Teams Blog

I always hesitate to write about “duh findings,” study results making so much sense, you wonder why the scientists bothered. But I know why they bother. Sometimes the expected answer proves incorrect. Also, though the information makes sense when you think about it, without the study you never would have thought about it. Those thoughts can lead to new insights.

Two Univ. of Maryland researchers asked a simple question, also the title of their study article: “When and Why Do Central Employees Speak Up?” As they point out, “When employees speak up openly on work-related matters, they aid in the early detection of problems and opportunities… and help their work groups respond successfully to unexpected situations…”

Logically, workers who are the most central to your work processes are the ones you want to hear from most. They are the most likely to see problems in the workflow or differences in the way teammates do the same work, for better or worse. Business professors Vijaya Venkataramani and Subrahmaniam Tangirala came up with the idea of surveying people of the same bank in India (see my study summary). This eliminated a lot of the factors that could complicate an experiment’s results. Everyone was in the same country within a distinct culture; subject to the same corporate policies, procedures and culture; in similar-sized units; doing basically the same work as the other groups. The professors asked about positive voice behaviors, defined in another study as “emphasizing expression of constructive challenge intended to improve rather than merely criticize. Voice is making innovative suggestions for change and recommending modifications to standard procedures even when others disagree.”

The survey asked group members whom they interacted with most (“central employees”) and other questions about other members. Central employees were found to speak up more only if they were considered influential, which was affected by whether they were considered good at their jobs (duh!). Even then, they spoke up only if they identified with the team, as shown by agreeing with statements like, “When I talk about my [work group], I usually say ‘we’ rather than ‘they.’” The professors suggest that managers who want employees’ feedback should improve their job skills and build team spirit. I agree.

But, I ask, do managers really want their people to speak up? I hear about plenty who claim to, but in reality discourage critical input. This led me back to the library book stacks to look up the study mentioned above. Respected teamwork researchers Linn Van Dyne and Jeffrey LePine at Michigan State Univ. wanted to know if people really draw a distinction between actions that are part of the job and those that go beyond the call of duty. You may again be thinking “duh,” but at the time (1998) scientists had not tested the assumption. Van Dyne and LePine (gotta love that rhyme) looked at “in-role” behaviors versus two kinds of “extra-role behaviors,” helping behavior and those voice behaviors. They used survey items about each worker such as:

• In-Role
  • “fulfills the responsibilities specified in his/her job description.”
  • “meets performance expectations.”
• Helping
  • “volunteers to do things for this work group.”
  • “attends functions that help this work group.”
  • “helps others in this group learn about the work.”
• Voice
  • “develops and makes recommendations concerning issues that affect this work group.”
  • “speaks up and encourages others in this group to get involved in issues that affect the group.”
  • “speaks up in this group with ideas for new projects or changes in procedures.”

The researchers surveyed 95 work groups at 21 employers plus each group’s supervisor. Each person rated themselves and four peers, and the supervisor rated every member. Van Dyne and LePine also did something too few researchers do, testing twice over six months. This makes it more likely the result you see at Time 2 (T2) was caused by the factor tested at Time 1 (T1). Otherwise, you only know there was a link between one description of the subject and another, not which caused the other.

In the Van Dyne and LePine study, people reported as helpful and speaking up at T1 (and T2) were rated more highly by everyone at T2. The effect was small, only adding 3% over in-role ratings. But if your manager is deciding between giving you a 3 or a 4 on your annual appraisal, that’s enough to make the difference. And it didn’t hurt ratings, I’m pleased to see.

I know from other studies that teams fostering open debate perform better than ones where no one speaks up, and people seen as helpers get more help from their co-workers. So if you are a team member, it is worth your while to take on extra job duties (making yourself more central) and non-job duties, including speaking up in the ways described above. Since self-ratings on extra-role behavior had no link to supervisor performance ratings, you might ask an honest someone on the team whether they think you help and speak up appropriately. If you’re a team manager, this research adds yet another reason to provide ongoing training to improve your teams’ job skills and reinforce team identity. The monthly “team-building activity” is not what I mean. This has to be a daily effort involving your every interaction with the team.

