Teams Blog

The railroad industry is probably not the first one you think of when you think of innovation. An American transported through time from before the Civil War would be stunned by cars and space shuttles, but instantly recognize a train.

The best-known firm in the niche market of railway high-technology came up with an innovative way to create innovation, however. Railinc Corp. provides a variety of products and services to help railroads run their businesses. With market penetration of more than 90%, clearly it has been doing things right. Director of Corporate Communications Patrick O’Neil provided me with examples of novel products, and CIO Rob Simora said that Railinc has creative people. But that is not the same thing as having a culture of innovation, and Railinc is not there yet, Simora said.

Coming from a company noted for creativity, General Electric, Simora wants to change that. But he knew better than to simply hold a meeting and tell people to start innovating. Instead he came up last year with an “Innovation Challenge.” CEO Allen West mentioned it at a North Carolina Technology Association panel discussion (see video) a couple of weeks back as a way to engage employees. I asked him how I could learn more. West pointed to Simora, literally—he was sitting right behind me.

We met last week at Railinc’s offices in Cary, N.C., USA. Simora explained the Challenge’s set-up. He picked seven teams of six people each with a couple of criteria in mind. The teams had to be cross-functional, bringing together people who normally did not work together. And they could not have any managers, to prevent the tendency to look to the highest job title for answers. The teams were allowed 3-1/2 months to come up with ideas. Simora gave them only one rule, saying the idea “had to provide value to Railinc.” Otherwise, it could be anything: a process, technology, or product.

The company offered small monetary awards to the top three finishers. Initially, Simora said, that is probably what drove participants. But later, the motivation was “meeting new folks (and) coming up with different technology.” This small investment of cash and time paid off, he said. The company expects to implement all seven ideas, with the teams leading the way. A trophy awaits each member upon completion of a team’s project. I think Simora tapped several best practices for motivating employees here, including time to pursue ideas, empowerment to implement them, tangible recognition, and visibility to upper management.

The ideas were judged by a panel of company executives on the potential value and the likelihood the company would implement the idea. The winner was a venture into “crowd sourcing,” the idea of tapping the expertise of a mass of people to address an issue (see The Crowd Sourcing Blog). The winning team proposed what it called the “Predictive Market” and “Idea Market.” According to team member Bill Dupre, “The rail industry has a lot of information that’s probably very dispersed” across roles. Dupre, an application architect, already had an outside interest in the crowd-sourcing concept. He suggested to his team that Railinc should host a site allowing people to come together to make predictions on various topics. This could help Railinc, and eventually customers, forecast support requirements, legislation, volume, etc. Since the team’s win in April, the company has purchased a tool for collecting responses and Dupre is moving forward with the project. An in-company version is already under test.

As with any first effort, there were some problems, Simora and Dupre readily admitted. The Challenge started in November, but some teams waited until January to get started. Because it was not anyone’s primary job, some of Dupre’s team could not participate after the initial meeting. Part of the team ended up doing the bulk of the work. Next time, Dupre said, he would try harder to build more collaboration, to help people share his passion for the team’s idea.

Railinc is so pleased with the results, it plans to hold another Challenge later this year. When I asked what lessons he plans to apply from the first round, Simora said he will provide more criteria up front to the judges and teams, so teams would have a better idea of how to “focus their effort.” He will also allow the teams to choose their own members.

Thanks to Railinc’s willingness to share their lessons learned, you can use them if you try a similar challenge. Most organizations make the mistake of throwing groups of people together without providing teamwork training or structure. That’s not a big deal for part-time, short-lived teams like Railinc’s Challenge teams. Unfortunately, most companies handle their permanent teams the same way, creating an ongoing waste of time, money, and goodwill. (Not wishing to seem ungrateful, I didn’t ask what Railinc does!) My first client in Raleigh, a university professor, decided the hands-off approach was a problem when two large students nearly came to blows in his office—between him and the door, he noted.

