Teams Blog

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.

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.

When you are tempted or told to do some “team building,” you have a stark choice:

1. Fix the issue that prompted the thought, or
2. Waste your time and money.

The scientific evidence is overwhelming that standard team building does not work, and given how adults learn, could not work. The team building industry is built on the quicksand of mass delusion among purveyors and buyers.

By “team building,” I am referring to occasional exercises, games, personality tests, drum circles, scavenger hunts, ropes courses, and so on. When I say it “does not work,” I mean the activity has no lasting positive impact on the team. In other words, standard team building provides less return than you invest even if all you invest is time (i.e., you get zero or negative ROI). Worse, when team members see managers resort to these activities rather than fixing the problems, that is seen as “lip service” or a “Band-Aid approach” and drives morale downward.

I have found zero scientific studies showing that any of the actions I listed above provide a benefit. I can say this, first, because I have now gone through more than 475 sources, most of them studies or analysis of multiple studies by researchers, and exactly one asserted support for team building as defined here. That one was thoroughly debunked later in the same journal (see blog post). Second, to double-check, I searched two databases of journal articles covering hundreds of journals and going back decades, one focused on psychology and the other on business articles. I used every relevant keyword I could think of: not just team building, but ropes, games, exercises, and such. No articles supporting team building turned up.

Of course, there are plenty of supporting claims in the popular business literature—the books and magazines you can pick up at any bookstore. You will also hear managers and consultants weave tales of successful team-building events. But as I detail in ”About Business Stories” on TeamResearch News, these have to be taken with a grain of salt for several reasons. One, clearly, is self-interest: a company or consultant who earns money selling these things, and a manager talked into spending money on one, both have reasons to:

• interpret team actions after the event as “changes,” positive ones at that;
• assume those changes were due to the team building;
• assume the team members see them as positive (or that members asked directly are willing to speak honestly); and
• assume the changes will last.

Studies that put self-serving perceptions up against measurement by objective outsiders routinely show the perceiver is wrong. It’s a built-in bias, which is why I double-checked my anti-team-building stance using the database review even though my opinion grew out of my in-depth literature review, not just personal experiences.

Success stories are ”anecdotal evidence,” which has often been proven inaccurate when tested scientifically. Along with the other problems, even if team building worked in one instance, that doesn’t mean it usually does. Give the worst hitter on a baseball team enough at-bats, and eventually they’ll get a hit. When a lottery winner says, “I just knew I was going to win,” no one asks how many of the non-winners thought the same thing… or how many times the winner thought they would win and didn’t… or whether the winner is unconsciously creating that memory based on prior weeks.

What I have never seen in one of these business stories about a team-building event are data from measurable goals or analysis to show the success was not due to other factors. If a sales team did a team building event last month, March 2010, and their sales went up this month, is that due to the team building or the fact that the economy is picking up? At least sales teams have quantifiable performance measures. I have yet to see a team of software engineers create objectively measurable performance standards before a team building event, then retest them immediately after and three months after (as scientific studies often do) to see if there were lasting positive changes.

One reason team building does not work is it violates the most basic tenets of adult learning. A pioneer of the field, Malcolm Knowles, said adults require among other traits that the training be relevant and practical. Unless your team is a troupe of drummers, a drum circle is not going be relevant to their work. Lessons arising from a scavenger hunt are not practical because they are not easily recognized and applied when a similar issue arises at work.

Life experience provides other reasons team building can’t work. Did you master golf or cooking after a single lesson? Do you want to fly with a pilot who has only played Flight Simulator? Of course not. Taking a team out for a “morale boosting” day of go-kart racing, when the next day you’re going to put them right back in the situation that is lowering their morale, simply defies logic. Even if you can remember the results of someone’s personality test during a conflict, that abstract knowledge isn’t easily translated into a specific situation. Much easier to apply is a list of agreed-upon behaviors with a safe enforcement method, plus a formal plan for what will be communicated and when. Why? Humans are not great at applying the abstract to the specific, but we learn and apply behavior-based rules every day. 