One point the Maryland researchers missed, I think, is that making more workers “central” to the group’s efforts could encourage more positive voice behaviors. You can do this by providing more cross-training, so more people take on the critical roles as needed due to overload, absences, and people moving on. There are so many wins in that for you, them, and the company, I would run out of hyphens to describe the situation: “Win-win-win-win-…”

Action Item: Do some reading about how to build team identity, or contact me for suggestions.

Sources:

• Van Dyne, L., and J. LePine (1998), “Helping and Voice Extra-Role Behaviors: Evidence of Construct and Predictive Validity,” Academy of Management Journal 41(1):108.
• Venkataramani, V., and S. Tangirala (2010), “When and Why Do Central Employees Speak Up? An Examination of Mediating and Moderating Variables,” Journal of Applied Psychology 95(3):582.

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%.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The benefits of empowered teamwork are one subset of the benefits of Agile software development. Having served as a project manager in an Agile company, I have seen this firsthand, but a talk by an “Agilista” last night confirmed my belief.

If you know about Agile, you might want to skip down three paragraphs as I explain it to newcomers. Traditional “waterfall” methods start a software project with an attempt to capture everything the end user needs to do and estimate the time and money needed. Once that information is approved, next comes design of the software. Then the software is created (“coded”). Next comes the testing phase, during which mistakes (“bugs”) are fixed until the client accepts the software. Finally comes rollout of the product. Each step flows downward into the next, hence the “waterfall” allusion.

In Agile, an initial set of requirements is collected and prioritized by a “product owner” working with the client. These are broken into small chunks, feature by feature, and captured in a “product backlog.” The product owner, a facilitator, and the other team members take a short period to do some initial design work. Then they decide how many of the features they can finish within a pre-selected time, usually two to four weeks. In perhaps the best known Agile method, the period is a “Scrum” and the facilitator is a “Scrum Master.” Once the team decides what to do, that set cannot be changed short of an emergency. The team then does a mini-waterfall of sorts, finishing the selected set of features to the degree they could be released to the customer (whether or not they are right then). After a demo and lessons-learned review, they repeat the whole process with the next set of features, starting the next business day. They’re done with the whole thing when the customer says they’re done.

At a meeting of the local chapter of the Association of IT Professionals, Robert Galen spoke on “Mature Agile Teams–Sixteen Essential Patterns.” Galen is director of research and development at iContact, an e-mail marketing company, and also has his own Agile consulting practice. Along with making me feel better about two points over which I parted ways with the aforementioned company–for those keeping score, I was right on one and half-right on the other–he provided a number of points about teamwork that work in any environment.

One of his 16 “patterns” was “Truly Collaborative Work.” Examples on his slide included, “Developers willingly engage in Testing.” This is not common in waterfall projects, and I have witnessed how it improves quality and cooperation. Another point was, “Members help each other out.” Science has shown that “organizational citizenship behaviors” improve team performance. “Listening to each other; mutual respect” appeared as well. In poorly performing teams, people listen at each other, listening but not really hearing (hence my Active Listening class).

“Behaving Like a Team” was another of Galen’s patterns. I especially liked his point about “Providing each other congruent feedback.” Agile promotes a practice I suggest for all teams in my teamwork book, daily “stand-up” meetings. These are conducted literally standing up, for a maximum of 15 minutes. Each member reports on only three things: what I did in the prior work day, what I plan on doing the next day, and any blocks I’ve run into. The last item becomes a top-priority action item for the facilitator. Galen said members of effective teams also participate in “Passionate debate.” He added “conflict,” but I later suggested the word “confrontation.” The scientific evidence shows that conflict of any type harms teams, but members must be willing to confront each other to make better decisions. Galen also said members will spend personal time together and succeed or fail “as a team.”

The research literature supports the use of self-managed or self-directed teams in most circumstances. Under his pattern, ”Quality on all fronts,” Galen said Agile teams are “Self-inspecting; self-policing; self-learning.”

