6. Create the Team

A team is a stable bounded group of individuals interdependent in achieving a shared goal. In the management age of empathy, creating a team goes beyond merely hiring talented designers and requires establishing the precondition for these individuals to collaborate and attack ambiguous and often business-critical problems. The most differentiating attitude of this small autonomous network of interconnected individuals derives from their willingness to take interpersonal risks to unlock learning during the problem-solving process. This peculiar behavioral configuration that distinguishes these groups originates from the presence of two social climates that affect their mindset and working practices: trust at the individual level and psychological safety at the collective level. In this chapter, you will learn how to create a team. You will learn how to build trust and psychological safety as preconditions for the fulfillment of the other four social needs of the working environment: dependability, structure and clarity, meaning of work, and impact of work. You will analyze the nature of fear, how to discern between which type of failure you must and must not reward, and how to clarify your role and contribution to the team. You will also examine how to institute a hiring practice founded on high hiring standards and a career framework that can support both individual contributors’ and managers’ professional progression. In the end, you will explore how to onboard new team members and how to plan your first meeting with a new hire.