The authors of the influential team development book The Wisdom of Teams wrote elsewhere, “Sending a bunch of men and women on an (outdoor) course to simulate teaming may be fun, but it doesn’t accomplish much.” Adult learning is enhanced by fun, and the teams I work with get plenty of laughs. But fun should not be the emphasis when you are trying to accomplish something serious. And if you don’t accomplish that something, don’t permanently solve the issue, you’re going to be killing a lot more fun at work over the course of a week than you can give them in an afternoon of Lego play.

“By 1972, the necessary theory and methodologies for practical, large-scale team-building programs were in place,” psychologists Skipton Leonard and Arthur Freedman wrote in Consulting Psychology Journal, as quoted in an earlier post. But a set of handbooks published that year for non-professional facilitators set the tone most people still think of when they hear the term “team building.” Let’s continue our somewhat disturbing look at how much or little has changed in teamwork training by covering the 1970s and ’80s.

The authors write, “many participants experienced team building as enjoyable, enlightening, and useful in improving intragroup relations but much less effective in accomplishing significant personal or team transformations… Line management considered these programs to be mostly irrelevant because they used so-called touchie-feelie exercises that were perceived as merely fun and games.” The journal article includes a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert asks, while cutting out paper dolls blindfolded, “Are you sure we’ll cry and hug?” Facilitator Dogbert replies, “Actually, hugging is iffy.”

Organizational development (OD) experts recognized the limitations of the touchie-feelie approach, which grew out of 1960s “encounter groups” (see Part 1), and noted a disconnect between team builders and managers. The former focused on relationships and how people were working together, such as their norms and decision-making processes. Managers “were more interested in setting goals and priorities and analyzing or allocating the way work was performed,” Leonard and Freedman write. I’ll note that these priorities do not have to be mutually exclusive; in fact, high-performance teams usually invest time in both.

The sense that people will play nice if they are taught to, ignoring the realities of competition and power struggles in the working world, came under challenge, a good thing. But corporate culture harmed teamwork in ways that seem depressingly current. Read these quotes about the 1970s from the article and tell me how much has changed:

• “The typical organization… was hierarchically organized, with firm boundaries between functional silos and a compensation policy that rewarded individual rather than team performance.”
• “Excited team builders frequently turned despondent” upon seeing positive team changes “evaporate within weeks (sometime days or hours) of the return of participants to their work units.”
• “Furthermore, the typical reward systems provided incentives for individual rather than team-oriented behavior and contributions. Employees and managers did what was inspected and measured…”
• “Many managers gave lip service to teamwork but were reluctant to walk the talk.”
• Deep down, people were and are afraid of teamwork because they “‘think it will render them anonymous, invisible…’”

Leonard and Freedman assert that the economic realities of the 1980s turned things around. The U.S. was in the worst recession prior to the current one, plus inflation was high, while former enemies Germany and Japan became economic powerhouses. Businesses responded by changing their basic models, eliminating lifelong employment expectations, and reducing layers of middle of management. “The span of control for most managers reached levels that ruled out the old command and control style of management,” the article says. “Without the guarantee of employment, management needed to develop new approaches to motivate and empower employees.”

Team approaches became more common, including “self-managing production teams,” cross-functional teams, and the quality circles of Total Quality Management. (As the article notes, TQM started in America, was ignored, and came to favor here only after Japan used it in that country’s spectacular rebirth.) Silo-busting, team-focused organizations became more typical and switched to team-based pay and rewards.

As the old personnel departments morphed into “human resources” and added OD to their responsibilities, some team builders came to realize they had to be more strategic in their approach, Leonard and Freedman write. Researchers “called for more consultation with teams in the process of doing their work” and stressed the need to do team development within the context of company goals and issues. How sad it is that 20 years later, some HR managers still resist this idea (see HR study summary) and HR and training groups have to continue to sponsor workshops on “strategic alignment.”

Frankly, any top manager would be foolhardy to support efforts that don’t feed the company’s goals. That means, in turn, HR and training folks are foolish to push such efforts without creating measures that show alignment.

We’ll finish up with the ’90s and beyond in Part 3. Perhaps we’ll find that the team building industry has learned something from the past, but I fear the Santayana quote remains in effect.

Go to Part 3.

