Teams Blog

It happened yet again. I was in a seminar, this one on sales, by a respected speaker on the subject who I won’t name to protect the guilty. His reputation is well deserved: his information on sales is practical, well presented, and in line with my own grad-school research into persuasion. But then he repeated what I call “The Mehrabian Myth.” He said only 35% of communication is through words. The rest, he said, was through body language and voice tone. To his credit, his number was the same as the most reliable figure in the scientific literature, but his mistake was in not qualifying the word “communication” as I’ll explain in a moment. Then he made it worse, saying he had just read about two studies that said the figure was “as low as 7%.”

Unfortunately, what his source did not tell him is that those studies are nearly 50 years old… have been thoroughly debunked since then… and didn’t really say that. I don’t really blame this gentlemen. As noted in an article I just submitted for publication to a national magazine, this idea is repeated so often by consultants and business speakers that everyone assumes it must be true. That’s why I call it “The Mehrabian Myth,” for the UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian who did those two studies. But the myth is not his fault: it’s about him, not created by him. Mehrabian has stated that the figure, which actually came from a later estimate, has been misquoted. And the figure was never about all communications. It was actually about the communication of emotion.

What Mehrabian first showed, and other researchers have confirmed, is a common-sense notion. When someone is talking about an emotion-raising topic, if their words do not match their body language, facial expression, and voice tone, the other person is going to believe those nonverbal cues. If I tell you I am doing fine, but you hear tension in my voice and I’m not smiling, you’re going to know I’m not really fine.

In the everyday exchange of information and routine stories of daily life, words are doing all or almost all of the work. And even in honest emotional conversations, the receiver may draw some conclusions about the degree of emotion you are feeling through body language, but most of the information they receive will still be carried by the speaker’s words.

After I was divorced, someone pointed out to me that my “nonverbals” did not match my verbals when I tried to explain nicely my wife’s actions during our marriage. I was mad, and it showed, even if intellectually I understand her motives. No doubt this mismatch contributed to our problems. In the workplace, the lesson is to be honest with yourself and your team members about what you are feeling. If you’re ticked off, don’t try to hide it. And because your words have more weight than you’ve been led to believe, monitor them to make sure you don’t make things worse.

Otherwise, relax. In most of your communications, people aren’t monitoring your every move, despite what the purveyors of The Mehrabian Myth would have you believe.

Comment

Today I taught my “Active Listening Skills” class to the newest set of volunteers at Hospice of Wake County, as I do pro bono every month. (Not tooting my own horn—I just don’t want you to think I am charging a wonderful nonprofit like Hospice!)  It’s great fun to work with people who very much want to be there and want to do well, which is not always the case when training in businesses. After the opening demonstration of the skill, I always ask what is hard about active listening. One of the gentlemen made the point, as someone usually does, that it is hard to resist coming up with a response in your head even though the other person is still talking. This is one of the hardest parts of the skill, especially when the person is saying something you don’t like or you are feeling rushed.

But as I pointed out to the group, this is a great way to both waste time and create an argument. I told them there have been plenty of times when I was working with grpus where one person was responding to something the other person didn’t say! Ususally this happens when some is setting up a counterargument by expressing the opposite position from the point they want to make. The other person comes up with their own counterargument and jumps in. Person A intends to say, “There are those who would argue that the starts are the light of the heavans seen through pinpricks in the hard shell of the sky, but we know they are really distant gaseous bodies like the sun.” But person B only hears the part before the comma, and jumps in with, “Are you kidding? That idea was disproved in the Middle Ages!” That the problem is located in Person B’s head is even more obvious when they actually let Person A finish the sentence but still respond only the ifrst half, which I hear happening much more foten than you might expect. It can be amusing when you are the observer, as in my team coach role, and you suddently realize the two sides of a conflict are actually saying the same basic thing but in different words.

Clues that this is showing up in your conversations are when someone says, “What I was going to say was…” or “That’s not what I said.” When youre in a meeting, the befhavor is worsened both because their may be several people vying for talk time and because a couple of less-obvious misunderstandings liek this can lead the whole team down a dead end.

Comment

Paul Maurice, coach of the Carolina Hurricanes professional hockey team, spoke on “Building a Winning Team” at an Association for Corporate Growth meeting recently. The title is somewhat ironic, given that the team was 2-11-3 on the season at the time, as he noted. Although I think sports metaphors are often misapplied in the business context, some of his comments mirrored what I have seen in business teams. A great way to tell that a team is in trouble, he said, is to observe members at a meal. If you have the stars at one table, the rookies at another, and the struggling players in a third, you have a problem. I have seen this in corporate lunch rooms, and it usually means your team has broken into subteams and is not working together. I asked what he did in that situation, and he said he would address individuals in each subteam to have them reach out across the borders. That’s a good first step.

He was surprisingly introspective given the stereotype of a professional coach. A few years ago, he said, the team was doing reasonably well, but after a loss to Florida he went into the locker room and lit into them as their heads hung down. The team lost a large number of games in a row afterward. He said many variables go into losing streaks, but he could not help but wonder how things might have differed if he had picked a better way and time to express his concerns.

But the most powerful thing he stated regarding teams is that you can tell within ten minutes of watching video of a good team what their system is. He listed all kinds of hockey terms I didn’t recognize, being a basketball fan, but the point was that the hockey equivalent of the team’s work processes were done in repeatable ways that an outsider could quickly recognize. On the other hand, he said, you could watch hours of videos of poorly performing teams and never figure out their systems.

In other words, if you want quality, you have to take the time to formalize your processes. Common to every quality control method from Total Quality Management to Six Sigma is writing down or diagramming of processes. That’s the only way you can ensure smooth coordination and handoffs of work—or the hockey puck.

Comment