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Measuring Team Blind Spots: Four Tools for Better Performance · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome back to Science of Leading, I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington.
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  Edwin, I want to start with a line from this week's piece that I think nails the
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  whole problem.
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  There's a gap between how a team thinks it operates and how it actually functions,
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  and that gap quietly erodes productivity, trust, and morale before anyone names it.
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  And the only way to close that gap is to measure it, Claire,
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  because conversation alone rarely surfaces it.
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  People are remarkably bad at self-assessing their own team's dynamics from the
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  inside.
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  Today I want to walk through four instruments that each catch a different piece of
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  that blind spot.
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  Let's start broad.
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  The Employee Engagement and Collaboration Survey, which is modeled after something a
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  lot of listeners have probably heard of, Gallup's Q12.
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  That's the right starting point if you don't yet know where your problems live.
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  It captures clarity of expectations, recognition, development opportunities,
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  sense of belonging, all in one assessment.
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  And the research behind it isn't small.
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  Gallup's meta-analysis spans over a hundred thousand teams across fifty-three
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  industries, and it found engagement correlates with team performance at point four
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  nine.
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  Teams in the top quartile of engagement see twenty-three percent higher
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  profitability.
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  That correlation number, point four nine, is genuinely strong for organizational
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  research, most people don't realize how rare a relationship that clean actually is
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  in this field.
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  It is strong, and that's exactly why it's the right first move for an established
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  team wanting a comprehensive baseline.
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  The tradeoff is breadth costs you depth, it's lengthy for frequent use,
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  and any single dimension gets covered but not deeply.
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  So if a team already knows their problem is specifically communication,
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  that's not the tool.
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  Right, that's when you go narrow, to something like the Communication and Feedback
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  Assessment.
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  Communication problems underlie most team dysfunction, so this one takes a genuine
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  deep dive into how information actually flows, where it breaks down,
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  whether people feel heard when they speak up.
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  It looks at meetings, email, informal conversations, feedback quality and frequency,
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  all as separate channels rather than one blurred "communication" score.
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  And I'd imagine leaders sometimes discover their own blind spots in that one,
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  not just their team's.
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  Often the most useful finding in the whole survey.
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  A leader who believes they're accessible and gets direct feedback finds out
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  otherwise.
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  The limitation is it's narrow by design, it can miss trust or goal alignment issues
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  sitting underneath the communication problem, so it works best paired with something
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  else, not run alone.
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  Which brings us to trust directly.
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  The Team Trust and Psychological Safety Survey.
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  This is foundational, because without psychological safety,
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  every other metric you measure will read artificially low.
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  People won't admit the real problem if they don't feel safe naming it.
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  The instrument here draws on the Psychological Safety Inventory,
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  thirty items across five dimensions, interpersonal risk-taking,
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  mutual trust and respect, structural support, identity and clarity,
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  supportive leadership.
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  It's been validated across genuinely diverse settings, including healthcare teams
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  tracking safety behaviors over time.
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  This feels like the right tool for a team after a leadership change,
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  or one that just seems guarded.
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  Exactly the use case it's built for.
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  New teams building relationships for the first time, teams after restructuring,
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  teams where people seem hesitant to speak up.
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  The real risk with this one isn't the instrument, it's the follow-up.
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  A manager who mishandles this data can damage the very trust they were trying to
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  measure.
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  This is not a survey you send out and then go quiet on.
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  And the last of the four, the 360-degree format, feels like the most involved one to
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  actually run.
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  It is, and that's the tradeoff for what it uncovers.
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  Feedback from supervisors, peers, direct reports, sometimes external stakeholders,
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  instruments like this run close to eighty research-based items measuring both
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  competencies and what's called derailer behaviors, patterns that actively undermine
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  team effectiveness.
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  The value is triangulation, a team leader may genuinely believe they welcome ideas,
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  and their peers and reports may experience something completely different.
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  That gap in perception is often the single most valuable thing the whole exercise
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  surfaces.
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  But that requires real coordination across multiple groups,
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  and skilled facilitation to land well.
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  Which is exactly why it's not the first tool to reach for.
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  It's best for cross-functional teams or leadership development specifically,
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  where one person's blind spot is shaping an entire team's culture,
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  and you have the resourcing to run it properly.
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  So four tools, four different blind spots, comprehensive baseline,
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  communication specifically, trust and safety specifically, and perception gaps
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  across roles.
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  And none of them replace judgment, they just make the blind spot visible enough to
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  act on with more than a hunch.
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  If you want a behavioral read on your own team that complements any of these,
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  OAD's free Top Performer Profile is about seven minutes, results in twenty-four
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  hours, no credit card.
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  That's O-A-D dot A-I.
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  Measure the specific gap, not just "how's the team doing."
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  That's what turns a survey into an actual intervention.
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  Perfect place to leave it.
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  Thanks, Edwin.
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  Always, Claire.