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Beyond Trust Falls: Building High-Performance Teams with Data · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome to the show everybody!
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  I'm Claire Monroe, here with Edwin Carrington.
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  And Edwin, I want to start today with a picture that I think will trigger some mild
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  PTSD for a lot of our listeners.
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  You are standing in a drafty conference room on a Tuesday morning.
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  You've just been handed a blindfold, and a colleague you barely talk to is
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  whispering, "just fall backward, I've got you."
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  Yes, we are talking about the classic corporate trust fall.
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  Oh, spare me.
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  The trust fall.
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  Or my personal favorite, paying thousands of dollars to lock your accounting
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  department in an escape room for two hours so they can solve fake riddles while
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  their actual, real-world inbox overflows.
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  It is a classic illusion, Claire.
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  We mistake a momentary spike in adrenaline and forced camaraderie for sustainable
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  behavior change.
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  Right!
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  It feels like you did something because you all went out for margaritas afterward,
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  but then Wednesday morning rolls around, the same communication bottlenecks happen,
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  and everyone goes right back to their silos.
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  In fact, Team Coaching International put out a stat that absolutely blew me away:
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  less than ten percent of teams rate themselves as high-performing before they
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  undergo actual, systemic team coaching.
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  Less than ten percent!
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  That ten percent figure is entirely consistent with what I've seen over forty years.
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  And the reason is simple: organizations treat the team as just a collection of
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  individuals.
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  They send the manager to leadership training, they give the star player executive
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  coaching, and they hope it trickles down.
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  But it doesn't.
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  The team itself is the unit of change.
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  You have to coach the system, not just the parts.
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  "The team as the unit of change."
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  I love that phrasing because the business case for getting this right is massive.
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  I was looking at the Gallup 2020 meta-analysis, and they found that highly engaged,
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  cohesive teams drive twenty-three percent higher profitability and eighteen percent
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  higher productivity.
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  That is not a marginal gain; that is a massive competitive moat.
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  Twenty-three percent higher profitability.
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  Think about that.
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  If you told a CEO you had a software tool that could boost profitability by a
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  quarter, they would write a blank check.
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  But when you tell them it requires changing how their executive team actually
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  communicates and makes decisions, suddenly they want to go do another escape room.
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  It's because addressing systemic misalignment is hard, uncomfortable work.
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  It's easy to fix a single person's behavior in a silo; it's much harder to untangle
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  the invisible web of expectations, defensive routines, and coordination bottlenecks
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  that build up between people.
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  So let's talk about how we actually untangle that web, because you can't just
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  lecture a team into high performance.
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  It has to happen in the flow of work.
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  What does real, systemic team coaching look like in practice?
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  It looks like running concrete, low-stakes behavioral experiments during your actual
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  meetings, not at an offsite.
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  For example, I often have teams implement a "decision log."
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  It sounds incredibly simple, but you document every major decision,
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  who owned it, what the assumptions were, and then you review it three months later.
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  It completely strips away the hindsight bias and forces a feedback loop on how the
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  team actually processes information.
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  Or you set up peer coaching circles where team members solve real operational
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  bottlenecks together, without the leader in the room to rescue them.
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  That is such a key distinction.
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  You are changing the actual rituals of how the work gets done,
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  not just talking about "trust" in the abstract.
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  But to do that effectively, you can't just guess at what's wrong.
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  You need data.
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  And this is where OAD, or Organizational Analysis and Design,
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  comes in as the diagnostic backbone.
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  Exactly.
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  Without validated behavioral data, you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall.
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  OAD allows you to baseline the actual, hard-wired behavioral traits of your team
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  members.
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  You get to see the real data on role fit, cognitive styles,
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  and communication traits.
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  For instance, is your team struggling because they lack cohesion,
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  or is it because you have six highly dominant, fast-paced visionaries and not a
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  single person naturally wired to build structure and process?
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  OAD takes the guesswork out of those dynamics completely.
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  It maps the invisible currents in the room.
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  Instead of pointing fingers and saying, "Why is Susan always slowing us down with
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  questions?", the team looks at the OAD data and realizes, "Oh,
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  Susan's behavioral profile shows she has a high need for precision and risk
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  mitigation.
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  That is actually our safety valve, not a bottleneck."
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  That shift in perspective is massive.
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  It turns personal conflict into objective chemistry.
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  You stop blaming people's character and start engineering their interactions.
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  Well, if you want to stop guessing and start measuring, you can actually test this
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  framework yourself.
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  Go to O-A-D dot AI to test OAD for free, baseline your team's unique behavioral
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  profile, and start building a high-performing team based on real data,
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  not trust falls.
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  That is O-A-D dot AI.
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  Edwin, thank you as always for the wisdom.
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  Always a pleasure, Claire.
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  Let's leave the blindfolds in the closet.