Leadership coach and blogger Julie Pierce has an interesting blog post on the question of how leaders should balance the desire to solicit input from their team with the desire to make the call based on their convictions? She offers three tips:
1. Be clear on who is making the final decision.
2. Be specific on what kind of input you need from the team.
3. Be selective with your “no”.
First, you need to be clear whether you are making this decision on your own vs. facilitating a highly collaborative process in search of consensus. Second, you need to be clear about the type of feedback and advice you want from your team. Do you want them to generate options, critique a proposal, explain potential obstacles during implementation, etc.? Finally, be judicious with your vetoes. Exercising veto power over the team if all members feel strongly something is never easy. If the stakes are small, consider acquiescing and holding onto that veto for a bigger issue.
Making and implementing decisions boils down to a key ingredient: listening. I often wonder why schools emphasize debating. Why not have listening classes as well? Debating is easy; listening with an open mind is not. The worst thing that you as a leader can do in the decision-making process is to voice your opinion before anyone else can. No matter how open and honest your people are, stating your opinion first will short-change the discussion process and taint what you hear later. I've learned this the hard way.
I agree with Triant. In my work, I have argued that leaders who state their positions firmly at the outset of a decision-making process can affect their teams adversely in three different ways.
Decision Framing Effect: You may trap your team into one way (your way) of thinking about a problem or issue.
Conformity Effect: You may discourage those team members with a dissenting view from expressing their ideas, options, or feedback.
Legitimacy Effect: You may create the impression that the decision has already been made, that the process of consultation is simply a facade since the choice is a fait accompli.
My former graduate school classmate, Martine Haas (now a professor at Wharton), has written a new paper exploring how peripheral knowledge might impact breakthrough innovation. Haas describes peripheral knowledge as information and ideas that may not seem pertinent to a particular task, that are outside of that technical domain. Haas argues that that peripheral knowledge drives innovation through two mechanisms: transplantation and perspective shifting. Haas defines transplantation as "the direct transfer of artifacts, technologies or practices from peripheral domains into core domains, with or without some modification." Perspective shifting means that " expertise or experience in a peripheral domain leads work group members to see a problem in a core domain differently, thus revealing new solutions."
Haas and her co-author, Wendy Ham, go on to argue that having more one person exploring a peripheral knowledge domain can be helpful, but of course, that takes scarce attention away from the specific task at hand. In short, it's a balancing act: How much time should we spend focusing narrowly on the task at hand versus moving outside of that area to explore potentially, but perhaps not very useful, topics?
One last challenge: Which peripheral domain will be most useful? Well that's a tough one. It's difficult to know in advance. However, I do think groups can be purposeful about peripheral knowledge accumulation. At leading design firms, they think carefully about related domains that are worthy of exploration. They examine industries or products that might be in some way analogous to their current project, and then they explore those areas. Stepping back at the start of a project to think about potentially useful peripheral knowledge could be a key step in an innovation team's work.
I heard the sad news this morning of the passing of Harvard Professor Richard Hackman. Widely acknowledged as one of the giants in the study of teams, the social psychologist influenced and advised many young scholars over the years. Hackman earned the Distinguished Educator Award and the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Academy of Management during his career. Perhaps more importantly, he had a vast influence on practitioners as well. He advised and presented to many organizations in the private and public sector, offering them useful insight on how to make their teams more effective. His book - Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances - influenced the thinking of many managers and executives and earned him the Academy of Management’s Terry Award for the best management book of the year. Here are just a couple of terrific excerpts from an HBR blog post that Hackman wrote in 2011. In the post, Hackman explained some of the common misperceptions about teams.
Misperception #1: Harmony helps. Smooth interaction among collaborators avoids time-wasting debates about how best to proceed.
Several weeks ago, I spoke with a group of senior executives about the importance of cultivating a climate of candor within their senior management team. I argued that leaders need to encourage people to share bad news. Put simply, bad news is not like cream; it often does not rise to the top. Instead it remains quite hidden, often until problems mushroom and grow to a much riskier size and scope. One executive noted that encouraging people to share bad news doesn't simply help the leader understand the key risks for the business. Opening sharing among top team members also helps uncover creative solutions to tough problems. Why? The other top team members may never hear about a key problem in another division or functional area if that bad news is not shared openly. If they do hear about it, they may be able to offer some ideas as to how to fix the problems. Perhaps they have even experienced a similar problem in their own division. In that way, a candid discussion of bad news isn't just about keeping the chief executive aware of key risks; it also provides an opportunity to get these problems fixed more quickly.
