Teams Blog

I once shocked a manager by telling her I thought she had rated me too highly in an annual performance review. I don’t recall the details anymore, just the stunned look on her face. Some mistake I had made during the year, though I had identified and corrected it at the time, made me feel that my colleagues had done a better job on one measure. Almost everybody got a 3 on almost everything, so a 3 seemed unfair. When I self-rated, I gave myself a 2. I ended up with a 3 anyway.

My apologies if this comes across as self-aggrandizing, but it illustrates a point: The most common complaints I have heard over the years about appraisals boil down to, “It’s not fair!” Many teamwork scientists and management gurus agree. John Hunter of Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog reports J. Edwards Deming “emphasized that forced rankings and other merit ratings that breed internal competition are bad management because they undermine motivation and breed contempt for management among people who, at least at first, were doing good work.” I’ve said for years that performance appraisals are legal protection for bad managers, a waste of time for the majority. If you set measurable standards for your employees, communicate monthly on the results, and praise and correct at every opportunity, an annual review tells the employee nothing new. If you don’t do those things, the review refocuses their effort way too late—perhaps 12 months too late. Though I offer recommendations in The SuddenTeams™ Program for harnessing appraisals to support team performance, that’s because appraisals are so prevalent, not because I like them.

Words like “fair” always cover a litany of traits, so I was intrigued when I came across a journal article defining the term, in effect. Two business professors, Richard Posthuma of the Univ. of Texas at El Paso and Michael Campion of Purdue Univ. started with a list of 1,000 possible sources and whittled it down to find 18 articles in peer-reviewed journals. From those they compiled a list of 20 best practices for performance reviews (PRs) that employees will consider fair. See the study summary for the complete list, but let’s discuss the ones most directly related to teams.

To ensure the team is focusing its efforts on the priorities of your company (or “nonprofit” or “agency”), I recommend having measurable standards that follow directly from measurable company goals. Some should be individual goals, and each team member should also have the team goals on his or her appraisal. Three of the best practices Posthuma and Campion found relate:

• “The PR should be based on observable job behaviors to the extent possible.”
• “Objective performance data should be considered to the extent possible.”
• “The PR should be aligned with organizational goals and objectives.”

They note in relation to another practice that at the start of the period covered by a review, “employees should have a good idea of what will be expected of them.” As an example of all of these, say a nonprofit helping ex-criminals break the crime cycle has a goal for the year to “Increase case closings by 20%.” The job placement team thus might create a goal of “Increase client placements by 20%,” and it follows that a placement counselor could have, “Place 20% more of my clients.”

You can make your whole HR process more efficient by having every employee draft their own job descriptions and negotiate them into final form with their supervisors. The method also lets you identify gaps between what managers expect and what people think the managers expect. Then use those descriptions as the basis for job ads, interviews, hiring decisions, reviews, and performance improvement plans if needed (to try to correct poor performance before firing someone). This alignment also reduces your odds of legal liability, according to employment law and HR experts. Posthuma and Campion list:

• “The content of the PR should be based on a job analysis or shown to be job related.”
• “Subject matter experts should have input on the factors to be evaluated in the PR.” They add that the best SMEs are people who are doing or have done the jobs.

I am, as regular readers know, a big advocate of employee empowerment. It is the most powerful method of improving a host of measures related to cost-effectiveness, worker and client satisfaction, etc. The professors say a best practice consistently shown to raise employee satisfaction is, “Employee participation should be allowed… in the PR process (e.g., setting goals, providing input on performance).”

Regular readers have also heard me say over and over that you cannot promote people into management without training them on how to lead people and yet expect them to succeed. Several of the appraisal best practices relate to training managers and employees on the process, and the former on how to provide feedback in a legal and respectful way. Most of us hate to give negative feedback, which is why I include that in my effective communication skills class.

If you want performance appraisals to matter to employees, then their appraisal of your appraisals has to matter. This study suggests there is a right way to review, and the professors say following it “should increase the acceptability of the information employees receive during their reviews, reduce the likelihood of complaints, and increase motivation…” If you’re a manager, that should increase your motivation to take the action below and use these “fair” practices.

