How to Build Connectedness & Improve Wellness in Your Project Team

Okay, today we are going to be exploring what it means to have a team that feels connected, and how project managers and people leaders can use their awareness of their team's mental and physical health to cultivate that sense of togetherness and make the collaboration flow. Joining me today is executive facilitator, bestselling author, and founder of Starfish Synergies, the exclusive North American provider of Hasbro's Play-Doh Power Solutions Corporate Training, Ms. Theresa Bailey.

Theresa, thank you so much for joining me today.

start with one big question to get us rolling on the sort of notion of like team connectedness and togetherness. And one thing that struck me when we were chatting is that you get to work with a lot of teams. You work with executive teams, you work with cross-functional teams, interdepartmental teams, project teams. What is the impact of having a team that feels connected? And why do you feel it's important that we revisit the definition of connectedness today?

And that the world has changed that technology has made us both more connected and less connected at the same time because it's less important to be physically together in some cases. So, all of these things are happening to the point that in the US, there was a surgeon general report on the epidemic of loneliness and social isolation that was undertaken, and I believe it was published in 2023.

So, it's everywhere and it's something we do need to revisit because I think people who are experiencing a lot of turnover, lack of retention, just languishing that's happening. It's all really relevant right now.

ago, my mind immediately went to, the COVID-19 pandemic. But then I appreciate the framing on it, which is that, if I'm understanding you correctly, it was almost a moment where we could recognize that things were different. It's this moment in time that kind of revealed that some of the things that we had just assumed in the past about how teams work together or what work is fell away.

But there's more to it than just that, I think there's a lot of this notion of, Oh, let's get back to the office, it's gonna be exactly the same as it was. And I think a lot of folks are finding that it's not, even if they are in person, even if they're working in like hybrid situations. And definitely, if you really liked working remote, and then are maybe still working remote while everyone's coming back to it, yeah, it's a whole different playing field.

Even leading up to 2019, things were changing and then we had this sort of giant pause where now we're coming out of it and things are not the same. There is no just getting back to it in a lot of cases.

and hadn't even thought they could work remotely and then suddenly found themselves working remotely. What was your journey like? Did you find it a big adjustment when you went into a remote working situation back in 2009?

And if it was, it was these WebEx is that there was no interaction and you were receiving information for the most part. So that part has changed a lot. And there was a moment during early stages of the pandemic where I was like, Oh, I have to be on camera now because it's not just phone calls. And I literally switched my desk around so that there was a nicer background than my treadmill, so it's been lonely.

It got lonelier, but also allowed this expansion of opportunity and creativity that has changed how we connect, but also understanding that people still feel very isolated outside of it.

How did you deal with that loneliness to feel connected again as you were settling into that?

But having those regular scheduled meetings to have conversations in person or go out and experience the world in person because virtual work is great, but it ends up being a little more transactional than it often is if you are in person. And I'm not sure that, for example, you and I would be able to have the conversations that we're having now, had we not met in person that first time at Collision.

And in the last several months where I've been back at conferences, that's a big change that I've noticed is just fast tracked connection again, for me personally, in the last six months, even compared to 2009.

You're going to all these conferences, but this one really felt like that sort of moment of coming together to have those bonds and create those bonds and create those relationships or reaffirm those relationships and then leave there knowing that, you can work differently with some of the people that you've networked with or that you've, met again at the conference. So it almost was that the sort of macro version of what you're talking about.

It's let's every now and again, I'll get together, get that, human in person contact. It doesn't mean it's the only way to do things, but it just helps us in our sort of mental wellness as social creatures. And then we can go back and do the, hybrid remote thing and feel recharged.

And I think that's changed a lot in the conferences I've been to and the networking I've done is people are much more intentional about following up after, so.

And probably a really good segue, I know I took us a little off topic, but probably a good segue back into sort of team connectedness and what that means. And I thought maybe I'd zoom out a little bit because I've got a chance to learn a bit about you.

