Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams

And when you build psychological safety and prosocial purpose, you start getting the best effort from your team because they know they can experiment and take risks, and they know how their work makes an impact—just like the Savannah Bananas did when they gave their players and staff room to experiment in the service of serving fans. When you build

When you build common understanding and prosocial purpose, you start to attract more people to your cause, and more talented people join the team. That’s because people are doing work that matters alongside people they deeply care for and enjoy collaborating with—just as the UCLA women’s gymnastics team recruited more and more top performers once V

What Garry Ridge did at The WD-40 Company is actually how culture transformation works on most teams. Throughout this book, we’ve discussed the three elements of a high-performing team culture as just that: elements. We’ve reviewed common understanding, psychological safety, and prosocial purpose as separate characteristics. We broke each one down

Or, make like Amazon and leave an empty chair at the meeting room table to remind everyone that, even though the customer or beneficiary isn’t in the room, they still matter—and decisions made should serve them.

Research suggests that stories are twenty-two times more likely to stay in our memory than facts or raw data alone. (It’s the reason every chapter of this book opens with a story.) So, if you want to help your team remember the impact they make, tell stories. Particularly, share Impact Stories, which help the team build a mental bridge between the

Kaiser Permanente, and even the Savannah Bananas suggests it isn’t just that individuals want to know they’re working for a firm that makes an impact on others—they want to know how they and their team are making an impact. The best-performing teams don’t ask individuals to join the organizational purpose; they exist in organizations willing to hel

But surprisingly, what drove the majority of employees’ perceptions of purpose wasn’t senior leadership, but rather middle managers discussing and emphasizing purpose. The survey was a 500,000-person, multiple-company replication of what KPMG found internally after implementing their “10,000 Stories Challenge.”72 All of this research, plus examples

The missing link between an individual’s prosocial motivation and an organization with a truly inspiring purpose appears to be at the team level. It’s not about what flows from the top; it’s about what’s being discussed

at all. (And yes, many of those who did merely mentioned shareholders.)68 Think about the missed opportunity for impact, or the impact that awareness of their influence would have on employees. One of the core questions of Gallup’s famous Q12 employee engagement survey asks whether the mission or purpose of the company makes employees’ jobs feel im