#team-building-in-uncertainty

#team-building-in-uncertainty

"For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what they actually did."

"When you talk to people about breaking them down, they feel like they're going to get flattened. This negative perception of breaking down siloes can impact the organization's ability to solve the siloes in the first place."

Men feel their masculinity is threatened when they are told they are less assertive, dominant, or 'masculine' than others. They may also experience these reactions when they find themselves to be subordinate to a woman who clearly takes the lead or when they are expected to perform tasks considered 'unmanly.'

What started as a casual indulgence became a shared ritual. And without intending to, Grease Wednesdays began to change our department culture. We all began to get to know each other as individuals, with pets and families and hobbies. The ritual also smoothed tensions between departments, built friendships between unfamiliar teammates, and helped us realize we hadn't felt all that connected before.

There may be something unsettling happening on your team. Despite expected productivity gains from integrating AI tools, overall team performance appears to be declining. People are starting to second-guess themselves, and trust is eroding in ways that are hard to pinpoint. is a corporate scientist and first-ever chief science advocate at 3M who is the author of Jayshree Seth The Heart of Science book trilogy published by Society of Women Engineers (SWE).

While uncertainty hung heavy in the air, our small team was unusually open with each other. We talked candidly about the challenges, the personal toll, and what it might all mean for the business. Without setting out to do so, we had built a foundation of psychological safety-one that made navigating a global crisis far less stressful than it might have been otherwise.