Teams Blog

“We’re all going to die!”  This was how Ryan Allis, CEO of iContact, started his presentation at a recent Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce event this week. He credited another speaker for the line, but his point was made: keep things in perspective. He shared stories that proved having and staying true to one’s goals and values can contribute to the bottom line. He should know. He set a goal when he was 16 that he would have a $1 million business by the time he was 21. Sadly, he missed the milestone… by 18 days.

Allis said he gave up a $200,000 job right out of high school to go to college. (Granted, it was the University of North Carolina, not that I’m biased.) While there, he and another Tar Heel started what would become iContact. The first year they lost $5,000. In 2008, they made $15 million. Allis described a corporate culture of practical jokes and parties that might have seemed alien to that audience, but sounded normal to someone recently moved from high-tech Seattle. He really caught my ear when he said his company used to have a list of 10 values “that was really sucky and nobody remembered them.”

This reminded me of a study I carry to all of my trainings, “Inspiration and Cynicism in Values Statements.” A survey of executive MBA students found, “On the whole, respondents evaluated the impact of their firms’ value statements on decision-making positively.” Reasons included: “positive outcomes… both inside and outside the company, guidelines provided for decision-making, increased accountability, and clarity of expectations.” But I think it important to note that high-level executives made up half of those respondents. They may indeed use those values, but I am willing to bet most of their employees do not. Allis’ statement surprised me because he had recognized at the top level what you generally only hear from people down the line.

In response, he took his senior leadership team on a retreat and came up with five values that form the acronym WOWME:

1. Wow the Customer.
2. Operate with Urgency.
3. Without Mediocrity.
4. Make a Positive Wake.
5. Engage as an Owner.

From the scientific standpoint, this was not the ideal way to create the list. The study found respondents were most likely to feel value statements had an impact when everyone in the company was involved in creating them, which fits what we know about the psychology behind motivation. There’s no better way to build buy-in than to involve from the start those from whom you want the buy-in. iContact is small enough that this could have been accomplished without a huge investment of time. Allis said they ended up laying off 10% of their employees who could not get on board with the new values as implemented. He probably would have lost far fewer with a bottom-up approach, and most of the turnover would have been voluntary, saving the company heartache and unemployment costs. Plus, each team in the company would have brought out its team values, in alignment with the eventual corporate ones.

That said, everything they have done to implement the values are right on target. I caught him for a quick interview after his talk. Allis said the values are used on performance appraisals and in coaching sessions. The company also has a values recognition program that is very high tech: a poster and stickers. Each time someone exemplifies one of the values, they get a sticker by their name. With a certain number of stickers, they get a gift card. The person with the most stickers at the end of the year gets a prize, Allis explained.

The company lives its values in the more general sense through its “4-1s” program, under which it gives each year:

• monetary donations equivalent to 1% of payroll,
• its product for free to area nonprofits,
• 1% of each employee’s time (2.5 days) for volunteer work, and
• 1% of its equity to The Humanity Campaign.

Given the company’s financial success, it seems to be fulfilling his statement, “The purpose of business is to create value and solve human problems…” Allis is personally proving you can do both with his own extensive volunteer work, including serving as the head of Nourish International, which engages college students to fight poverty.

I can’t resist pointing out, however, that the whole company may not have bought into the values yet. Allis would probably be surprised to learn that five months after WOWME was introduced, his company Web site still lists the old 10-item values list!

Source: Urbany, J. (2005), “Inspiration and Cynicism in Values Statements,” Journal of Business Ethics 62:169.

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.

“Be a team player” is one of the most abused phrases in business. Most of the time, what it really means is, “Shut up and go along with everyone.” You know: the way people at Enron and Lehman Brothers and Toyota were “team players.” How did that work out for them?

At Thursday’s meeting of the local chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth, Jacob Blass of Ethical Advocate made a convincing argument for the “bottom-line implication” to emphasizing ethics within a company. His company offers ethics training and an elegant solution for anonymous reporting and investigation of ethical issues. A former psychologist, he reported on a study that found 45% of companies are experiencing fraud at any given time, which in turns mean every company eventually will. Running the math shows that fraud adds 7% to company costs in the United States. But fraud is only one form of unethical behavior. As Blass said, it ranges from cheating customers to harassment in the workplace, so throwing in legal costs and negative judgments would probably drive the figure for all ethical issues much higher.

