How To Build Connectedness & Improve Wellness In Your Project Team

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Galen Low: Hey folks, thanks for tuning in. My name is Galen Low with the Digital Project Manager. We are a community of digital professionals on a mission to help each other get skilled, get confident, and get connected so that we can amplify the value of project management in a digital world. If you want to hear more about that, head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership.

Okay, today we are going to be exploring what it means to have a team that feels connected, and how project managers and people leaders can use their awareness of their team's mental and physical health to cultivate that sense of togetherness and make the collaboration flow. Joining me today is executive facilitator, bestselling author, and founder of Starfish Synergies, the exclusive North American provider of Hasbro's Play-Doh Power Solutions Corporate Training, Ms. Theresa Bailey. 

Theresa, thank you so much for joining me today. 

Theresa Bailey: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here and talk about all these things that I love so much. 

Galen Low: So I met Theresa at a conference here in Toronto, the Collision Conference, we were chatting in July, 2024 just to timestamp it. But, oh my gosh, have we ever had some great conversations talking about what you do, how you develop teams, and of course, the Play-Doh bit, which is, I think is so cool.

Theresa Bailey: Yeah, that was a whole wild experience at Collision. There was so much going on around and so much innovation, and we were standing behind a stage, I guess, and we did, we talked forever about all of the stuff that we're going to get into today. 

Galen Low: Absolutely. And Theresa's bag full, purse full of Play-Doh. 

Theresa Bailey: Yes, I did. It's a great opener. 

Galen Low: Absolutely, it is. Absolutely. 

Speaking of great openers, I thought maybe I would just start with one big question to get us rolling on the sort of notion of like team connectedness and togetherness. And one thing that struck me when we were chatting is that you get to work with a lot of teams.

You work with executive teams, you work with cross-functional teams, interdepartmental teams, project teams. What is the impact of having a team that feels connected? And why do you feel it's important that we revisit the definition of connectedness today? 

Theresa Bailey: Well, I think that everyone feels the difference between now and say five years ago.

And we talked a lot more about what being connected or being isolated perhaps looked like now compared to then. And there has been such a focus on it or an understanding that things have changed and that people are less connected than ever. And that the world has changed that technology has made us both more connected and less connected at the same time because it's less important to be physically together in some cases.

So, all of these things are happening to the point that in the US, there was a surgeon general report on the epidemic of loneliness and social isolation that was undertaken, and I believe it was published in 2023. So, it's everywhere and it's something we do need to revisit because I think people who are experiencing a lot of turnover, lack of retention, just languishing that's happening. It's all really relevant right now. 

Galen Low: I really like that notion of you said five years ago, my mind immediately went to, the COVID-19 pandemic. But then I appreciate the framing on it, which is that, if I'm understanding you correctly, it was almost a moment where we could recognize that things were different.

It's this moment in time that kind of revealed that some of the things that we had just assumed in the past about how teams work together or what work is fell away. But there's more to it than just that, I think there's a lot of this notion of, Oh, let's get back to the office, it's gonna be exactly the same as it was.

And I think a lot of folks are finding that it's not, even if they are in person, even if they're working in like hybrid situations. And definitely, if you really liked working remote, and then are maybe still working remote while everyone's coming back to it, yeah, it's a whole different playing field.

Theresa Bailey: It is, in the context is different in which we're doing it. And listen, I was doing remote work before it was cool. I started working from home in 2009 before we actually really called it anything. It was just, I had a business where I was working from my house, but it's very different and the political climate is different.

How we treat each other is different. And I think people would acknowledge that how we interact with each other is very different. Even leading up to 2019, things were changing and then we had this sort of giant pause where now we're coming out of it and things are not the same. There is no just getting back to it in a lot of cases.

Galen Low: You know, that kind of puts you nearly a decade ahead of some other folks who weren't working remotely and hadn't even thought they could work remotely and then suddenly found themselves working remotely. What was your journey like? Did you find it a big adjustment when you went into a remote working situation back in 2009?

Theresa Bailey: Well, way back then, yes. It was an interesting change because I was working in this sort of structured place where we were always in. And then to start working from home, it requires a lot more discipline, a lot more scheduling around people's appointments to make sure you have those connection times. And back then we weren't doing any online meetings.

It was all phone call. There was no video conferencing, anything. And if it was, it was these WebEx is that there was no interaction and you were receiving information for the most part. So that part has changed a lot. And there was a moment during early stages of the pandemic where I was like, Oh, I have to be on camera now because it's not just phone calls.

