November 2004
Vol. 2, No. 5
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From the Editor: Are you waiting for your manager to help you build teamwork? The best manager I ever had, Peggy Durbin of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), used to quote in her e-mail signature the Catholic nun Mother Teresa: "Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person." I started team training that way. I was hired at LANL to just rewrite their "property" (equipment) management manual. But it quickly became clear this was really a massive process improvement project that would require consensus among lab employees assigned property; property administrators who provided them with direct support; two teams with centralized support functions, and the Department of Energy. The lab's property program had received failing grades from auditors and was facing stiff penalties. So I took it upon myself to train four self-directed work teams, first facilitating them myself, then gradually teaching them to lead themselves. Except when invited, managers were never present, and for the most part, they went along with what these workers had decided on their own (in consultation with DOE auditors). The result? In two years, they had raised the system grades from "Failing" to "Outstanding."
Nothing prevents you from helping your team use formal agendas and rules in its meetings; assign action items for every decision; write down, measure, and try to improve its work processes; or use any of the other techniques you've seen in TeamResearch News. So what—or who—are you waiting for?
Tired of waiting for someone else to turn your team into a true one? Don't. Contact Jim today for help getting started.
Study: Good team processes were far more important to bank branch performance than diversity, either by itself or as addressed in formal diversity training, according to a new study out of Harvard. Diversity did not hurt performance, either, even without the training.
An associate professor specializing in diversity issues, Robin Ely, compared demographics, diversity training, and employee ratings of their branches' teamwork with financial performance at 486 retail branches of a U.S. bank (7,500 employees). Performance measures included the overall score from a bonus program, and goal attainment in new sales, customer satisfaction, and customer referrals.
Each branch in this company is treated as a multifunctional team. The company has an impressive record of hiring and promoting women and minorities, and of reinforcing diversity as an important value, plus has a well-attended diversity training program. Despite mixed results for diversity in the research literature, Ely predicted that in this bank, diversity would clearly improve performance.
Ely was surprised by the results. Diversity by itself had no clear relation (good or bad) to performance. For example, branch teams whose employees had spent very different lengths of time in the company performed moderately better by one measure, but worse by others. Age diversity was linked to lower scores on one measure, but was neutral otherwise. Gender and racial diversity had no relation to performance. Also counter to Ely's prediction, having higher levels of participation in diversity training did not improve performance.
But good teamwork was strongly related to good performance. Ely measured teamwork quality based on the results of an annual employee survey on five team-related questions, including, "How do you rate teamwork in your area at the present time?" Overall, team processes were six times more closely related to performance than was diversity training.
However, what Ely described as an "inexplicable, yet consistent pattern of results" showed that among branches with high tenure/age diversity, those with better teamwork performed somewhat worse than those with less teamwork. One theory Ely had was that these branch employees might believe their teamwork was better than it really was, because they don't openly express their diversity. In other words, people would think they had better teamwork but were really just "groupthinking" or avoiding confrontation, which are known to hurt group performance. But Ely readily admits this will need more research.
Application: In theory diversity has the potential for improving a group's performance by exposing the group to different ideas and thus sparking creativity. But most studies have shown that this potential is yet unrealized. In this study, diversity training programs did not appear to be the answer, although Ely questions whether skills-based programs might be more effective than the mere awareness programs the bank emphasized. Teamwork training was not measured, so we can't know if that would have changed the type of teamwork the branches experienced. And, of course, this study looked only at patterns of data, not causes, and only at one point in time, not changes over time.
That said, I cannot help but note that higher perceived teamwork was strongly related to bottom-line results. I believe this is yet more evidence that measuring the financial impact of your training dollars would show that popular programs are not necessarily the ones that bring real results. Diversity training and teambuilding games can be important, but they simply will not have the financial impact of training that helps teams develop clear missions, goals, and processes.
Source: Ely, R. (04), "A Field Study of Group Diversity, Participation in Diversity Education Programs, and Performance," Journal of Organizational Behavior 25:755.
Study: Ever wonder what your company's top managers do in their meetings? Apparently, not as much as they could—just like a lot of your teams, I suspect.
