Teams Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources:

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

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

A study I just posted to TeamResearch News about HR practices points out the way scientists think a little differently than most of us, and thus why I put a lot more stock in what they have to say than in most writers of business stories in popular publications.

This study was based on something called the Workplace and Employment Survey (WES), which is sponsored by the Canadian government and which people are legally required to respond to. Right off the bat, this makes the study different. The response rate of around 96% is four times better than the typical response rate to surveys of roughly 25%. Scientists without government sanctions supporting them go to great lengths to make sure results are not too badly skewed due to those low response rates, and thus are similar to what they would have gotten had they reached everybody.

Scientists are also careful about drawing conclusions from their work. A major mistake most people make when reading about studies—including most journalists and consultants—is to confuse correlation with causation. Simply put, just because two data are linked, that doesn’t mean one caused the other. In the HR study, for example, higher levels of training at a workplace were linked to higher levels of people quitting. Is this because a better-trained worker has more skills they can use to get a job elsewhere, as the scientists suggest based on other research? Probably. But it also could be that companies with higher “quit rates” have to provide more training because they have to hire more people to backfill those positions. A simple correlation does not show whether the training came first or the quitting came first, and the article’s authors say that. (Their study design provides some evidence, though.)

Scientists will point out where their data are lacking. In this study, the authors point out the WES data is not very detailed. It is possible that classroom training leads to higher quit rates, but on-the-job training leads to lower ones. You can’t draw a conclusion about all training from this gross figure (gross as in “general,” not as in “yucky”).

Scientists also are pretty quick, at least in publications, to point out where they were wrong. In part this is because they know in peer-reviewed journals, where other anonymous scientists critique the articles before they are published, if the authors don’t admit they were wrong, the reviewers will tell them. In this study, some of the researchers’ hypotheses turned out to be wrong, and they state that.

Finally, scientists are careful to limit their conclusions to what they actually investigated and found. For example, these authors point out the study was only about voluntary turnover, and there are likely to be compelling reasons for a company to offer training despite it harming this one metric. (If you doubt that, I refer you to the powerful evidence in the book The Fifth Discipline.)

Contrast all this to stories in popular business publications. They are not usually reviewed by other experts on the topic before publication. They assert positions without offering hard data to back it up. Their language is imprecise. I recently commented on another writer’s blog that the best “practices” a post claimed for teams were not “practices” at all, but descriptions of well-performing teams.

These stories also make claims they can’t support. A press release that got coverage from a national professional organization estimated financial losses due to workers who avoid conflict at work. But when I contacted the firm that put out the study, they admitted the sample was just anybody who responded to an online poll, and the demographics showed that the respondents in no way represent the common worker. Sixty-seven percent were female, for example. Two-thirds worked in companies of 750 or more and 71 percent had college degrees. Most people work for smaller firms, and only around 25% of Americans have degrees. Yet the release claimed, “New research reveals employees waste an average of $1,500 and an 8-hour workday for every crucial conversation they avoid.” No, it doesn’t. It says workers who use the Internet and happened to see an ad for the survey and are interested enough to respond gave that as the average answer, which probably would not turn out to be accurate if an outside observer actually measured the time.

In short: reader beware.