And I literally switched my desk around so that there was a nicer background than my treadmill, so it's been lonely. It got lonelier, but also allowed this expansion of opportunity and creativity that has changed how we connect, but also understanding that people still feel very isolated outside of it.

Galen Low: That's really interesting. 

How did you deal with that word loneliness? I think it resonates, and it probably resonates with a lot of my listeners too. How did you deal with that loneliness to feel connected again as you were settling into that? 

Theresa Bailey: Back then, it was really about making time to meet physically with people when I could and planning some of those meetings, having regular times when I came in to meet clients I was working with in the office in person or having that time, even lunch meetings or whatever it was. But having those regular scheduled meetings to have conversations in person or go out and experience the world in person because virtual work is great, but it ends up being a little more transactional than it often is if you are in person. 

And I'm not sure that, for example, you and I would be able to have the conversations that we're having now, had we not met in person that first time at Collision. And in the last several months where I've been back at conferences, that's a big change that I've noticed is just fast tracked connection again, for me personally, in the last six months, even compared to 2009.

Galen Low: That was actually really interesting, and this is probably a bit off topic, but, this notion of going to a conference, post pandemic, it used to be just par for the course, right? You're going to all these conferences, but this one really felt like that sort of moment of coming together to have those bonds and create those bonds and create those relationships or reaffirm those relationships and then leave there knowing that, you can work differently with some of the people that you've networked with or that you've, met again at the conference.

So it almost was that the sort of macro version of what you're talking about. It's let's every now and again, I'll get together, get that, human in person contact. It doesn't mean it's the only way to do things, but it just helps us in our sort of mental wellness as social creatures.

And then we can go back and do the, hybrid remote thing and feel recharged. 

Theresa Bailey: Absolutely. And I think, I'm not sure what your schedule was prior to that conference, but I was able to go to a few where it was almost like a frenzy of joy and connection with people. I'm like, Oh, we're back and coming out of it with more intensity and purpose than any other conferences I've been to before.

Because we recognize that that was more special than I think we used to take things for granted before, but also Oh, that was a great person. I am 100 percent following up now. And I think that's changed a lot in the conferences I've been to and the networking I've done is people are much more intentional about following up after, so. 

Galen Low: I love the word joy that you use, especially in the context of, like I definitely, wouldn't have normally been like my goal of going to this conference is to leave with a bit of joy, would not have been my goal. And yet I think you're right. I think that sort of togetherness, spark this joy of feeling connected. And I think, that is the thing that feels like it, changes the way that we build relationships and work with one another. 

And probably a really good segue, I know I took us a little off topic, but probably a good segue back into sort of team connectedness and what that means. And I thought maybe I'd zoom out a little bit because I've got a chance to learn a bit about you. And I know that these days you are a master facilitator. You're helping executive teams adapt to change through interactive, compelling, and creative workshops. But you've also got a background in psychology, community psychology, actually.

And you have in the past been working with at risk groups in the not for profit sector. And it got me thinking, I'm like, okay, well, even though most of our team based work, for our listeners, it's not as extreme as say, dealing with homelessness or mental illness, but what are some of the psychological factors that can negatively impact project work and teamwork in general?

Theresa Bailey: Well, I think that a lot of us have felt that inability to focus or concentrate and that fog and a lot of that comes from it's not always right in our workplace, and there's so much focus on team building in the workplace, but people are bringing their stress from other places, they're feeling disconnected, whatever it is, into the workplace.

So it can show up as brain fog, feeling lack of motivation, procrastination, not wanting to follow up with people because you don't want to bother talking to anyone, so isolating yourself. You can see it in the things like a lack of empathy for other people, which leads to shortness with people and less patience and tolerance, lots of people not showing up at team meetings or just tapping out.

Like all of those things are, I think, really relevant to the teams and groups that I'm working with right now. It's showing up in abundance.

Galen Low: I like that word fog because, I think definitely in recent years, and again framing the pandemic as a bit of a sort of moment in time where we were able to look and reflect on it we did have this collision, this merger of what's going on in your life and your work started to come together, whereas we used to, at least, I definitely used to put on my work persona, left everything behind at home, went to the office, did my thing.

Didn't really share too much. Didn't bring a lot with me and then go home and pick it up again. Whereas I think a lot of modern work today is combining those two worlds, right? It's not like personal life and work life anymore. It blends together. And as a result, anything that is off kilter in any of those areas, it's going to impact everything else in that ecosystem. 