Writing in Harvard Business Review, a consultant reported on a survey he conducted of top managers (CEOs, vice presidents, etc.) from 187 companies worldwide, each with stock values totalling at least $1 billion. Despite the focus on company leaders, the results mirrored the meeting problems most teams lower down suffer. "Our findings support what many executives have long suspected—namely, that they spend too much time discussing issues that have little or no direct impact on company value," Michael Mankins wrote. "Even worse, their meetings often fail to produce both the quality and quantity of decisions required to drive superior performance."
One reason was, "Agenda setting is unfocused or undisciplined." The agenda was the same from week to week, or priorities were set by the crisis of the moment. Since in most cases no one was managing agenda items, "the team often ran out of time before it could address key items." Thus decisions that really needed to be made at that level in the company were pushed down "to individuals ill equipped to deal with the problems' underlying complexity and poorly placed to see the larger ramifications of their decisions."
Because of the various problems Mankins found, teams did not spend as much time on strategy as you might expect: on average, only 15% of their total meeting time yearly. In one global financial services company, "top executives spent more time…selecting the company's holiday card than debating the bank's strategy for the entire continent of Africa (where they had made significant capital investment)." In addition, more than 65% of meetings weren't even called to make decisions, instead being used to share information or hold discussions. And when decisions were made, those decisions often didn't create any change, because people came away with different interpretations or consensus had not been built.
Application: If all of this sounds familiar, it should: these findings match perfectly with my experience in virtually every meeting I have observed (unless the team had learned formal facilitation). So the advice Mankins has for top managers, gleaned from his review of how the best teams operated and described below, should be useful to any team.
"Deal with operations separately from strategy." Dutch bank ABN AMRO had a board that "spent most of its time reviewing loans and discussing day-to-day operations." But when the bank faced major challenges early this decade, the board began setting aside separate meetings (one-third of their meeting hours) to discuss strategy alone. For a lower-level team, the equivalent would be to set aside one team meeting per month to only talk about long-term planning, process improvements, etc.
"Focus on decisions, not on discussions." The Cadbury Schweppes leadership team requires that all background materials for a meeting go out at least five days in advance. Mankins says this means "members can devote meeting time to making decisions on important issues rather than to having those issues explained in lengthy PowerPoint presentations." If you don't allow time in the meeting for backgrounding, people quickly get the message and start reading beforehand.
"Measure the real value of every item on the agenda." The impact, financial or otherwise, of each agenda item should be considered. The figures don't have to be perfect. The point is to make sure your priority is those items that will have the biggest effects on the organization. I can't tell you how many times I have squirmed in my seat as a series of minor issues get discussed, often letting the team conveniently run out of time to properly address the major issues on the "main part" of the agenda.
"Get issues off the agenda as quickly as possible." The CEO of Cardinal Health asks of his team, "'When does this decision need to be made?' and then make(s) sure their timetable will enable them to reach a decision in time."
"Put real choices on the table." Mankins says "the most important requirement for…strategic decision making is to present viable options." The former head of British bank Lloyds TSB insisted that every strategic proposal include at least three alternative options. Mankins notes that the bank's market value increased 40 times in 18 years.
"Adopt common decision-making processes and standards." Mankins writes that "companies with superior decision-making capabilities use a common language, methodology, and set of standards for making decisions." At Barclays, each decision must be based on facts, chosen from among alternatives, and result in action. There are tons of resources on how to improve the speed and quality of decision-making (including free techniques from me—see the TeamTrainers "Problems" page). Take some time to formalize the decision-making process within your team.
"Make decisions stick." At the top levels, this means basing your resource allocations on your strategic decisions, so they have real consequence and gain importance among team members and their business units. It also means a version of the "Silence is consensus" rule. One such rule laid down by the CEO of Gillette was, "The team is free to debate any decision in staff meetings, but once a decision is reached, there is no more debate—no 'I don't agree with this…(in) hallway conversations.'" He also built team accountability by having team members rate each other and the team overall, and then partially tying compensation to those ratings. In your team, always turn decisions into actions with assigned people and dates by which they must report on their progress.
Source: Mankins, M. (04), "Stop Wasting Valuable Time," Harvard Business Review, September: p. 58.
Study: Trust makes teams work better, right? Not as much as you think. Although trust makes people feel better about their teams, there is only weak evidence that trust helps teams perform better, at least as a direct cause. In fact, Clause Langfred of Washington University has found a situation in which trust actually hurts team performance: when team members of a self-managed team trust each other so much, they don't track each others' progress.
