Teams Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They bought a pool table.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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%.

How team members “think, make decisions, plan, design, perceive, and remember”—in other words, how information is processed as a group—will clearly impact how the team performs.  But many managers focus on the outputs of the process instead of the process itself. For example, if they don’t like a plan, they will send it back with some changes and questions. When they have to go through this several times on every plan, they understandably become frustrated. Often, though, they will either yell at the team for whatever they perceive the problem to be or start doing the plans themselves. Instead, perhaps they should stop to look at the understanding the team has about what they are planning or the planning process itself.

It may have been Edwards Deming who first said the majority of what appear to be individual performance problems are actually process problems (I confess I didn’t record the source). The AntiClue blog has made the same point, and it’s one of performance consultant Don Clark’s main causes of performance problems (3/4 of which are mostly out of the individual’s control). Almost all process problems boil down to someone not having the information they needed when they needed it, if you include as “information” knowledge, skills, procedures, external decisions, etc. A study from last year confirms that managers need to pay much more attention to how their teams get, use, and store knowledge. Psychology professor Leslie DeChurch and management professor Jessica Mesmer-Magnus teamed up to draw relevant data from 65 studies into team cognition. The American Heritage Science Dictionary defines cognition as, “The mental process of knowing, including awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.” The professors describe it as including both “the nature of team member interaction” and “conditions that dynamically enable and underlie effective teamwork,” so it’s both a process and a group mental state. Psychologists Nancy Cooke and Jamie Gorman, the sources of the first quote in this post, put it succinctly: “team mind.”

Cognition is measured two ways. One compares the understanding of some topic across each pair of members on the team. For example, the similarity and accuracy between members A and B, B and C, and A and C are averaged to get a team cognition figure. The other way looks at the team’s overall view of some topic, measuring members A, B, and C together. The DeChurch/Mesmer-Magnus study looked at the ways these two approaches; the type of team (decision-making, action, and project teams); and other possible factors might affect the relationship between cognition and team performance. I won’t go into all the details, but it was clear that the more a team had a shared perception of its work, the better it performed. Though more true on subjective tests like ratings by managers, it also seemed to impact measurable performance. This appears to operate in part by improving work processes and member motivation, but a higher level of team mind by itself raised performance.

The authors suggest that managers pay attention to whether perceptions are shared among team members and in what ways. Cooke and Gorman use the example of a team that works with boilers, pumps, electronics, and motors. Everyone on the team could see a strong connection between all four of these in their work. In a more complementary kind of shared cognition, a couple of members might see connections between the first three items, while another set of members might only see a connection between pumps and motors. Between all the members, however, the team mind sees a connection of all four. In the latter scenario, you can surely see the potential for misunderstanding if those different views were not understood and respected. That is, complementary cognition is okay so long as the people who don’t see the pump/motor connection defer to those who do on matters affecting the motors.

Accuracy of cognition is also important. For example, say you work in a pharmaceutical plant where following a standard operating procedure (SOP) is required by government regulation. It’s not enough for one or two members to understand the SOP thoroughly. If the whole team doesn’t understand it, you increase the risk of a regulatory breach.

DeChurch and Mesmer-Magnus make the interesting suggestion of performing job task analyses on the work the team does and then “structure important support systems (e.g., measurement, performance appraisal, and reward structures) to develop and shape the collective cognition needed for successful teamwork.” I was trained on job task analysis while working at Los Alamos. An outsider observes people while on the job to determine the steps they go through and thus the knowledge, skills, and information necessary to succeed at the job. That done, the researchers say, leadership and training would be likely methods to ensure the team develops the proper cognition.

Or “team mind,” as I think I’ll start calling it. That term makes for all kinds of punny opportunities:

Q. What kind of cognition does a group of soil scientists need?
A. A dirty mind.

Sources:

1. Cooke, N. J., & Gorman, J. C. (in press), “Assessment of Team Cognition.” In P. Karwowski (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ergonomics and Human Factors, 2nd Ed. Taylor & Francis Ltd.
2. DeChurch, L., and J. Mesmer-Magnus (2010), “The Cognitive Underpinnings of Effective Teamwork: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Applied Psychology 95(1):32.

“Survey finds mostly grumps,” the headline said in the Raleigh News & Observer recently. According to a report by The Conference Board (the same organization that reports Consumer Confidence numbers every month), employee satisfaction is at its lowest level “in more than 22 years of studying the issue.” Only 45 percent said they were happy with their jobs, down from 61 percent back in 1987, according to the Board’s press release. The decline has occurred fairly steadily over time, so it’s not just related to the recession.

More than half of American workers don’t like their jobs. That is shocking to me, despite the sad stories I often hear as I network for my business. Money is part of the issue, with incomes falling and health insurance cutting discretionary finances further. But a major component is workers who don’t find their jobs interesting, a figure that dropped from 70 percent in 1987 to 51 percent. In fact, the drop “crosses all four of the key drivers of employee engagement: job design, organizational health, managerial quality, and extrinsic rewards,” the release said. (Money falls under that last category.) It also says the data indicates “the increasing dissatisfaction is not just a ‘survivor syndrome’ artifact of having co-workers and neighbors laid off in the recession,” quoting John Gibbons, program director of employee engagement research.

Among those under 25, only 37% like their jobs. Given that job satisfaction correlates strongly with the likelihood of someone staying in the job, this poses a direct threat to long-term organizational efficiency, dependent as that is on the transfer of corporate and industry knowledge from older to younger workers. If they don’t stick around, you can’t pass it along before older workers retire, as the Board notes.

A quote in the N&O (actually Associated Press) article caught my eye for obvious reasons, from a 26-year-old: “There is no sense of teamwork in most places anymore.” It’s one thing to hear a 56-year-old say “anymore,” but simply pitiful from someone that young. However, he is also right on the mark. Multiple studies report that a sense of teamwork is related positively to job satisfaction.

Along with team development, another answer is empowering employees to make more decisions about how they accomplish their work. Cross-training people to do each others’ jobs is an easy way to raise the “interestingness” of their work. Note that none of these tactics necessarily require an investment of much more than time: time to put teamwork best practices in place, train some managers, have people shadow each other, and maybe change some policies and procedures.

Why bother? In addition to the higher innovation and productivity of satisfied workers mentioned in the press release, I have seen it positively linked to higher retention rates, lower absenteeism, and higher motivation. Even in good times, money is not a Top 4 motivator for most employees (among those above a subsistence level of pay). At a time when companies can’t even offer that, low-cost alternatives like training and empowerment just makes that much more sense.

Note: The report was based on a survey of 5,000 U.S. households. Neither the release nor the article report the data-quality specifics like margin of error, but the Board’s research is well respected. That said, I’d prefer to be reporting on the original report, but I ain’t paying $395 to do a blog post!

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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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