Action Item: Print off the employee review process best practices and go through the list with your team. Ask members whether they think your process follows the practices, voting “yes” or “no” on each. On any in which many say “no,” work with the team to raise concerns with the “powers that be” in your organization. If you are the power that be, call me to talk about how to make things right: 919-414-8939.

Group members believe in using rewards instead of punishment to foster cooperation and will back that belief with money, according to a study on cooperation in groups I have summarized in TeamResearch News. If you use punishment instead, you are acting irrationally to your long-term harm within the team, the article suggests.

Psychology professors Toko Kiyonari and Pat Barclay put undergraduates in front of computers in groups of four, with no way to communicate with the other members or match people to the computer names they were given. They were told they could keep $5 Canadian or donate it to the group. The researchers would take the donated amount, double it, and split it. Each person was gambling on how to get the most money: by cooperating, or via the “Take the Money and Run” approach, as the Steve Miller Band would put it. The scientists called this “defecting” in the article, which actually reported on a series of three studies. Only then were the members told they would get to either reward (in some cases) or punish group members who had defected, if they wanted to. After that, they were given another option, of rewarding or punishing members who had rewarded or punished in the previous round.

As you would expect, most people given the choice punished defectors. However, even more people rewarded the first-round cooperators. In the third round, those who in the second round punished the first-round defectors did not get rewarded. Perhaps more interesting, people who chose not to punish defectors did not get punished themselves. Few took the attitude of “you’re either with us or against us,” in other words. Over all the studies, people who actively rewarded came out ahead financially, above punishers and people who neither rewarded nor punished.

Let’s put this in business terms. Say you and I are on an Inside Sales Team. The team decides that any member approached by the Outside Sales Team for help should drop everything and do it, because we need a better relationship with that team. Maybe we’re trying to get the Marketing Team to make a change and want Outside support (there’s a pun there). Say we then find out two of our eight members refused to go along, telling Outside members to go… “sell” themselves when they asked for help. In the next team meeting, two members yell at the defectors, two more opt to thank and praise members who cooperated with the Outside Team, and two say nothing. Later, when 360-degree performance appraisals go out, what happens?

These studies say most of the cooperators will ding the defectors on their teamwork and give higher ratings to the cooperators, obviously. But most of the team will also downgrade the people who yelled in the team meeting and upgrade those who used praise instead. Those who sat quietly will not get downgraded, however. More research is needed, as the scientific cliché goes. After all, if you try to stay mutual friends with people who are divorcing, often you will be forced to make a choice by one person or the other and cut off if you refuse.

The article (see the summary for the source) nonetheless shows the relative “rightness” of using reward instead of punishment when trying to build cooperation in a group. Subconsciously, it’s what people expect. This leads to some interesting guesswork as to why people still resort to punishment if we have evolved to rely more on rewards.  “By demonstrating that one experiences anger toward defectors and that one will irrationally punish them… punishers demonstrate that it is not in others’ best interests to defect on the punisher,” the professors point out.

In the summary I call this the “bully explanation.” We know from repeated studies that people usually quit due to their managers, not their employers. Yet bad managers persist, and companies refuse to do anything about them until too late. Sounds irrational to me.

Action Item:  Whether you are a team manager or member, the next time you feel like punishing someone for not cooperating, instead go into your next team meeting with them present and praise everyone who cooperated. The person will likely get the message, and you’ll build a better relationship with everyone else. If you would like details, or teamwork coaching to improve cooperation, let me know.

Finally: 500 sources.

When I started TeamTrainers ten years ago, I wanted to make sure I was only telling my clients what really worked. I’d attended some trainings on team development and read some books in the six years I’d been doing it at my work. Few spoke of actions I was finding most effective, and some of the suggestions seem really dubious based on what I had learned of small group psychology. So I fell back on my early career as a journalist and “hit the stacks.” Every week for six months, I spent a day in the libraries at the Univ. of New Mexico. In those days, I was able to go through a half-dozen articles a week, focusing on scientific studies, and a book every couple of weeks. I think I had around 350 sources when I finished the first draft of my training method, The SuddenTeams™ Program. Mind you, not all of my sources are scientific. I have to create practical applications from the science, and examples from the real world help me teach them.

