What to Do When Personality Differences Hinder Teamwork

It can be hard to interact and meaningfully connect with someone who is different from us. The more we differ, the further apart we are, the harder it is to build a bridge. Why? Because most of our relationship skills are grounded in finding commonalities. When those commonalities are subtle or scarce, we struggle to connect.

However, commonalities are not the linchpin of high-performing teams. Amy Edmonson and a legion of other scholars have convincingly shown that the key ingredient for a team coming together well is psychological safety—not liking each other, not socializing, not commonality (although all those factors can help).

As Dr. Edmonson defines it, psychological safety is “the belief that work environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” It is “the experience of being able to speak up with relative ideas, questions, or concerns. It is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able—even obligated—to be candid.”

One of the interesting characteristics of psychological safety is that it is inherently a team dynamic. It doesn’t exist in any meaningful way at the individual or organizational level. It lives and breathes (and dies) at the team level.

So, if you want your team to work together well and you accept that psychological safety is the key, how do you build it? Here are three things to do to get started.

Measure

When interviewing Dr. Don Berwick, former CMS Administrator and CEO of IHI, he taught me that “a measure is the shadow of your heart.” If we sincerely care about something and want to change it, we will measure it. So, start by assessing where your team is in terms of their level of psychological safety and then decide on what would be a reasonable level of improvement. Continue to measure through regular pulse surveys. This is not a one-and-done. You need to evaluate whether what you are doing is increasing psychological safety (in which case, keep doing it!) or not (in which case, you need to try something else).

Choose a Generous View

At the very heart of psychological safety is the belief that I won’t be judged negatively for being me. Unsurprisingly, it is the negative judgments we make about one another that, more than almost anything else, destroy psychological safety.

To create psychological safety, we need to consciously and consistently choose a more generous view of others. I am not advising that we simply pretend that everyone and everything is great. Rather, I am suggesting that if we can suspend judgment and replace it with curiosity, we will be better able to hold space for the universal contradiction that good people do bad (or even just annoying) things.

Insights from the Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) help people choose to see one another more generously. The SDI provides a framework to help team members look beyond people’s behavior and see how three primary motives (performance, people, and process) are driving that behavior. When we see in this way, it’s easier to choose a generous view because people often have a rational motive even if their behavior is frustrating for us.

Maintain Good Intent

In Crucial Conversations, we make this audacious claim: people never become defensive about what you are saying; they become defensive because of why they think you are saying it.

Said another way, psychological safety is entirely dependent upon the perception of intent in the conversation. If you want to create safety in a conversation, a relationship, or a team, start by cultivating good intent and then sharing it. Sharing lets them know what your motives and intentions are. It also helps you stay accountable to and connected with that good intent, even when issues pop up that might otherwise irritate or frustrate you.

Your team may never become “besties.” But that shouldn’t be your goal. Solid friendships don’t always equal high performance; people may love being on a low-performing team with high comradery. Building a high-performing team that learns together, achieves results, and respects one another is a much more worthy goal and one that is within reach of all teams.