February 2005
Vol. 2, No. 8
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From the Editor: Last week I had some fun talking about teamwork to three organizational theory classes at the University of Washington-Bothell. In the past, I have had trouble expressing the passion of my belief in the power of true teamwork. I know why. I'm usually pretty calm at work, but once or twice a year I think I get too passionate in defending some position. I'm polite about it, but the unexpected surge of emotion makes people uncomfortable. Because of this, I get nervous letting my emotions show in TeamTrainers activities. But I think my talks, though always well received, would be more effective if I did just that.
So last week, I tried it. I showed my ire at managers for whom "Good is good enough," who are comfortable so long as their teams are performing as well or somewhat better than their peers. (One bank CEO said, "I think the team is doing fine," as he turned down my services.) Not optimizing such teams causes unnecessary suffering for the members and their customers, which I find sad. I railed against those who think a day or two playing team games in the woods or wherever is going to solve months or years of problems back in the office. I called it "nonsense" to merely exhort team members to get along without investing the time it takes to help them do so. Admitting this was just an educated guess, I said I thought 85% of team managers take one of those ineffective approaches to team management. In the end, I begged these young people to try to become the kind of manager who wants to get the "highest possible output at the lowest possible costs" while meeting the needs of their employees.
According to the instructor, the students are still talking about my speeches. I proved to myself yet again a lesson I had allowed myself to forget—that individuals, like teams, must brave scary changes to improve their performance. It makes me wonder: What scary change have you proposed to your team lately?
Making a commitment to change your team's behavior is not as scary (or costly) when you use an experienced guide. Contact me today.
Study: Many managers think the key to teamwork is for people to socialize together often. They presume the team that lunches, drinks, and plays ball together as much as possible will succeed. However, as is usually the case for presumptions based on a few facts, this one has not held up to scientific scrutiny.
Earlier studies into what scientists have dubbed "social capital"—business ties built through activities outside of work—did find that team socializing helped performance. But those studies only looked at interactions within the team, without considering the team's relationship to the rest of the firm. So two Korean professors and an American took a look at social ties both in and outside of the group. They sent surveys to 60 work groups or teams, averaging 6 members each, in 11 small and mid-sized Korean companies in high technology, consumer sales, or paint manufacturing. The survey asked how often group members socialized with:
The researchers looked at organization charts and talked to company insiders to fully understand each team's place in its company, and got the CEO or another high-level manager "who usually evaluated the group's performance" to rate the group's effectiveness.
It turned out there can be too much of a supposedly good thing: the most effective groups were those with some members who socialized a lot, but not all members. On a chart in the article using a 0 to 3 scale, 3 being the groups that socialized the most, the effectiveness curve rises sharply to around 1.4, then drops nearly as quickly until the teams that socialized a lot were actually worse performers than the teams that never socialized outside of work. The authors suggest that the benefits of social ties found in the earlier studies help the team only up to the point that members start to close ranks. It's well established that humans who identify strongly with their group start to turn against people who aren't in their group, causing prejudice, resistance to outside opinions, and other social ills that would certainly harm workplace performance. "Our findings," the authors conclude, "suggest that it is actually counterproductive for a group's functioning when all its members go out together informally outside of the organization."
Prior to the study, the researchers thought social ties with same-level groups would help performance, by improving how those teams worked together. But that did not prove to be the case—cross-group ties neither helped nor hurt. However, teams that socialized with managers in other departments did do better. This might come about, the authors suggest, because a team with those kinds of connections is better able to "absorb outside political pressure, protect itself from external threat, and coordinate and negotiate with outsiders…" Together, having a moderate amount of internal ties plus ties to external leaders explained about 15 percent of the difference in team performance in this study.
Application: Regular readers know my disdain for typical teambuilding activities when used as anything other than a fun reward. So you'll understand my glee when I read this sentence: "Our results also call into question the benefits of traditional team building efforts focused around creating a highly cohesive team." As usual, balance seems to be the key. In the earliest days of humanity, our family, social, and work groups were all the same people, so it makes sense that some socializing can help a team. But too much togetherness is an invitation to "groupthink," where team agreement is more important than the free exchange of ideas (in and outside of the group) that leads to the best decisions. Also, on most teams there will be people who want to keep the lines well drawn between their business and personal lives. Pushing them to socialize outside of the office would logically cause resentment and harm teamwork.