For an individual worker, small-group dynamics are more complex than either large-group or one-on-one interactions, yet they are the least emphasized of the three in most corporate environments. Left to their own devices, most groups will work out their problems, but the organic process takes two to three years and rarely creates optimal results. Providing formal guidance can slash that time to months. Even for short-term teams, a few structures like team rules, an action item spreadsheet, weekly reports, and a project timeline will pay huge dividends for small investments of time… just as the Innovation Challenge has for Railinc.

“We’re getting innovation improved in our culture,” Simora said. But the biggest payoff may simply be an increase in cross-functional cooperation, one type of diversity that science has found to consistently improve team performance.

Dupre said, “For a long time we have been so siloed into, ‘You work here,’” but he and Simora said that is changing. Dupre’s team demonstrated this by the way it decided to use its $1,000 prize. Members could have split it amongst themselves. Instead they spent it on a critical piece of technology for any hi-tech firm, one Railinc had nonetheless failed to provide its workers.

They bought a pool table.

Action Item: If your company needs new ideas, follow Railinc’s lead and create your own challenge. For suggestions, contact me.

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.

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.

When you are tempted or told to do some “team building,” you have a stark choice:

1. Fix the issue that prompted the thought, or
2. Waste your time and money.

The scientific evidence is overwhelming that standard team building does not work, and given how adults learn, could not work. The team building industry is built on the quicksand of mass delusion among purveyors and buyers.

By “team building,” I am referring to occasional exercises, games, personality tests, drum circles, scavenger hunts, ropes courses, and so on. When I say it “does not work,” I mean the activity has no lasting positive impact on the team. In other words, standard team building provides less return than you invest even if all you invest is time (i.e., you get zero or negative ROI). Worse, when team members see managers resort to these activities rather than fixing the problems, that is seen as “lip service” or a “Band-Aid approach” and drives morale downward.

I have found zero scientific studies showing that any of the actions I listed above provide a benefit. I can say this, first, because I have now gone through more than 475 sources, most of them studies or analysis of multiple studies by researchers, and exactly one asserted support for team building as defined here. That one was thoroughly debunked later in the same journal (see blog post). Second, to double-check, I searched two databases of journal articles covering hundreds of journals and going back decades, one focused on psychology and the other on business articles. I used every relevant keyword I could think of: not just team building, but ropes, games, exercises, and such. No articles supporting team building turned up.

Of course, there are plenty of supporting claims in the popular business literature—the books and magazines you can pick up at any bookstore. You will also hear managers and consultants weave tales of successful team-building events. But as I detail in ”About Business Stories” on TeamResearch News, these have to be taken with a grain of salt for several reasons. One, clearly, is self-interest: a company or consultant who earns money selling these things, and a manager talked into spending money on one, both have reasons to:

• interpret team actions after the event as “changes,” positive ones at that;
• assume those changes were due to the team building;
• assume the team members see them as positive (or that members asked directly are willing to speak honestly); and
• assume the changes will last.

Studies that put self-serving perceptions up against measurement by objective outsiders routinely show the perceiver is wrong. It’s a built-in bias, which is why I double-checked my anti-team-building stance using the database review even though my opinion grew out of my in-depth literature review, not just personal experiences.

Success stories are ”anecdotal evidence,” which has often been proven inaccurate when tested scientifically. Along with the other problems, even if team building worked in one instance, that doesn’t mean it usually does. Give the worst hitter on a baseball team enough at-bats, and eventually they’ll get a hit. When a lottery winner says, “I just knew I was going to win,” no one asks how many of the non-winners thought the same thing… or how many times the winner thought they would win and didn’t… or whether the winner is unconsciously creating that memory based on prior weeks.

What I have never seen in one of these business stories about a team-building event are data from measurable goals or analysis to show the success was not due to other factors. If a sales team did a team building event last month, March 2010, and their sales went up this month, is that due to the team building or the fact that the economy is picking up? At least sales teams have quantifiable performance measures. I have yet to see a team of software engineers create objectively measurable performance standards before a team building event, then retest them immediately after and three months after (as scientific studies often do) to see if there were lasting positive changes.

