Every Team Has a Temperature
What we repeatedly experience becomes what we learn to call normal.
Walk from a cold room into a warm one and you notice the difference immediately. Your body responds before you have really thought about it. You take off a layer, your shoulders relax and you might even comment on how warm it feels.
Stay there for long enough and, eventually, you stop noticing. The temperature hasn't necessarily changed; you have. Your body has adjusted to the environment around it. You have acclimatised.
I have been thinking a lot lately about how often we do the same thing with people and the environments we spend our time in. We notice things when they are new to us, but with enough exposure even the unfamiliar can start to feel ordinary. The behaviours around us become familiar, what is familiar starts to feel normal, and what feels normal quietly begins to shape what we expect from ourselves and from each other.
Eventually, we can become so accustomed to the temperature around us that we forget to notice it at all.
When extraordinary starts to feel normal
Over the past year, I have spent a lot more time around people who write books, develop ideas, build intellectual property, speak professionally and put their thinking into the world.
When I first stepped into that environment, I noticed it. Writing a book still felt like a very big thing to me. I had thought about it, talked about it and imagined doing it one day, while around me people were discussing chapters, manuscripts and publishing as part of their everyday work.
Over time, those conversations stopped feeling unusual. Writing a book didn't become easier, or require any less work, but it did start to feel possible. I was surrounded by people who took their ideas seriously enough to develop them, who challenged each other's thinking and, importantly, who didn't allow each other to think small. An idea was rarely left exactly where it started. It was questioned, stretched and pushed further, often by people who could see more possibility in it than you could see yourself.
This week, sitting in New Zealand, I finished the first draft of the book I had spent years thinking I might write one day.
There have been thousands of words written, ideas that have changed shape along the way and plenty of moments when I have questioned whether what I was trying to say was any good at all. Somewhere along the way, writing a book stopped feeling like something I might do one day and became something I was doing.
Being around people who thought bigger, challenged generously and didn't allow each other to think small had changed what felt possible to me.
It makes me wonder how much of what we come to believe is possible, expected or simply normal is being shaped in exactly the same way.
Teams have a temperature too
Think about the last time you joined a new team. In those first few days and weeks, you notice things that people who have been there for years probably don't even register anymore.
You may notice who speaks in meetings and whose voice rarely makes it into the conversation. You see what happens when somebody disagrees, asks for help or admits they don't know something. You start to understand how freely information moves, how people respond when something goes wrong and whether an idea is explored, challenged or quietly dismissed.
None of this needs to be explained to you. You are watching, listening and working it out.
Spend enough time there and you begin to understand what gets encouraged, what gets avoided and what people have learned to keep to themselves. You work out whether discussion is genuinely welcome, whether people really want your opinion when they ask for it and whether taking initiative is expected or it is safer to wait for permission.
Eventually, the things you noticed so clearly when you first arrived become less noticeable to you too. That is the temperature of a team. It is being established in the way people respond to each other every day, often long before anyone thinks to call it culture.
What happens repeatedly becomes normal
There is research behind what we experience when we spend enough time around other people.
In 2002, Wharton professor Sigal Barsade studied emotional contagion in groups: the way emotions can transfer between people and influence what happens within the group. Her research found that emotions could spread between people in a group, influencing how they felt and how they worked together, including levels of cooperation and conflict.
What interests me about Barsade's research is that it gives weight to something we can easily underestimate in teams: what happens between us doesn't necessarily stay between us. The way we show up becomes part of the environment other people are working within.
We experience a behaviour once and we notice it. Experience it repeatedly and it becomes less remarkable, until eventually it starts to feel normal. Once something feels normal, it begins shaping what we expect from the people around us and what they expect from us.
Those expectations find their way into our own behaviour. We speak up more because speaking up is what happens here. We hold back because we have learned that challenge rarely goes anywhere. We offer help because contribution is reciprocated, or we protect what we know because experience has taught us that this is how we get ahead.
This creates a particular responsibility for leaders. People are paying attention to what leaders model, what they encourage, what they challenge and, just as importantly, what they repeatedly allow. A behaviour does not need to be formally endorsed to become part of the temperature of a team. Sometimes it simply needs to happen often enough without being addressed.
None of those individual moments feels large enough to create a culture. Together, repeated over time, they do.
This is why culture is never simply what an organisation says it values. It is also what people experience often enough that they stop noticing it.
What have we stopped noticing?
Most teams don't wake up one morning and decide they are going to become cynical, avoid difficult conversations, protect their own patch or wait for the leader to make every decision. The temperature changes much more quietly than that.
Think about a room becoming colder one degree at a time. You probably wouldn't notice the exact moment it changed. You would simply adjust. Pull your sleeves down. Move a little differently. Stay long enough and eventually the temperature that would once have felt uncomfortable becomes the temperature you expect.
Teams can change in much the same way. A difficult conversation is avoided and life goes on. Information is held back and there appears to be an advantage in doing so. A leader repeatedly steps in to solve problems the team could have worked through together, or an idea is dismissed quickly enough that next time it feels easier not to raise it. Each moment shifts the temperature slightly, and people adjust to the conditions around them.
The same happens when the room becomes warmer. People admit they don't know something and receive help rather than judgement. Opportunities and information are shared freely. A leader changes their mind because somebody else has a better argument. Challenge is welcomed because it makes the thinking stronger. Contribution starts to invite more contribution.
Very few of these moments feel significant on their own. That is exactly why they matter. One degree at a time, they teach us what kind of room we are in and what we can expect from each other.
We are all part of somebody else's environment
We spend a lot of time thinking about the people we surround ourselves with. Do they challenge us, encourage us, expand our thinking and bring out something better in us?
There is another question I think we ask far less often:
What do people repeatedly experience because I am here?
Every person in a team is part of the environment everyone else is working within. Leaders have significant influence over the conditions, but much of what shapes a team happens in the ordinary interactions between us.
It is in whether we follow through on what we say we will do, how freely we share what we know, how we respond when another person sees something differently and whether our contribution creates more room for other people to contribute theirs.
This is where teaming becomes more than the collection of what each individual person can do. We influence the conditions in which other people think, speak and contribute, just as they influence those conditions for us.
Every time we walk into the room, we become part of its temperature.
Notice the room again
There are things that feel normal to me today that would have felt enormous a year ago. There are also environments I have stepped away from and only then recognised how much I had stopped noticing while I was inside them.
Spend enough time in any environment and we adjust to what surrounds us. The behaviours, expectations and interactions that once caught our attention gradually become part of the everyday.
Every now and then, it is worth noticing the room again. Look at your team as though you have just walked into it for the first time. Pay attention to what happens repeatedly, what has become normal without anyone consciously deciding it should be, whose voices shape the conversation and what people have learned from each other about what is possible here.
Then notice what you bring into the room too.
What changes in the temperature because you are there?
Better teaming is built in the ordinary moments between people, every day.
The temperature in the room belongs to all of us.
Barsade, S. G. (2002). “The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644–675.