Teams Blog

Researchers have been looking into manufacturing, supply chain, and project management for years, often making recommendations to managers. Maybe you have followed their advice on the job. But there’s a problem, according to professors Francesca Gino and Gary Pisano: “Most formal analytical models in operations management (OM) assume that the agents who participate in operating systems or processes—as decision makers, problem solvers, implementers, workers, or customers—are either fully rational or can be induced to behave rationally.” In other words, scientific theories about how to run a plant or project assume that people:

• identify and react only to relevant information;
• have the same preferences in every situation;
• consider all options before making a decision; and
• make those decisions without emotion.

Oh, yeah, sounds like every workplace I’ve been in.

Gino, of the Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill but headed to Harvard Univ., and Pisano of Harvard, point out in a 2008 paper that people effects on a  system’s performance have permeated other fields of research, from economics and accounting to the law. But “a ‘behavioral perspective’ has largely been absent in the field of operations,” they write. Because of this, current OM models can’t really explain the difference between one firm’s performance and another’s. In turn, managers don’t find OM theories very useful. Especially relevant to Teams Blog is the authors’ point that “behavioral operations” researchers needs to look into how individual cognition and “social norms and systems affect operations.” Gino and Pisano say based on previous research (cited below) that this will lead to very different predictions about what will fix specific issues.

In an interview I asked Gino, an assistant professor of organizational behavior, why OM scientists resist research on the effect of human behavior. She said there is “skepticism from some people that maybe it is not dramatic or very significant…” She noted that her co-author’s interest was sparked by going into organizations and seeing what worked, which suggests that other academics have not done that. However, she said, “The researchers, the more they hear, the more they understand that it is important to study the psychology of people.”

People effects have explained results that defied scientific theories in other fields. In the OM world, this could explain “the tendency of projects to run late and over budget or the tendency of organizations to over commit their R&D resources,” the article says. Researchers have identified many biases and questionable rules-of-thumb that affect our decision-making. Gino and Pisano provide a somewhat depressing list of 19 shortcuts humans take in their decision-making that can mess up the results. Some include:

• “Information avoidance—People’s tendency to avoid information that might cause mental discomfort…”
• “Confirmation bias—People’s tendency to seek information consistent with their own views or hypotheses”
• “Law of small numbers—People’s tendency to consider small samples as representative of the (entire) populations from which they are drawn”
• “Sunk costs fallacy—People’s tendency to pay attention to information about costs that have already been incurred and that cannot be recovered… when making current decisions”
• “Conservatism—People’s failure to update their opinions or beliefs when they receive new information…”
• “Hindsight bias—People’s tendency to think of events that have occurred as more predictable than they in fact were before they took place”

Take another example the professors explore, the “anchoring and adjustment” bias. People often start their thinking from a particular point, sometimes without a good reason for it, and then stay too close to that point. In one study, software developers given a higher anchor to start with ended up with higher final estimates than when they were given lower or no “anchors,” the article says. Sales forecasts are often off because they start with the previous year’s sales instead of an unbiased analysis of this year’s market.

Of course, behavioral operations researchers and managers can’t erase human bias. However, Gino and Pisano write, “operating systems can be designed in such a way that systematic errors are eliminated, or at least their negative consequences reduced.”

I asked Gino what advice she would give, for instance, a chief operations officer whose IT planner tends to anchor too closely to industry averages. “First, you need to be aware of the bias, which is a very simple lesson, but it is hard to recognize,” she said. Have someone act as a devil’s advocate, she suggested, asking the planner to bring alternatives to the table and questions like, “How did you come up with this number?” I would add, based on something else she said, that you cannot push the person for a certain number and be surprised when it turns out wrong. In the IT scenario, don’t anchor yourself to industry averages if the planner offers good reasons not to.

While other scientists are catching up to Gino, Pisano and other… okay, I can’t resist calling them “BO researchers*” at least once… take a look at the biases table in the article and maybe you’ll find your own answers. Or call me and I’ll show you how to account for people effects in your operation.

Sources:

• Bendoly, E. (06), K. Donohue, and K. Schultz (06), “Behavior in Operations Management: Assessing Recent Findings and Revisiting Old Assumptions,” Journal of Operations Management 24(6):737.
• Boudreau, J., W. Hopp, J. McClain, and L.J. Thomas (03), “On the Interface Between Operations and Human Resources Management,” Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 5(3):179.
• Gino, F., and G. Pisano (08), “Toward a Theory of Behavioral Operations,” Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 10(4):676.

*BO is American slang for a person’s smell or “body odor.”

In another example of people relearning a well-established truth the hard way, plaintiffs in a U.S. Supreme Court case this week found out they could not use their work pagers for “sexting.” More to the point of this blog, I hope their managers learned a similar message: don’t tell people they have rights they don’t actually have.

To both sides I say, “Duh.”

As chronicled in the court’s opinion,  two police officers in Ontario, Calif., were going way over their monthly character limits for the alphanumeric pagers they had been issued by their department. The police chief requested transcripts of their messages to determine whether he needed to pay for higher limits or people were overloading them with personal messages. It turned out their on-duty messages were mostly personal, and many were sexual. After an investigation by the internal affairs office, the officers were disciplined. The Associated Press article on the case notes, “a police official… informally told officers that no one would audit their text messages if the officers personally paid for charges above a monthly allowance.” However, that was wrong. The city had a written policy to the contrary, and that trumped whatever that person said.