One reason team building does not work is it violates the most basic tenets of adult learning. A pioneer of the field, Malcolm Knowles, said adults require among other traits that the training be relevant and practical. Unless your team is a troupe of drummers, a drum circle is not going be relevant to their work. Lessons arising from a scavenger hunt are not practical because they are not easily recognized and applied when a similar issue arises at work.

Life experience provides other reasons team building can’t work. Did you master golf or cooking after a single lesson? Do you want to fly with a pilot who has only played Flight Simulator? Of course not. Taking a team out for a “morale boosting” day of go-kart racing, when the next day you’re going to put them right back in the situation that is lowering their morale, simply defies logic. Even if you can remember the results of someone’s personality test during a conflict, that abstract knowledge isn’t easily translated into a specific situation. Much easier to apply is a list of agreed-upon behaviors with a safe enforcement method, plus a formal plan for what will be communicated and when. Why? Humans are not great at applying the abstract to the specific, but we learn and apply behavior-based rules every day. 

The authors of the influential team development book The Wisdom of Teams wrote elsewhere, “Sending a bunch of men and women on an (outdoor) course to simulate teaming may be fun, but it doesn’t accomplish much.” Adult learning is enhanced by fun, and the teams I work with get plenty of laughs. But fun should not be the emphasis when you are trying to accomplish something serious. And if you don’t accomplish that something, don’t permanently solve the issue, you’re going to be killing a lot more fun at work over the course of a week than you can give them in an afternoon of Lego play.

“By 1972, the necessary theory and methodologies for practical, large-scale team-building programs were in place,” psychologists Skipton Leonard and Arthur Freedman wrote in Consulting Psychology Journal, as quoted in an earlier post. But a set of handbooks published that year for non-professional facilitators set the tone most people still think of when they hear the term “team building.” Let’s continue our somewhat disturbing look at how much or little has changed in teamwork training by covering the 1970s and ’80s.

The authors write, “many participants experienced team building as enjoyable, enlightening, and useful in improving intragroup relations but much less effective in accomplishing significant personal or team transformations… Line management considered these programs to be mostly irrelevant because they used so-called touchie-feelie exercises that were perceived as merely fun and games.” The journal article includes a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert asks, while cutting out paper dolls blindfolded, “Are you sure we’ll cry and hug?” Facilitator Dogbert replies, “Actually, hugging is iffy.”

Organizational development (OD) experts recognized the limitations of the touchie-feelie approach, which grew out of 1960s “encounter groups” (see Part 1), and noted a disconnect between team builders and managers. The former focused on relationships and how people were working together, such as their norms and decision-making processes. Managers “were more interested in setting goals and priorities and analyzing or allocating the way work was performed,” Leonard and Freedman write. I’ll note that these priorities do not have to be mutually exclusive; in fact, high-performance teams usually invest time in both.

The sense that people will play nice if they are taught to, ignoring the realities of competition and power struggles in the working world, came under challenge, a good thing. But corporate culture harmed teamwork in ways that seem depressingly current. Read these quotes about the 1970s from the article and tell me how much has changed:

• “The typical organization… was hierarchically organized, with firm boundaries between functional silos and a compensation policy that rewarded individual rather than team performance.”
• “Excited team builders frequently turned despondent” upon seeing positive team changes “evaporate within weeks (sometime days or hours) of the return of participants to their work units.”
• “Furthermore, the typical reward systems provided incentives for individual rather than team-oriented behavior and contributions. Employees and managers did what was inspected and measured…”
• “Many managers gave lip service to teamwork but were reluctant to walk the talk.”
• Deep down, people were and are afraid of teamwork because they “‘think it will render them anonymous, invisible…’”

Leonard and Freedman assert that the economic realities of the 1980s turned things around. The U.S. was in the worst recession prior to the current one, plus inflation was high, while former enemies Germany and Japan became economic powerhouses. Businesses responded by changing their basic models, eliminating lifelong employment expectations, and reducing layers of middle of management. “The span of control for most managers reached levels that ruled out the old command and control style of management,” the article says. “Without the guarantee of employment, management needed to develop new approaches to motivate and empower employees.”