If you, as a manager or team member, try to get your team members to "hang out" all the time, you need to take a careful look at how often they are already doing so. At the same time, discouraging these informal ties and refusing to participate isn't the best course either. Basically, I recommend you allow such contacts to develop naturally, and organize the occasional opportunity, but don't let people feel pressured to join in.
To improve contacts between teams and outside leaders, the researchers seem to support companies who have company-wide social activities and sponsor "informal groups around common hobbies…" Computer-based social networks are another route, such as discussion groups on non-work topics.
The authors note several limitations to the study, centering on whether findings in 11 companies in Korea are accurate for most companies around the world. Bear this in mind as you decide what, if anything, you want to do based on this information. For one thing, outside socializing is far more expected in Asian companies than in U.S. ones, and one could argue that this might make the findings either more or less relevant to American teams.
Source: Oh, H., M. Chung, and G. Labianca (04), "Group Social Capital and Group Effectiveness: The Role of Informal Socializing Ties," Academy of Management Journal 47(6):860.
Article: I don't know too much about kaizen, a process-improvement method from Japan that is getting attention in the U.S., especially in manufacturing. So I was fascinated by an article describing the experience of Cornell University MBA students who joined teams of experienced workers conducting kaizen projects at Lord Corporation, which "designs, manufactures, and markets chemical and mechanical products worldwide." The article was written by a Cornell professor, James Bradley, and Jim Willett from Lord.
They write that Lord uses a lean-manufacturing model "supported by high-performance work teams… Each team organizes its efforts using the 20 keys of lean manufacturing, which are a set of activities and management practices that are within its daily control." For example, each team has control over attendance, empowerment, objectives, roles, responsibilities, workloads, performance standards and metrics. Lord also holds quarterly "kaizen weeks." The plant "halts production in the affected areas for three to five days, during which the teams…conceive and implement their plans to meet the goals of their kaizen projects." (They develop their goals and schedules prior to the shutdown.) Bradley and Willett explain the conclusions reached by the students after they were invited to participate as equal team members during two kaizen weeks in 2002-3. A number would apply to any team's efforts at process improvement:
One key observation is that improvements were made even in processes addressed in previous kaizen sessions. "As intimidated novices analyzing a process already addressed by experts, the students found that they still helped to reduce setup time in one press by 90 percent even though (it) had been reduced by 80 percent in an earlier kaizen project."
Application: The truth is, there's no news here. To optimize a process, you need to:
I did find one interesting piece of advice I'd not seen before, about dealing with people who push a hidden agenda. "Team members who wanted to pursue an unbiased approach found that they could soften the position of the others by persistently mentioning facts and, in Socratic fashion, asking questions that led the team to refute the preconceived solution," the authors report.
Source: Bradley, J., and J. Willett (04), "Cornell Students Participate in Lord Corporation's Kaizen Projects," Interfaces 34(6):451.
Study: Team members need to learn from each other and from outside the team to maximize their efforts, but is one method better than the other depending on the goal? To find out, a Chinese researcher, Sze-Sze Wong, surveyed 73 work groups (not necessarily "teams" the way I use the term) from a financial services firm, a hospital, a "diversified industrial firm," and a high-tech company. She asked team members how often they tried to learn from others in and outside of the team, and asked the team managers to rate their teams' efficiency and innovativeness.
Teams whose members actively learned from each other were more efficient, and those whose members learned from people outside the group were more innovative (a team could do both, of course). This makes sense. Learning about the work of others on your team can help you meet their needs more effectively, while going outside the team is more likely to bring in new ideas.
Team cohesion (togetherness) had an effect on internal learning that was exactly the opposite from what Wong expected. Teams that either were closer or less close than average were less likely to learn internally than were the teams with average cohesion. Also, the closer a team was, the more external learning members sought, which seems counter to the impression of members becoming closed off to outside ideas as they come to identify more with the team. Also contrary to Wong's ideas before the study, neither internal nor external learning was related to how routine the group's work was. In other words, people doing routine jobs were just as likely to seek knowledge as were those in complex jobs.