Granted, the policy did not specifically mention pager text messages. But trying to play that technicality reminds me of a TV show I saw this week, in which the father told the teen-age son to take his dirty dishes “to the kitchen.” The son dropped them off on the floor just inside the doorway, and when confronted, argued the father had not said to put them in the dishwasher.

Notice that because the plaintiffs were employed by a government, they could bring the Constitution into their argument. Although many employees seem to think otherwise, by itself the Constitution does not limit the rights of private companies. For example, a worker who claims they have a “right to free speech” about their company is simply wrong. That “right” prevents a government from censoring you (in most cases), but does not apply to a private entity unless Congress has created a law saying you have a right. Whistleblower rights–legal protections for people who report lawbreaking by their employers–exist because of federal law. (Usual disclaimer: I ain’t a lawyer, this is not legal advice, contact a lawyer for specifics).

Since my first exposure to this topic in a grad school Media Law course, I have seen case after case where employees were fired for doing personal stuff on computers, including moral and perfectly legal activities like side-business work.  There are exceptions, but generally speaking, since the office computer and telephone are owned by the company, the company can do whatever it wants with them. That usually includes watching or listening to what you are doing.

That said, I’ve also seen cases where the decision hinged on whether the company had a specific policy and enforced it consistently. My guess would be that if a company president was seen using his office computer to play online poker, and the company did not have an employee handbook saying otherwise, the courts might back someone who was fired for lawful personal use of their company computer. In “employment-at-will” states, where employers can fire someone for any reason not specified as against the law, even that argument might be hard to make. Nonetheless, not only are formal policies smart from the legal standpoint, they also are the ethical thing to do, giving people fair warning about how you define right-and-wrong.  Most of us think what we consider right should be obvious to everyone else, but you know that isn’t the way human beings work.

For employees, the AP article says, it is a “common-sense message”: “Use your own cell phone if you’ve got something to text that you don’t want your boss to read.” I would add a common-sense message to employers, which is to have a written policy on personal use you reinforce regularly. Since the City of Ontario did that, another common-sense message goes out to supervisors, which is, don’t interpret company policies on your own. If you aren’t absolutely sure how a policy impacts an employee question, go ask whoever is responsible for the policy.

Unfortunately, as I’ve long said, I prefer to call this kind of thinking “horse sense.” There seem to be more horses than there are people who have that sense, so it isn’t all that common.

How team members “think, make decisions, plan, design, perceive, and remember”—in other words, how information is processed as a group—will clearly impact how the team performs.  But many managers focus on the outputs of the process instead of the process itself. For example, if they don’t like a plan, they will send it back with some changes and questions. When they have to go through this several times on every plan, they understandably become frustrated. Often, though, they will either yell at the team for whatever they perceive the problem to be or start doing the plans themselves. Instead, perhaps they should stop to look at the understanding the team has about what they are planning or the planning process itself.

It may have been Edwards Deming who first said the majority of what appear to be individual performance problems are actually process problems (I confess I didn’t record the source). The AntiClue blog has made the same point, and it’s one of performance consultant Don Clark’s main causes of performance problems (3/4 of which are mostly out of the individual’s control). Almost all process problems boil down to someone not having the information they needed when they needed it, if you include as “information” knowledge, skills, procedures, external decisions, etc. A study from last year confirms that managers need to pay much more attention to how their teams get, use, and store knowledge. Psychology professor Leslie DeChurch and management professor Jessica Mesmer-Magnus teamed up to draw relevant data from 65 studies into team cognition. The American Heritage Science Dictionary defines cognition as, “The mental process of knowing, including awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.” The professors describe it as including both “the nature of team member interaction” and “conditions that dynamically enable and underlie effective teamwork,” so it’s both a process and a group mental state. Psychologists Nancy Cooke and Jamie Gorman, the sources of the first quote in this post, put it succinctly: “team mind.”

Cognition is measured two ways. One compares the understanding of some topic across each pair of members on the team. For example, the similarity and accuracy between members A and B, B and C, and A and C are averaged to get a team cognition figure. The other way looks at the team’s overall view of some topic, measuring members A, B, and C together. The DeChurch/Mesmer-Magnus study looked at the ways these two approaches; the type of team (decision-making, action, and project teams); and other possible factors might affect the relationship between cognition and team performance. I won’t go into all the details, but it was clear that the more a team had a shared perception of its work, the better it performed. Though more true on subjective tests like ratings by managers, it also seemed to impact measurable performance. This appears to operate in part by improving work processes and member motivation, but a higher level of team mind by itself raised performance.

The authors suggest that managers pay attention to whether perceptions are shared among team members and in what ways. Cooke and Gorman use the example of a team that works with boilers, pumps, electronics, and motors. Everyone on the team could see a strong connection between all four of these in their work. In a more complementary kind of shared cognition, a couple of members might see connections between the first three items, while another set of members might only see a connection between pumps and motors. Between all the members, however, the team mind sees a connection of all four. In the latter scenario, you can surely see the potential for misunderstanding if those different views were not understood and respected. That is, complementary cognition is okay so long as the people who don’t see the pump/motor connection defer to those who do on matters affecting the motors.

