October 2005
Vol. 3, No. 4
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From the Editor: A recent addition to my life from the animal world is reminding me of some lessons about work relationships: I adopted a ferret! I've had ferrets before, so I knew having one again would provide me with endless benefits. They are the funniest animals I have ever been around. They love to play, doing bizarre little head-banging dances when they're most excited. They will steal anything that isn't nailed down. My new companion "Minna" even tried to steal me a while ago—she grabbed onto my finger and started pulling with all of her four-pound might. At times they follow you like puppies, and other times they'll run right past you as if on missions of grave international importance.
In fact, whatever ferrets do, they do with their whole beings, even more so than dogs and cats. Whether eating, playing, exploring, or going for a ride on your shoulder, they are completely committed to the activity of the moment. If you want to play and they want to explore, exploration is what will happen. Also, Minna's priorities are very clear. If I pull one of two favorite toys from wherever she last hid them, and she's awake, the jingling of their bells will stop her in her tracks and bring her running to the rescue. (My favorite game is tug of war on the vinyl floor, where she can't get any traction and ends up spinning her wheels like a cartoon character.) After pulling Minna out of the closet the other night from her nap, hoping she would play before our bedtime, she lay on my arm like a Beanie Baby. I don't think she noticed she'd been moved until she roused herself 20 minutes later. Living (or napping!) entirely in the moment is a basic teaching of Zen that can make a difference in your career.
When you talk to a teammate, do you focus completely on what he or she is saying, or do you start thinking about what to say in response—or worse, about something completely unrelated? When you're in a team meeting, are you really in the meeting, or do you spend part of the time checking your text messages or chatting via your laptop? Do you share your thoughts with the whole team, or lean over to the person next to you and mutter with them, stealing both your and their attention from everyone else? When the job gets a little boring, do you find ways to focus your attention, or use this as an excuse to shop on the Internet?
Teamwork is hard. It is so because controlling your ego is hard, admitting you might not have all the answers is hard, trusting near-strangers is hard, keeping emotions balanced is hard, and reacting with compassion when someone else can't do these things is amazingly hard. But so is being a parent, a romantic partner, or a friend in need, all roles we nonetheless take on eagerly. Just as with those roles, there are amazing benefits awaiting you from true teamwork that you cannot get any other way. In each case, there is pain in the transition, but a better life awaits on the other side. To get there, though, it will take all of your being every moment of the workday. Focus leads to effective living.
Just ask a ferret!
P.S. During most of September each year, the libraries I rely on at the University of Washington are on limited hours because the school is between sessions. This year that meant I could only publish this issue on schedule if I researched, wrote, and edited it in two days last weekend. I worry about the quality of the issue if I have to rush it—plus, I admit, I'd rather not give up an entire weekend to this free service! So I hope you'll forgive my having published a week late.
Focusing on a team's real barriers to top performance is not as easy as buying "feel-good" teambuilding experiences, but unlike them, it will bring actual change. A teacher can help your team find that focus. Contact me today to find out how.
Article: A grassroots movement to adapt "lean" manufacturing techniques to office work is saving one company "a conservative $32,000" annually per process-improvement event. Perhaps most interesting is that top management had almost nothing to do with it—lower-level managers and employees did most of the work on their own initiative, according to an engineering services manager who with another person decided to try it and taught themselves how.
The Antioch Company's 1,100 employee-owners produce scrapbook supplies, bookmarks, journals, and "celebration products," much of these sold through direct marketing. They had conducted "kaizen" process-improvement events in the manufacturing end for two years before Kristi Huls and senior materials manager Jane Mobilia-Witte decided to try adapting it to the office processes they oversaw. After a rough first try that brought fears and tears but also success, the two "conducted nine events in our 'spare' time in the first year, all a result of word-of-mouth advertising." They're up to 53 total three years later. The meetings take two to three days, with the process improvements requiring about 30-90 days after that.
The authors write, "Despite the wide variation in office workflows, the processes tend to have common sources of waste that lean events can uncover, including":
Other problem themes included lack of ownership over the process and unnecessary e-mails, forms and other communications.
