Teams Blog

“We’re all going to die!”  This was how Ryan Allis, CEO of iContact, started his presentation at a recent Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce event this week. He credited another speaker for the line, but his point was made: keep things in perspective. He shared stories that proved having and staying true to one’s goals and values can contribute to the bottom line. He should know. He set a goal when he was 16 that he would have a $1 million business by the time he was 21. Sadly, he missed the milestone… by 18 days.

Allis said he gave up a $200,000 job right out of high school to go to college. (Granted, it was the University of North Carolina, not that I’m biased.) While there, he and another Tar Heel started what would become iContact. The first year they lost $5,000. In 2008, they made $15 million. Allis described a corporate culture of practical jokes and parties that might have seemed alien to that audience, but sounded normal to someone recently moved from high-tech Seattle. He really caught my ear when he said his company used to have a list of 10 values “that was really sucky and nobody remembered them.”

This reminded me of a study I carry to all of my trainings, “Inspiration and Cynicism in Values Statements.” A survey of executive MBA students found, “On the whole, respondents evaluated the impact of their firms’ value statements on decision-making positively.” Reasons included: “positive outcomes… both inside and outside the company, guidelines provided for decision-making, increased accountability, and clarity of expectations.” But I think it important to note that high-level executives made up half of those respondents. They may indeed use those values, but I am willing to bet most of their employees do not. Allis’ statement surprised me because he had recognized at the top level what you generally only hear from people down the line.

In response, he took his senior leadership team on a retreat and came up with five values that form the acronym WOWME:

1. Wow the Customer.
2. Operate with Urgency.
3. Without Mediocrity.
4. Make a Positive Wake.
5. Engage as an Owner.

From the scientific standpoint, this was not the ideal way to create the list. The study found respondents were most likely to feel value statements had an impact when everyone in the company was involved in creating them, which fits what we know about the psychology behind motivation. There’s no better way to build buy-in than to involve from the start those from whom you want the buy-in. iContact is small enough that this could have been accomplished without a huge investment of time. Allis said they ended up laying off 10% of their employees who could not get on board with the new values as implemented. He probably would have lost far fewer with a bottom-up approach, and most of the turnover would have been voluntary, saving the company heartache and unemployment costs. Plus, each team in the company would have brought out its team values, in alignment with the eventual corporate ones.

That said, everything they have done to implement the values are right on target. I caught him for a quick interview after his talk. Allis said the values are used on performance appraisals and in coaching sessions. The company also has a values recognition program that is very high tech: a poster and stickers. Each time someone exemplifies one of the values, they get a sticker by their name. With a certain number of stickers, they get a gift card. The person with the most stickers at the end of the year gets a prize, Allis explained.

The company lives its values in the more general sense through its “4-1s” program, under which it gives each year:

• monetary donations equivalent to 1% of payroll,
• its product for free to area nonprofits,
• 1% of each employee’s time (2.5 days) for volunteer work, and
• 1% of its equity to The Humanity Campaign.

Given the company’s financial success, it seems to be fulfilling his statement, “The purpose of business is to create value and solve human problems…” Allis is personally proving you can do both with his own extensive volunteer work, including serving as the head of Nourish International, which engages college students to fight poverty.

I can’t resist pointing out, however, that the whole company may not have bought into the values yet. Allis would probably be surprised to learn that five months after WOWME was introduced, his company Web site still lists the old 10-item values list!

Source: Urbany, J. (2005), “Inspiration and Cynicism in Values Statements,” Journal of Business Ethics 62:169.

A study I just posted to TeamResearch News about HR practices points out the way scientists think a little differently than most of us, and thus why I put a lot more stock in what they have to say than in most writers of business stories in popular publications.

This study was based on something called the Workplace and Employment Survey (WES), which is sponsored by the Canadian government and which people are legally required to respond to. Right off the bat, this makes the study different. The response rate of around 96% is four times better than the typical response rate to surveys of roughly 25%. Scientists without government sanctions supporting them go to great lengths to make sure results are not too badly skewed due to those low response rates, and thus are similar to what they would have gotten had they reached everybody.

Scientists are also careful about drawing conclusions from their work. A major mistake most people make when reading about studies—including most journalists and consultants—is to confuse correlation with causation. Simply put, just because two data are linked, that doesn’t mean one caused the other. In the HR study, for example, higher levels of training at a workplace were linked to higher levels of people quitting. Is this because a better-trained worker has more skills they can use to get a job elsewhere, as the scientists suggest based on other research? Probably. But it also could be that companies with higher “quit rates” have to provide more training because they have to hire more people to backfill those positions. A simple correlation does not show whether the training came first or the quitting came first, and the article’s authors say that. (Their study design provides some evidence, though.)