Accuracy of cognition is also important. For example, say you work in a pharmaceutical plant where following a standard operating procedure (SOP) is required by government regulation. It’s not enough for one or two members to understand the SOP thoroughly. If the whole team doesn’t understand it, you increase the risk of a regulatory breach.

DeChurch and Mesmer-Magnus make the interesting suggestion of performing job task analyses on the work the team does and then “structure important support systems (e.g., measurement, performance appraisal, and reward structures) to develop and shape the collective cognition needed for successful teamwork.” I was trained on job task analysis while working at Los Alamos. An outsider observes people while on the job to determine the steps they go through and thus the knowledge, skills, and information necessary to succeed at the job. That done, the researchers say, leadership and training would be likely methods to ensure the team develops the proper cognition.

Or “team mind,” as I think I’ll start calling it. That term makes for all kinds of punny opportunities:

Q. What kind of cognition does a group of soil scientists need?
A. A dirty mind.

Sources:

1. Cooke, N. J., & Gorman, J. C. (in press), “Assessment of Team Cognition.” In P. Karwowski (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ergonomics and Human Factors, 2nd Ed. Taylor & Francis Ltd.
2. DeChurch, L., and J. Mesmer-Magnus (2010), “The Cognitive Underpinnings of Effective Teamwork: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Applied Psychology 95(1):32.

In May of 2000, I received a gift for all the wrong reasons: more than a week off with pay, because a wildfire was threatening to burn down my workplace! I refer to the Cerro Grande Fire that destroyed 400 homes in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and melted a guardrail within sight of American’s only nuclear weapons “pit” facility. At the time I had been working at Los Alamos National Laboratory, home of the atomic bomb, since 1993. Having completed three years as a project leader there, I was frustrated at the limitations of being a manager at a government facility. But I had learned something important about myself. It seemed I was pretty good at creating self-directed work teams, and it was very rewarding to see those teams take off.

One day I was watching TV coverage of the fire. A shot from a news helicopter showed heavy billowing smoke, which opened up briefly to reveal the main administration building. My office was next to that building. I decided it was time to pursue another job. So I spent the rest of my time off writing the business plan for what would become TeamTrainers™ Consulting.

I filed for a business license on June 5, 2000, ten years ago today, in Albuquerque. I chose the date in honor of my father, who would have been 79 that day had he not died when I was 10. The first order of business was finding out the truth about team building. I had taken a couple of seminars, read some books, and done a ropes-course retreat, and was skeptical based on my experiences. As an ex-reporter, I was used to digging for the real story, and had already reviewed something like 600 scientific sources on topics as diverse as romantic attraction, persuasive writing, and corporal punishment of children. For the next six months, I was in the libraries at the University of New Mexico one day a week doing research.

The result was my training manual, The SuddenTeams® Program. Currently it’s over 500 pages (not the book version) and I have nearly that many sources in my bibliography, not counting another 250-300 I reviewed but didn’t use. It covers every aspect of forming and leading a team from after the people have been selected until the team shuts down, including special challenges such as leading virtual teams, getting buy-in from unions, etc.

At this point I made a mistake. I now know the sales cycle for my type of service is 12 to 18 months. At the time, not seeing much sales movement after six months, I panicked and decided I needed a better market. Given its size and high-tech companies,  and my friends there, Seattle seemed the logical choice. You could say I was following the Microsoft model, given that Bill and company started that company in Albuquerque and moved to the Seattle suburb of Redmond.

During my years in Seattle, I freely admit, TeamTrainers ranged from full-time activity to mostly dormant. It’s 10 with an asterisk, as they say about sports records. I am grateful to my ex-wife for pushing me to revive it at one point. I can say I taught at Hewlett-Packard in Silicon Valley, the City of Seattle, and the University of Washington-Bothell, among other places. Another mistake I made was promising clients confidentiality. My argument was that I was giving them a competitive advantage they didn’t want their competitors to know about. But it didn’t add to my sales, and it’s making things a little harder now because I can’t offer many references.

That birthday asterisk also applies to my time here in Raleigh, NC. I grew up here, lived elsewhere 25 years, and came back for family reasons in 2008. I took a year off from TeamTrainers after moving to Raleigh, deciding whether I really wanted to start this business for the third time given that I would mostly be marketing for a while. But the fun I have helping teams is worth the effort.

I have never wavered from the mission I chose from the start: “To improve people’s lives by spreading the benefits of true teaming as widely as possible.” That’s why I keep my hourly rate below the market average, so smaller companies and nonprofits can afford my services. My first gig here was at N.C. State University, and I am especially proud of pro bono work such as trainings for Hospice of Wake County and the N.C. Jaycees. Having seen the life-changing impact of real teamwork on workers and their managers, I wish I could get every team in America to adopt the best practices for teamwork according to science. But until they do, TeamTrainers will have many more birthdays.