Changes in federal enforcement could make this all the more pertinent to business owners or top managers. “If an organization is convicted of a federal crime,” Blass said on a slide, “its failure to maintain ‘an effective compliance and ethics program’ may result in the assessment of harsher penalties.” We’re talking a 400% increase, Blass wrote.

You may be stunned to learn who commits fraud. About half are senior managers, Blass said. This isn’t just about line workers stealing pens. Most, 93%, had no prior record. Another study showed that 43% of people admitted to some form of unethical behavior on the job, and 75% admitted to having observed it but not reported it.

Among that last set, the top reason cited was because reporting the behavior was “not being a team player.” This was a much higher percentage, 96%, than fear of retaliation, coming in third on the list at 68%. Blass said people think, “It doesn’t affect me, so I’m not going to do anything.”

But it does. Ethical lapses hurt the company’s bottom line, and thus each team member’s job security and any profit-sharing. Many unethical behaviors will directly impact the reputation of the team or individual team members, in turn harming credibility, persuasiveness, motivation, and, ultimately, careers. I know of a situation at a nonprofit where a series of lapses, each in itself relatively minor, added up to drive out the organization’s top fundraiser.

Staying quiet is not “being a team player.” Researchers use the term “groupthink” to refer to the behavior of teams so averse to confrontation that everybody goes along with the first or easiest idea—or more often, the boss’s idea. Some have pointed to the Bay of Pigs disaster during the administration of U.S. President John F. Kennedy as an example. The CIA proposed an invasion of Cuba by exiles to overthrow Cuban President Fidel Castro. Naysayers did not feel comfortable speaking up, and the April 1961 invasion was a horrid failure costing lives on both sides, damaging the U.S.’s reputation, and requiring another $53 million to free imprisoned invaders.

When the Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba, an event facilitated by the invasion fiasco and triggering a crisis in October of 1962, Kennedy wisely recognized the teamwork problem. He ordered people to speak up, promising no retribution for disagreement. Open debate in the White House led to a nuanced response that provided a peaceful resolution.

I asked Blass during the Q&A how he would get people to redefine being a team player to include speaking up. Having already stressed the need to “draw a clear line in the sand” about ethics through explicit, repeated communications, he now added that a leader must “walk the talk.” He gave a wonderful example from his own experience.

He was running a company whose building did not have enough parking spaces for all of the workers. It had implemented a rotation system for parking in which he included himself. From his office window, he was able to see people cheating. He sent out a memo asking, do you want me to name names in a company meeting, “or do you want me to treat you like adults?” The cheating stopped.

What also needs to stop is the use of “be a team player” as a cudgel to force people into supporting positions that are not supported by the facts. Persuasion, not retaliation, will move your team toward the high performance that ultimately reduces everyone’s pain.

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A used college textbook I picked up at the unfortunate end-of-life sale of a Durham, N.C., bookstore has been feeding me some interesting insights into the book’s namesake, Human Motivation (Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.: Belmont, CA, 1994). Written by Univ. of Calgary psychology professor Robert Franken, for a study wonk like me it is a pleasant way to get my research fix without having to work quite so hard. Most of my research involves going through ”primary research,” meaning scientific journal articles, most of which are written as if a computer were programmed to spit out as much multisyllabic jargon as it could within something resembling English. “Secondary research” like this book, in which an expert reviews the work of other experts and sometimes dumbs it down a bit, makes life easier for “tertiary” researchers like myself. My job is to explain the heavy stuff to the popular audience–in my case, the customers for my training services and you, dear reader.

I was going to dive into the science of stress from the book at this point, but instead I think I’ll reduce my own holiday stress by indulging in a rant. As alluded to in an earlier post, I have little patience for people who step outside their areas of expertise and report scientific findings without learning the context. When Greg Hyer was nice enough to “spotlight” me in his recent LinkingRaleighNC newsletter, I made the point that I spent thousands of hours using my old journalism skills to review the scientific literature on teamwork. Although I keep up with other topics in the business world to make sure my solutions remain relevant in the real world, I don’t comment on those topics as if I were an expert.  That’s not to say I’m shy about expressing my opinions, but I don’t claim they come from any special knowledge of the topic.

The danger is that listeners who assign a level of credibility to someone based on their knowledge in one area do not easily distinguish it from what is realistic in other areas. That is, credibility tends to be “one size fits all.” Physicist Edward Teller, considered by many the father of the hydrogen bomb, practically caused the Cold War (in my nonexpert opinion) with the help of people who gave him too much credibility in the areas of foreign and military policy based on his expertise in physics. Whenever a speaker uses a law of quantum physics in a talk about management, I see pens scribbling madly. But the whole reason quantum physics has been so controversial and fascinating in the scientific community is because those laws at the subatomic level do not apply to objects the size of atoms–or humans.

