May 2006
Vol. 3, No. 11
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TeamTrainers™ Consulting has teamed up with project management consulting firm Key Consulting to offer a four-module series on project management. If your company is joining the movement toward tackling its work as formal projects, this training series will give your managers the key skills they need to meet or exceed customer needs on time and on budget. The fourth module is a one-day team leadership seminar based on the most comprehensive team training guide anywhere, The SuddenTeams® Program from TeamTrainers. Visit the Key Consulting site or contact me today to find out how to get started.
From the Editor: In Ancient Greece, Aristotle called it "The Golden Mean." In India, the Buddha spoke of "The Middle Way." For millennia Chinese thinkers have called for maintaining a healthy balance between opposites, captured in the words "yin" and "yang." These philosophers came from radically different cultures around the world, yet arrived at the same conclusion: morality, reason, and peace are to be found in the medium between two extremes. Good team leadership or membership, too, may be found in this "happy medium."
Yin and yang, as you probably know, are meant to indicate that in any pair of opposites, the one side could not exist without the other. When Westerners talks about yin and yang, I have noticed, they tend to focus on the obvious opposites like darkness and light or heat and cold. Obviously, if there were no cold, we would need no concept of "heat," because heat would just be the way things always are. In these cases, it's easy to feel comfortable in the middle zone between "too dark" or "too light" and "too hot" or "too cold," that zone where you can walk outside without sunglasses or streetlights, coats or sweat.
The Middle Way becomes much more difficult to choose when you start to play with other opposites like "good" and "evil." In the West, we are taught to consider good as the only way to go, without realizing that what we are calling "good" is really just another middle zone. It is "good" not to kill, we are told, but the same person will tell you that during World War II, killing Nazi solders was "doing good." The opposites are not "kill" and "don't kill"; they are "kill anyone anytime" and "never kill under any circumstances." Every person I've talked to about this who initially said they believe the latter eventually admitted there might be a circumstance in which they would kill, like a gang was attacking their child, so they wouldn't have time to be careful about the amount of force used. The hard part of morality is figuring out whether a particular killing falls into the murky middle ground between.
Bringing this around to teamwork, we'll use as an example the fact that people say it is "good" to be cooperative at work. But if you are too cooperative, never standing up for yourself and your ideas, your team will lose the benefit that science says diverse perspectives give to teams. What we think of as trying to be a good team player by way of cooperation is really trying to find the Middle Way between refusing to help others and never asserting yourself. In fact, one of the items on a handout in The SuddenTeams Program called "Ways to Be a Team Player" might surprise you: "Be willing to disagree openly with the team, and push the team to raise its goals and standards."
When you're trying to decide how to handle an issue such as an apparently uncooperative team member, it might help to identify the true yin and yang between which that person's behaviors fall. In most cases, you will find that the person could behave a lot worse than they are. Or maybe their behaviors are a symptom of a larger problem. For example, if you expand your thinking to the whole team, you might find that your team has shifted its "medium" off of center—if this person seems too pushy, could it be that the rest of the team isn't decisive enough? In my city, Seattle, there have been discussions about whether the "Seattle Spirit" is so focused on building consensus that it prevents decisions from being made. The debate about what to do with an elevated highway that probably can't survive another strong earthquake has been dragging on since the last quake—five years ago. And we're in an earthquake zone!
When you take the yin and yang approach to a team problem, you may find that this person just needs some help with "how" to communicate her positions, not criticism for taking those positions. Or you may find that more gently helping the team toward making decisions, by introducing formal methods for doing so, will make the person both less strident and less of a "lone wolf." Either way, the individual, the team, and you will be better off.
Study: Results of a large survey in Great Britain indicate the use of formal teams improves company profits in a wide range of industries. Contrary to many consultants' claims, however, letting a team lead itself or make most of its own decisions does not necessarily provide financial benefits, according to U.S. economist Jed Devaro of Cornell Univ.
Devaro analyzed data from interviews of "the most senior manager(s) at the workplace with responsibility for employment relations" for the British Workplace Employee Relations Survey in 1998, covering 2,191 workplaces. Virtually every type of industry was represented, leaving out only categories like farming and home-based businesses. The main factors he tested against each other used the measures shown here:
Generally, the higher the percentage of line workers in teams, the more likely the manager was to report above-average profits. At the extremes of a table in the study article, only 7.4% of managers from workplaces with zero teams said their company profits were "a lot better than average," while 24% of those from totally team-based workplaces said that. Note that the survey specifies "formally designated" teams, so this should have reduced the counting of work groups managers just call "teams" to sound good. It should be noted Devaro points out that the figures do not rise consistently from the lowest profits and team use to the highest of each. But the overall correlation was extremely strong.