Team approaches became more common, including “self-managing production teams,” cross-functional teams, and the quality circles of Total Quality Management. (As the article notes, TQM started in America, was ignored, and came to favor here only after Japan used it in that country’s spectacular rebirth.) Silo-busting, team-focused organizations became more typical and switched to team-based pay and rewards.

As the old personnel departments morphed into “human resources” and added OD to their responsibilities, some team builders came to realize they had to be more strategic in their approach, Leonard and Freedman write. Researchers “called for more consultation with teams in the process of doing their work” and stressed the need to do team development within the context of company goals and issues. How sad it is that 20 years later, some HR managers still resist this idea (see HR study summary) and HR and training groups have to continue to sponsor workshops on “strategic alignment.”

Frankly, any top manager would be foolhardy to support efforts that don’t feed the company’s goals. That means, in turn, HR and training folks are foolish to push such efforts without creating measures that show alignment.

We’ll finish up with the ’90s and beyond in Part 3. Perhaps we’ll find that the team building industry has learned something from the past, but I fear the Santayana quote remains in effect.

Go to Part 3.

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.

Any dip into history reminds me how poor we humans are at learning from the past. An article I came across on the history of teamwork by consulting psychologists Skipton Leonard and Arthur Freedman proves the point. So many of the lessons I try to get across in my practice have been known to work for decades, yet remain largely ignored by “team builders” and many managers.

Prior to the 1800s, “With the exception of music (i.e., orchestras) and the theater, there are few examples of the high levels of specialization of labor, interpersonal communication, integration of effort, cooperation, and problem solving that characterize modern teams,” the authors write. I smiled when I saw that. My first introduction to project teamwork came as a backstage “techie.” For the record, I wasn’t doing that prior to the 1800s.

Otherwise, the “work environment” was a line of orders from the king down, along with jostling for power by everyone who wasn’t trying simply to survive. Only in families was there some level of cooperation and division of labor, though again one spouse or the other usually ruled. That said, “Researchers who have studied group dynamics in the past often note the parallels with family dynamics…” Leonard and Freeman write.

In 1897, French sociologist Émile Durkheim made fairly accurate predictions about group norms—informal rules people naturally create, usually without knowing it, as they do things together. Freud touched on groups as well, but the authors credit American psychologist William McDougall as the first “teambuilder,” based on his 1920 book The Group Mind. He offered five bases for better group effort, they write:

• “continuity of existence…”
• “development of an emotional relationship to the group as a whole by defining the nature, composition, functions, and capacity of the group”
• “interaction… with other groups similar to the group but differing in some key aspects”
• “traditions, customs, and habits that define the relationships between members”
• “a definite structure…”

Let’s stop right there. All of this perfectly matches what I said yesterday in a talk for a Chamber of Commerce event and that I create through The SuddenTeams Program. It is backed up by decades of subsequent research after McDougall. None of it matches what most “team builders” force work groups to do. And most managers still refuse to address these 90 years after McDougall first wrote about it. Okay, rant over.

The middle of the last century saw the growth of “social psychology,” so-called to differentiate it from the previous focus on individuals or pairs of people. What we now call social norms, groupthink, and peer pressure were first identified. A center for group dynamics research was founded around 1946. (The center’s Web site disagrees with the authors on the date.) That year, founder Kurt Lewin and his students also hosted “a conference on intergroup relations focusing on racial and religious discrimination” sponsored by a state agency and diversity groups. It attracted a number of people who would later be important researchers in the teamwork field, including names that appear in my bibliography. It may well have been the first use of the participatory training style so common today, and Leonard and Freeman say it was the birth of the field of group dynamics.

