trust is needed so that you can have some psychological safety, which is psychological safety is the license that you have to speak up. And very quickly, all teams sooner or later engage in conflict. And one way to resolve conflict is psychological safety.
You have to be able to have hard difficult conversations about something without any repercussions. So that’s the difficulty in distributed teams or teams that they don’t see each other. How do they create this trust so they get to know each other? I’ve seen examples in banks for example, when they have teams that are distributed all over the world, they try to create events. They call this the watercooler event. So when you go to the watercooler, you have a 10-, 5-minute conversation with your teammate about something that has nothing to do with the job. “Maybe what did you do this weekend?” “My kid is doing that,” that kind of thing.
So these teams try to create this watercooler event. I’ve seen them, for example, one of the banks that I’ve helped, Monday mornings when they have the first meeting, they take turns around the team. And one of the members always takes about 5 minutes and that’s all. Five minutes to talk about their kids or what did they do during the weekend. Something to break the ice a little bit but also to learn about you. And then over time it created this trust.
Mills: What about, there are places, for example, where you can go and do team building exercises, ropes courses, things like that. I mean are those that sounds similar to the watercooler idea, but a little different in that you’re really outside of the workplace and you might be doing something that looks like it could be a little bit perilous and you might have to depend on one of your coworkers to make sure that you don’t fall on your face. Does that make for a more effective team or is this just, “We’re really just having fun and then we’re going to go back and be a bad team the same that we were before”?
Salas: Well, let me tell you the story. So there’s a difference between team building and team training in my mind. Team training is about getting team competencies, the Cs or the ABCs that I talked about. So it’s about team competencies. Team building is like you just described. You onto the wilderness of North Carolina somewhere and you wine and dine for 3 days and you do tasks and that do the job. That’s really about role clarity, the biggest benefit of that, because during those 3 days, again, you wine and dine with your teammate and along the way you’re going to talk about what you do, and you’re going to learn about that.
So about almost 20 years ago, maybe this needs to be updated, I did a meta-analysis of, again a quantitative integration, of team building. And I found very little correlation with performance, which a lot of consultants didn’t like. But there’s a benefit of team building. You get this role clarity, you learn more about your teammates, and so forth. But team training is about competencies. It’s very different. So that the two have a place. It’s just that you need to make sure that you understand the benefits of each one.
Mills: I want to ask you how your background in the military influenced your work as a psychologist and in your interest in teams.
Salas: Sure. So I worked for the Navy for 15 years and I was hired to develop a team performance laboratory at that time. And interestingly enough, in order to do that, when my colleagues that I recruited and students, what we needed to do is immerse ourselves in the context were the marines, airmen, airwomen we’re performing. So what I learned working for the military was that in order to help, in order to understand what the teams do and the help they need, I needed to learn the context, embed myself in what they do. One of the most satisfying things of my career over the last almost 40 years now is that when I go and try to help organizations, I embed myself and my colleagues in the context and learn. We sweat with them, we wake up early, we stay late, whatever the demand is.
And I learned that in the military early on that when you sweat with them, then they listen to you and they respect you. You’re not this ivory tower professor or whatever researcher doing things. And so when I left working for the Navy in 1999 or so, I took that with me and say, If I’m going to learn, I’ve done work with air traffic controllers, I've done work in health care, for banks, for NASA—I mean, oil and gas. I’ve embedded myself and then learn. And then you can contextualize the interventions and then use the psychological principles that we know to adapt to their environment. And it has a tremendous impact because they get it. It’s their context. But the psychological principles that we use across all these industries, by the way, it’s just that you contextualize it. So that’s what I learned in the military, I call it “sweating with them.”
Mills: What happens if a team falls into conflict and gets stuck and it really doesn’t seem to be working effectively? Are there some techniques that can be applied to fix it or do you just blow it up and say, “This team is just not going to cut it?”
Salas: Well, coaching is one. If you can get an external view, that’s one. Another way is, I learned this from my colleagues, Scott Tannenbaum. Again there’s a technique if you can engage in a technique to self-diagnose. So you usually ask maybe three questions. As a team, what things do we need to stop doing? As a team, what things do we need to start doing? And as a team, what things we need to improve? So if you have psychological safety and you can speak up, and then you do this diagnosis of your team, stop, start, continue, you’ll find out what’s wrong and what creating the conflict and what things we need to do to ensure that we don’t get in into this mode.
So there are a technique. Is it just, again, you have to have the discipline of, “Okay, let’s talk about this. Let’s get serious. The team is not functioning well. We’re not taking care of the patient. We’re not doing whatever. We’re exhibiting unsafe behavior. We need to do something. So time out, let’s talk about this.” And then you say, “Okay, we need to stop doing this, start, continue.”
Mills: Does every team to be effective have to have a designated leader, or is that a role that can shift as the team does its work?
Salas: Yeah. No, actually I’ve seen in health care, shared leadership is probably, it’s a way to function. The OR is one example of that. At one point the anesthesiologist is leading, then it might be the technician, then it might be the surgeon, and then back to the anesthesiologist, so it rotate. So no, I don’t—more and more jobs and more and more teams have shared leadership. Somebody with the right expertise steps in at the right time to lead, to facilitate, and implement from there.
Mills: So last question. What are you working on now? What are the big questions you still want to answer?
Salas: What motivates me now after doing all this work for all these years is, what are the organizational conditions that are needed so that the behaviors, cognitions, and attitudes are sustained over time. So how do we create organizations? How do we design organizations? How does the leadership that’s the C-suite needs to act and what things they need to do in order to ensure that the behaviors, that teamwork is sustained over time and it becomes part of the DNA of the organization? They get ingrained. So I think that’s one of the biggest challenges. But these days, I mean there’s all kinds of technologies going on.
There’re human automation teams. There’re human robot teams. There are robot-to-robot teams. I’m not an expert in those, but I know there’s a lot of interesting in this kind of teaming, with AI, with automation, with a robot. And so that’s also the kind of questions that other scientists, scholars are trying to answer, “How do two robots mimic teamwork?” All the things that I talked about to some degree. But to me, the things that interest me are those conditions. And it translate the psychological science that we have, the principles that we have so that people can use them and apply and improve their teams and lives and so forth and so on. So that’s what turns me on this day is the translation.
Mills: Well, this is all really interesting. I very much appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. Thank you, Dr. Salas.
Salas: Thank you for having me.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And again, we’d like to hear from you about what you think of this podcast and what you’d like us to talk about more than we are now. So please go to our website, speakingofpsychology.org, and look for a link to our listener survey. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
Eduardo Salas, PhD, is a professor of psychology and chair of the department of psychological sciences at Rice University. He is an industrial/organizational and human factors psychologist whose research focuses on understanding how teams work and how to design and implement effective team training strategies. Salas has coauthored more than 600 journal articles and book chapters, coedited 33 books and authored two books on team training and the science of teamwork. His most recent book is Teams That Work: The Seven Drivers of Team Effectiveness.