After moving to Seattle, for three years I published an e-newsletter, hitting the Univ. of Washington libraries a full day once a month. TeamResearch News has morphed into a collection of study summaries arranged by topic on my Web site. Along with other sources picked up over time, I was over 450 sources when I restarted the business here in Raleigh. Now I walk to the library at North Carolina State Univ. once a month, but usually only half a Saturday. (Fortunately, it’s easier to find studies on the Internet these days.) With the typical human penchant for nice, round numbers, I yearned to top the 500 mark. With the personality and performance article I wrote up last week, I did it. You can download the bibliography (PDF) and count them if you like.

Most people seem impressed when they hear about my research into “The Science of Teams™,” but I have run into skepticism. A meeting of potential referral partners in Seattle fell apart when one person took an anti-science stance. Speaking as a former reporter, I put a chunk of the blame on the media. When they report on studies without putting them into the bigger context; or make one study appear to contradict the next by not reporting the different methods; and hype books by people on the fringe of scientific thought as if those theories have been proven, the average reader is understandably confused.

But science learns the same way you do: through trial and error. Scientists do this in a very controlled way, however. They eliminate other factors that could have caused the result they saw, and try the same test again with some slight changes to see if that makes a difference, and they invite others to try it. They pore through other scientists’ work to get ideas and avoid others’ mistakes. And when they’re done with their trial, they have to submit the report to an anonymous team of colleagues who critique the article, questioning the scientist’s methods and conclusions (hence the term “peer-reviewed journal”) . Then the journal editors take a crack.

Tiny differences in how studies are put together can cause very different findings. Over time, however, a trend will develop until most of the scientists in a particular field of study agree on some basic truths. Sometimes new evidence causes a huge shift in thinking. But more often, especially in the behavior sciences, consensus develops in a slow, methodical way over many years, and proves able to predict results. They’ll still call it a “theory” though, as in “the theory of gravity.” And there are always “outliers,” exceptions to the rule.

But the media do not report all this. There have been countless “shifts” reported that from a scientific standpoint are relatively minor. Whether you eat a lot or a little salt, or go on a high-fat diet to shed some pounds quickly, is almost irrelevant. The basic truths of nutritional science have held accurate through countless studies over decades. You have a much better chance of being healthier than the average person  if over the long term you:

• eat a variety of food, including fresh fruits and vegetables.
• limit your fat intake, especially saturated fats.
• eat no more calories than you expend through exercise and daily activity.

The same is true in teamwork science. Sometimes the latest fad or buzzword flies in the face of science, with no studies supporting it. It’s just an idea somebody has. These eventually disappear, but not before wasting some teams’ time, money, and goodwill. Other popular team building solutions are like diets: they might have a short-term, temporary effect, but as soon as you go off the diet/activity, the bigger, underlying issues are still there—and the pounds or problems return.

Winston Churchill famously wrote, “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Scientists make mistakes, have egos, hang onto theories longer than they should, and otherwise show the same foibles as the rest of us. I rejected at least 100 studies for various reasons, including my belief that some were poor science. But scientists follow a process, the scientific method, and subject themselves to checks and balances the rest of us would find highly irritating, for a simple reason: they want the truth.

I’ll take that over some consultant pushing his or her latest Big Idea, or popular but unproven practices, any day. And today, I have 500 reasons supporting me.

Action Item: Test one of your beliefs about leading or being on teams. Check out the list at TeamResearch News for short study summaries on the topic, or contact me.

The trend toward pre-employment personality testing concerns me for various reasons I won’t rant about now, but one of the biggest is the spurious basis for the judgments drawn from these tests. Personality and performance are both so complex, any claim that you can predict the best personality for a given job is, at best, shaky.

First, you don’t just have to fit the tasks of the job, but also the personalities of the team (current personalities, that is), manager, and anyone else the worker will deal with regularly. As discussed in earlier posts, personality is situational: though I come up in tests as an introvert, correctly, I love making a living immersed in groups of people. Also, four researchers argued in the journal Group Dynamics, “there are specific, lower-level facets within the higher-level… traits that may have differing and even contradictory effects on team performance.” (I bet the same is true for individual performance.) For example, do extroverts help teams because they are assertive or because they are social? If you were hiring for a team that was too aggressive and thus not getting along well with other teams, an extrovert might or might not be a good addition depending on his or her specific subtraits. By the same token, there are many different ways to measure performance, the researchers point out. To use the test results accurately, you would have to match the specific subtraits to the specific type of performance you were looking for in a specific team within a specific environment—any piece of which could change the next day.