In another theatre reference, they write that Lewin conducted “shop-floor group meetings in a pajama factory (the play and then the movie Pajama Game reputedly were based on these experiences).”

Lewin was involved in the founding of the National Training Laboratory (NTL) in Bethel, Maine, but died before he could participate in its first conference. The idea of ”training groups” (“T-groups”) began there. These, too, looked a lot like modern facilitated trainings (versus lectures) and presented the first diversity trainings. Many future teamwork researchers passed through the NTL. “Leaders from educational, religious, community, and business organizations came to Bethel each summer for several intense weeks of training aimed at improving… their effectiveness as individuals and change agents in society and organizations,” the authors write. “Bethel converts returned to their institutions and introduced flip-charts, innovative seating arrangements, and programs that balanced theory input with experiential learning modules.”

Ideas prevalent today moved from the lab into businesses. “Herb Shepard and Bob Blake, in their work with an Esso refinery, developed a managerial grid based on structured, leaderless groups in the late 1950s and called their approach ‘organization development’” (OD). I had to bite my tongue a few years ago when an HR person called self-directed teams ”passé” as if they were a recent fad.

The upheavals of the 1960s caused in the U.S. a cynicism about the possibility of large system change. Social psychologists focused more at the small group level where change seemed reasonable, the authors write. Researchers began to note the effect that job tasks had on organization (instead of the other way around), and developed a “sociotechnical” approach to OD that recognized how tasks, technology and organization evolve together.

“By 1972, the necessary theory and methodologies for practical, large-scale team-building programs were in place,” Leonard and Freeman write. Unfortunately, a series of handbooks on team building introduced the “touchie-feely” approach that was fun but ”much less effective in accomplishing significant personal or team transformations.” Sound familiar? It would if you had been at my talk yesterday!

More in a future post.

Go to Part 2.

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.

In 1986, when I dropped out of my first attempt at grad school, my best friend Steve Charry was taking another stab at a bachelor’s degree. We met during his first try at what I still call North Carolina School of the Arts despite its name change; another was at the University of Wisconsin; and he was trying again at Washington State University. (Baseball management kept luring him away.) I asked if he could use a roommate, and ended up in tiny Pullman on the Idaho border for four years. Thus he was responsible for my becoming a fan of WSU sports, and my love of the University of North Carolina Tar Heels rubbed off on him.

I moved on after he met his eventual wife, cutting down on our hangout time, and my working hours at WSU were cut back. Over the next 20 years we stayed close despite shifting around the country. I tried again and earned an M.A., while he continued to a Ph.D. from WSU and eventually became a history professor at Illinois Valley Community College. As long-distance phone charges dropped and cell phones took over, we got to the point of talking at least twice a game anytime we could both see UNC or WSU men’s basketball games on TV.

An occasional topic of fantasy was what would happen if the two teams played each other. A fantasy it seemed: Not only do they play in different conferences on opposite coasts, UNC is among basketball’s elite programs, and WSU is, shall we say, the opposite thereof.

Then WSU lured a former Wisconsin coach, Dick Bennett, out of retirement to put his unique system in place in Pullman. In an earlier post, I quoted an NHL coach saying you could quickly figure out the system of really good teams, while bad teams had none. In sports terms, this means the way the players arrange themselves on the court or ice, how they move, what they focus on, and so forth. Dick took the job on the understanding that his son, Tony, a respected small-college coach, would come along as assistant coach and take over when Dick re-retired.

Almost miraculously, it worked. WSU began to win games with a recognizable style of defense-oriented, slow, no-turnover play, despite having players of modest talent compared to the better-known programs they routinely beat. By 2007, with Tony now at the helm, WSU reached the national championship tournament fans call “March Madness.” Steve and I were disappointed to see that the way the teams were placed in the brackets, WSU couldn’t survive long enough for them to meet UNC. In 2008 both returned, and when the brackets came out, I was stunned to see that our fantasy could easily become real: if both teams won their first games, they would play each other in the second round.

