Job Satisfaction

Recipes don’t always work out. Ask some of my dinner dates. But the closer you follow them, the more likely you are to get the results pictured in the cookbook. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a recipe for cooking a high-performing, happy team?

An exercise at the end of my active listening skills class always produces an interesting insight into human behavior.

The participants are paired off with people they do not know and provided questions to ask each other, like:

“Leadership scholars are increasingly acknowledging that traditional, unitary approaches to leadership are likely suboptimal in team settings.” Translation: Objective study shows top-down team leadership, the way most business teams are led, is not the best way.

I admit it. I gushed. I said those stereotypical words, "I'm a big fan."

Rock god? Movie star? No. I'm a team science geek. I said them to Jack Zenger, co-author of The Extraordinary Leader. In a presentation in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, "7 Reasons Why Strengths-Based Development Just Works Better," Zenger brought to life the lessons from the book.

In my recent work with a multinational project team, I have been relying on the practice of "servant leadership." I use the word practice on purpose. Servant leadership calls for those in charge to put their followers ahead of themselves. This, in turn, requires awareness of one's words and actions—and more importantly, the thoughts that lead to those words and actions. Those thoughts point to the source of one's behaviors.

As you read articles about leadership, you soon come to understand that engaged workers are satisfied workers. If people are highly involved in their work, they like the job, right?

Probably, a recent study says. But wait—there's more!

There are many ways managers can reduce conflicts in their teams without squelching new ideas. Too bad more don't use them, because a new study gives voice to the critical role of managers in managing disagreements.

My frustration with airport security has risen to the point where I shudder at the mere thought of flying. I have never been a frequent flyer, with 20 flights the most I took in a single year. But now I take as few as possible. My biggest complaints are irrationality and inconsistency in the U.S. security system. For years they banned nail clippers, but not ball point pens. As a martial artist I could defend myself well with a ball point pen, but I have no idea how to hurt someone with a nail clipper. The policy was irrational, yet they kept it for years.

This week I finished reading a monumental book on people and their relationships to work. The stories are poignant, maddening, funny reminders of the good and bad in the American workplace.

"Proud of my work?" spot-welder Phil Stallings asked. "How can I feel pride in a job where I call a foreman's attention to a mistake, a bad piece of equipment, and he'll ignore it. Pretty soon you get the idea they don't care." This from a man who also says of his work, "To a great degree, I enjoy it." A poor manager can create a poor employee.

A lot of philosophy classes are on my college transcript, taken with the incomparable Rick Miller, a Columbia Univ. Ph.D. incongruously teaching  for decades at N.C. School of the Arts. From those and Zen writings I can provide a plethora of moral and ethical reasons nearly every organization should create true teams with their own charters, goals, procedures, and improvement plans. But some managers will only be motivated to change by one reason: Money.

"Although some managers dismiss visions as irrelevant to organization performance…" two management researchers wrote recently, "businesses need a purpose…" Since the context makes clear they are talking about vision statements, not hallucinations, they incorporated two magnificent understatements into a single sentence.

If you’ve read my book, The SuddenTeams Program, you may have noticed a significant absence: guidance on choosing team members. The reason is, despite the claims of many consultants, we don’t know much about how to create a team. As European organization researchers wrote recently, "the question of how to form effective teams remains largely unanswered." In ten years of looking, I have found very few studies relating to the choice of people to maximize team performance.

I once shocked a manager by telling her I thought she had rated me too highly in an annual performance review. I don't recall the details anymore, just the stunned look on her face. Some mistake I had made during the year, though I had identified and corrected it at the time, made me feel that my colleagues had done a better job on one measure. Almost everybody got a 3 on almost everything, so a 3 seemed unfair. When I self-rated, I gave myself a 2. I ended up with a 3 anyway.

Pay, you've no doubt heard, is not the top employee motivator. But money does play a major role in ways that fact hides, as shown by a 57-year-old model of human motivation that got more support from a new survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). By coincidence, the survey also supports a discussion comment I made recently on motivational quotations, but first we go to Abraham Maslow.

One of my favorite blogging activities is showing that many of the buzz words of management are nothing new, are unproven, or both.

One of the myths of team building is the idea that leadership is a set of well-identified traits that work in most situations. But scientific research says this is false in several ways. I became more convinced as I finished reading a book chapter reviewing the current state of team science by J. Richard Hackman and Nancy Katz of Harvard Univ., which I first wrote about two weeks ago. I hadn’t intended to return to them here, but I think what they have to say about this is too important to sit on.

After all the U.S. media focus on schoolyard bullies in recent years, I'm glad to see a growing awareness of what those playground pugilists may grow up to be: abusive bosses. Prof. David Yamada and a growing chorus of researchers are out to change that by making workplace emotional abuse illegal in the Unites States. Among a host of other good reasons, Yamada wants to save lives.