Theresa Bailey: Yeah. And I think we need to just be aware of that as both leaders and people working with other people. And if you think about learning and what learning is, it's really creating neural pathways in your brain. So we have these neural pathways leading up to a big change where we all started working differently.

Which it took us a long time to break into those new neural pathways and some of us really got good and I would include myself in that and in isolating myself and working on my own and just getting my stuff done. Well, so it took us about a year or 2 to build these new pathways and suddenly you're changing it up and going back to something else.

And we expect to just bring it back overnight. And I think that chaos in our brains has led to chaos in our lives and chaos in work. And it shows up in all of these places because of the stress that we're experiencing. 

Galen Low: I really love that you brought it to these neural pathways because, I think you're right. Like the brain is rewiring itself and adjusting. We are very adaptable, creatures. But, yes, we've created this sort of yo-yo for ourselves, and as adaptable as we are, we don't love change, it's still difficult, we still need to, do the work and it takes time to adjust. 

And then, we're just yanking everyone back into it, it's okay, we've created these new pathways, and then we have to like basically decimate them and go back to the way things were, or do we, or can we even. And I think that can be quite confusing for people and probably, doubles down on that sort of notion of isolation in terms of finding your feet in a new world of work.

Theresa Bailey: Absolutely. And I think really just understanding that's happening makes a difference with how you interact with others and plan your work with your teams around the things that you're trying to implement, just understanding that that's happening is helpful to have in the background of.

Galen Low: Uh, that actually, that is a sort of, good segue, I think, and maybe we'll combine two things together. Because, I think as project managers, mostly my audience, but also people leaders, anyone working in a team, like just what are some ways that team members and team leaders can identify, this fog, this isolation in their team, and what can they do about it to bring about a deeper sense of connectedness?

Theresa Bailey: Well, a lot of time it shows up in lack of empathy, ending up in conflict or people withdrawing, not engaging. When we're looking to see if there are problems, it's really how people are interacting with each other and how accountable people seem to be to each other and their work. Or are they taking a very individual stance?

And usually when people start taking an individual stance about my work and this is me and I should do this when everyone's doing that, I end up being called in. So those are the sort of the key indicators for me. 

Galen Low: Fair enough. When you get called in, on a team that is going into selfish mode and not in together mode, what is your first step once you get in there?

Theresa Bailey: Well, first I try to understand what's going on and what's going on has a lot of different perspectives typically. So I will talk to the person who's called me. What are you seeing? But then I like to get other perspectives also. So I might ask a couple other people what they think, and then we figure out where they want to be.

So where do you want to be? And we talk about a plan on how to get there. And often one of the first steps is bringing people together to have open discussions about the challenges that they're experiencing. And typically they won't have had a chance to voice some of those things prior to the conversation, or maybe they didn't even know that's what was bothering them.

So, it's really a focus on ensuring the psychological safety, which became such a buzzword term through the pandemic, but making sure that psychological safety foundation is there. And then it being able to dig into some of the other the foundation of effective teams, such as structure and clarity and dependability and those types of things, but really trying to figure out what's going on first.

Galen Low: That's what makes your background so interesting, because you've got the psychology background, you've got the facilitation, you have, life coach training, and you can see how all of these things actually come together. And it also shines a light on the skills, the different skills that people managers, people leaders, project managers, team members need to cultivate within themselves as well, because the thing that really stood out to me about what you said was, some of these people haven't had the chance to talk about some of these feelings that they're having, or recognize some of these feelings that they're having.

And I think because of the earlier thing we touched on, which is that, sometimes, especially in remote work, but even just like work today, sometimes it gets really transactional. And it's okay, here's the agenda. Did we achieve the meeting goals? And, it's like, when is my moment to have these conversations and to process my feelings about the work and deal with my own isolation?

And also, do I need to do it alone? Is this a thing that I need to carry and solve myself? Or is this something that you know, I should raise with the team, we should have conversations about and that we should invest time to. Like not a lot of organizations are going to love the idea of let's just have a, weekly Kumbaya talk about our feelings meeting and that probably isn't effective either, but just recognizing that there needs to be a space for that conversation to happen.