But the fact I found most compelling, given that I am currently working on a contract with a large software firm, is this: of the four types of firms studied, the type whose team members were least likely to try to learn from each other was high tech. That is, the tech firms were least likely to use the kind of learning that increased team efficiency.
Application: This is one of those studies that adds to a growing line of thought, so we can't give it too much weight at this point. It does give more strength to the idea from the socializing study I reported on above that the optimum level of team togetherness falls closer to the middle than the extremes. And Wong suggests managers bear in mind what kind of learning is best for the desired goal: internal learning (but not external) helped efficiency, and the opposite was true for innovation.
Finally, if you happen to work in a high-tech firm, and you're wondering why the team doesn't seem to hit its deadlines smoothly, maybe it is time to have everyone write up their own job descriptions independently and then compare results. This simple exercise can take a team a long way toward understanding where its misunderstandings are coming from.
Source: Wong, S. (04), "Distal and Local Group Learning: Performance Trade-offs and Tensions," Organization Science 15(6):645.
Article: Successful teams use clearly written objectives to ensure all members are working on tasks that will help the team get where it wants to go. Without absolute agreement about what a team is trying to accomplish, some members will certainly waste their own time, and probably the time of others, by not pulling in the same direction.
Unfortunately, according to quality consultant Bill Pardee, many people do not know how to write objectives that maximize the benefits. Pardee's perspective is not one business people often hear from: he is a former information scientist with a Ph.D. in physics. Yet his assertions fit perfectly with my own teamwork experience.
Pardee says written objectives help us by:
Writing an objective down ensures "that we interpret it in essentially the same way every day without asking someone else," Pardee writes. Objectives should be written in such a way that "the person doing the work can readily and frequently measure his or her progress," and an outside observer would get the same measurements. Pardee does not support "stretch goals," objectives that are intended to motivate but are not realistic. "When an individual knows he will fail no matter how hard he works… the objective loses most of its 'beacon' value," he writes. Plus, it is difficult to accurately predict costs and thus compare potential return on investment (ROI) among options when you don't take a realistic view of the benefits side of the equation.
Of course, allowing someone to constantly set objectives that are easy to achieve also fails to provide the benefits he listed. Another example of a poor objective is one the person or team does not have significant control over. (For example, I'll note that in a contest between sales teams, no team can be sure it will "win the sales contest" because none can control what the other teams do.)
Pardee says objectives that start out as an activity—"To do statistically designed experiments on that production line"—can often be clarified by describing the desired outcome: "Consistent productivity above 90 percent on that production line." But this isn't always the case. He points out that U.S. President John Kennedy's memorable objective, "send a man to the moon and bring him back safely this decade," was far more powerful than if he had called for the outcome instead, which was "that massive space complexes had been created…and a handful of moon rocks were distributed to labs around the world," as Pardee puts it.
Generic objectives are easy to write, but carry little power. A goal to "increase customer satisfaction" could be used by any company or team regardless of function, and provides "nothing that guides us in making the customer more satisfied," Pardee writes. Generics also fail to communicate well, because general terms like "high quality" can be interpreted very differently by different people.
Finally, he says, a good objective must include a specific date if people are to judge whether it can be achieved, what the costs will be, and whether it conflicts with other objectives.
Application: Measurable objectives are critical to getting the most out of a team. "You get what you measure," as the business mantra goes. Pardee, by his own admission, does not say anything new. He states, "Many traditional rules, such as 'achievable,' 'time-based,' and 'specific' do contribute to these benefits." But I find it significant that someone not from a traditional manager or consultant background uses the same approach to objectives as experts on the topic from the MBA ranks. This speaks to the universality of the value of well-written objectives.
Pardee also provides an excellent test for any objective: "Would two or more independent experts agree approximately on the cost, time and difficulty of achieving the given objective?" I recommend you apply that test to every objective you write.
I also tell every team that after creating a general goal or mission statement, it should write three to five measurable objectives to guide progress toward that goal. The most commonly quoted acronym for good objectives is SMART, my definition of which is:
The words chosen vary among experts, but the concepts are roughly the same. If you aren't creating objectives with your team now, it's time to start being SMART.
Source: Pardee, W. (05), "Writing Useful Technical/Business Objectives," Research Technology Management, Jan/Feb:13.
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