People who know their work is being "monitored" in some way tend to perform better. If they have to work closely together to accomplish their daily tasks, it's easy for everyone to know how someone is doing, including their manager. Obviously, a traditional manager-led team has a fair amount of monitoring from the manager. But self-managed team members who have a lot of freedom in their individual jobs only get monitored if their teammates make an effort to do so. If teammates don't trust each other, that will happen, of course. But, Langfred thought, team members with a lot of trust might be hesitant to monitor each other. They might worry that "a suggestion to monitor fellow team members could be perceived as a violation of trust itself, leading to anger, hurt, and fear…" Langfred writes. "Factors such as the desire to be perceived as a 'team player' and to conform, the fear of sanction or punishment, and concern for the feelings of fellow team members" might combine to keep members from suggesting that the team track individual effort.
He tested his theory using 71 four-person teams of MBA students working together on projects on which they were judged by instructors and outside experts. He used questionnaires in which members rated their teams on trust, individual job freedom ("autonomy"), and monitoring within the team. Then he compared those ratings to the team's project scores.
As expected, the higher the trust on these teams, the lower the amount of monitoring. More to the point, teams with a lot of autonomy and high levels of trust also had low monitoring—and, yes, they did not perform as well.
Application: We know that team members that coordinate their efforts perform better as a team. As Langfred puts is, "some monitoring of individual team members needs to be in place if process loss and coordination errors are to be avoided." But to coordinate, you have to have a good feel for what your team members are doing and how that work is coming along. If you are reluctant to get this information because you "trust" that person, or are afraid they will think you don't trust them, you can't coordinate. "The practical implication is essentially that a lack of monitoring can be naïve, regardless of levels of trust, and that a little skepticism never hurt anyone—or any team," Langfred writes.
High-performance teams use various methods to track the work of individuals. The most effective I've seen is the "Action Items" technique I detailed in the July 2004 issue. Using formal project management, even for team improvement efforts, accomplishes the same thing. The need for monitoring is also why I recommend that each individual's contribution to the team's joint efforts should be part of performance appraisals. The key lesson from this study is, don't drop those methods just because the team has matured and members have learned to trust each other. Teams at this phase are in danger of becoming too comfortable, of suffering from "groupthink" and other ills of a team for which being "good team players" is more important than great accomplishments. One of those ills may be a reluctance to monitor despite its importance. (Read the next section for more about monitoring.)
Source: Langfred, C. (04), "Too Much of a Good Thing? Negative Effects of High Trust and Individual Autonomy in Self-Managing Teams," Academy of Management Journal: 47(3): 385.
Study: One of the biggest objections I hear to creating empowered teams, from managers and workers alike, is the fear that some team members will let the others do all the work. There are easy ways to avoid this problem, which scientists call "social loafing," and a recent study adds to our understanding of the issue.
Four researchers set up a study using college students who were invited based on being in the top or bottom 25% of their classes in "achievement motivation," defined as "the tendency of an individual to work toward the achievement of personal goals or standards." They were paired off, told they were in a study on e-mail communication, then separated by screens and not allowed to talk. Then they were asked to come up with as many ideas as they could for use of a particular item, but unknown to them, the messages they supposedly exchanged with their partners were fake. Some people were led to believe their partner would try hard on the study, and others the opposite. Also, although the researchers could count how many ideas every individual came up with, some students believed only the total amount of ideas produced by both people could be counted. (In other words, if any of those people tended to be a social loafer, they would think they could get away with it.)
The results identified only one combination of factors in which people loafed: People with low personal motivation who thought their partners were going to work hard and that their own output could not be counted did not work very hard. On the other hand, people:
Application: How nice it would be to simply stack our teams with highly motivated workers and thus eliminate the issue of social loafing. On high-profile projects in which you can choose your team members that might be possible, but most teams are thrown together without that opportunity. So for most of us, the application of this study is exactly what the previous study described: put into place ways to track an individual's contribution to team tasks, providing for some individuals the motivation they don't carry inside.
Source: Hart, J., et al. (04), "Acheivement Motivation, Expected Coworker Performance, and Collective Task Motivation: Working Hard or Hardly Working?" Journal of Applied Social Psychology 34(5): 984.
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