Michael Ungar explains how teams perform best with a 4:1 ratio of positive to negative feedback, and that teams who laugh together are 19% more effective. He describes a weekly ritual where members share glows, grows, and gratitude to maintain psychological safety and shift toward higher performance.
We know from research that teams are at their most effective when the positive comments outnumber the negative comments between the team by 4 to 1. Anything more than that is a little cheesy. Anything less, you've got too much negative going. So part of it is being aware of the negative and positive. And I will sit in teams, I will sit in team meetings and tag it. I will, I will keep little tally sheets. I think another thing that we talked about is making sure that your team's laughing together. Teams that laugh together are 19% more effective than teams that don't. Because behind laughter is a sense of psychological safety. Most teams that laugh together are laughing at themselves or laughing at something silly or goofy that happened. And that's uniting them as a team. So all of those things, as long as we become more aware of them, we can often bring that practice in. But yeah, we're really good at the negative, right? That's the thing. You know, 3 o'clock in the morning, you're still going over the conversation in your head about what you should have said, right? And like I said, really good neurological reasons for those negative things to be so strong. So we have to be very explicit about calling out the positives. We have created something on our team that we do. We do sort of a kind of a Teams chat check-in at the end of every week. Right. And it's, we have 3 things that we put on there, our glows, what we really loved about this week, our grows, opportunities for growth this week, and our gratitude. So 2 out of the 3 is positive. And then by the time you get all of that positive stuff in at the end of the week, wow.
