March 2006
Vol. 3, No. 9
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From the Editor: Some changes in behavior are harder to ingrain than others. During my first try at graduate school 20 years ago, I lost a half-an-hour’s computer work. This was before the days when computers would save files automatically, and I failed to save my file before the system blinked out. I swore that I was never again going to have to re-do work because I failed to save regularly, and I have tried to transfer that oath to doing backups on a regular basis. Yet this newsletter is coming to you late because 20 years later, I did not get around to backing up the previous draft despite the nagging voice in the back of my mind, and then my hard drive died. So I got to spend my Saturday rewriting this issue from scratch. Too bad, since the first version was the best newsletter ever written! (I'm joking.)
Other change efforts of mine have gone better. How are yours doing? In Lesson #2 last month, I challenged you to work on recognizing trigger events and practicing different responses in your head. I purposely did not suggest you try performing the changes yet, because the hardest part of change is turning off the old knee-jerk response. By focusing just on recognizing events as they are happening, the goal is to slow down the "stimulus-response/stimulus-response" process enough that you will be able to insert the desired behavior.
The time has come to try. The next time one of your trigger events occurs, whether in your team or in your head, try to respond in the way you have been practicing. If it doesn’t go perfectly, that’s okay: that’s just a sign that you are human. But notice the result. Is it what you had hoped for? If not, that too is okay. You are running an experiment, and science learns as much by being wrong as by being right. Just adjust the response, and try it again the next time the trigger event occurs. Through patient trial and improvement, you will learn the response that works best for you or your team. In the process, it will begin to replace the old pattern, until your new response eventually becomes your "knee-jerk" response and you don’t have to think much about it anymore.
For example, I have been trying to reduce negative feelings I get from the actions of others. I'm doing so by focusing not on "right-and-wrong" but rather on the actual effect of the action. When another driver pulls into traffic in front of me without leaving enough room—"cuts me off" in American parlance—I used to not only hold onto, but build up the resulting anger by thinking about the event over and over. Legally and in safety terms the person was "wrong," but my anger would not change their behavior, and the negative feelings turned my mood ugly. The only direct effects of their action on me were that I was momentarily scared and a fraction of a second was added to my travel time. The real internal damage came from my own thoughts. By instead acknowledging the fear and irritation, but then asking, "What is the effect?" I have gotten myself to move on in my thoughts to more pleasant subjects and improve my day. After a lot of practice, it comes very easily now.
Here’s hoping your efforts continue to improve your day. Keep "trialing."
As reported in the first article below, meeting quality can make or break a team's success. TeamTrainers offers a three-hour "Meeting Facilitation Skills" course that will get your meetings on track. Contact me today to schedule one for your team or managers.
Study: Whether meeting time was well spent, not the amount of meeting time or number of meetings a worker attended, was linked to worker well-being in a recent international survey.
Researchers from the United States and England conducted Web-based surveys of 676 workers in those countries regarding pre-scheduled meetings over the previous week, and of 304 there and in Australia regarding meetings in a single day. They used the results to test various meeting-related variables against "overall job attitudes and well-being" (JAWB). JAWB was tested using scales asking about emotional states such as "anxious," "relaxed," "optimistic," "depressed," and "enthusiastic." It also included a question about job satisfaction and several to indicate whether the person wanted to quit their job.
Contrary to the griping you hear about meetings around the office, neither the number of meetings an individual had attended in the time period tested, nor the total amount of time spent in those meetings, was correlated to most of the JAWB measures. But perceived "meeting effectiveness" had strong correlations to every measure of JAWB. For comparison, its relation to the Depression-Enthusiasm scale was +0.54. Meeting effectiveness was rated based on how the respondent felt the meetings were at:
The authors suggest the reason for the role of effectiveness is that interrupting your individual work to go to a meeting has a cost. You have to "change gears" to focus on something different, and you lose time for your tasks. If the meeting provides enough value to overcome the cost, it has a positive effect on the feelings you derive from work, and if not, those feelings go down. Supporting their point, people who felt especially driven to accomplish goals disliked meeting demands regardless of meeting quality, while those who were less driven liked meetings more. "For those who are less goal oriented…" the researchers write, "some meetings may be desired, for example, to permit social interaction or to provide structure to an unstructured day."
In the week-based study, whether the worker had to cooperate with others to get assigned tasks done made a predictable difference: when cooperation was needed, meeting time had a positive effect on well-being, but the reverse was true when cooperation wasn’t needed. That relation was not true for the one-day survey, but the authors speculate that is because the perceived costs have to build over time. Also, whether someone preferred working alone or in groups, as well as a person’s confidence in their meeting skills (presenting information or sharing ideas) did not affect the other study results.
Application: We have to be a little careful applying this study, since it is not a random sample. People volunteered for it, so there are some biases that could make these results different from the general workplace. For example, more than half of them were supervisors, which is not the case in any organization (although it feels like it sometimes!). But I’m comfortable making recommendations because the results completely fit both my prior research and my experience working with teams.