Scientists will point out where their data are lacking. In this study, the authors point out the WES data is not very detailed. It is possible that classroom training leads to higher quit rates, but on-the-job training leads to lower ones. You can’t draw a conclusion about all training from this gross figure (gross as in “general,” not as in “yucky”).

Scientists also are pretty quick, at least in publications, to point out where they were wrong. In part this is because they know in peer-reviewed journals, where other anonymous scientists critique the articles before they are published, if the authors don’t admit they were wrong, the reviewers will tell them. In this study, some of the researchers’ hypotheses turned out to be wrong, and they state that.

Finally, scientists are careful to limit their conclusions to what they actually investigated and found. For example, these authors point out the study was only about voluntary turnover, and there are likely to be compelling reasons for a company to offer training despite it harming this one metric. (If you doubt that, I refer you to the powerful evidence in the book The Fifth Discipline.)

Contrast all this to stories in popular business publications. They are not usually reviewed by other experts on the topic before publication. They assert positions without offering hard data to back it up. Their language is imprecise. I recently commented on another writer’s blog that the best “practices” a post claimed for teams were not “practices” at all, but descriptions of well-performing teams.

These stories also make claims they can’t support. A press release that got coverage from a national professional organization estimated financial losses due to workers who avoid conflict at work. But when I contacted the firm that put out the study, they admitted the sample was just anybody who responded to an online poll, and the demographics showed that the respondents in no way represent the common worker. Sixty-seven percent were female, for example. Two-thirds worked in companies of 750 or more and 71 percent had college degrees. Most people work for smaller firms, and only around 25% of Americans have degrees. Yet the release claimed, “New research reveals employees waste an average of $1,500 and an 8-hour workday for every crucial conversation they avoid.” No, it doesn’t. It says workers who use the Internet and happened to see an ad for the survey and are interested enough to respond gave that as the average answer, which probably would not turn out to be accurate if an outside observer actually measured the time.

In short: reader beware.

Usually for fun—in the sense that it’s usually fun and usually not for pay—I do an occasional backstage gig, returning to my undergraduate roots. Recently I completed a production with a dance school. This round got me to reflecting on how the lack of role definition can cause friction on a work team, and how easily that friction can be minimized through simple communication.

My job was easy compared to the rest of the “running crew” (techies who work during the show, not just setting it up and “striking” afterwards). All I had to do was run projections displayed on a curtain at the back of the stage using PowerPoint on a laptop, plus raise and lower the houselights and make onstage fog. All of it boiled down to pushing buttons. However, as the only official crew member onstage, the others being in a booth at the back of the audience, I also served as the eyes and ears of the stage manager. The SM “calls the show,” which is to say she was telling the lighting guy and I when to do our next things. Next to me onstage, but not on headsets to the booth, were the technical director and director of the company.

Both are wonderful people  whom I enjoy working with. Like most directors and choreographers, the boss gets perfectionistic during a run. Most backstage personnel do, too, if they’re any good. But usually the boss is not backstage during the production, turning things over to the SM. It was sometimes unpleasant to be stuck between the bosses onstage and the person literally running the show in the booth. The former could not hear what the status was of the sound and lights. Furthermore, to save money, we had never run a “dry tech” in which the nonperformers talk through the “cues” (technical changes such as a shift in lighting or sound). So the stage manager didn’t know she was supposed to call the next projection cue with the next light cue, instead of calling it later with the music cue as she was doing. Meanwhile, the bosses kept pushing me to go with the next cue without recognizing the pattern. At more than one point I literally had three people talking to me at once and saying different things.

This is not intended as a complaint, but rather an allegory. How often have you found in the working world that you were getting different messages from well-meaning stakeholders who clearly weren’t talking to each other? How often has the fix been a simple matter of getting them together briefly? In this case, after the dress rehearsal, the stage manager rightly insisted that we run a dry tech right then. It took maybe 30 minutes, and as a result the performances went fine minus the usual minor glitches. Certainly the bosses and audiences expressed their approval.

Another friction point was cleared up when the stage manager gladly ceded the cue calls on the curtain to the director. Again I had been stuck between the SM telling us to “go” and the curtain puller refusing to do so. The director had told the puller she would make the call, but hadn’t told me or the SM about this change from the norm. After a rough rehearsal, I told the SM, and she had no issue with the change once told about it.

A few minutes to clarify who was to do each task, and to talk through how the work of the show was to be accomplished, would have saved far more time as well as heartache on the parts of five people. Anything like that going on in your team?

