Teams Blog

I was fired from my first true project manager job. Though I’ll note that the person who fired me was himself fired a few months later, there were some legitimate beefs. The biggest mistake I made was in not telling the sales staff what they were asking for in my first assignment was impossible. I wanted to make a good impression and seem cooperative, but of course the project failed miserably and I never really recovered my credibility. I also didn’t understand the PM role in a customer-facing position. Though the project process I applied in each of my projects was appropriate, and worked well in the rest of the projects, I did not adapt it enough to meet the ultimate outcome: a pleased customer. The boss said I was “too process-focused.” At the time I was flabbergasted by the statement, given that he was a PMP® (certified Project Management Professional) and yet had zero PM processes in place. Projects were inefficient and often missed their targets.

We both might have kept our jobs had we found a better balance between outcome and process. A TeamResearch News summary I just posted reports on a study that addresses this need. It found, first, that student teams who took time to do any planning at all did better at a game requiring teamwork than those who didn’t. Those whose planning focused on the goal rather than the process did better when some of their resources were taking away halfway through the game. The researcher believed the outcome teams were better at adapting their processes to the change. The type of planning made no difference when a team member was added late. I’d guess adding a member required no process change, whereas losing materials might.

This was reassuring to me because my teamwork training method, The SuddenTeams® Program, reflects these findings. The study author, Harvard-trained researcher Anita Woolley of Carnegie Mellon University, writes in her article that managers should “pay attention to how they structure early team meetings and the relative emphasis they place on processes versus outcomes.” Based on what the scientific literature had told me, I have teams address both goals and processes. But the order of events relative to this issue is:

1. Set a team mission.
2. Set goals toward meeting the mission.
3. Identify team stakeholders.
4. Document team and work processes.

Immediately after that, the team dives into process improvement. Written processes are a key step in every quality improvement system like TQM and Six Sigma, and invaluable for improving efficiency and reducing conflict. But The SuddenTeams Program puts the emphasis on what the team is accomplishing and for whom before defining how to get there. As the study shows, and my firing taught me, both the outcome and processes are critical to maximum team performance, but you have to keep your eye on the prize.

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Two studies on lawsuits against businesses caught my eye recently. For one, business researchers used public records to determine how many lawsuits were filed against companies before and after mergers through acquisition, and how many of those suits got to the point of a court making a judgment that the firm did something wrong (not related to the merger). They looked at 576 U.S. firms acquired in 1987, including public and private firms and both foreign and U.S. buyers. With the help of law students, they categorized and counted judgments that found the company liable in six categories: “personal injury, product liability, other torts, labor disputes, environmental violations, and contract disputes.” On average, the number of negative judgments jumped 50% over pre-acquisition levels. The result did not appear to be offset by any decrease in judgments against the acquiring firm (published in Organization Science, Vol. 20, No. 1, p. 206). M&A candidates, be advised.

Then a newsletter from the Society for Human Resources hit my Inbox with a report on the annual Workplace Class Action Litigation Report from law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP, based in Chicago. It concluded that “workplace class actions filed against employers and the monetary risk they pose to companies has increased exponentially over the past six years,” according to the article in HR Week (Jan. 19, 2010). The report was based on class- and collective-action filings in federal and state courts in 2009.

Not surprisingly given the recession, unpaid wages and 401(k) losses were significant contributors. Wage-and-hour litigation topped all workplace class actions. However, the article says, “As layoffs increased, displaced workers also filed more age discrimination and Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification lawsuits.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) stepped up its actions “and secured $294.1 million in settlements for allegedly injured victims of job bias.” Both the EEOC and Department of Labor have added significant staff, the report says, so the firm sees more coming.

Each of these studies indicate companies were not paying attention to warning signs raised by employees, especially during stressful events like mergers and force reductions. It’s one thing to dismiss one person as having “attitude problems” instead of really trying to understand them. But to ignore so many people that they file, and win, a class-action lawsuit indicates an enterprise-wide “hear no evil” problem. Many wage-and-hour suits are brought after repeated complaints by multiple employees. Even product liability cases often result after people inside the company raised red flags and were ignored by upper managers.

I asked Ralph DiLeone, managing partner at The DiLeone Law Group in Raleigh, NC, for his thoughts. ”Planning for these events and paying attention to warning signs is critical. We recommend our clients hold an annual meeting with us and a few other of their trusted professionals… when we discuss any employee situations, questions and issues,” he wrote. He added two warnings: “Don’t just rely on ‘my neighbor said’ on these issues. Don’t wait, as the consequences can be dire!”

Where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire. If you hear similar complaints from more than one employee, listen. If you don’t hear any complaints from any employee, arrange for an anonymous job satisfaction survey to make sure. And these studies indicate that in either case, if you’re a business owner, you better add a reputable lawyer like Ralph to your business team.

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“Survey finds mostly grumps,” the headline said in the Raleigh News & Observer recently. According to a report by The Conference Board (the same organization that reports Consumer Confidence numbers every month), employee satisfaction is at its lowest level “in more than 22 years of studying the issue.” Only 45 percent said they were happy with their jobs, down from 61 percent back in 1987, according to the Board’s press release. The decline has occurred fairly steadily over time, so it’s not just related to the recession.