Steve didn’t know. He was in a coma, felled by a stroke at 49 a few days earlier.

Soon we learned his case was hopeless, and his wife made the hard but correct decision to take him off life support. At his memorial service a week later, during my eulogy, I told the story I just told you. And I asked everyone to watch at least a little of the UNC-WSU game scheduled for… that night. Had this been a movie, WSU would have won. But the Bennett system ran into too much talent within another extremely successful system, and UNC moved on easily.

Last season I missed about half the games on TV. It was just too painful to watch knowing I would not be hearing from Steve. Fortunately I adjusted in time to watch Carolina win the national championship. At season’s end Tony Bennett left WSU, and in a double whammy for me, took the job at the University of Virginia, a team in Carolina’s conference. I knew this was bad news for the rest of the league.

When those two teams played a couple weeks ago, I was more apprehensive than most UNC fans. The Tar Heels are struggling this year, having lost four key players to the NBA. Although I would not dare tell Coach Roy Williams how to coach basketball, I know something about teams, and he knows his hyper-talented freshmen have not bought into his system. My only hope before the game was that Virginia’s players had not yet bought into “Bennett Ball.” They had. They beat Carolina soundly, 75-60.

Steve would not have been surprised. One team accepted a way of doing things which had worked for other teams in the past. The other has not. The Virginia players did so despite having to radically change the way they interacted with each other. And this is the moral of the story for business people. There are a number of systems for running a team. Even the least cost-effective is better than having no system at all. But few teams I have encountered, probably fewer than 10%, have adopted a significant portion of any of these systems.

Whether you are competing against other companies or only against your own past performance, Bennett Ball teaches you what can happen when you drop some ego and invest some effort. As for Steve Charry, his story teaches you to drop everything else and find the problem if your blood pressure is north of 200. Maybe it would have made no difference, but I think he would agree with the advice nonetheless. He left a wife, three children, parents, a sister, many respectful colleagues, and a wounded best friend who will never fully heal.

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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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A used college textbook I picked up at the unfortunate end-of-life sale of a Durham, N.C., bookstore has been feeding me some interesting insights into the book’s namesake, Human Motivation (Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.: Belmont, CA, 1994). Written by Univ. of Calgary psychology professor Robert Franken, for a study wonk like me it is a pleasant way to get my research fix without having to work quite so hard. Most of my research involves going through ”primary research,” meaning scientific journal articles, most of which are written as if a computer were programmed to spit out as much multisyllabic jargon as it could within something resembling English. “Secondary research” like this book, in which an expert reviews the work of other experts and sometimes dumbs it down a bit, makes life easier for “tertiary” researchers like myself. My job is to explain the heavy stuff to the popular audience–in my case, the customers for my training services and you, dear reader.

I was going to dive into the science of stress from the book at this point, but instead I think I’ll reduce my own holiday stress by indulging in a rant. As alluded to in an earlier post, I have little patience for people who step outside their areas of expertise and report scientific findings without learning the context. When Greg Hyer was nice enough to “spotlight” me in his recent LinkingRaleighNC newsletter, I made the point that I spent thousands of hours using my old journalism skills to review the scientific literature on teamwork. Although I keep up with other topics in the business world to make sure my solutions remain relevant in the real world, I don’t comment on those topics as if I were an expert.  That’s not to say I’m shy about expressing my opinions, but I don’t claim they come from any special knowledge of the topic.

The danger is that listeners who assign a level of credibility to someone based on their knowledge in one area do not easily distinguish it from what is realistic in other areas. That is, credibility tends to be “one size fits all.” Physicist Edward Teller, considered by many the father of the hydrogen bomb, practically caused the Cold War (in my nonexpert opinion) with the help of people who gave him too much credibility in the areas of foreign and military policy based on his expertise in physics. Whenever a speaker uses a law of quantum physics in a talk about management, I see pens scribbling madly. But the whole reason quantum physics has been so controversial and fascinating in the scientific community is because those laws at the subatomic level do not apply to objects the size of atoms–or humans.