Source: Leonard, H. S., and A. Freedman (2000), “From scientific management through fun and games to high performing teams: A historical perspective on consulting to team-based organizations,” Consulting Psychology Journal 52(1):3.

Any dip into history reminds me how poor we humans are at learning from the past. An article I came across on the history of teamwork by consulting psychologists Skipton Leonard and Arthur Freedman proves the point. So many of the lessons I try to get across in my practice have been known to work for decades, yet remain largely ignored by “team builders” and many managers.

Prior to the 1800s, “With the exception of music (i.e., orchestras) and the theater, there are few examples of the high levels of specialization of labor, interpersonal communication, integration of effort, cooperation, and problem solving that characterize modern teams,” the authors write. I smiled when I saw that. My first introduction to project teamwork came as a backstage “techie.” For the record, I wasn’t doing that prior to the 1800s.

Otherwise, the “work environment” was a line of orders from the king down, along with jostling for power by everyone who wasn’t trying simply to survive. Only in families was there some level of cooperation and division of labor, though again one spouse or the other usually ruled. That said, “Researchers who have studied group dynamics in the past often note the parallels with family dynamics…” Leonard and Freeman write.

In 1897, French sociologist Émile Durkheim made fairly accurate predictions about group norms—informal rules people naturally create, usually without knowing it, as they do things together. Freud touched on groups as well, but the authors credit American psychologist William McDougall as the first “teambuilder,” based on his 1920 book The Group Mind. He offered five bases for better group effort, they write:

• “continuity of existence…”
• “development of an emotional relationship to the group as a whole by defining the nature, composition, functions, and capacity of the group”
• “interaction… with other groups similar to the group but differing in some key aspects”
• “traditions, customs, and habits that define the relationships between members”
• “a definite structure…”

Let’s stop right there. All of this perfectly matches what I said yesterday in a talk for a Chamber of Commerce event and that I create through The SuddenTeams Program. It is backed up by decades of subsequent research after McDougall. None of it matches what most “team builders” force work groups to do. And most managers still refuse to address these 90 years after McDougall first wrote about it. Okay, rant over.

The middle of the last century saw the growth of “social psychology,” so-called to differentiate it from the previous focus on individuals or pairs of people. What we now call social norms, groupthink, and peer pressure were first identified. A center for group dynamics research was founded around 1946. (The center’s Web site disagrees with the authors on the date.) That year, founder Kurt Lewin and his students also hosted “a conference on intergroup relations focusing on racial and religious discrimination” sponsored by a state agency and diversity groups. It attracted a number of people who would later be important researchers in the teamwork field, including names that appear in my bibliography. It may well have been the first use of the participatory training style so common today, and Leonard and Freeman say it was the birth of the field of group dynamics.

In another theatre reference, they write that Lewin conducted “shop-floor group meetings in a pajama factory (the play and then the movie Pajama Game reputedly were based on these experiences).”

Lewin was involved in the founding of the National Training Laboratory (NTL) in Bethel, Maine, but died before he could participate in its first conference. The idea of ”training groups” (“T-groups”) began there. These, too, looked a lot like modern facilitated trainings (versus lectures) and presented the first diversity trainings. Many future teamwork researchers passed through the NTL. “Leaders from educational, religious, community, and business organizations came to Bethel each summer for several intense weeks of training aimed at improving… their effectiveness as individuals and change agents in society and organizations,” the authors write. “Bethel converts returned to their institutions and introduced flip-charts, innovative seating arrangements, and programs that balanced theory input with experiential learning modules.”

Ideas prevalent today moved from the lab into businesses. “Herb Shepard and Bob Blake, in their work with an Esso refinery, developed a managerial grid based on structured, leaderless groups in the late 1950s and called their approach ‘organization development’” (OD). I had to bite my tongue a few years ago when an HR person called self-directed teams ”passé” as if they were a recent fad.

The upheavals of the 1960s caused in the U.S. a cynicism about the possibility of large system change. Social psychologists focused more at the small group level where change seemed reasonable, the authors write. Researchers began to note the effect that job tasks had on organization (instead of the other way around), and developed a “sociotechnical” approach to OD that recognized how tasks, technology and organization evolve together.

