Teams Blog

After all the U.S. media focus on schoolyard bullies in recent years, I’m glad to see a growing awareness of what those playground pugilists may grow up to be: abusive bosses. Prof. David Yamada and a growing chorus of researchers are out to change that by making workplace emotional abuse illegal in the Unites States. Among a host of other good reasons, Yamada wants to save lives.

He is a law professor at Suffolk Univ. in Boston and director of The New Workplace Institute. According to a version of his proposed law introduced in the Massachusetts State Senate last year, “Between 37 and 59 percent of employees directly experience health-endangering workplace bullying, abuse, and harassment, and this mistreatment is approximately four times more prevalent than sexual harassment alone.” Posts on his blog, Minding the Workplace, report on two suicides apparently resulting from this kind of abuse. One describes the recent death of an academic journal editor after alleged bullying by his boss, detailed by The Hook, a weekly newspaper.

Versions of Yamada’s bill have been introduced in 15 states and passed by two senates. Though that’s as far as they have gotten, I think it’s likely the United States will eventually catch up to countries like France and Sweden that have national laws against workplace bullies.

Yamada described the law in a speech at the Univ. of Augsburg back in April. The law would make it illegal for an employer to “subject an employee to an abusive work environment” with conduct such as “derogatory remarks, insults, and epithets; verbal or physical conduct of a threatening, intimidating, or humiliating nature; the sabotage or undermining of an employee’s work performance; or attempts to exploit an employee’s known psychological or physical vulnerability.” To break the law, the bully must have intended “to cause pain, injury, or distress” and have caused mental or physical damage. Though aimed at repeated abuse, it says a single very bad example could be enough.

If this language sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because much of it is taken directly from sexual harassment laws. Because of those you may think bullying is already illegal, but Yamada makes the case that existing laws do not cover general abuse. For example, if the insults mentioned above related to your gender or religion, they might break anti-discrimination laws. Otherwise, almost anything goes legally.

Managers should note that as with discrimination laws, not only the abuser but also his or her employer could be sued if this law passed in your state. A court could order an employer to take a number of actions including firing the bully, and paying back pay to a victim who quits because of the abuse. Employers would have some protections, again modeled on sexual harassment law. If the employer tried to fix the problem, or had a system to address it that the victim did not use, that would be a valid defense. Damages for emotional distress would be limited to $25,000, and punitive damages would not be allowed. The law also would include defenses to protect the employer from false claims, for example from a worker fired for other, valid reasons.

I suspect some readers will come up with reasonable objections along the lines of employer rights and the idea that the victim could just quit. I understand the thinking, but recognize the exact same arguments were made against sexual harassment laws 20 years ago and racial discrimination laws 50 years ago.

How sad that we have to even consider resorting to laws to make some managers play nice. I recall sitting stunned in a Seattle Chamber of Commerce committee meeting some years ago after the head of a builder’s association argued against better workplace safety rules because “nobody wants their people to get hurt.” His argument was logical, based not only on moral grounds but financial ones. I was stunned because there is massive evidence that wanting to save money in the short term regularly stops employers from investing in long-term savings through problem prevention. As evidence I present recent mining disasters, BP’s little problem in the Gulf of Mexico, and thousands of other citations in the public record. Please forgive this blatant plug, but my teamwork training and coaching services could save almost every business team in the United States many times more money than my services cost, yet I have room for more clients.

If you are a manager and know of someone causing strife on your staff, you already have a host of reasons to confront the behavior. Yamada writes, “there is strong consensus that bullying and related behaviors can be very costly for employers. These factors include:

• “Reduced productivity
• “Reduced employee loyalty
• “Increased absenteeism and related costs of medical premiums, workers’ compensation, and disability payments
• “Increase attrition and related costs of hiring and training
• “Greater risk of employee lawsuits, even in the absence of specific legal protections…”

The day is probably coming when ignoring the problem becomes yet another way to beg for a lawsuit. More importantly, any ethics book will tell you ignoring it is wrong, especially when suicide is a possible outcome.

Are you the type of person who gets people upset but believes “in telling the truth straight out, and if they can’t handle it, that’s their problem?” Or who enjoys insult humor and practical jokes at work? Or curses a lot more than your co-workers do? As with sexual harassment, it doesn’t matter whether you think your behavior is abusive. What matters is whether the other person does. Start looking inside yourself now, because you don’t want a judge doing it for you later.

Action Item: If you’re not sure whether you or someone you manage is abusive, or what to do about it, drop me a line or give me a call: 1-919-414-8939.