After determining a process for which a kaizen event is needed (see "Application"), Huls and Mobilia-Witte work with the involved stakeholder to identify facilitators (2), process experts, representatives of support organizations, a customer (internal or external) of the process, and a role I think is often overlooked, that of a "novice" who can bring fresh questions. After that, the event process is similar to any other problem-solving or process improvement method you've read about. They gather information, train the team on the process, set goals, outline the process, map the current versus desired states, create and assign action items, and follow up. Even the few "unsuccessful" events sound like they were good investments. The team that created the training sessions decided their process was fine—yet ended up with 124 action items that led to the training.
Application: How do you know whether you can get results that make this rather simple process worth it? Huls and Mobilia-Witte offer two sets of questions to ask. First, see if you can answer "yes" to any of these (the question lists are direct quotes):
Then see if you can answer "no" to any of these:
If you got an answer that points to the need for a kaizen event, talk to your team members about holding one. If you can, get a copy of this article (see "Source" below)—people who won't believe scientists will believe other managers and workers like themselves. (For the record, everything these authors are doing matches with my research.) Then just gather the right people for the roles they identify and map your current process. I think the rest will flow naturally. But don't miss the part about assigned action items and following up to make sure those are done. Otherwise, nothing will change.
In case you run into resistance about the meeting time, let's run the math on a worst-case cost scenario. A company in my area known for high pay and benefits and otherwise treating employees well estimates their total costs associated with an hour of labor works out to $73 an hour. Let's assume a team of seven there goes three days in meetings and their follow-up time is just as long (which did not appear to be the case at Antioch). So we multiply: 6 (days) x 8 (hours) x 7 (people) x 73 ($/hr) = $24,528. Assuming they matched Antioch's average gain, even in this high-cost company, this team investing a higher-than-average amount of time in the project would generate a return on investment (ROI) of 23% in the first year alone. If that doesn't seem like much, what if this was a permanent team and it fixed all its processes the same way? The savings would pay for the total costs of 1.6 of the team members. And chances are good that your company's standard hourly labor rate is much lower, which would make the ROI even higher.
Of course, if you want to learn how to perform this process as cost-effectively as possible, call me.
Source: Huls, K. (05), "The Antioch Company Brings Lean into the Office," Journal of Organizational Excellence, Autumn:31.
Study: The key to a successful peer-review program may be to not make the reviews anonymous, according to a new study out of the Israel Institute of Technology.
Peter Bamberger and three colleagues found a split in the research literature over the usefulness of having employees at the same level in a company review each others' performance. Some studies found that, for example, peer reviews within a manager team had a "positive, long-term impact on managerial effectiveness." But others "concluded that such appraisals generally harm relationships and impair group functioning." So Bamberger's team wondered if the difference might lie in whether or not the reviews were anonymous.
You might think that anonymous ratings would be better, but these researchers suspected otherwise. Based on their reading of earlier scientific work, they thought an employee who was never going to know what his teammates said about him might rate them lower then he would otherwise. If having better ratings than your peers might mean you get a better annual performance review and/or raise, you might feel the need to protect yourself against the possibility of the others giving you low ratings. On the other hand, if the ratings are all openly known, that problem goes away. Also, each rater would have to think more about the ratings they gave because they might have to defend them, so the ratings would probably be more accurate.
To test their ideas, Bamberger's team introduced a peer review system to a manufacturing plant owned by a commune ("kibbutz") in Israel. The workers were in 16 of the plant's 17 departments, operating (I believe) as empowered teams. The plant had no performance appraisal system before allowing this study. This one was introduced in very general terms, because the researchers wanted the workers to be unsure of how the appraisals were going to be used—that is, unsure of whether they were in competition with their fellow workers through the ratings. Every employee was given a peer review form that was identical except for one differences. Half of the teams received a form with no place to put their names and another indicator that it would look like anyone else's form. The other half received forms that required their names and were personalized so they knew they were identifiable. The appraisals were administered one month, six months, and 11 months after the program was announced. At roughly the same times, supervisors were asked to rate their employees' performances.