“By 1972, the necessary theory and methodologies for practical, large-scale team-building programs were in place,” Leonard and Freeman write. Unfortunately, a series of handbooks on team building introduced the “touchie-feely” approach that was fun but ”much less effective in accomplishing significant personal or team transformations.” Sound familiar? It would if you had been at my talk yesterday!

More in a future post.

Go to Part 2.

Source: Leonard, H. S., and A. Freedman (2000), “From scientific management through fun and games to high performing teams: A historical perspective on consulting to team-based organizations,” Consulting Psychology Journal 52(1):3.

I thought I had finally found it: scientific evidence that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is worth the time and money for team building. You see, in all of my research, not once have I seen such evidence. I have heard people talk about how they improved their communications with one or two other people on their team after an MBTI exercise, and I believe them. Others have said it was “pretty accurate,” to use the most common phrase (not “completely accurate”). But the only unabashed support I have heard comes from the people who sell MBTI services, and managers who invested in them. Neither are very objective sources, and no one had return-on-investment (ROI) figures.So I went looking through two databases of peer-reviewed journals. “Peer reviewed” means the article was reviewed by anonymous experts in the field. One database focused on business and the other on psychology and related sciences. Together they cover hundreds of journals going back decades. The number of articles I found referring to MBTI in a team setting: 2. 

When I came across the first, I thought we had a winner: “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: A bridge between counseling and consulting.” But then I came across a second from the same journal which turned out to be a response to the first. Both are now summarized in TeamResearch News. It turns out the author of the first article, Mary H. McCaulley, co-founded the Center for Applications of Psychological Type with Isabel Briggs Myers, co-creator of the test. None of the references in her articles were tests of the effectiveness of the test. 

The study summary has the details, but there are many problems with the MBTI. The test itself is not as respected as other personality tests used by scientists. One problem is that its scoring pushes people artificially into extreme labels rather than recognizing people can fall in the middle. (Initially it did, but that neutral position was later dropped.)  

To illustrate, if you created a scale from 0 to 100 measuring how much someone likes bananas, the scoring method used by the MBTI would say you don’t like them if you scored a 49 and you do if you scored a 51. But two people who scored a 2 and a 98 are a lot more different than two who scored a 49 and a 51. Scientists would say the latter two are identical, while the MBTI would say they are different. 

It also does not provide reliable results. Even one of the MBTI manuals reports a 35% change in type over four weeks, and another study reported 50% over five weeks. Since you can’t be sure whether the first test or second is closer to the truth, you would have to take the test a minimum of three times, and preferably more, to nail down an accurate type reading. Even then, the article says, you have to be aware that personality is a relatively small contributor to work performance, and that behaviors differ according to the situation. No one who has seen me do a presentation or training would think me an introvert, but that’s what I am. I treat my public work as a performance to make it interesting.

Ms. Briggs was not a psychologist: she had only a bachelor’s degree, in political science. And the MBTI was based almost exclusively on the theories of Carl Jung. Though an influential theorist right up there with Freud, and the guy who came up with the terms “introvert” and “extrovert,” he is controversial within the scientific community and much of his theory work remains untested. Personality tests preferred by researchers are based on evidence guided by theory, not theory alone. 

Even if the MBTI consistently helps most takers get along better with two teammates (the highest number I hear people say), it would be aiding less than half of the total number of communication channels within a team. Within roughly the same time taken by the typical MBTI exercise, and for free, you could draft:   

• a communication plan covering who needs what information from whom by when, and in what form, and
• a set of group-created rules for how you will talk to each other, and what to do if someone breaks a rule.

These two tools, if backed by team and manager self-discipline, will eliminate the majority of your team’s communications issues. Well-supported by research, they also meet the standards of adult learning by providing concrete, relevant information. With MBTI exercises, you end up with abstract type information and general suggestions that users must try to project into the future, instead of clear behavior-based guidelines. 

In the movie Jerry MacGuire, a client of the title character makes him scream into the phone, “Show me the money!” I would say the same thing to the next MBTI practitioner who claims the test is a good way to spend your money for team building.

Comment

“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!

Comment

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.

Comment

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.

Comment

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.

Comment