Garold Stasser and his colleagues published a series of influential studies in the 1980s and 1990s regarding information sharing in groups. Stasser's research examined groups in which members possessed a mix of shared and unshared information. Shared information represented data which all members of the group possessed. Unshared information proved to be unique to a particular individual. Stasser created a series of experimental studies to examine how groups behaved in this type of shared/unshared information circumstance.
For instance, in one study, he created a murder mystery with a series of clues. If people put the clues together successfully, they could identify the culprit and exonerate the other suspects. Stasser compared how individuals and groups performed when trying to solve this murder mystery. He found that individuals actually outperformed groups. Stasser argued that groups struggled because members tended to not share, discuss, and integrate privately held information effectively.
Recently, Brian Waddell, Sukki Yoon, and I conducted a new study using Stasser's murder mystery. Our research will soon appear in the academic journal, Management Decision. Our control groups worked on the same mystery using the same instructions provided by Stasser. In our experimental condition, we assigned one member to play the role of devil's advocate. We asked that person to question assumptions, probe lines of thinking, and encourage people to think differently. We compared the results of the two types of groups. We found that groups with a devil's advocate performed much more effectively than the control groups. Here is a chart summarizing our results:
B. Waddell, M. Roberto, and S. Yoon, (Forthcoming). "Uncovering Hidden Profiles: Advocacy in Team Decision Making." Management Decision.
In Warren Bennis' terrific book, Organizing Genius, he suggests a simple method for intervening productively when conflict emerges within a team. He learned the method from Robert Taylor at Xerox PARC. Taylor used to refer to Class 1 and Class 2 disagreements. In a Class 1 disagreement, the "combatants" cannot even fully explain the other sides' position. In a Class 2 disagreement, the parties can clearly articulate the other side's views. When a conflict emerged, Taylor would urge group members to shift toward Class 2. In other words, he would ask them to articulate clearly and concisely the other side's point of view. That method seemed to take the temperature down a bit, and it often helped pave the way toward a resolution. Bennis argues that it helped the members find common ground. Moreover, he explains that it may have used the principle of cognitive dissonance to Taylor's advantage. In other words, the simple act of understanding and then stating the other side's position and rationale may have made opposing members more likely to embrace key elements of it.
Fortune recently interviewed Nobel-prize winning chemist Roald Hoffmann. They asked him how his experiences translate at all to leadership in the business world. Hoffmann talked about his work leading groups of researchers, managing large grants, and maintaining a high level of productivity. I found this particular excerpt quite interesting:
In science, almost all the papers we publish are written together with several people in research groups. But within that research group, somehow, we have mastered the ethics of collaboration. There's something about the way that the group leader tells people that an idea made by one of the other people in the group is not good or not right. The criticism is made in a way which allows the person, first of all, to come up with further evidence, but more importantly, doesn't shake them so that they're afraid of making another idea. Hoffman has hit the nail on the head when it comes to describing that delicate balance. We all can recall bosses who crushed someone during a meeting, leaving that person reluctant to express their ideas at future team meetings. We also know that some teams are simply too polite. People avoid conflict, and therefore, the teams don't generate and discuss enough creative alternatives.
How does a leader strike that delicate balance? No magic formula exists. Leaders need to constantly keep their fingers on the pulse of a team. They need to read body language, ask for feedback, and meet one-on-one with team members to see if they might have additional input to add. Leaders also need to conduct periodic "after-action reviews" with their teams - not about the task only, but also about the group process. How is it going? How can we perform better as a team? How can our dialogue and collaboration improve? Leaders will never get the balance perfect... but they can monitor the team aggressively so as to determine when they may have tipped the scales too far in one direction or another.