And I know that these days you are a master facilitator. You're helping executive teams adapt to change through interactive, compelling, and creative workshops. But you've also got a background in psychology, community psychology, actually. And you have in the past been working with at risk groups in the not for profit sector.

And it got me thinking, I'm like, okay, well, even though most of our team based work, for our listeners, it's not as extreme as say, dealing with homelessness or mental illness, but what are some of the psychological factors that can negatively impact project work and teamwork in general?

So it can show up as brain fog, feeling lack of motivation, procrastination, not wanting to follow up with people because you don't want to bother talking to anyone, so isolating yourself. You can see it in the things like a lack of empathy for other people, which leads to shortness with people and less patience and tolerance, lots of people not showing up at team meetings or just tapping out.

Like all of those things are, I think, really relevant to the teams and groups that I'm working with right now. It's showing up in abundance.

Didn't bring a lot with me and then go home and pick it up again. Whereas I think a lot of modern work today is combining those two worlds, right? It's not like personal life and work life anymore. It blends together. And as a result, anything that is off kilter in any of those areas, it's going to impact everything else in that ecosystem.

Which it took us a long time to break into those new neural pathways and some of us really got good and I would include myself in that and in isolating myself and working on my own and just getting my stuff done. Well, so it took us about a year or 2 to build these new pathways and suddenly you're changing it up and going back to something else. And we expect to just bring it back overnight. And I think that chaos in our brains has led to chaos in our lives and chaos in work.

And it shows up in all of these places because of the stress that we're experiencing.

And then, we're just yanking everyone back into it, it's okay, we've created these new pathways, and then we have to like basically decimate them and go back to the way things were, or do we, or can we even. And I think that can be quite confusing for people and probably, doubles down on that sort of notion of isolation in terms of finding your feet in a new world of work.

in lack of empathy, ending up in conflict or people withdrawing, not engaging. When we're looking to see if there are problems, it's really how people are interacting with each other and how accountable people seem to be to each other and their work. Or are they taking a very individual stance? And usually when people start taking an individual stance about my work and this is me and I should do this when everyone's doing that, I end up being called in.

So those are the sort of the key indicators for me.

And often one of the first steps is bringing people together to have open discussions about the challenges that they're experiencing. And typically they won't have had a chance to voice some of those things prior to the conversation, or maybe they didn't even know that's what was bothering them. So, it's really a focus on ensuring the psychological safety, which became such a buzzword term through the pandemic, but making sure that psychological safety foundation is there.

And then it being able to dig into some of the other the foundation of effective teams, such as structure and clarity and dependability and those types of things, but really trying to figure out what's going on first.

And it also shines a light on the skills, the different skills that people managers, people leaders, project managers, team members need to cultivate within themselves as well, because the thing that really stood out to me about what you said was, some of these people haven't had the chance to talk about some of these feelings that they're having, or recognize some of these feelings that they're having.

And I think because of the earlier thing we touched on, which is that, sometimes, especially in remote work, but even just like work today, sometimes it gets really transactional. And it's okay, here's the agenda. Did we achieve the meeting goals? And, it's like, when is my moment to have these conversations and to process my feelings about the work and deal with my own isolation? And also, do I need to do it alone? Is this a thing that I need to carry and solve myself?

Or is this something that you know, I should raise with the team, we should have conversations about and that we should invest time to. Like not a lot of organizations are going to love the idea of let's just have a, weekly Kumbaya talk about our feelings meeting and that probably isn't effective either, but just recognizing that there needs to be a space for that conversation to happen.

Every organization I go into pretty much without fail, they will tell me that communication is the challenge. What does that mean though? So taking a moment to sit down and talk about what communication actually means, because you will get 12 different answers in a row of 12 people. So try and figure out what that is. Sometimes that comes down to some of those things.

Well, I'm feeling left out or I don't have the energy to have these conversations sometimes, but knowing that about the people you're working with, especially as a project manager, I think would probably be very informative.

Have we all left the meeting or, left the room or left the table with a different understanding of what that is and has it created isolation because we actually have isolated definitions of what we're trying to do. And that sort of gets amplified as you work because you're like, well, I feel isolated from the people I'm working with because it all seems like we're trying to achieve something different, but I know what we need to achieve. So let me just do my work.

