TeamResearch News

October 2003
Vol. 1, No. 4

TeamResearch News summarizes the latest information from studies or articles on business teams, along with guidance on how to apply that research in your workplace. It is published the first full weekend of each month as a free service from TeamTrainers^TM Consulting (www.suddenteams.com), with announcements sent by e-mail to subscribers.

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From the Editor: One of this month's studies made me rethink a decade-long trend in team development research regarding team conflicts. It was a well-designed in-depth review of all the relevant studies, and it supports both earlier research and my direct experiences. So I have modified the SuddenTeams Program and my team talks because of it. This points out the importance of being willing to learn and to change your mind if you want to best serve yourself, your employees, and your customers. Of course, to me it also suggests that you should ask my competitors what they do to stay current!

Contents

Studies and Articles

• Managing Self-Managed Teams
• Unions and Companies Create Successful Plants Together
• Task Conflict Not as Good as Believed
• Effectiveness of Teambuilding Activities Questioned

Don't Waste Money on Quick Fixes

Newsletter Information

• Subscribe/Unsubscribe
• Contact the Editor

Managing Self-Managed Teams

Study: Researchers looked at which leadership techniques were most effective when overseeing a self-managing work team—one that handles the administrative duties performed for typical work groups by the manager. They developed case studies from a Fortune 500 company organized into 300 self-managed teams and compared the behaviors of effective leaders with those of average ones. "Effectiveness" was rated using objective team performance metrics, team member ratings, and supervisor ratings of the leader.

Superior leaders were found to serve as liaisons between the team and the company, rather than connecting themselves to either exclusively. They did this by:

• Relating to people in and outside of the team and "building political awareness" in both groups.
• Scouting information for each side about the other and tracking activities in and outside of their teams.
• Persuading the company and the team to pay attention to each others' needs.
• Empowering their teams.

Application: Although the study focused on self-managed teams, the findings are applicable in some degree to any team that makes many of its own decisions. If you manage an "empowered" team, try these behaviors taken from the study:

• Relating
• Find out and help meet the needs of your manager and colleagues in other departments.
• Help team members with their individual needs, instead of considering this a burden.
• Scouting
• Seek information helpful to the team from upper managers, peers and company experts.
• Find and use a standard problem-solving approach to analyze problems.
• Persuading
• Defend team decisions to upper management.
• Rather than ordering the team to choose an option you prefer, try talking it into the decision, perhaps using data from outside the team such as the impact of a decision on the team itself.
• Empowering
• Let, and make, the team make its own decisions, but only after giving it the same information, training, and resources you would want before making those decisions.
• Stay out of the team's day-to-day activities.
• Don't ignore individual performance problems just because the person's on a team—provide needed training and coaching.

Unions and Companies Create Successful Plants Together

Article: An article in Industry Week points out that teams including management and union representatives have been the key to both reducing tensions and improving productivity in several manufacturing companies. Many have formed "high performance work organizations" (HPWOs) in which the two sides act as full partners in the running of the plant, including "shared decision-making around the vital functions that are critical to the business, its costs, and the processes used to do the work."

Instituting an HPWO requires:

• joint planning,
• a free exchange of information that both sides tend to protect,
• dismantling of the "us vs. them" mentality on both sides, and
• acceptance of the union as "an independent source of power for the workers."

Application: Companies and unions having ongoing problems with each other should consider this joint approach to improve worker satisfaction and company bottom lines. Either management or union leadership can start the process by:

• Researching examples of union-management cooperation.
• Obtaining a blueprint for such activities (the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers has a program).
• Sharing that information with the other side and proposing a high-level meeting whose only goal is to consider setting up a joint planning team to investigate the costs and benefits.
• Hiring a neutral facilitator to run that meeting.

If the planning team is created and comes up with hard numbers showing advantages for both sides, large-scale planning sessions are the next step.

Source: Jusko, J. (03), "Nature vs. Nurture: Unique Arrangements Help Manufacturers Break from Traditional Adversarial Union-Management Relationships to Improve Both Business Performance and Company Morale," IndustryWeek 252(7):40 (July 2003).

Task Conflict Not as Good as Believed

Study: Team researchers and experts (including this editor) in the past decade have believed that conflict, originally seen as a bad thing for teams, could actually help teams perform better if the conflict was about tasks or ideas and did not get personal. To test this idea, two researchers ran statistical tests on 30 studies published since 1994. Both task conflict and personal or "relationship" conflict—not just the latter—hurt team performance. Both types also hurt worker satisfaction, though relationship conflict was worse. Conflict generally had a stronger effect on teams doing nonroutine work like projects, versus those whose work was fairly routine like factory production work. This may be because of time pressures or because the decisions made were more complex.

The researchers noted there may be circumstances where task conflict is helpful, but only if team members are very open and trusting with each other. The bottom-line conclusion: "it seems safe to stop assuming…task conflict improves team performance."

Application: Team leaders and trainers have encouraged positive conflict because it ensures that ideas are being exchanged freely, a hallmark of effective teams. This review forces us to be more specific. If team members don't freely share ideas and opinions, especially when making complex decisions, carefully controlled task conflict is probably better than no exchange at all. But we should teach team members conflict management and formal decision-making methods to reduce the negative effects of that conflict in the short term. That isn't a new idea, but we should also aim long-term at getting the team to exchange ideas fearlessly but with little or no fighting. For free handouts with some sample methods, contact the editor.

Effectiveness of Teambuilding Activities Questioned

Article: Off-site business retreats featuring outdoor teambuilding activities such as "building tents blindfolded" and whitewater rafting continue to be popular. "But the value of off-site retreats and physically challenging exercises is a source of considerable debate, particularly in a weak economy that puts extra scrutiny on every discretionary program that can't show solid ROI," notes a journalist writing in Workforce Management. He says some companies are dropping these retreats, but there are no hard numbers on whether spending on them is changing. All of the teambuilding consultants or clients interviewed for the article liked these activities. But none could offer a dollar figure or other metric proving a bottom-line benefit. A Wells Fargo HR executive is indirectly quoted as saying "the day's ultimate success will depend on how much is remembered about building teamwork and communication."

Application: In my years of research I have never come across publicly available, peer-reviewed research evidence that these types of activities have any long-term effect on daily operations. They can be useful as rewards or incentives for good performance, or as fun breaks from the routine. But a few hours or days away from the worksite, even with some followup, cannot fix problems occurring day in and day out for months. One source in the article provides how to apply this information in saying, "it's more important to figure out what's hampering (the team)—dealing with real workplace issues—than to say I climbed a wall with someone…"

Don't Waste Money on Quick Fixes

Is a manager you know fond of teambuilding games or offsite activities? Suggest he or she perform a cost-benefit analysis comparing it to team coaching from TeamTrainers to instill scientifically proven team development practices. This quote from Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, Harvard professors widely recognized as the leading experts on teams, says it all: "Sending a bunch of men and women on an Outward Bound course to simulate teaming may be fun, but it doesn't accomplish much." Contact the editor today for customized cost-benefit estimates.

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Contact the Editor

Your questions and suggestions are always welcome. Contact:

Jim Morgan
Head Coach, TeamTrainers Consulting
(425) 823-5082
jim@suddenteams.com
www.suddenteams.com