This morning, I read this interview with Blake Anderson, Adam DeVine, and Anders Holm - the creators of the show Workaholics on Comedy Central. They describe how they brainstorm together to come up with ideas for the show. To me, the most fascinating portion of the interview addresses the issue of how they "put the brakes on an idea." Anders Holm explains that you don't want the same person always being the individual who is reining the group in or pruning ideas:
Adam: I don’t think any of us have a real problem, being like, “Naaaah,” to an idea. Because it’s not hurting our feelings, it’s just an idea and we’ll come up with a new one. We try not to be too precious with any of these ideas. And we’ve worked together now--like really, really worked hard together--for the last six, seven years. So we’re really comfortable knowing whether the guys are gonna love this one. Or the guys aren’t gonna love this one but I’m gonna keep pitching it anyway. Anders: You gotta juggle that role around or else all of a sudden somebody becomes the cop. Then as soon as that person speaks it’s like, “Uhhhhggg, here comes the cop.” For us everybody puts on the badge every once in awhile.
I'm in agreement about avoiding the conversation cop phenomenon. In working with executives, I often talk about the value of assigning someone to play the role of devil's advocate to enhance the quality of high-stakes decisions. However, I argue that a group should rotate the responsibility for playing the devil's advocate. Otherwise, that person can become a broken record, and other group members can begin to downplay the arguments put forth by the constant critic.
Wharton Professor Martine Haas (a grad school classmate of mine) and Duke Professor Jonathan Cummings have published a new study about teams. They collected original data within a multinational corporation about how people allocate their time among multiple teams on which they are serving. According to Knowledge at Wharton, here is what they found:
The professors also discovered that highly skilled people were more likely to be involved in multiple teams, and that having members who were involved with multiple teams was associated with good team performance. A person with that kind of knowledge tends to be highly sought after, so his or her attention will likely be divided among many teams. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, says Haas. Teams composed of these valuable members also performed well. "That was a surprising result," she notes. "It's not necessarily causal, but it suggests if you take people who are assigned to several other teams already and bring them onto a new team, that team can benefit from their networks, knowledge and access to resources, even if they can't devote a lot of attention to the team. The exception is if the team members who are involved in lots of other projects are also very geographically dispersed -- in this case, the fact that they cannot devote much attention to the team makes the performance advantage disappear."
I find these results compelling, and they make sense intuitively. I do wonder about one thing though. Does it matter what TYPE OF WORK the teams are doing, or THE TIME CONSTRAINTS under which they may be operating? Perhaps some types of work require more focused attention, while others benefit from people being able to access a wider network through service on multiple teams. Similarly, perhaps working under a tight deadline could make it less attractive to serve on many teams simultaneously.
"Collaboration improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood — in fact, when individuals feel their role is bounded in ways that allow them to do a significant portion of their work independently. Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focusing on the task."
Erickson also finds that a little less clarity or definition on the path to achieving the team's goals can be beneficial. Why? Individuals perceive the task as something requiring them to be creative, and they feel empowered to provide their input as how to achieve the team's objectives. In other words, define the shared goal very clearly, but give the team members some freedom to figure out the best way to get there.
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about doodling in today's paper - yes, doodling. The article actually features how some firms have created workspaces with lots of whiteboards and chalkboards so people can display ideas visually. They also describe how some firms hire graphic facilitators to help teams display their ideas during brainstorming meetings.
I love the concept. I've worked with graphic facilitators on numerous occasions, and they really do help a team capture their ideas, and they help team members build on each others' ideas very effectively. If we want teams to be creative, then we need to recognize that capturing elements of the conversation visually can be critical. If we want people to learn from one another, then whiteboards and chalkboards can be very helpful. After all, consider a classroom without a chalkboard or whiteboard... could we learn as effectively in that environment. Finally, we have to remember that some people process information more effectively if data and concepts are visually displayed. Not everyone learns or thinks best if they are simply listening to conversation or looking at spreadsheets.
Researchers Heidi Gardner and Lisa Kwan have conducted an interesting new study that explains why some teams do not perform effectively. Their research shows that what others think of you actually does matter. Specifically, your fellow team members' assessments of your ability have a significant effect on team performance overall. Why? The scholars studied the variance in team members' perceptions of each others' expertise. Low variance means the members have similar perceptions. High variance means the team members hold clashing perceptions of each others' expertise. The scholars describe the high variance condition as "expertise dissensus." They argue that expertise dissensus increases interpersonal conflict and decreases productive collaboration. As a result, the team members experience less satisfaction and cannot work together effectively over time.