One amusing finding is that only 5.7% of managers admitted their companies' profits were below average. (U.S. readers may recognize this as the "Lake Wobegon Effect," based on an American writer's fictional hometown where "all the children are above average.") To get meaningful differences based on profit reports, Devaro could only compare the top three out of five responses.
On the surface the study also showed a mild link between use of self-directed teams and profits, but Devaro then looked deeper into the numbers. Basically, he analyzed the statistics to mask the impact of other factors that could be affecting both profits and the choice to give teams autonomy. If the existence of unions at a company both increased the use of empowered teams and improved profits, for example, the statistical link between empowerment and profits would miss the point. After crunching the numbers, Devaro concluded that use of teams with more autonomy, regardless of which statement from the list above was used to define autonomy, was not really correlated to financial performance.
But that word "average" is critical, Devaro writes. The numbers "reveal a great diversity of possible effects of teams in the cross section, ranging from large negative to large positive effects." This is why some studies find that empowered teams help while other studies don't: "depending on the… context, teams can be beneficial, detrimental, or neutral."
Application: I confess I gulped when I saw the summary of this study's findings before reading the article. Since my consulting practice is focused on empowered teams, I didn't really want to report here that empowerment doesn't help. (For the record, I would have—like science, I improve only by questioning my beliefs.) But when I read the quotes in the previous paragraph, I realized Devaro wasn't really saying anything I don't say. In fact, the large "Assessment" chapter of The SuddenTeams Program is focused on finding out if empowered teamwork will work for the group involved given its makeup, history, company, tasks, etc. If not, there's no point in going through empowerment training, although training on some specific teamwork skills can still be helpful.
Then another quote leapt out at me. Devaro also pointed out that the results did not show autonomous teams were worse than boss-run teams on average—just not necessarily better. This goes to arguments made in business ethics literature that there are good reasons other than finances for empowering teams. If you can help people feel happier at work and take fewer sick days, and you knew that doing so would not hurt your profits, why wouldn't you do that? Most studies show empowerment increases job satisfaction and reduces absenteeism.
Unfortunately, I can't give you a few tips that would do much good in helping you decide whether you can safely (if not more-profitably) empower your teams. That chapter of the program is large because of the many variables that have to be considered. So the best advice I can offer here is two-fold. First, if some people in your company claim that formal teams "won't work here" for this or that egocentric reason, this study refutes the claim pretty strongly. And second, if some other consultant guarantees that empowering your teams "will pay for itself" without having spent a lot of time looking into your situation, get that guarantee in writing!
Source: Devaro, J. (06), "Teams, Autonomy, and the Financial Performance of Firms," Industrial Relations 45(2):217.
Study: Networking isn't just for finding jobs, building business alliances, and making friends. Networking within your team and company can make a major difference in the team's chances of success, according to a review of studies on the topic going back 50 years.
Organization researchers Prasad Balkundi and David Harrison found 37 relevant studies covering 3,098 work teams—no student teams or lab experiments. A number of themes became clear. For one, the higher the number of pairs of team members who interact, whether to exchange job-related advice or as friends, the better their teams did on tasks. The term the researchers use is "network density." To illustrate, assume there are two teams of six members each in your company. Doing the math tells us there are 15 possible pairs of people (Persons A and B, B and C, A and C, etc.) "If team A had 10 pairs of friendship ties," the authors explain, "and team B had 4 pairs, Team A's social network would be regarded as more dense than team B's." Obviously, these pair connections increase the amount of data and advice sweeping around the team. But teams with fewer ties rely on fewer people to funnel that information, who as the authors point out, may filter, distort, or hoard it. Higher density also increased the likelihood of the team keeping members and remaining functional, especially density of friendship ties.
The researchers thought advice ties would have more influence on task performance while friendship ties would affect team longevity more, but only the latter was true. Either kind of density helped task performance equally, but, logically, friendship has more effect on people staying in the team.