The article dates from 2006, but I found it last spring while researching my post on the Myers-Briggs test and think it has a lot for hiring managers and HR directors to consider. I am intrigued by the broad background of the researchers, with representatives from academia (Univ. of Central Florida), consulting, a nonprofit research organization, and the U.S. Army. They reviewed the results of studies linking personality to team performance and predict how specific traits will relate to various aspects of that performance.

By the way, consistent with my earlier series on the history of team building, there was a nearly 40-year gap in the research from 1959 to 1997. My point is, the personality/performance link does not have multiple decades of studies supporting it like other aspects of teamwork.

Here are the aspects they found in the literature and how they defined them (all are direct quotes):

• Adaptability—Team members use information from the task environment to adjust strategies through the use of flexibility, (changing) behavior, and reallocation of resources.
• Shared situational awareness—Team members develop shared knowledge of the team’s internal and external environment.
• Performance monitoring and feedback—Team members give, seek, and receive task-clarifying feedback.
• Team management—Team members direct and coordinate task activities, assign tasks, plan and organize, and motivate other team members.
• Interpersonal relations—Team members optimize interpersonal interactions by resolving conflicts, use of cooperation, and building morale.
• Coordination—Team members organize team resources, activities, and responses to ensure complete and timely completion of tasks.
• Communication—Team members exchange information efficiently.
• Decision making—Team members integrate or pool information, identify alternatives, select solutions, and evaluate consequences.

Out of 12 personality traits, the authors think only two will be positive for every aspect of performance: emotional stability and flexibility. When you understand that the two subtraits of the first one are “adjustment” and “self-esteem,” this makes sense. As the researchers say, “Given that those low on adjustment are prone to be distressed, upset, hostile, irritable, and nervous, they are not likely to excel in interpersonal or team settings.”  As for flexibility, a team that resists changing to new conditions clearly won’t perform as well as one that easily adapts. However, I think you can have too much of a good thing. Some teams are too quick to chase the latest gig or trend. I worked for a company that essentially failed because it leapt to meet every new customer request and spread itself too thin. And in a highly regulated industry like drug development, any flexing needs to be grounded within the restrictions placed on the team. In either case, having at least one “stick-in-the-mud” to serve as devil’s advocate would be helpful.

The authors think someone with a strong desire to achieve will also be good for a team, with the exception that a high achiever may not have the best interpersonal relations. (What if that person wanted to achieve at any cost?) No trait is absolutely negative, they think; dominance comes closest, with a mix of negative or neutral marks. A team with lots of dominant people would probably have difficulty making decisions, but those same people might monitor the team’s performance carefully, which could be a good thing.

The rest of the traits, the authors think to be a mixed bag. You might think people with high levels of affiliation (desire for personal connection) would be good for a team, and it probably would improve communication and interpersonal relations. But that trait could hurt the ability to lead, coordinate, or make decisions with team members, because those people can be more interested in socializing than getting work done.

All of this is only educated guessing, mind you. The critical point? These are predictions, results these very educated guessers think will prove true if studies are done on them. They are saying nobody knows what personality traits will help specific parts of team performance, which means nobody knows better than a team’s leaders and members what traits will help that team. Even then, being human, they may go for the traits they prefer rather than the ones they really need to perform better.

Action Item: Call me if you want to talk about how to cut through issues of personality by focusing on demonstrated character and agreed-upon behaviors instead, at 919-414-8939.

Source: Driskell, J., et al. (2006), “What Makes a Good Team Player? Personality and Team Effectiveness,” Group Dynamics 10(4):249.

Pay, you’ve no doubt heard, is not the top employee motivator. But money does play a major role in ways that fact hides, as shown by a 57-year-old model of human motivation that got more support from a new survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). By coincidence, the survey also supports a discussion comment I made recently on motivational quotations, but first we go to Abraham Maslow.

You have probably come across his famous Hierarchy of Needs triangle from 1943. Maslow’s point was that some human needs take priority over others in affecting our behavior, in this order:

1. Physiological—Food, water, air, etc.
2. Safety—Security, both physical and of resources.
3. Love/belonging—All varieties, including romantic and family.
4. Esteem—Confidence and respect.
5. Self-actualization—Morality and self-acceptance.