As I argue whenever I speak on teamwork, meetings are the most critical tool in optimizing team success. A poorly run meeting—which describes the vast majority I attend—not only wastes the time of and labor costs for everyone around the table, it also blows the best opportunity for harnessing the power of group decision-making to improve the work that goes on outside the conference room. This study indicates, not surprisingly, that it also lowers attendees’ happiness on the job, which we know affects both turnover and absenteeism. (Low meeting effectiveness was directly related to greater "Intention to quit" in this study.)
The authors say meeting effectiveness may be improved when "people come prepared to meetings, an agenda is used, meetings are punctual (start and end on time), purposes are clear, and there is widespread attendee participation." To learn more, pick up a relatively modern book on meeting facilitation (not parliamentary procedure) and help your team adopt their principles. Or, contact me to schedule my three-hour "Meeting Facilitation Skills" training for your team.
Source: Rogelberg, S., D. Leach, P. Warr, and J. Burnfield (06), "’Not Another Meeting!’ Are Meeting Time Demands Related to Employee Well-Being?" Journal of Applied Psychology 91(1):86.
Study: Corporate values can have a positive impact on decision-making if they are created with employee involvement and properly implemented, according to a study by Univ. of Notre Dame business professor Joel Urbany.
He explains that values may be communicated by "an ethics code or values statement, reflecting a combination of guiding philosophy, rules for customer interaction, regulations, processes, and decision-making guidance for an organization’s employees." Urbany surveyed Executive MBA students from a wide range of industries to ask what the impact was of value statements in their firms and why they thought values did not have a greater impact. He then asked how the managers thought such statements should be created and used, versus how they were implemented in the managers’ firms. The comparisons brought out five major sets of findings.
First, despite the cynicism with which value statements are often met in business, most of these managers thought such statements had positive effects in their firms, averaging around a 7.3 on a 10-point scale. These effects included "positive outcomes (not related to decision-making) both inside and outside the company, guidelines provided for decision-making, increased accountability, and clarity of expectations." Nonetheless, there was a negative undercurrent, with one set of respondents saying value statements did not have the impact they could have for reasons including: "poor communication, lack of leadership within the organization, challenges in assessing trade-offs between soft returns (deeper values) and hard returns (sales, profit), and the fact that individual differences in values make it difficult for the firm to impose values on some individuals."
The third major finding was that respondents overwhelming saw a difference between the ideal way of implementing value statements and the way their firms did it. Fourth, for every one of the 17 elements Urbany asked about, furthermore, there was a significant link between the degree to which that element was done properly and the amount of impact the value statements appeared to have. The fifth major result was that people who believed their companies set up values correctly thought the positive impacts were almost entirely internal. Those who thought the values were imposed from above and improperly enforced focused on external benefits, suggesting that those values were put in place primarily to make the firm look good to outsiders, Urbany writes.
Application: The managers in this study agreed that value statements should be:
Those items are reflected in the way I approach the issue with a team, having the team develop a code of conduct that the team manager agrees to adhere to in dealing with the team. The easiest way is to set aside meeting time to ask the question, "What drives you crazy about working in a group of people?" After brainstorming on that list, you should be able to combine and winnow them down to ten or less behaviors, and then rewrite those behaviors into rules against those behaviors. If you like, you can categorize those rules by value names ("Respect," "Trust," etc.). The team I most recently worked with came up initially with the behavior of answering a cell phone in the middle of a one-on-one meeting. The eventual rule was something like, "Do not answer a cell phone during a meeting unless you are on-call." You also should help the team create a procedure telling what to do if a member thinks another member has violated the rules.
It would be interesting to see this survey done among line managers and workers, because I suspect they would be even more cynical than the executive respondents in this study. Also, it would have been nice to see the differences between the 43% who identified themselves as top managers (vice presidents or above), and the rest who were presumably middle managers. But regardless of level, I have found that teams involved in the process as described above lose their cynicism and make their values a part of their decision-making processes.
Source: Urbany, J. (05), "Inspiration and Cynicism in Values Statements," Journal of Business Ethics 62:169.
Study: In a series of experiments, college students consistently failed to portray emotion in e-mails as well as they thought they did, even with "emoticons." In the simplest study, people were asked to write one serious and one sarcastic statement about each of ten topics and send them via e-mail. Recipients had to guess which emotion was contained in each statement. Asked how well they did, senders thought 97% of the statements would be correctly identified, but only 84% were despite the fact the recipients knew the two choices.
In one of the more complex of the six studies, the researchers at three American universities recruited pairs of friends or strangers, and asked them to separately write statements portraying one of four emotions. The pairs then exchanged statements by e-mail; by voice while sitting back-to-back (to eliminate visual cues); or sitting face-to-face. Again, all participants greatly overestimated the rate at which recipients would pick the right emotion, predicting around 89% accuracy for all three situations. But recipients were only right 63% of the time by e-mail, and around 73.5% by voice (whether facing each other or not). Other findings from the various studies included:
The researchers said those last two results indicate people don’t think about information they have that the recipient does not have. When forced to "misread" their own statements, the senders were forced to experience a different perspective than their intended one; regarding the jokes, they made their predictions as if the recipients could see the performance they saw. For those of you who like to send jokes by e-mail, it is worth noting that the average humor ratings by recipients were only around 3.5 on a scale of 0 to 9—not very funny, in other words.
