Dear Greg James,
Concerning your team’s difficulties and major miscommunication problem that affected HS Holdings’ revenue. A key element in bettering your team is having psychological safety. A lot of your members are feeling rejected while having tension and misunderstanding on each countries’ work in the team. There seems to be a lot of separation and disparity diversity. Creating a psychologically safe environment can increase collaboration, help with problem solving, and increase trust (Edmondson & Roloff, 2009). This can be done by encouraging more honest conversations within the team, discouraging disrespectful or chastising behavior, and helping the team understand common goals. This will help members of the group to feel more comfortable speaking up when things are going wrong and to communicate ways to solve the problem. Secondly, research has suggested that shared identity, shared context, and spontaneous communication, all moderated conflict and distribution (Hinds & Mortensen, 2005). We recommend encouraging spontaneous communication and psychological safety over a chat app (discord, ect), where members can talk at their leisure (any device, anytime). This helps with the distribution (separation diversity) and conflicts of the team, while building a stronger sense of shared context and identity, by allowing pressureless communication about their lives and work-related thoughts (emergencies can be communicated faster). A chat app doesn’t require members to travel and has an option for video calls (similar to face-to-face communication). Additionally, chat apps are more instantaneous than emails, which invites members to join whenever without feeling left out or favored.
A shared sense of identity could be developed by uniting the team in a low stakes environment through an escape room, a series of tasks, or a similar activity. This can help the team connect in new ways, problem solve, and avoid blaming each other. They need to understand that shortcomings for one member of the team are shortcomings for the entire team. Pushing around blame hurts the entire team instead of helping them.
Very concise and well-written! The point you made about psychological safety and it’s effects on how it’s hurting the team and how it can be improved specifically. Overall great job!
Oops, just letting you guys know the last paragraph shouldn’t have been pasted into the post.