More than half of American workers don’t like their jobs. That is shocking to me, despite the sad stories I often hear as I network for my business. Money is part of the issue, with incomes falling and health insurance cutting discretionary finances further. But a major component is workers who don’t find their jobs interesting, a figure that dropped from 70 percent in 1987 to 51 percent. In fact, the drop “crosses all four of the key drivers of employee engagement: job design, organizational health, managerial quality, and extrinsic rewards,” the release said. (Money falls under that last category.) It also says the data indicates “the increasing dissatisfaction is not just a ‘survivor syndrome’ artifact of having co-workers and neighbors laid off in the recession,” quoting John Gibbons, program director of employee engagement research.

Among those under 25, only 37% like their jobs. Given that job satisfaction correlates strongly with the likelihood of someone staying in the job, this poses a direct threat to long-term organizational efficiency, dependent as that is on the transfer of corporate and industry knowledge from older to younger workers. If they don’t stick around, you can’t pass it along before older workers retire, as the Board notes.

A quote in the N&O (actually Associated Press) article caught my eye for obvious reasons, from a 26-year-old: “There is no sense of teamwork in most places anymore.” It’s one thing to hear a 56-year-old say “anymore,” but simply pitiful from someone that young. However, he is also right on the mark. Multiple studies report that a sense of teamwork is related positively to job satisfaction.

Along with team development, another answer is empowering employees to make more decisions about how they accomplish their work. Cross-training people to do each others’ jobs is an easy way to raise the “interestingness” of their work. Note that none of these tactics necessarily require an investment of much more than time: time to put teamwork best practices in place, train some managers, have people shadow each other, and maybe change some policies and procedures.

Why bother? In addition to the higher innovation and productivity of satisfied workers mentioned in the press release, I have seen it positively linked to higher retention rates, lower absenteeism, and higher motivation. Even in good times, money is not a Top 4 motivator for most employees (among those above a subsistence level of pay). At a time when companies can’t even offer that, low-cost alternatives like training and empowerment just makes that much more sense.

Note: The report was based on a survey of 5,000 U.S. households. Neither the release nor the article report the data-quality specifics like margin of error, but the Board’s research is well respected. That said, I’d prefer to be reporting on the original report, but I ain’t paying $395 to do a blog post!

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The holidays slowed things down enough for me to get back into the library, and I came across a set of recent studies on workplace diversity in the Academy of Management Journal. It’s a depressing topic for me. The most obvious reason is what it says about human beings, the mere fact that we are still having to discuss the issue in the 21st Century. Our inability to look past differences that genetically amount to a fraction of a percent of our genome and are literally skin deep is ridiculous. Whether biological, cultural, or learned, the average behavior and aptitude differences between men and women or blacks and whites are swamped by the differences caused by education. The behavioral differences between a Type A and Type B white guy or Type A and Type B black woman are far larger than those between the average white guy and black woman.

That said, diversity advocates have a problem in both over-reaching and, often, over-simplifying the effects. I consistently hear that diversity improves creativity, team performance, problem-solving, and so forth. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a myth, as there is no clear scientific evidence supporting this position. A “meta-analysis” of diversity studies in which researchers reviewed the results from 63 studies over five years found that overall, personal diversity neither helped nor harmed team performance (see summary). Functional diversity—having a range of educational specialties, skills, and tenure within a company or industry—usually helped team performance.

But those are averages. Other diversity studies I’ve summarized in TeamResearch News show the answers are not that simple. And the two I just came across provide more context. One found that teams of people who like mentally challenging tasks did better when diverse, but age diversity hurt performance and educational diversity had no effect with people who didn’t. In another, diverse teams in industries that weren’t diverse tended to struggle. As I note in the summary, that’s not because the minority members aren’t as capable as the majority members. It’s because majority members don’t know how to work with the minority members.

This is not entirely, or mostly, their fault. In an industry dominated by one gender and race, one or two minorities on a team generally learn the unwritten codes of the majority and follow those to fit in. (I’m not saying they should do this, or that it’s fair, but merely that this is what usually happens.) The majority members never have to learn about the cultural norms of somebody else. When placed on a team where they are not the majority, not only do they not know how to act, they don’t know how to learn how to act, because they’ve never had to.

Though the researchers in the most recent study point a manager in that situation toward diversity education, I don’t think that is the first step. As with personality tests and rope-course teambuilding, there is little support in the independent scientific literature to suggest these are cost-effective practices. Put in place the proven best practices of high-performing teams first, because they place the focus on the similarities between humans rather than the differences. Every group in every culture works better if it has clearly articulated goals, rules, and procedures, for example. A Harvard study at a U.S. bank found that training to develop good procedures was more effective at improving team performance than was diversity training. In fact, diversity training had no effect at all on performance (good or bad), contrary to what the Harvard researcher thought would be true.

In short, contrary to what some managers and those who sell to them want to believe, both teamwork and effective diversity require fundamental changes in the way people interact on a daily basis. And that takes more than a seminar or two.

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