If you draw the connections between pairs of people in a group, the result can look like a hairy mess or more like an asterisk: *. In the latter case, the person or team in the center of the asterisk—the one that everyone else is connected to—is said to be more "central" to the network. Another finding of the studies is that having a "central" team leader, one connected to a lot of the other team members on a one-to-one basis, performs tasks better. This could be because the team leaders make better decisions thanks to those connections, or because they have more informal influence over team members, Balkundi and Harrison write. In a similar way, the study said, a central team within a network of teams performed better than those with fewer connections. "A central team has access to unique knowledge—including an understanding where such knowledge is located elsewhere inside and outside the organization, and how to obtain it," the researchers say. This includes "market trends, hostile forces in the environment, and information about potential new products and suppliers…"
Correlations do not prove that one factor causes the other, but when the authors looked at the question of causality, they found that indeed, networking had more of a link with later performance than performance at the earlier time had on later networking. In other words, strong performance as a team did not cause people to build more ties; stronger ties lead to better performance.
As teams age, though, these pair ties have less of an impact. Referring to one of the standard models of team growth, the researchers explain that as members become more familiar with each other ("moving from 'forming' and 'norming' to 'storming' and 'performing'"), advice-giving and friendship among pairs are no longer as vital to easy exchanges of information.
Application: The authors make the somewhat extraordinary claim that their study lays to rest all doubts about the value and mechanisms of good social networks in team performance, but it's hard for me to argue with them. That said, how do you improve networking?
For one thing, I'll confess that I recognized a personal weakness as a leader from these results. I do pretty well at connecting with employees on a work basis. They generally all become comfortable coming to me for work-related advice. But I have a hard time letting down my guard on a personal level with co-workers, and therefore probably do not gain a central position on friendship ties either as a team leader or member. This study's results increase my motivation to relax and do more social things with employees, including such simple things as going out for coffee.
Along those lines, there's nothing wrong with taking the group out to lunch on occasion or other social activities. Unfortunately, that's the only thing most managers do to build teamwork, and by itself it doesn't accomplish much. But in conjunction with all the other things I recommend through this newsletter, social outings can help build friendship ties. To build advice ties, first be free with your own expertise—but offer it as suggestions, and don't get mad when the adults you work with make their own choices. If they ignore you and it was a mistake, trust me, they'll remember next time. But also encourage them to get help from other team members. If someone brings you a question that someone else on the team can answer just as well (or better), encourage them to go ask that person. Finally, when assigning tasks to two- or three-person subteams, try to make sure everyone on the team eventually works with everyone else.
Source: Balkundi, P., and D. Harrison (06), "Ties, Leaders, and Time in Teams: Strong Inference about Network Structure's Effects on Team Viability and Performance," Academy of Management Journal 49(1):49.
Study: Most people in information technology seem to think that disciplines such as project management don't go together with innovation. But in a recent study, software development teams that monitored their behavior carefully were more likely to meet their goals.
Just as individuals are encouraged to "reflect" upon their lives to improve, teams who show what the scientists call "reflexivity" question, plan, explore new options, and review past experiences. The "self-reflection and self awareness… in more reflexive teams is likely to help the team find better solutions…" write Martin Hoegl of the WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany and Praveen Parboteeah of the Univ. of Wisconsin-Whitewater (USA). They performed a study with 145 software development teams in Germany to test this idea, including two possible factors leading to higher team reflection. Some members of each team, plus the team leader and an external manager (totaling 575 people) answered questionnaires.
Teams that were more reflective created higher quality software from both customer and team viewpoints. They weren't any better at hitting their schedules and budgets on time, but they weren't any worse either. In other words, for the benefit of higher quality, there was no cost in overall efficiency to taking the time to plan and monitor progress. In turn, team reflection was higher in teams with more social skills such as expressing personal needs and understanding those of others (correlation of +0.32). The same was true for the project management skills necessary for "planning the project" and "to control the progress of the project" (+0.18). Neither social nor project management skills were directly correlated with product quality or efficiency, which means reflection was the means by which those skills affected performance.
Team size did not make any difference in the power of reflection. However, reflection was not as closely linked to performance on software upgrade projects as it was for new-product development. The authors guessed this was because new projects were likely staffed with people that had higher social and project skills, and also because the uncertainty of new-product work forced teams to be more reflective.