Sure enough, the average ratings from peers using identifiable forms were higher than those using anonymous forms. Furthermore, over time supervisors' ratings of their employees teamwork, motivation, mentoring and performance went up for the teams using identifiable ratings. Note that checks done after the study proved that the supervisors did not know there were different forms (they weren't told the new system was part of a study). The differences between the anonymous and identifiable ratings increased somewhat over time, making it safe to say that this difference caused more fair and accurate ratings (accurate in the sense of agreement between peers and supervisors).
Application: I know it can be a hard sell to get employees and managers to buy into peer assessments at all, and telling them their comments will be anonymous is a time-honored technique for gaining their support. But what if you told them that according to this study, their ratings from both peers and supervisors are liable to be higher and more in agreement if they can be identified? On the other hand, if you already have a peer-review system, it generates headaches for you, and the responses are anonymous, this might be the key to turning things around.
I know from personal experience how de-motivating anonymous reviews can be. When I tried to introduce progressive management techniques like "management by walking around" in a position I held years ago, I got slammed by some of the workers. This was my fault, of course, for not introducing my changes more slowly and communicating about them better. But I was still learning as a manager. Some of the comments were downright cruel, and only by matching them up with the constructive comments from other people did I learn anything useful from that exercise. I immediately sent out a general note apologizing publicly to those bothered by me, along with an action plan for correcting the problems. But it was an unnecessarily painful experience, and I can only imagine how line workers not accustomed to criticism from all sides must feel the first time they get such a shock.
Source: Bamberger, P., et al. (05), "Peer Assessment, Individual Performance, and Contribution to Group Processes: The Impact of Rater Anonymity," Group & Organization Management 30(4):344.
Study: The factors of trust between teams differ in importance over time as management and development teams work together, according to a new study from two information systems researchers and a management professor. They observed college seniors randomly assigned to 24 teams that served as both managers and development teams designing new information systems: that is, Team 1 managed Team 2, but served as the developers for Team 3; Team 2 served as the developers for Team 1 and managed Team 3, etc. Using questionnaires filled out at the start ("Time 1" or T1), end (T4), and twice during the six-week class projects (T2 and T3), the researchers checked the levels of three factors earlier research has identified as making up trust:
For the teams in their developer roles, integrity went up in importance over time for trusting their management teams. It was unimportant at T1 and very important at T3. Benevolence did not play much of a role—in fact, it was negatively correlated at T1 and unrelated by T3. Ability played the biggest role for both teams. By T3 either type of team's opinion of the other's competence had far more to do with their trust of that team than the did softer characteristics.
There was another part of the study, but I think the methodology was too flawed to give meaningful results, so I am not going to report on it in detail. The researchers believed a group that trusts another group will be more willing to take a risk with the other team, which makes sense. Unfortunately, they chose to use a team's demand for formal project management as indicating a team was unwilling to take risks. Neither my experience in project management nor my teamwork research has hinted at existing levels of trust being a significant motive behind using formal PM. To their credit, the authors admit that at one stage the use of formal project management might have been a sign of more trust, not less.
Application: It's encouraging that the factor of trust over which a manager has the most control—ability—is also the most important in building trust. Presuming a company hires people using similar processes, a project manager will have a limited range of people to choose from when it comes to character and kindness. These characteristics are also hard to assess objectively (unless you're a trained researcher) and harder to train into people. When it comes to ability, however, both in initial hiring and project team selection you can much more easily assess the knowledge, skills, and performance record of individuals. It's also easier to provide effective training for skills than for traits that are closely tied to personality.
Plus, even if one or two individuals are actively bad people, the rest of the team can apply peer pressure to control them (overtly or not) and thus maintain a certain "average" level of character ratings. But if a person cannot do the tasks for which he or she was selected, the team can fail the ability test and quickly lose the trust of other teams that deal with them. In this study, remember, T3 was only four weeks into the project, and by that point one team's ability was already the main predictor of the other team's trust in the first.
