Multicultural teams and psychological safety

I meet many teams in my work, often multicultural in their setup. This is a great asset that can help teams to add multiple perspectives and be stronger as a team. But it is also a hindrance for team development. The more different we are the harder it is to reach #psychological safety, align towards a shared team purpose, agree on rules, way of working, take decisions etc. All needed in a high performing team. So in other words multicultural teams have greater potential but also some extra steps that are important to be aware of. How we interact and what assumptions we have on each other is habitually formed by the culture we come from, most of us are unaware of this. We feel that what I do is the normal/obvious way, and when we meet people from other cultures we tend to think that their behaviour is strange and wrong. This is of course also connected to our set of self-serving biases that serve to explain away our own actions in a way that props up our self-esteem. This hindrance for a team can be hard to break through and could block teams from developing into high performance. Awareness is the first step.

In my work as Team Coach I follow teams from the outside, coaching them and the Team Leads / Scrum Master, or whoever has the main responsibilities to enable team development. I often make use of a tool called GDQ, developed by Susan Wheelan, with 60+ self assessment questions that helps to identify in what stage of team development the team is in. In one company that I work with, all teams are free to sign up for a GDQ and then also to repeat the GDQ once every six months to better support and help them in their journey. One of these teams did recently run their second GDQ, the result showing some early signs of entering Stage 2 (Fight and countertendency) but also strong indication that they still were in Stage 1 (Dependency and Inclusion). In 8 months a team should have been able to move further in the team development, we needed to investigate this further to give better support. In the report we saw indications of silence, lack of involvement and decision making were important areas to focus on. After discussing the result with the team and then also in a 1 on 1 session with the Scrum Master we decided to dive into the cultural aspects of these areas. We devised a WS consisting of three parts, cultural differences, personal preferences and analysis.

Cultural differences

I invited all team members to consider the following question: “In the culture that I come from, how do we look at engagement and decision-making. How do we enable it and how does it look like”, using an adapted 1-2-4-All pattern we created a list of all cultures (7 nations in a 11 person big team). Each nationality shared their different perspectives, we then reviewed the similarities and differences. We also discussed what we liked with the different cultures and what we did not like. Some members in the team emphasised that even though some things were part of their culture he/she did not like, follow or felt detached from it in some way. I had anticipated that and that is why we also stringed in another part, their personal preferences.

Personal preferences

To continue our investigation and collective learning we continued into the personal preferences. In this session I made use of the exercise “my washing instructions” in which each team member writes down answers to the following statements “what brings you energy”, “how to best communicate with me”, “what makes me frustrated”, “what people misunderstand about me.”. This is then shared with an other person in the team, she/he listens actively, notes things down and prepares to share his/her understanding of this person with the others in the team. We ended the session with some reflections on what we have heard, what is common, what stood out as important and what we need to take into consideration.

Analysis and actions

So now we have helped to bring forward a lot of information to the team, both helping each other to see what cultures we have in our habitual behaviours but also how we are unique. I like to use the liberating structure What, So What, Now What to make sure that we first list the facts that stand out, analyse the facts to see if there are any hypotheses that we can form and then based on that device actions. This to avoid jumping directly into faulty assumptions and actions, if you have not tried it i encourage you to do so you will be surprised on what will happen when we combine our brains in these steps.

I’m sure that this session helped the team to take the next step in team development, to make their own team culture, to be more aware of the cultural habits and most of all the personal needs and traits so that they can make use of it when they continue their journey. I hope that this short post encourages you to try something similar. Below I have added my script for the session.

If you have questions please let me know and I will support you the best I can.