Teams Blog

The holidays slowed things down enough for me to get back into the library, and I came across a set of recent studies on workplace diversity in the Academy of Management Journal. It’s a depressing topic for me. The most obvious reason is what it says about human beings, the mere fact that we are still having to discuss the issue in the 21st Century. Our inability to look past differences that genetically amount to a fraction of a percent of our genome and are literally skin deep is ridiculous. Whether biological, cultural, or learned, the average behavior and aptitude differences between men and women or blacks and whites are swamped by the differences caused by education. The behavioral differences between a Type A and Type B white guy or Type A and Type B black woman are far larger than those between the average white guy and black woman.

That said, diversity advocates have a problem in both over-reaching and, often, over-simplifying the effects. I consistently hear that diversity improves creativity, team performance, problem-solving, and so forth. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a myth, as there is no clear scientific evidence supporting this position. A “meta-analysis” of diversity studies in which researchers reviewed the results from 63 studies over five years found that overall, personal diversity neither helped nor harmed team performance (see summary). Functional diversity—having a range of educational specialties, skills, and tenure within a company or industry—usually helped team performance.

But those are averages. Other diversity studies I’ve summarized in TeamResearch News show the answers are not that simple. And the two I just came across provide more context. One found that teams of people who like mentally challenging tasks did better when diverse, but age diversity hurt performance and educational diversity had no effect with people who didn’t. In another, diverse teams in industries that weren’t diverse tended to struggle. As I note in the summary, that’s not because the minority members aren’t as capable as the majority members. It’s because majority members don’t know how to work with the minority members.

This is not entirely, or mostly, their fault. In an industry dominated by one gender and race, one or two minorities on a team generally learn the unwritten codes of the majority and follow those to fit in. (I’m not saying they should do this, or that it’s fair, but merely that this is what usually happens.) The majority members never have to learn about the cultural norms of somebody else. When placed on a team where they are not the majority, not only do they not know how to act, they don’t know how to learn how to act, because they’ve never had to.

Though the researchers in the most recent study point a manager in that situation toward diversity education, I don’t think that is the first step. As with personality tests and rope-course teambuilding, there is little support in the independent scientific literature to suggest these are cost-effective practices. Put in place the proven best practices of high-performing teams first, because they place the focus on the similarities between humans rather than the differences. Every group in every culture works better if it has clearly articulated goals, rules, and procedures, for example. A Harvard study at a U.S. bank found that training to develop good procedures was more effective at improving team performance than was diversity training. In fact, diversity training had no effect at all on performance (good or bad), contrary to what the Harvard researcher thought would be true.

In short, contrary to what some managers and those who sell to them want to believe, both teamwork and effective diversity require fundamental changes in the way people interact on a daily basis. And that takes more than a seminar or two.

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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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