Since these project teams were made up of students and quite short-lived compared to most corporate teams, this study may tell us nothing about the role of integrity and benevolence in long-term trust between permanent groups in the work world. But my point is, when you're putting together project teams—especially short-term teams—these findings add more fuel to the concept of picking the right mix of skills and allowing time and money to "train in" whatever skills are weak.
Source: Serva, M., M. Fuller, and R. Mayer (05), "The Reciprocal Nature of Trust: A Longitudinal Study of Interacting Teams," Journal of Organizational Behavior 26:625.
Study: A recent study on helping behaviors between team members mostly just confirms what we already knew scientifically and from common sense: people who enjoy working with each other, expect members of groups to help each other, and have fewer arguments over tasks are more likely to help each other with the team's work. But a detail in the numbers is intriguing. The average level of helping behaviors across the group had no relation to group performance. Nor did comparisons between the least helpful or most helpful members. In other words, it didn't matter if one team's most helpful member was more helpful than another team's most helpful, and the same was true for the least-helpful members. But the range in helping behaviors between the lowest and highest member within a team had a powerful impact.
Management professors tested 815 business school undergraduates in 176 class-project teams in an American university. Yee Ng is with Nanyang Technological Univ. in Singapore, and Linn Van Dyne is at Michigan State Univ. The project required a class presentation and two written case studies over 15 weeks, so the grades on these projects served as performance measures. At the end of the semester, the students were asked to rate their teams on the following (listed with sample statements):
The students also rated their fellow team members on helping behaviors (indicating, for example, whether the person "helped other group members with their work responsibilities"). To understand the result of most interest, let's consider four categories of people:
Let's assign them numerical values, from the most helpful to the least helpful: 1) High-High, 2) High-Low, 3) Low-High, and 4) Low-Low. Three types of teams got the highest grades. A team with the most helpful among the least and most helpful people, as you might expect, headed the list (using our categories, these teams could be described as "1-3"). Those with two other combinations got slightly lower grades on average: lowest of the high with highest of the low ("3-2") and lowest of the high plus lowest of the low ("2-4"). Way behind the others were the teams whose most helpful members were among the best in the study, and the least helpful was among the worst ("1-4"). Putting these in order:
Notice that a team with a really unhelpful person (a "4") did better with a relatively unhelpful best person (a "2") than it did if its top "helper" also topped the study charts. In other words, a team cursed with a "4" helper did better with a "2" than with a "1." The level of help from either extreme individual was not by itself a factor. The range between them is what made the difference in team performance. A wide range in helping behaviors was more dangerous than a lower range even if the two extreme people together weren't very helpful. In the list above, the worst combination is 3 points apart (4-1=3) on the scale, while the others are only 1 or 2 points apart.
Why would this be the case? The researchers suggest that "great disparities in member inputs create frustration and dissatisfaction when collective efforts are required." It was surprising that average group helping did not increase grades, but this could be a matter of how the numbers lay out on a graph. Without dragging you into the math, I'll just say that a direct correlation plots out on a chart as a straight line. But this one curved. Low average helping led to low grades and high to high grades, but the line between those ends goes up more and more quickly as it rises.
Application: To increase group cohesion, the authors write, managers should set explicit goals, create tasks that require cooperation and increase social interaction. Making clear that you expect people to work together will help build cooperative norms—say it repeatedly and make sure you don't reward "lone wolves" when they should have been asking for help. I won't go into reducing task conflict here because it has been covered in numerous previous issues.
But I admit I'm not sure how to help you make sure you don't combine a really unhelpful person with a really helpful one on a team, and the authors don't offer any direct suggestions either. They do point out that having those cooperative norms was "more strongly related to individual-level helping than group cohesion or task conflict." So maybe pushing cooperation early and often in a team's life cycle will at least keep the least-helpful member from sinking so low that he or she sinks the team.
Source: Ng, K.Y., and L. Van Dyne (05), "Antecedents and Performance Consequences of Helping Behavior in Work Groups: A Multilevel Analysis," Group & Organization Management 30(5):514.
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