He did an excellent job of defining the role of the supervisor of a self-managed team. My oft-repeated summary is, ”Tell the team what direction you need it to go, give it its boundaries, and get out of the way.” Then you fall in behind, making sure the team has the resources it needs and nudging it to stay on course. A previous speaker last night had a great analogy. Josh Anderson, Agile Coach at Teradata, likened this to raising the bumpers when you take kids bowling, so their balls stay out of the gutters. Galen’s related pattern was “Saying NO as a Leader.” He emphasized that managers can’t just walk away from the team, and added in bullet points:

• “Sometimes direction is required.”
• “Courage to tell it like it is.”
• “Behind the scenes, 1:1 Coaching…”

Finally, he emphasized, members’ first loyalty must be to the team. This made me uncomfortable, because plenty of teams have failed by focusing too much on themselves. But Agile’s emphasis on including at each step the customer’s representative (the product owner), and often the customer, is a perfect way to align team cohesion with business goals.

I thought I had finally found it: scientific evidence that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is worth the time and money for team building. You see, in all of my research, not once have I seen such evidence. I have heard people talk about how they improved their communications with one or two other people on their team after an MBTI exercise, and I believe them. Others have said it was “pretty accurate,” to use the most common phrase (not “completely accurate”). But the only unabashed support I have heard comes from the people who sell MBTI services, and managers who invested in them. Neither are very objective sources, and no one had return-on-investment (ROI) figures.So I went looking through two databases of peer-reviewed journals. “Peer reviewed” means the article was reviewed by anonymous experts in the field. One database focused on business and the other on psychology and related sciences. Together they cover hundreds of journals going back decades. The number of articles I found referring to MBTI in a team setting: 2. 

When I came across the first, I thought we had a winner: “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: A bridge between counseling and consulting.” But then I came across a second from the same journal which turned out to be a response to the first. Both are now summarized in TeamResearch News. It turns out the author of the first article, Mary H. McCaulley, co-founded the Center for Applications of Psychological Type with Isabel Briggs Myers, co-creator of the test. None of the references in her articles were tests of the effectiveness of the test. 

The study summary has the details, but there are many problems with the MBTI. The test itself is not as respected as other personality tests used by scientists. One problem is that its scoring pushes people artificially into extreme labels rather than recognizing people can fall in the middle. (Initially it did, but that neutral position was later dropped.)  

To illustrate, if you created a scale from 0 to 100 measuring how much someone likes bananas, the scoring method used by the MBTI would say you don’t like them if you scored a 49 and you do if you scored a 51. But two people who scored a 2 and a 98 are a lot more different than two who scored a 49 and a 51. Scientists would say the latter two are identical, while the MBTI would say they are different. 

It also does not provide reliable results. Even one of the MBTI manuals reports a 35% change in type over four weeks, and another study reported 50% over five weeks. Since you can’t be sure whether the first test or second is closer to the truth, you would have to take the test a minimum of three times, and preferably more, to nail down an accurate type reading. Even then, the article says, you have to be aware that personality is a relatively small contributor to work performance, and that behaviors differ according to the situation. No one who has seen me do a presentation or training would think me an introvert, but that’s what I am. I treat my public work as a performance to make it interesting.

Ms. Briggs was not a psychologist: she had only a bachelor’s degree, in political science. And the MBTI was based almost exclusively on the theories of Carl Jung. Though an influential theorist right up there with Freud, and the guy who came up with the terms “introvert” and “extrovert,” he is controversial within the scientific community and much of his theory work remains untested. Personality tests preferred by researchers are based on evidence guided by theory, not theory alone. 

Even if the MBTI consistently helps most takers get along better with two teammates (the highest number I hear people say), it would be aiding less than half of the total number of communication channels within a team. Within roughly the same time taken by the typical MBTI exercise, and for free, you could draft:   

• a communication plan covering who needs what information from whom by when, and in what form, and
• a set of group-created rules for how you will talk to each other, and what to do if someone breaks a rule.