P.S. If you are in the Raleigh, N.C., USA, area, come visit with me next Tuesday (5/18/2010). I’ll be serving on a panel discussing “Sales, Service & Support: Working as a Team,” at a luncheon sponsored by Linking Raleigh NC. To join us, see http://bit.ly/dbNX2S. I’d love to meet you!

In parts one and two of our walk through team-building history, researchers Skipton Leonard and Arthur Freedman showed us that much of what we think of as recent advancements actually date back as much as a century. We’ll finish up the journey with a look at the ’90s and what should have changed in the Aughts, according to them.

In the 1990s, the authors write, team-based structures became more commonplace in part because IT companies adopted them. “Owing to the spectacular success of these corporations in the global marketplace, organizations of all varieties—from low tech smokestack industries to governmental agencies and educational institutions—enthusiastically embraced team-based structures in efforts to improve productivity and quality,” they report.

However, almost all of the books on teamwork were based on the experiences of their authors as team developers, not on hard science about what works and what doesn’t. Even the book I most often recommend as a starting point for those interested in teams (other than my own teamwork book, of course), was based primarily on its authors’ work at consulting firm McKinsey and analysis of Gulf War logistics operations. (The Wisdom of Teams, 1994.) Solid research on teamwork had dropped by the wayside. Most university researchers even gave up membership in the National Training Laboratory, discussed in Part 1 as one of the birthplaces of modern teamwork efforts. This parallels my constant griping that many consultants seem out of touch with the science, which I’ll repeat shortly.

The journal article upon which this series of posts is based was published in 2000, so we can see if their advice for the “future” was heeded in the past decade, as quoted below.

“1. Don’t oversimplify the process.”

Leonard and Freedman recognize the need for easily understood concepts, but say team builders must know and address the complexity of group dynamics. Too often consultants try to make team development seem easy, and it simply isn’t. An example is the overuse of the “Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing” model first proposed in 1965. Unfortunately, this is still quoted as gospel by too many presenters and team builders. I use it as a frame of reference, but always add that teams can be in various phases at once and the curve through them is rarely smooth. Also, with proper development the “Storming” phase is not inevitable. On the down side, teams can drop out of the Performing phase after hitting it, so you can never completely stop your teamwork efforts.

“2. Start studying teams as they exist and function in real-life contexts today.”

This, I’m happy to say, has become more prevalent in research over the past decade. For example, research on business project teams in automotive and railway companies since I started TeamTrainers in 2000 has influenced my work. A study in a large bank showed that good teamwork was more important to branch performance than diversity training.

“3. Practitioners need to revive their historically active partnership with researchers.”

Amen. The biggest barrier to my marketing efforts are the myths that continue to be spread by many in the team building industry who don’t take the time to learn the science. On the research side, however, too many studies are still simply “correlational,” as Leonard and Freedman lament. That is, they merely describe high-performance teams at a given point of time or rely on participants’ recollections instead of using more sophisticated methods to detail what caused that high performance. A lot of my recommendations are built on likely results based on the science combined with my real-world experiences. I’d rather they were all based on studies that compared monetized performance of similar teams at Point A to performance of the same teams at Point B (and C) with just one change in the way those teams were operated. Then we’d know much better whether that change worked and was the difference.

“4. The research and theory regarding teams needs to move beyond the linear, homeostatic view of organizational systems.”

In other words, much of the research has viewed organizations as progressing in a straightforward way that works toward internal balance. Have you ever worked in one of those? I’m sorry to say there has not yet begun to be enough research into how the corporate culture limits team performance, or how teams react to and cause changes in the corporate environment, or the role of decisions by some upper managers. My definition of a high-performance team says that the team performs as well as it can given its environment. The classic example is when a company declares itself “team-based” but continues to give raises and bonuses based on individual performance. Said company should not be surprised when people then put their own agendas ahead of the team’s.

“5. Finally, researchers and practitioners need to have a better appreciation for the history of research and theory regarding teams.”

That’s part of the reason for this series of posts (and last week’s anti-”team-building” rant). Much of what we think is new is not, and much of what we need to know is known. If you’re a manager and want better teamwork, it’s just a matter of learning what really works and applying it. If you don’t want it, then you are wasting your company’s money and causing yourself and others unnecessary pain. Have the courage to admit team leadership is not your thing and find a position that will be healthier for you and the team.

Source: Leonard, H. S., and A. Freedman (2000), “From scientific management through fun and games to high performing teams: A historical perspective on consulting to team-based organizations,” Consulting Psychology Journal 52(1):3.