Team Membership

Here's a little good news from the gender wars: In a study from Quinnipiac Univ., gender had no impact on the ratings students gave each other on group projects.

However, the study also adds fuel to the gender wars. Females earned higher teamwork ratings overall than males regardless of the gender of the rater.

There's that person at your work who doesn't say much. Hold a brainstorming session, and their mouth stays calm. Ask for their ideas, and they seem to have none, until you receive an e-mail two days later. Invite them to the bar with the rest of the gang, and you'll have one less drink to buy. Invite them for a one-on-one, though, and they might accept.

"I'm sorry."

Talk about a couple of powerful words that are powerfully hard for many of us to say when they really count. Having made myself acknowledge a couple of major "oops" this week, I want to chat about the well-tempered apology.

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.

This is not your typical Teams Blog post. An unnerving experience earlier this week drives me to share something far more personal than the latest teamwork study.

Smart teams fail. I’ve personally seen dozens of groups with people smarter than me miss deadlines, overrun budgets, or produce poor-quality, client-enraging results routinely. You can’t walk across the campus of my former workplace, Los Alamos National Laboratory, without tripping over a Nobel laureate. Yet the place has been rife with mismanagement from the top team on down.

You have several projects on your plate already, and an e-mail arrives asking you to start another right away. You don’t want to say “no” to the Big Boss. What do you do?

A few months ago I was at a luncheon chatting with two workers for the State of North Carolina. After they found out about my scientific approach to team building, they began asking some very specific questions. Clearly something was bothering them about their workplace. One of them said something like, "I keep hearing all this talk about teamwork, but I don't see a 'team.'" Both were irritated by the constant push for teamwork where they didn't sense a need for it. I asked a couple of questions:

I always hesitate to write about "duh findings," study results making so much sense, you wonder why the scientists bothered. But I know why they bother. Sometimes the expected answer proves incorrect. Also, though the information makes sense when you think about it, without the study you never would have thought about it. Those thoughts can lead to new insights.

Group members believe in using rewards instead of punishment to foster cooperation and will back that belief with money, according to a study on cooperation in groups I have summarized in TeamResearch News. If you use punishment instead, you are acting irrationally to your long-term harm within the team, the article suggests.

The trend toward pre-employment personality testing concerns me for various reasons I won't rant about now, but one of the biggest is the spurious basis for the judgments drawn from these tests. Personality and performance are both so complex, any claim that you can predict the best personality for a given job is, at best, shaky.

The benefits of empowered teamwork are one subset of the benefits of Agile software development. Having served as a project manager in an Agile company, I have seen this firsthand, but a talk by an "Agilista" last night confirmed my belief.

When I was a kid, my beverage of choice was Thrifty Maid Grape Drink, the house brand of Winn-Dixie stores. The amount of actual grape innards was minimal, and to this day I can recall the slightly acrid taste it presented around the edge of the tongue. But it accompanied every breakfast for years, to the point where the smell was enough to turn my poor mother's stomach.

"Be a team player" is one of the most abused phrases in business. Most of the time, what it really means is, "Shut up and go along with everyone." You know: the way people at Enron and Lehman Brothers and Toyota were "team players." How did that work out for them?

My book, The SuddenTeams Program, is featured in the current issue of Triangle Business Journal (Feb. 19, p. 11). How that happened is a lesson in laying groundwork, building relationships and taking chances. As the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

My master’s thesis was on persuasion. That may surprise you given what I do now, but there is a connection. Team members with no authority over each other can either persuade, argue, or give in. Guess which is the healthy option. Teams have to convince others in the company to give them needed help or resources, and have to persuade stakeholders to accept the team’s solutions. Managers who want the most out of their teams are listening to people like Dan Rockwell, the Leadership Freak.