For example, I’ve heard several people try to apply something called the Principle of Uncertainty to human relations. They say it means that an observer has a direct physical impact on the actions of the observed person. This is neither an accurate statement of observed effects, or even the correct principle to apply to the asserted effect.

When you look at a car going down the road, you can tell where it is, what direction it is traveling in, and roughly how fast. This does not appear to be the case for the particles that make up atoms and their cousins. A scientist cannot, for example, be absolutely sure where a particle is and absolute sure how fast it is going. The more sure she is of one, the less sure she is of the other. Quoth Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, “Articulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, it applies only at the small scales of atoms and subatomic particles and is not noticeable for macroscopic objects, such as moving vehicles.”

The effect of the observer plays a role, but is not the point to the Uncertainty Principle.  The “observer effect” is more accurately tied to a another physicist who gave the analogy of a cat in a box who may or may not be dead. In our observable world, whether the cat has died has nothing to do with when somebody decides to open the box. In the quantum world that operates on mathematical probabilities, the “cat” would not definitely be dead or alive until the observer opened the box. There’s also a concept speakers may be thinking of in which changes to one particle can effect another particle long after they bump into each other.  (“Long after” in relative terms; we’re talking tiny fractions of a second).

Regardless, in the human world, a team member is going to do what the team member wants to do. Obviously, it is possible to influence somebody else’s moods or decisions, otherwise my “Art and Science of Persuasion” class would be a big waste of time. But it requires old-fashioned communication skills and basic psychology, not concentrating on their brain waves as you sit alone in your office. Even then, the best you can do is hope your efforts overcome the myriad of influences on their decision-making from genetics, parenting, earlier experiences, current environment, and everyone else who is trying to change their thinking. But quantum-level effects are not a concern.

My point is this: when trying to decide who to listen to on a given topic, caveat emptor (“buyer beware”). Speaking of that, I’ll share Dr. Franken’s expertise on the science of stress next time.

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I am working as a volunteer stagehand for the City Ballet of Raleigh production of The Nutcracker Suite, and it reminded me how I got started as a team leader. My undergraduate degree was in that kind of work from North Carolina School of the Arts (as it was called then), which may seem to have little to do with team coaching. But it was there I first led a team, ten students working as the lighting crew. Someone else designed the lighting, but as “master electrician” it was my job on “load-in” day to get the 120 or so lights hung where they belonged, connected to the right circuits, and the circuits connected to the right dimmers.

I planned that thing half to death. I led the team in preparing the lights, developed a process, and trained the members on it. As a result, we got the load-in done very quickly—one “techie” not on the crew said our time had to be “some kind of record.” Without knowing it, I had just become a project manager. The parallels between a show and a business project are obvious: each has a budget, schedule, and scope and quality requirements. Unlike a lot of projects, though, a show has a “hard deadline.” Most business projects that supposedly have such don’t really. If enough things go wrong, the deadline moves. But with a show, when the curtain is scheduled to go up, it has to go up.

Oddly, most shows I’ve been involved with did so without massive last-minute pushes. (Not all, of course—I recall loading out one show’s costumes the night of the final dress rehearsal after nearly pulling two all-nighters in a row to get done.) And conflicts break out, but most of the time they get smoothed over at least to the degree that everyone does their job professionally. I can’t say either of those positives applied to most of the business projects I have observed, even in mature companies. Techies and onstage performers alike are rightly known for their “whatever it takes” attitude, but the same is true of most of the team members I’ve worked with. Is the difference in show “project” success the clarity of the goal in putting on the show? The fact that roles and responsibilities (on- and offstage) are extremely well defined? How well understood the process and tasks are by everyone on the team, across all functions? The fact that everybody including the techies has a backup with the training to step in on a moment’s notice?

I’m not sure. But I am sure if your team had all those best practices in place, it would be performing a lot better than any of your competitors’ teams.

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