Ep189: What Great Teams Do Great Issue #7 - Team is risk averse

Corey Fernandez talks about the latest in our What Great Teams Do Great issues series - What happens when your team is risk averse.

Transcript

This is a part of our what great teams do. Great issue series. I'm Corey Fernandez with Humanergy. All these issues use our What Great Teams Do Great model. This is available at humannergy.com or in the book of the same name. Each issue is presented with suggested actions to get a team back on the path to Team greatness. So here's the issue, the team is risk averse due to some backlash over past mistakes, team members play it safe, duck and cover and don't reach their full potential. So what do we do? So it's important when we're charting a course to a future reality, to note that it can be exhilarating but also anxiety provoking. It requires a team to add some tolerance for risk, since the journey will ultimately expose some things that we didn't know, some surprises. So Mark Twain said, to succeed in life, you need two things, ignorance and confidence. The team may not know exactly what lies ahead, but we want to start the trip figuring out what it is the team really wants to achieve. Kind of set up a goal, right? That's motivating, something that we can aim for to help us push through some of the risks and even some of the uncomfortableness that can come with risk. This can give us some of the courage right, to overcome some of that risk aversion that's inherently built in human beings. And certain team members are going to experience that more than others. We want to start with smaller, easier to achieve goals, right? We want to be able to build momentum over time, rather than biting off a big, risky venture right off the bat. It's important to set something more achievable up front that won't push the team past a certain risk threshold too quickly. Slowly, we can amp up on harder to achieve and risk your plans with a higher reward. One of the things I can remember is I spent time on a expedition in Chile and Patagonia, and our goal, our aim, was to cover over 200 miles paddling in Chilean waterways. We camped on 16 remote beaches and so on. Many of us had not had back country experience, and so it was really important early on to not only create some enthusiasm around that, that path we are going to journey through, that goal we are trying to get to at the end of 30 days, but also to make sure that we took some smaller steps early on, to build confidence amidst the group. So really, really important here, and we also don't want to become cavalier about risk as we're getting more down the road, right? We might start to get a little bit more comfortable, but we don't want to get we don't want to get cavalier about the, you know, the underlying risks that lie ahead. We want to be aware of potential problems that are inherent every move, and don't let that stop the team from taking calculated risks and actions that carry some degree of peril. There must be a calibration between kind of risk and potential reward, right? And we want to continue to commit to a strong vision and alignment and open communication and again, going back to this example of this expedition, one of the ways that we did this, and we meant we managed risks over time, is that every day, when we were about to make a move, we'd always evaluate four things, kind of four metrics, so to speak, we'd evaluate we'd evaluate the sky, what was happening in the sky, we'd evaluate the water, what was happening in the water, what was the state of the water? What was the state of the land features around us? What did we have protected or unprotected areas? And then ultimately, what was the state of our people? Those were kind of our metrics, right things that we kept a really strong eye on. And we would actually come together, and we communicate regularly throughout the day to see if any of those metrics were changing. Did the sky change on us? Did the winds change on us? Did the land features change on us in an unexpected way, or the water, or did we find an illness or an energy zap that affected the team? Right so we can make adjustments, right and actually manage our risk along the way? It's an iterative process, and again, when the team's focused on the larger goal and then still willing to take those steps along the way and communicate to manage the risks as they come along, it's a really, really effective way to help that team become less and less kind of risk averse and really build the momentum toward that larger, more important goal. Hope this is helpful as you continue to tune into Humanergy on our podcast, on our YouTube channel and so on. Thank you for tuning in.