Sources: The following sources (and more) are all available free on “David Yamada’s ‘Papers’” page:

• “Crafting an American Legal Response to Workplace Bullying: The Healthy Workplace Bill”
• “Is There a ‘Business Case’ for Workplace Bullying Legislation?”
• “Massachusetts Senate Bill No. 699″ (2009-10 Session)
• “Workplace Bullying and American Employment Law: A Ten-Year Progress
  Report and Assessment”

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.

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.

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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.

I promised a look at the science behind stress according to the textbook mentioned in my last post, Human Motivation. (Actually, I don’t make “promises,” but that’s a subject for another post.) The first point of interest is that scientists do not use the word “stress” the way most people do: as an inherently negative state. According to Dr. Robert Franken, “Stress is… viewed as set of neurological/physiological reactions that serve some ultimate adaptive purpose,” reactions including blood becoming thicker and rushing to the brain and muscles, sweating, fats being released in the bloodstream, and increased breathing rates. As you might suspect, this is what we often call a “fight or flight response,” and indeed, all of these reactions allow us to do either of those things better–or heal better if they fail. (Thicker blood contains more of the chemicals the body needs to heal and presumably bleeds out slower.)

In developed nations, the events that trigger this reaction rarely require physical action or risk injury, however. Repeated exposure to these physical changes without the ability to respond physically is blamed for the well-documented connection between what business people call stress and higher disease and death rates.

But there’s a catch. “How the individual responds to those reactions determines whether they produce feelings of distress (a negative feeling) or produce feelings of eustress (a positive feeling),” Dr. Franken wrote. Jumping from an airplane creates the fight or flight response. If you jumped out on purpose, you enjoy the response. If the plane has stopped working, you probably don’t.

This distinction is important because the internal physical reaction is actually a two-step process. First the reaction needed to arouse greater attention and deal with an immediate threat kicks in. About 10 seconds later, secondary reactions that provide more long-term energy occur, and that response takes between 15 minutes and one hour to return to normal. The diseases associated with distress, to use the more precise term, appear to come mostly from this second phase.

There can be a third phase. If the distress remains long enough, the adrenal glands that create all of the hormones in the two-phase reactions can eventually collapse, “often the precursor to death…” Franken wrote.

What I see in this is a 10-second window of opportunity to control your internal response to a stress event, which fits perfectly with what I teach as the “S-R/S-R” model. An external stimulus (“S”) creates a response (“R”) in us, but it’s not like the classic response test where you cross your legs and the doctor hits below your kneecap with a rubber hammer, creating an automatic external reaction. Instead, it is an internal response which becomes an internal stimulus for the external response. In the workplace, then, we have two opportunities to control our external responses to outside events like a harsh word from a co-worker. First, we can change our internal R such that it does not become an internal S. Second, if that doesn’t work–if we get angered by that harsh word–we can control the external R. That is, we can keep our trap shut until we calm down.

Now I know how long we have to do that before we hurt ourselves: 10 seconds, which is an eternity. Maybe that old anger-management advice about counting to 10 has a scientific basis after all.

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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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Today I taught my “Active Listening Skills” class to the newest set of volunteers at Hospice of Wake County, as I do pro bono every month. (Not tooting my own horn—I just don’t want you to think I am charging a wonderful nonprofit like Hospice!)  It’s great fun to work with people who very much want to be there and want to do well, which is not always the case when training in businesses. After the opening demonstration of the skill, I always ask what is hard about active listening. One of the gentlemen made the point, as someone usually does, that it is hard to resist coming up with a response in your head even though the other person is still talking. This is one of the hardest parts of the skill, especially when the person is saying something you don’t like or you are feeling rushed.

But as I pointed out to the group, this is a great way to both waste time and create an argument. I told them there have been plenty of times when I was working with grpus where one person was responding to something the other person didn’t say! Ususally this happens when some is setting up a counterargument by expressing the opposite position from the point they want to make. The other person comes up with their own counterargument and jumps in. Person A intends to say, “There are those who would argue that the starts are the light of the heavans seen through pinpricks in the hard shell of the sky, but we know they are really distant gaseous bodies like the sun.” But person B only hears the part before the comma, and jumps in with, “Are you kidding? That idea was disproved in the Middle Ages!” That the problem is located in Person B’s head is even more obvious when they actually let Person A finish the sentence but still respond only the ifrst half, which I hear happening much more foten than you might expect. It can be amusing when you are the observer, as in my team coach role, and you suddently realize the two sides of a conflict are actually saying the same basic thing but in different words.

Clues that this is showing up in your conversations are when someone says, “What I was going to say was…” or “That’s not what I said.” When youre in a meeting, the befhavor is worsened both because their may be several people vying for talk time and because a couple of less-obvious misunderstandings liek this can lead the whole team down a dead end.

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