Healing Broken Teams from Inside Out — New Podcast

What is the number one cause for failure in early-stage startups? Team issues! In this episode of Stanford Innovation Lab, I had a chance to interview executive coach Michael Terrell. Michael is the founder and managing partner of Terrell Leadership Group, and co-author of The Inside Out Effect, which focuses on effective leadership. In our conversation, Michael shares his insights on effective team dynamics, his process for diagnosing team issues, and examples of how he works through team challenges.

This is a topic of great interest to me since successful collaboration leads to remarkable results. Those who are skilled at collaboration, including athletes and musicians who are required to work in teams, know how to lead, when to follow, and when and how to sacrifice their personal goals for the greater good. For most of us, this education comes quite late in life, when we are thrown into a situation where collaboration is required and we are totally unprepared.

There are many effective tools for preparing individuals to work on creative teams. One of my favorites is the “Six Thinking Hats” model, developed by Edward de Bono, the renowned inventor of the concept of lateral thinking. This model describes six different roles we play on teams and shows the benefits of each role.

I introduce this model early in my creativity classes, because it gives the students a concrete tool that they can draw upon for the rest of the course — and the rest of their lives. In de Bono’s model there are six different roles we play on teams, each represented by a different colored hat. Most people have one dominant hat color, with one or two other colors close behind.

• Those who are drawn to facts and logic wear the white hat.
• Those who are comfortable generating new ideas wear the green hat.
• Those who use intuition to make decisions wear the red hat.
• Those who are organized and process-oriented wear the blue hat.
• Those who uncover what might not work wear the black hat.
• Those who see the positive possibilities wear the yellow hat.

To demonstrate the value of this model, I ask my students to take a short “test” to determine their dominant working style. Even without the test, most people know what hat colors they typically wear. I ask the students to come to class wearing a shirt that matches their respective “hat” color so that they can easily see that they collectively represent the entire spectrum of working styles. I put them on teams of six, with others with different dominant working styles. Each student is given a real hat with six detachable tassels, one for each of the different colors. Over the two-hour class, the students attach one or the other of the tassels to the top of the hat to represent whatever role they are playing at that time.

The teams are given a challenging task to tackle, and each person gets a chance to try out playing different roles as they discuss possible solutions. We start with everyone wearing the same hat color, beginning with white, then green, then blue, and so on. Later in the session, the students are allowed to change hat colors at will, experimenting with those that feel most comfortable and those that feel awkward to them. They gain a shared vocabulary about the roles they play on teams, and realize that they can change those roles as easily as changing tassels on their hat.

The Six Hats model provides a useful vocabulary for group work of all types. For example, a team can explicitly state at the beginning of a brainstorming session that they should all put on their green hats in order to generate ideas. This is particularly important for those who don’t normally wear a green hat and are more comfortable evaluating ideas after they are generated. Later in the process, you can explicitly state that you are all going
to put on your blue hats in order to plan for the next steps of the project. And during a risk- assessment session, everyone is invited to wear a black hat in order to see all the places where things might go wrong.

I wish I had been introduced to this tool early in my life, because I often fell into the common trap of thinking that everyone sees the world as I do. It was always surprising and often frustrating to work with others who approach problems from a very different point of view and with a very different process. I didn’t understand their perspective and felt as though they didn’t understand me. I almost always wear a green hat, with both blue and yellow close behind. As a result, I have had to learn how to work with others who naturally wear a black or a red hat, which are the least comfortable for me, and to don those hats when appropriate. In my work as a teacher and colleague, I also find this a valuable tool. By knowing which color hat each individual naturally “wears,” I have a better understanding of why people act as they do and can respond accordingly.

I have been using the Six Hats model for many years and have seen over time that students and practitioners in different disciplines tend to wear characteristic hat colors. It might be that individuals are drawn to fields where their approach is most valued or that each discipline reinforces a specific working style. For example, the students studying electrical engineering tend to wear white hats and are, therefore, well tuned to manipulating lots of data. In the business school, a majority of students wear blue hats and are very comfortable managing projects and processes. And in the drama and literature departments there is a preponderance of red hats, where students are comfortable drawing upon their feelings as they create new art. This is another reason it is fruitful to bring together people from diverse disciplines to generate ideas. They bring not only different knowledge, but also different approaches and working styles.

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The description of de Bono’s Six Hats model is an excerpt from inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity