Post by MSD Animal Health Tech Solutions R&D

What makes a team smart? NOT a simple grouping of smart individuals. Our Mark Ashton CMgr MCMI finds a parallel in something Simon Sinek describes:   "Sinek recounts asking US Navy SEALs how they decide who makes their team, and draws a graph with two axes: performance and trust. No-one wants a person in the low-performance, low-trust zone, and everyone wants someone in the high-performance, high-trust zone BUT where it gets interesting is the other areas.   In the talk he says that the seals do not want the high-performer, low-trust person either and would take a middle-performer, high-trust or even a low-performer, high-trust over that person.   And then the kicker, in most companies we are measuring and rewarding the wrong thing – we have a million ways of measuring performance but no mechanisms for measuring trust. So we end up promoting and rewarding potentially toxic behaviour just because it’s the only thing we measure.   Trust is at the heart of psychological safety – so I'm with Project Aristotle on this one!"