Building High-Performing Teams: Cultivating Emotional Safety
Change is the only constant. The business reality requires teams to embrace ambiguity, experiment relentlessly, and pivot gracefully when needed.
The people make (or break) high-performing innovation teams and building lasting high-impact teams goes beyond attracting and retaining talents. The key is cultivating emotional safety across the organization, where curiosity, creativity, and self-reflection flourish.
Here are four pillars to nurture emotional safety at the organizational level:
Embrace Failure as Information: Treat every experiment as a source of learning, separating the outcome from the process. When my team faced a technical challenge during the Amazon Glow project, we transformed our mindset to view setbacks such as negative customer feedback as input for improvement. My team redefined the quality metrics for interactive play and identified new solutions to enabling computer vision. A mindset shift enriched our innovation journey with insights, purpose, and resilience.
Systematically Reward Learning: Incorporate a learning-centric approach into performance management and goal setting. At Dropbox, our emphasis on learning rewarded actions within our control, empowering our team to navigate ambiguity with agency and conviction. We centered OKR (Objective and Key Results) on rapid iteration (quantifying the number of prototypes) and learning (measuring the rounds of customer co-design sessions). This deliberate emphasis on learning rewarded actions teams have control and built a strong foundation of meaningful discovery.
Learn as a Team: Collective wisdom drives innovation. Establish mechanisms for teams to share discoveries, preventing repeated mistakes and sparking fresh ideas. My innovation teams at Amazon and Dropbox established weekly "knowledge-sharing" meetings. During these sessions, team members present recent discoveries, such as insights from successful experiments, user feedback, or lessons learned. This knowledge exchange leads to new product concepts, bolsters emotional resilience, and forges stronger bonds within the group.
Lead with Action: Teams act according to leaders' actions more than words spoken or documented in strategies. Additionally, consistency between leaders' words and actions signals executive reliability, the cornerstone of emotional safety. When leaders prioritize values over optics, act according to agreed priorities, and maintain consistency, they set the stage for innovation, resilience, and success. For instance, during the development of Amazon Glow, my decision to prioritize customer experience demonstrated our team's commitment to "family experience first." The team knew we could be bold and felt more comfortable pushing boundaries. Ultimately, we developed a 4.5-star product.
When we prioritize emotional safety, leaders empower our teams to have the courage to explore, the willingness to learn, and the agility to iterate toward the next big thing.
Image by Midjourney: an innovative, creative, and confident team