Theresa Bailey: Yeah, there needs to be a space for it to happen. And you can tell me if this is accurate, but I would think that by nature, the people you're working with. So if you're a project manager and has a client that you're doing work for, you're expected to be transactional. You're expected to not necessarily take time to deal with some of these other things that absolutely impact productivity.

Every organization I go into pretty much without fail, they will tell me that communication is the challenge. What does that mean though? So taking a moment to sit down and talk about what communication actually means, because you will get 12 different answers in a row of 12 people. So try and figure out what that is.

Sometimes that comes down to some of those things. Well, I'm feeling left out or I don't have the energy to have these conversations sometimes, but knowing that about the people you're working with, especially as a project manager, I think would probably be very informative. 

Galen Low: Yeah, no, absolutely. Like it's just semantics, right?

Like I've seen it go sideways so many times that, from a communication standpoint, well, we've told them all that our goal is to achieve whatever this thing, right? And what does that thing mean? What does success really look like? Have we all left the meeting or, left the room or left the table with a different understanding of what that is and has it created isolation because we actually have isolated definitions of what we're trying to do. 

And that sort of gets amplified as you work because you're like, well, I feel isolated from the people I'm working with because it all seems like we're trying to achieve something different, but I know what we need to achieve. So let me just do my work. But actually the problem is way higher, way higher than the individual. 

Theresa Bailey: Absolutely. And I know that it's not project manager related, but they were all working on projects on in this plan that I worked in and all the different teams were not getting along and into communication with the issue.

We realized that each 1 of the 3 teams on rotation had a different term for a product they were using. One used a chemical product, one used a bag collar, and one used like an old name for it. So when they were talking across staff, they were totally blowing the communication because they were talking about the same thing, but not using the same language. And it was just a giant mess. 

Galen Low: Honestly, I can relate to that because so like my world is digital project management and you get these really cross-functional teams that don't necessarily see eye to eye, you have the sort of stereotypical comparison would be, okay, yeah, you've got creatives and you've got engineers. And they'll get into little tiffs, sometimes big tiffs, and I'm looking at it and I'm going, you guys are agreeing.

You're just using different words and you're framing things differently to get there. And you already are thinking of yourselves as adversaries who won't understand one another. But when I look at the conversation, I'm like, I think you're saying the same thing. You're actually agreeing. Let's like, let's get on the same page in terms of vocabulary.

And you might actually see that we're actually, seeing eye to eye more than we think. And I think coming back to what you said, I agree that especially from a project management standpoint, it is expected that we are more transactional. We are managing by influence, get this thing done.

Here's your scope, make sure it gets done on time and on budget. But the actual art of doing that is these moments that are mostly invisible of showing your appreciation for the team or like digging into okay, someone's mood was a little bit off today. Let's have a side conversation and see what's going on and they're not celebrated.

So no one ever talks about them, like I'm not going to be like, Oh, my win this week was, I spent some time, and I took one of my team members for a coffee because, they were feeling a bit distracted in stand up today. And I wanted to figure out what's going on so that the work can get done.

No one's gonna applaud that for a project manager. They will applaud the outcome though. They'll be like, Oh, that person's working really well. Like they hit a rut and then now they're working well. Whatever you did, good job. But it's not really that known thing of Oh yeah, your skillset is actually quite a human skillset.

And getting good work out of people is quite a human skill, much more than, just cracking the whip and checking things off of a list and being transactional. And I think just that appreciation, just in our work culture, I think could go a long way because that is the work. You know what I mean, 

Theresa Bailey: yeah, it is. As long as we humans are still working, that is the work and that is the magic. And when you were talking about, I think it was, you were talking about creatives and engineers. And so when you have that realization amongst the two groups, you can just see people relax, their shoulders come down, they sit back and they're like, uhh.

And then they're able to form new relationships where they can be more innovative and creative and their energy can go towards that rather than defending their stance. And I think that's what happens when we start working on our own, is we don't have the opportunities to relax our shoulders and work towards something in the same way that we do if we're always disconnected and just isolated by ourselves. 

Galen Low: I like the connection you drew there as well. I want to dig into it about this notion of being creative, being innovative. Almost as an outcome of feeling safe, like psychologically safe, relaxed as a team.

Would you say that's one of the main benefits of having a team that feels, you know, "connected"? 

Theresa Bailey: Yeah, I think that that's key. And if you think about Google's study that they did, Project Aristotle, where they came up with five components of effective teams. It was impact meeting, dependability, structure, and clarity.

