What harvesting honey and building effective teams have in common

How you get honey from a beehive closely guarded by 30,000 bees is actually quite a remarkable, beautiful and messy story. It’s a time when you will really need support, because this whole process cannot be done alone. It’s a team effort, and you need to conscript willing family members, friends and neighbours to help.

Just like when harvesting honey together, in the workplace, all team members must play their part and contribute fully. To fully contribute, though, each team member needs to feel ‘safe’ to do so without fear of retribution. The sense of safety and willingness to speak up is not an individual trait, however, and even though it’s something you do feel and experience at the individual level, it’s an emergent property of the group.

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Not who, but how

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. In her book, The Fearless Organization, she shares the results of a study into the relationship between error-making and teamwork in hospitals. She expected to find that more effective teams make fewer mistakes. But conversely, it was the teams who experienced more errors that reported better teamwork – higher-performing teams were more willing to report their mistakes because they felt safe doing so. Teams that had worse performance actually felt less safe to declare their mistakes, so data was not recorded.