These two tools, if backed by team and manager self-discipline, will eliminate the majority of your team’s communications issues. Well-supported by research, they also meet the standards of adult learning by providing concrete, relevant information. With MBTI exercises, you end up with abstract type information and general suggestions that users must try to project into the future, instead of clear behavior-based guidelines. 

In the movie Jerry MacGuire, a client of the title character makes him scream into the phone, “Show me the money!” I would say the same thing to the next MBTI practitioner who claims the test is a good way to spend your money for team building.

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When I was a kid, my beverage of choice was Thrifty Maid Grape Drink, the house brand of Winn-Dixie stores. The amount of actual grape innards was minimal, and to this day I can recall the slightly acrid taste it presented around the edge of the tongue. But it accompanied every breakfast for years, to the point where the smell was enough to turn my poor mother’s stomach.

One day when I was 8, I bounced down the steps and into my seat in the breakfast room, tossed back half a glass, and gagged. My throat and nose burned and eyes watered. “Mother, something’s wrong with my grape juice!” I yelled into the kitchen. My loving mother’s response was cackling laughter.

The date was April 1: April Fool’s Day. The “juice” was red wine. In today’s vernacular, I had just been “punked” by my mother.

She meant well, and could not have predicted the effect it would have. Already a sensitive kid, I lost all remaining joy at being on the wrong end of a practical joke. As an adult I have not practiced anything more than the mildest of forms. It took me longer to realize the damage of “put-down” humor, an art form I unfortunately mastered, to the detriment of a number of friendships. Many people truly suffer before if not after the “reveal” of practical jokes, though usually in private afterward. Upon seeing some new research, my position has hardened against these forms of humor when used without explicit permission or after a first strike by the target.

A psychologist at the University of Zurich, Willibald Ruch, led a massive team that surveyed 23,000 people in 73 countries (using 42 languages). The team found that anywhere from 3% to 30% of people in these countries had gelotophobia, defined in Science News as the “inability to distinguish ridicule from playful teasing. For them, all laughter is aggressive, and a harmless joke can come across as a mean-spirited assault.” Gelos is the Latin word for laugh.

Considered a personality trait, not an illness, the fear can nonetheless have profound effects on the person suffering from it–and therefore, one presumes, those around them. According to the study article (cited below), it shows up by causing the person to lose self-confidence, avoid situations in which they have felt laughed at, and assume that laughter in their vicinity is directed at them. Finns were the least likely to make that assumption (8.5%), while around 80% of Thais did.

Another pair of studies confirmed that “gelotophobes are less cheerful and characterize their humor style as inept, socially cold, and mean-spirited. They report less frequent use of humor as a means for coping and indulge less often in self-enhancing and social humor.” They also found things less funny overall. The report on those studies makes the point that gelotophobes are perfectly capable of being funny. They just don’t try, or don’t see their own humor the way most others might.

For the record, I’m not among the estimated 11% of Americans who are gelotophobes. Although I don’t like being the butt of jokes, I’m not easily embarrassed. Humor is a critical part of my presentation, training, and coaching styles, one of the ways I try to differentiate my services. And I’m a black belt, so no one ever laughs at me. (Yes, that’s a joke.)

At the same time, I am very careful these days to gauge the type of humor my audience can take. The more people there are, the less likely I am to tease someone or point them out individually, especially if I don’t know them. By directing humor at myself, I hope to convey that my intentions are honorable even when I tease.

I recommend against the use of “cutting” humor in work situations unless you are sure the butt of the joke can take it, best tested by asking yourself whether you’ve ever seen them use that kind of humor. Good-natured humor is a sign of well-oiled teams; it might even be the oil. But I think there is no place in the workplace for practical jokes. There might be exceptions, such as the small all-male team one of the members told me about where locker-room humor was used to reduce tension. However, there are plenty of ways to be funny with someone without being funny at them. Furthermore, a practical-joking team with a couple of gelotophobes would at best create unnecessary tension, and could at worst earn itself a lawsuit.

In short: Put… the grape drink… down.