In a seventh study (not fully reported in the article), the use of emoticons—graphics meant to indicate an emotion—did not change the degree of accuracy. The authors point out that "many emoticons are themselves ambiguous (does that ‘;-)’ after ‘I’m really looking forward to seeing you’ mean that she is flirting—or kidding?)." Also, if people overestimate their ability to portray emotion correctly, they logically would understimate the situations in which emoticons were needed.
Application: Simply put, when you need to deliver news or a comment that could possibly upset someone, do not use e-mail. Go see the person if you can, and if not, pick up the phone. If you try to avoid confrontation by sending an e-mail, chances are good you will just set yourself up for a worse confrontation later on. You even have to be careful when trying to portray a positive emotion by e-mail, because it could be misinterpreted, or at least a waste of the recipient's time (per the humor study).
In short, limit e-mails to strictly factual information until you have exchanged a number of messages with an individual, and even then be careful. If it’s a negative emotion, again, speak to them in all cases.
A side note about the "facts" you hear from some consultants: I have always considered the oft-quoted statement that "90% of communication happens through nonverbal cues" to be suspect. The researchers question that figure, too, and you may have noticed that in their relevant study, pairs sitting face-to-face were no more accurate about emotional tone than those speaking back-to-back. In other words, the addition of visual cues did nothing to increase the accuracy with which emotion was portrayed. In most situations visual cues probably do help—the study was a very limited test—but again, always question the source of any claim that sounds a little hard to believe.
Source: Kruger, J., N. Epley, J. Parker, and Z. Ng (05), "Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89(6):925.
Study: When defined subgroups existed within a team, the team was more prone to personal conflicts which hurt teamwork and team performance in a study of joint venture (JV) managers.
Researchers Jiatao Li of Hong Kong Univ. of Science and Technology and Donald Hambrick of The Pennsylvania State University surveyed members of 71 management groups in companies formed through international partnerships between other companies. Each had at least four members, with at least two each from each partner company. Most were from Chinese/American partnerships. Performance information was collected twice, once at the same time the rest of the data was gathered and again 2.5 years later. Members from a given partner tended to be similar to others from that partner and not to the others on the team in age, tenure, ethnicity, and gender. (The article is not clear on whether "tenure" meant with the partnership, with the partner company, or in the industry).
The results showed that overall average diversity among the group members was not correlated with conflict and performance. In contrast, the degree to which the members clumped together on those issues—created "factional groups," in the researchers' words—was strongly related. Specifically, teams with factions had more personal conflict (such as "emotional friction") and task conflict ("disagreement about operational decisions").
By testing different subsets of variables against each other, the researchers determined that task conflict neither hurt nor helped team processes and performance as rated (separately) by the top company leaders. But emotional conflict reduced ratings on what they called "behavioral integration," measured by these questions:
If a team reported low scores on those questions, company leaders were more likely to report that the JV was not performing well overall or compared "to its competitors in China." There was also a direct, negative link between emotional conflict among top managers and poor company performance. However, task conflict had no correlation (positive or negative) with integration or performance.
Application: This is another in a series of studies suggesting that having subgroups within your team makes applying best practices for team development even more important. In this case, recognizing those groups was easy because each represented separate companies. Although the personal characteristics this study looked at were more obvious due to the international flavor, it you have a team made up of representatives from several different teams—say, a team appointed to improve a cross-functional process, with two or more members from each function—this may be a warning sign. Even more so than with other teams, you need to take the time to establish some rules and procedures addressing the issue. One suggestion is that whenever feasible, planning tasks should be assigned to subteams (not single individuals) made up of people from different functions. The team should also create a code of conduct, because members will otherwise fall back on the behaviors considered acceptable within their organizations, which could conflict with other members’ expectations. Finally, as a manager of such a team, consistently make clear in your communications and decisions that the company's needs trump those of any one function.
If you have to put together a team with representatives from different organizations (be they companies or just units in your company), it’s okay to think about demographics in picking representatives. According to this study, a team could have a lot more problems if it mixed equally two distinct subgroups: for example, older Chinese men who had spent many years in their company and young white American women representing a start-up. It might help bridge the gaps to add an older woman with many years in the Chinese company, or if she was from the startup, having a lot of industry experience.
Contrary to what you will hear from many consultants and managers, this study also adds to the growing evidence that task conflict is not inherently good for teams. The biggest review in recent years showed it was more bad than neutral, and in this study, it did not have a positive effect on teamwork or performance. Task conflict is better than people being unafraid to express their ideas, but with proper team development you should try to accomplish open discussions without significant amounts of any type of conflict. Another point to take away is that overall diversity, as an average, also neither hurt nor helped team functions or resulting company performance. It's what you do to help people focus on the bigger issues that makes the difference.
Source: Li, Jiatao, and D. Hambrick (05), "Factional Groups: A New Vantage on Demographic Faultlines, Conflict, and Disintegration in Work Teams," Academy of Management Journal 48(5):794.
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