As I say in my persuasion class, if someone’s financial security is under threat, there’s no point in appealing to their self-esteem. Your listener is focused on how to keep the money flowing and won’t hear anything else until the threat is resolved.

When I speak at events, most audience members realize pay is not a primary motivator for most workers, consistently coming in around #5 in surveys. The SHRM report, “2010 Job Satisfaction Report: Investigating What Matters Most to Employees,” concurs. Employees surveyed for it ranked “Compensation/pay” at #6 among items considered “very important” to job satisfaction. (Satisfaction and motivation are not the same thing scientifically, but I think there is enough overlap to treat them that way for this purpose.) Money still played a big role, however. Number 1 on the list was “Job security,” #2 was “Benefits,” and #4 was “Organization’s financial stability.” The company’s money matters in each, and each speaks to the bottom levels of Maslow’s triangle, ensuring you have the basics of life. Studies into happiness find that money can, in fact, buy it if you aren’t getting enough to eat. Only after the typical person has enough to cover basic needs, plus a bit left over, does extra money lose a lot of its power to motivate.

In case you’re wondering, the Great Recession does not appear to have played a factor in the survey. The results for job security and benefits have been fairly consistent since the earliest results presented, from 2002. (“Financial stability” was a new item this year.)

The report actually covers two groups of people, which leads to my discussion comment. One is a scientific sample of workers, based on all U.S. households with telephones (probably landlines), a total of 606 respondents. The other asked the same questions of a random selection of SHRM members who appeared to be working outside of academia, with 589 respondents.* One big difference emerged in comparing these groups. The HR folks thought “Relationship with immediate supervisor” was going to come in at #1, with 72% saying it was “Very important.” But it came in #7 for employees, with 48%. “Communication between employees and senior management” came in #3 for HR professionals (65%), but #8 for employees (47%).

I understand why HR folks would think manager relations are more important than employees say they are. As a member of SHRM, I know these topics come up all the time. There’s nothing wrong with that: the results show these matters are very important to half the workforce. I just find it intriguing that the emphasis in HR-group presentations and related magazines cause HR reps to miss a critical fact. If people feel their basic needs are in jeopardy, they will put up with a bad boss and poor communications at least until the job market turns around. Those who aren’t confident about their chances in that market will stick around forever.

This can lead a bad boss to think everything is hunky-dory because nobody is quitting. I addressed this in a recent LinkedIn discussion focused on managers who use motivational quotes instead of solving the problems that are so demotivating. That creates a cynicism that makes later change efforts difficult. People think it’s the latest “feel-good” campaign and see no point in changing. As the first commenter, I gave an example from a study in which the rah-rah didn’t work, so the company went back and tackled its operational problems through training and coaching with marvelous results.

I won’t link to the discussion to protect the very nice person who defended the use of motivational quotes. She said she had been sending them out regularly at the behest of a former manager and had nothing but positive comments. When comments in the discussion turned a bit negative, I jumped back in to tell her I was sure that was true. Unfortunately, based on my experience with teams, I told her I could almost guarantee the percentage of people who hated them was nearly as large as the supporters, and another bunch of recipients ignored them, some with annoyance. In addition to the genuine supporters, many of the nonsupporters would say positive things either for reasons of office politics or because they knew her intentions were good. The only way to know people’s true opinions would be to conduct an anonymous employee survey, I said (or arrange anonymous interviews, I could have added).

As illustrated by the SHRM survey, when I assess new clients’ teamwork, management and HR is often shocked by what I learn. Whether you are trying to raise productivity or morale, you are probably using the wrong methods unless you have a means of getting objective information about what matters to your employees. The most cost-effective way to fix that is to skip the surveys and let the employees solve the issue. Tell them what the problem is and why it is a problem; ask them for the solution; and pledge to help them put that solution in place—even if you have your doubts about it. They’re going to have to implement the solution anyway, and you don’t have to motivate them when it’s their solution.

Action Item: If you aren’t organized to support this cost-effective style of empowerment, contact me today to learn the details or get started.

*For my fellow statistics geeks, confidence level was reported at 96% with a margin of error around 4%.