And the fifth and by far most important one was psychological safety and making sure that people felt that safety and being able to express themselves freely without feeling repercussed or being made fun of, or they were going to be punished. That's the key to all of it. And if you can create that, whether it's hybrid or remote or in person, then you're 10 times ahead of the place you would be if you hadn't been able to create it. 

Galen Low: You had mentioned that psychological safety had become a buzzword. And I tend to agree. I think it was everywhere. And I think because it was everywhere, it got stigmatized as, especially, from a corporate lens of Oh, now we need to like, spend all this time taking care of people and talking about their feelings. And a lot of people were like, had a very negative reaction to this what they saw as an additional layer of something they didn't quite believe in, but I guess that's the trend now, so I guess we need to do it, but love that sort of connection across, right?

It's well, I don't know if we always talk so much about why psychological safety, because now it's just like box we need to take. It's Oh, I got to create a psychologically safe environment for my people, for my team, I guess we'll have snacks or something. Right? Like I'll tell people they can just say anything to me and that should do it.

Right? But I don't know if everyone always connects the dots to like, how that safety, right? Project Aristotle, like you talked about, how that safety translates into better work? And I think what's nice about the bridge you created there is well, if you feel safe, you can be more creative, you can be more innovative because you feel, safer to speak up about those ideas you have in your head because we are creative human beings.

And then that produces better ideas that fuel into the work rather than just keeping on doing a thing over and over again because that's the way we've always done it. 

Theresa Bailey: Absolutely. And I think the one thing is that if you don't have a place where people can speak up, they will see mistakes in the work that is going ahead, but not say anything, because they'll be willing to watch you crash and burn with the decision that you've made, if they're not willing to speak up about it.

And I've seen that happen a few times before well, I don't know, AP doesn't want me to say anything, so I'm not going to say anything. And then you know that it goes off. So that's one of the repercussions. But I do think that to your point, I don't like to talk about psychological safety other than to provide it as a construct.

I don't see it as a checkbox that you want to check off because I think it's more about being human and developing relationships. And I think the nuance is the same as when people talk about networking, that sends shivers down my spine. I don't want to network, but I do like to meet people and understand their ideas and build relationships.

Those are two different things. So it's like psychological safety might be to networking as building community is to building relationships, right? Like I might've got those reversed. There's a nuance of humanness and genuineness and authenticity that needs to be brought to the process.

Galen Low: I love that. Isn't that such a human thing to create an icky framework from something so organic and natural, right? So that when then we can stigmatize it and have arguments about it, whereas actually it's just core to what we do, building community, building relationships. 

Theresa Bailey: That's right. Yeah. And I think all of those things back to your point, they make you more productive as a project manager and working with the people that you're working with, because people are able to speak up with their new ideas, maybe better ideas.

They're going to help you find where you're going off track. They're going to want to find solutions. They're going to get excited about finding new ways of doing things that they didn't before. And if you do not feel comfortable with the people you're working with, or you dread working with people on a project, you're not going to have that same excitement and it's not going to be the same.

Galen Low: Love that. 

Last question for me really is, carrying it all forward. So we've got listeners who are sort of project managers or people leaders, middle management and they're sold on this. They understand that this is going to have, the right impact to the work, but they're working in an organization that is a little bit resistant to this.

How would you arm them with an argument to find that balance between investing in people and their mental and physical health and this notion of connectedness and just, getting the work done without making sacrifices in the business?

Theresa Bailey: Well, one of the first, if you want data, I would look at that surgeon general report because disconnection loneliness is related to increases in every type of illness, which impacts absenteeism and people leaving and your health benefits that you're paying out, all of that stuff, like there's direct research to show that.

So if you can't get behind that, then you have to think about what it feels like for you to be in a place where people don't like each other. People are going to leave, but also it's adding to your stress. And so there's tons of research out there. But also you can tell how you're feeling and I would just ask the other people involved around you get as much input as you can about how people are feeling and I think that ends up providing the justification for doing more work around building community and connection.

Galen Low: Boom. I love that. Theresa, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a lot of fun. Always great chatting with you. 

Theresa Bailey: You as well. Thank you so much. As you can see, I love talking about this stuff, so I could do it all day. 

Galen Low: Alright folks, there you have it. As always, if you'd like to join the conversation with over a thousand like-minded project management champions, come join our collective. Head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership to learn more. And if you like what you heard today, please subscribe and stay in touch on thedigitalprojectmanager.com.

Until next time, thanks for listening.