Comment

Sources:

• Gaidos, S. (2010), ”When Humor Humiliates,” Utne Reader, Jan.-Feb., No. 157: 74 (excerpted from Science News, 8/1/09).
• Proyer, R.T., et al. (2009), ”Breaking ground in cross-cultural research on the fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia): A multi-national study involving 73 countries,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 22(1-2):253.
• Ruch, W., U. Beermann, and R.T. Proyer (2009), “Investigating the humor of gelotophobes: Does feeling ridiculous equal being humorless?” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 22:111-143.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week I met with a new referral partner, marketing expert Angela Ursprung of Strategic Guru, and she mentioned an incident that brought up a teamwork issue. She talked about once giving a partner a sales lead, and the person never followed up. She never gave the person another lead, and rightfully so. When it comes to sales leads, use it or lose it, I say.

Two of the underlying needs of us humans are the needs for relationships and esteem (refer to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs). When that person ignored Angela’s lead, he or she disrespected the effort Angela had made to build a relationship and her expertise in mapping a marketing opportunity to a provider. At the very least, if the person had a solid reason for not following up, he or she could have communicated that fact back.

When a team member makes an unusual effort on your behalf, a simple thank-you is not enough. A strong effort comes from a strong motivation, and encouraging a repeat of that behavior requires a strong response. The best way is to match the effort. Try the action your colleague suggests, if you have the resources—even if you don’t think it will work. After all, you could be wrong! If you cannot follow up for some reason, at least respect your colleague enough to explain why. This will feed their motivating needs and raise the likelihood of their providing help to you in the future.

This is not a “manipulation,” by the way. Every relationship you have is based upon feeding each others’ needs. I’m talking about not messing up your work relationships by ignoring basic psychology.

And in case you’re wondering, yes, I followed up on Angela’s lead this morning. When an expert helps me, I pay attention (and respect).

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It happened yet again. I was in a seminar, this one on sales, by a respected speaker on the subject who I won’t name to protect the guilty. His reputation is well deserved: his information on sales is practical, well presented, and in line with my own grad-school research into persuasion. But then he repeated what I call “The Mehrabian Myth.” He said only 35% of communication is through words. The rest, he said, was through body language and voice tone. To his credit, his number was the same as the most reliable figure in the scientific literature, but his mistake was in not qualifying the word “communication” as I’ll explain in a moment. Then he made it worse, saying he had just read about two studies that said the figure was “as low as 7%.”

Unfortunately, what his source did not tell him is that those studies are nearly 50 years old… have been thoroughly debunked since then… and didn’t really say that. I don’t really blame this gentlemen. As noted in an article I just submitted for publication to a national magazine, this idea is repeated so often by consultants and business speakers that everyone assumes it must be true. That’s why I call it “The Mehrabian Myth,” for the UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian who did those two studies. But the myth is not his fault: it’s about him, not created by him. Mehrabian has stated that the figure, which actually came from a later estimate, has been misquoted. And the figure was never about all communications. It was actually about the communication of emotion.

What Mehrabian first showed, and other researchers have confirmed, is a common-sense notion. When someone is talking about an emotion-raising topic, if their words do not match their body language, facial expression, and voice tone, the other person is going to believe those nonverbal cues. If I tell you I am doing fine, but you hear tension in my voice and I’m not smiling, you’re going to know I’m not really fine.

In the everyday exchange of information and routine stories of daily life, words are doing all or almost all of the work. And even in honest emotional conversations, the receiver may draw some conclusions about the degree of emotion you are feeling through body language, but most of the information they receive will still be carried by the speaker’s words.

After I was divorced, someone pointed out to me that my “nonverbals” did not match my verbals when I tried to explain nicely my wife’s actions during our marriage. I was mad, and it showed, even if intellectually I understand her motives. No doubt this mismatch contributed to our problems. In the workplace, the lesson is to be honest with yourself and your team members about what you are feeling. If you’re ticked off, don’t try to hide it. And because your words have more weight than you’ve been led to believe, monitor them to make sure you don’t make things worse.

Otherwise, relax. In most of your communications, people aren’t monitoring your every move, despite what the purveyors of The Mehrabian Myth would have you believe.

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