Application: Want to know if your team is "reflective?" Here are the items Hoegl and Parboteeah used in their interviews, quoted from the article as translated from the German:
You can use these to test your team. List those items on a page (please give credit by noting the "Source" below). Add a space after each. In your next team meeting, distribute copies to each team member. On a white board, write this: "Completely Disagree: 1—2—3—4—5— :Completely Agree." Tell the members to write the number they believe is correct for each item. Then have them total the numbers and divide by 5. Now go around the room and have everyone tell their answers. This should spark a good discussion about what your team could be doing better in monitoring its performance. Now average everybody's averages and set some action items to make improvements, with one of those actions being to set a reminder to repeat this procedure in six months. The team average itself doesn't matter. What matters is that six months later, the number goes up.
Source: Hoegl, M., and K.P. Parboteeah (06), "Team Reflexivity in Innovative Projects," R&D Management 36(2):113.
Study: A champion for innovation increased team performance, by helping the team feel more powerful and helping with various types of communications, according to a study of product innovations. This was the first study to look "inside the 'black box' between champion behavior and team performance…" say the authors, organizational behavior researcher Jane Howell of the Univ. of Western Ontario (Canada) and operations management professor Christine Shea of the Univ. of New Hampshire (USA).
Quoting another study, the authors define a champion as someone who informally arises—not someone formally assigned—to "make 'a decisive contribution to the innovation by actively and enthusiastically promoting its progress…'" By interviewing executives at manufacturing firms in the electronics, automotive, and aerospace industries, they identified product innovations created through project teams that had identifiable champions. They said a product innovation was "a new technology… introduced commercially to meet either an external user's or a market's need." The researchers conducted interviews or used questionnaires with the champions and team members, and asked top division managers about each team's performance over a one-year period. Specifically, the managers "rated the team's quality of technical innovation, adherence to schedules and budgets, cost performance, value of the innovation to the organization, and overall performance…" The main findings were:
But the question of the "black box" was of key importance, and in exploring it the authors do an excellent job of explaining the statistical concept of mediation. Knowing there is a direct correlation between one factor and an outcome does not tell you how that factor may have affected the outcome. By the same token, the lack of a direct link between the two does not mean there wasn't an indirect effect: Factor "A" may not have been correlated to Outcome "C," but if A correlates to Factor "B" and B to C, A still played a role in C. Scientists call the in-between factors mediators. Full mediation occurs when A had a direct link to C, but sticking B between them wipes that link out—and A is linked to B and B to C at correlations that are statistically significant (too large to occur just by chance). Partial mediation occurs when the direct A-to-C link decreases but remains significant after the introduction of B in the analysis (whether or not, in this case, the mediator is significantly linked to the outcome).
In this study, for example, putting team potency between champion behavior and team performance (both initially and a year later) eliminated the direct link reported between champion behavior and performance. That is, if the champion couldn't make the team feel more potent, it didn't perform better. Task coordination activities, also, fully mediated the relationship. However, ambassador activities did not mediate—did not play a role—in the relationship between having a champion and team performance. For scout activities, only the "one year later" figures were mediated, perhaps indicating it takes more time for scouting to help the team than task coordination does.
Application: The authors have some suggestions for managers and teams who recognize the potential in someone to become a champion, meaning by definition someone on the team who is really enthusiastic and optimistic about a particular innovation. First I should note that even though the person may have taken on the leadership role on their own, there's nothing wrong with giving them some official authority in that area, such as asking them to head up a process improvement effort and letting others in the company know. If the person shows an ability to work with other groups, follow the authors' suggestion that "providing them with training to help improve these skills would be a worthwhile endeavor." When selecting someone to support as a champion, give preference to people who have credibility outside the team and/or show a strong willingness to work across groups.
You can also encourage champion behavior by encouraging it when you see it, even to the extent of training champions on how to increase team potency by "expressing optimism and enthusiasm about the success of the innovation, involving and motivating others to support the innovation, and persisting in overcoming obstacles." Be careful, though, the authors say. Appointing a voluntary champion to a formal position of authority that person doesn't want could sap their drive.
One other point the authors are too polite to point out, but I'm not: as a team manager or team member, don't let your pride or ego get in the way of following an informal champion's lead regarding the product they are supporting. Speaking as a manager I know this is hard, but it is also the ultimate test of your belief in the power of teamwork.
Source: Howell, J., and C. Shea (06), "Effects of Champion Behavior, Team Potency, and External Communication Activities on Predicting Team Performance," Group & Organization Management 31(2):180.
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