But actually the problem is way higher, way higher

than the individual.

So when they were talking across staff, they were totally blowing the communication because they were talking about the same thing, but not using the same language. And it was just a giant mess.

And you already are thinking of yourselves as adversaries who won't understand one another. But when I look at the conversation, I'm like, I think you're saying the same thing. You're actually agreeing. Let's like, let's get on the same page in terms of vocabulary. And you might actually see that we're actually, seeing eye to eye more than we think.

And I think coming back to what you said, I agree that especially from a project management standpoint, it is expected that we are more transactional. We are managing by influence, get this thing done. Here's your scope, make sure it gets done on time and on budget. But the actual art of doing that is these moments that are mostly invisible of showing your appreciation for the team or like digging into okay, someone's mood was a little bit off today.

Let's have a side conversation and see what's going on and they're not celebrated. So no one ever talks about them, like I'm not going to be like, Oh, my win this week was, I spent some time, and I took one of my team members for a coffee because, they were feeling a bit distracted in stand up today. And I wanted to figure out what's going on so that the work can get done. No one's gonna applaud that for a project manager. They will applaud the outcome though.

They'll be like, Oh, that person's working really well. Like they hit a rut and then now they're working well. Whatever you did, good job. But it's not really that known thing of Oh yeah, your skillset is actually quite a human skillset. And getting good work out of people is quite a human skill, much more than, just cracking the whip and checking things off of a list and being transactional.

And I think just that appreciation, just in our work culture, I think could go a long way because that is the work. You know what I mean,

And then they're able to form new relationships where they can be more innovative and creative and their energy can go towards that rather than defending their stance. And I think that's what happens when we start working on our own, is we don't have the opportunities to relax our shoulders and work towards something in the same way that we do if we're always disconnected and just isolated by ourselves.

were going to be punished. That's the key to all of it. And if you can create that, whether it's hybrid or remote or in person, then you're 10 times ahead of the place you would be if you hadn't been able to create it.

And a lot of people were like, had a very negative reaction to this what they saw as an additional layer of something they didn't quite believe in, but I guess that's the trend now, so I guess we need to do it, but love that sort of connection across, right? It's well, I don't know if we always talk so much about why psychological safety, because now it's just like box we need to take.

It's Oh, I got to create a psychologically safe environment for my people, for my team, I guess we'll have snacks or something. Right? Like I'll tell people they can just say anything to me and that should do it. Right? But I don't know if everyone always connects the dots to like, how that safety, right? Project Aristotle, like you talked about, how that safety translates into better work?

And I think what's nice about the bridge you created there is well, if you feel safe, you can be more creative, you can be more innovative because you feel, safer to speak up about those ideas you have in your head because we are creative human beings. And then that produces better ideas that fuel into the work rather than just keeping on doing a thing over and over again because that's the way we've always done it.

So that's one of the repercussions. But I do think that to your point, I don't like to talk about psychological safety other than to provide it as a construct. I don't see it as a checkbox that you want to check off because I think it's more about being human and developing relationships. And I think the nuance is the same as when people talk about networking, that sends shivers down my spine.

I don't want to network, but I do like to meet people and understand their ideas and build relationships. Those are two different things. So it's like psychological safety might be to networking as building community is to building relationships, right? Like I might've got those reversed. There's a nuance of humanness and genuineness and authenticity that needs to be brought to the process.

And if you do not feel comfortable with the people you're working with, or you dread working with people on a project, you're not going to have that same excitement and it's not going to be the same.

How would you arm them with an argument to find that balance between investing in people and their mental and physical health and this notion of connectedness and just, getting the work done without making sacrifices in the business?

about what it feels like for you to be in a place where people don't like each other. People are going to leave, but also it's adding to your stress. And so there's tons of research out there. But also you can tell how you're feeling and I would just ask the other people involved around you get as much input as you can about how people are feeling and I think that ends up providing the justification for doing more work around building community and connection.