For example, I’ve heard several people try to apply something called the Principle of Uncertainty to human relations. They say it means that an observer has a direct physical impact on the actions of the observed person. This is neither an accurate statement of observed effects, or even the correct principle to apply to the asserted effect.

When you look at a car going down the road, you can tell where it is, what direction it is traveling in, and roughly how fast. This does not appear to be the case for the particles that make up atoms and their cousins. A scientist cannot, for example, be absolutely sure where a particle is and absolute sure how fast it is going. The more sure she is of one, the less sure she is of the other. Quoth Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, “Articulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, it applies only at the small scales of atoms and subatomic particles and is not noticeable for macroscopic objects, such as moving vehicles.”

The effect of the observer plays a role, but is not the point to the Uncertainty Principle.  The “observer effect” is more accurately tied to a another physicist who gave the analogy of a cat in a box who may or may not be dead. In our observable world, whether the cat has died has nothing to do with when somebody decides to open the box. In the quantum world that operates on mathematical probabilities, the “cat” would not definitely be dead or alive until the observer opened the box. There’s also a concept speakers may be thinking of in which changes to one particle can effect another particle long after they bump into each other.  (“Long after” in relative terms; we’re talking tiny fractions of a second).

Regardless, in the human world, a team member is going to do what the team member wants to do. Obviously, it is possible to influence somebody else’s moods or decisions, otherwise my “Art and Science of Persuasion” class would be a big waste of time. But it requires old-fashioned communication skills and basic psychology, not concentrating on their brain waves as you sit alone in your office. Even then, the best you can do is hope your efforts overcome the myriad of influences on their decision-making from genetics, parenting, earlier experiences, current environment, and everyone else who is trying to change their thinking. But quantum-level effects are not a concern.

My point is this: when trying to decide who to listen to on a given topic, caveat emptor (“buyer beware”). Speaking of that, I’ll share Dr. Franken’s expertise on the science of stress next time.

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Last night I delivered a talk on “The Mindful Way of Working” for the first time, sort of. I qualify the statement because I have guided people in meditation and mindfulness for a few years now, and have taught some of the techniques for decades as a martial artist. But I had not taught these practices in a business context, a meeting of the IS Committee of the North Carolina Project Management Institute (NCPMI). Part of the reason is I didn’t want people to think I was pushing my religion, Zen Buddhism. So I probably went overboard in making the point Buddhist practice is compatible with any other religion (my “sangha” in Seattle was founded by devout Catholics) and meditation is used by Protestant ministers, Moslems, Hindus and secular humanists, among others. Another point of discomfort for me is that the topic strays far from my primary practice of using scientific findings to support group work.

But I decided to offer the course anyway, primarily to expand my marketing possibilities, I will admit. Of course, I also could have done that by offering team–building games despite there being no scientific backing that they provide any return on investment (ROI). There is little research on productivity or other benefits from mindfulness in the workplace yet, but there is significant research on the stress-reduction capabilities in medical practice. In fact, the method called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has proven effective in a variety of settings, and the few studies in the business world are encouraging as well.

For the class and my Zen practice, I say “mindfulness at its most practical level is simply keeping your mind on what is going on in this moment. As in meditation, you try to focus your mind on one thing and let all extraneous thoughts go on their way. For example, if at work you are writing a report and you think, ‘I need to pick up some bread,’ don’t go on to making out your grocery list in your head. Put your mind back on your writing.” Purists will rightly argue there is a lot more to it, and I touched on aspects such as recognizing automatic thoughts for what they are and noticing the impact of certain physical sensations on our emotions and relationships.

What it boils down to is self-control, perhaps the most critical skill to business success. We all have to do things we don’t want to in order to accomplish routine tasks, act professionally with colleagues we don’t like, guide employees to do things we think should be obvious to anyone, and so on. Mindfulness, and the meditation practice that supports it the way working out supports athletic performance, are powerful options to achieve that self-control.

The class participants seemed either to get it or not know what to make of it, and either response is fine with me. But I know they stayed very engaged throughout the class and walked out with a choice of new tools to help their working or personal lives. To me, that makes overcoming my fears worth the risks.

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