Wharton management professor Jennifer Mueller and Wharton lecturer Julia Minson have published a fascinating new paper titled, "The Cost of Collaboration: Why Joint Decision-making Exacerbates Rejection of Outside Information." Minson and Mueller compared how pairs of people responded to outside input as opposed to individuals working alone. They found that people working in pairs exhibited a greater tendency to reject outside input. The individuals and the pairs gave initial responses to a series of questions such as, "What percentage of members of Congress are Catholic?" Then, they had an opportunity to revise their estimate based on outside input. As expected, the pairs demonstrated higher accuracy during their initial responses (two heads are better than one). However, the discrepancy in accuracy disappeared after the opportunity to incorporate outside input. Why? The individuals working alone tended to adjust their responses more so than the pairs.
What's going on here? A number of factors surely play a role in this phenomenon. However, I think the general point is that teams have a tendency to be inward-focused at times. An in-group vs. out-group dynamic emerges, whereby you exhibit an affinity for your fellow group members, and you tend to reject, marginalize, or discriminate against those in the out-group (such as the outsider providing input to the pair). The group members also may spend time bolstering each others' confidence in the judgment at which they arrive, and that makes it difficult to alter that judgment in the future.
I recall one fascinating example of this phenomenon in action during a leadership development workshop. My colleague Amy Edmondson was conducting a team exercise called the Electric Maze. She invited a group of individuals on stage to work on the exercise. After the group had a chance to plot their strategy for a few minutes, the audience members had an opportunity to offer the group advice before it started the exercise. The group barely listened to the audience. They had become so fixated on the strategy that they had begun to concoct that they were not receptive to outside advice. The amazing thing is that the group had only been plotting its strategy for a few minutes when the outsiders chimed in with their input. Yet, the group dismissed the outside input. The team already had become insular!
Jonah Lehrer recently wrote a fascinating New Yorker column in which he argued that brainstorming doesn't work. In some ways, he's right on the money. Academic studies often have demonstrated that individuals could perform better at a creative task than a group engaged in brainstorming. For instance, Lehrer cites one of the early studies at Yale:
The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to follow Osborn’s guidelines. As a control sample, the scientists gave the same puzzles to forty-eight students working by themselves. The results were a sobering refutation of Osborn. The solo students came up with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” Brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but rather made each individual less creative.
Unfortunately, Lehrer's column draws some misleading conclusions as well. Scott Berkun, author of Mindfire: Big Ideas For Curious Minds, has written a strong rebuttal to Lehrer's essay. Berkun offers four key criticisms of Lehrer's conclusions:
1. Nothing matters if the room is filled with morons or strangers (or both).
2. Brainstorming is designed for idea volume, not depth or quality.
3. The person leading an idea generation session matters.
4. Generating ideas is a small part of the process.
Berkun takes particular issue with the conclusions that Lehrer draws from a study by Charlan Nemeth. Brainstorming typically involves a shared norm called "deferred judgment." Under that norm, participants do not criticize each others' ideas during the idea generation process. Berkun explains Nemeth's study:
The primary thrust of Lehrer’s critique is based on a 2003 study by Nemeth, where students were divided into groups and given 3 different sets of instructions. In one group, no instruction was given (‘Minimal’). In the second group, basic brainstorming rules were given (‘Brainstorming’). In the last, brainstorming rules were given, plus students were allowed to critique each others ideas (‘Debate’).... The results do show that the group that could critique generated more ideas... [However] The debate groups was given brainstorming instructions, as well as an instruction to debate. It should be labeled “Brainstorming with debate“. If the only instruction they were given was to debate, it’d be a fair comparison. But it isn’t.
Lehrer concludes from this Nemeth study that stimulating dissent and debate works much more effectively than brainstorming. I'm with Berkun - that conclusion is a step too far. My work over the past fifteen years has focused a great deal on the importance of debate and dissent. I'm glad that Lehrer has chosen to emphasize its importance. However, an effective group process doesn't employ either deferred judgment or dissent and debate. It involves both! In the idea generation phase, deferred judgment makes sense as a norm employed to encourage the generation of many different ideas and options. Later, dissent and debate become critical as a means of comparing and contrasting those options, and perhaps facilitating the development and generation of more ideas and alternatives.
One final point - Later in the article, Lehrer describes the many innovations that emerged from Building 20 at MIT over the years. He concludes, "The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself." In other words, if you get the team composition right, you will automatically get lots of constructive dissent and debate. I disagree wholeheartedly with this conclusion. It's just not right. You do not guarantee constructive dissent and debate simply by building a diverse team and giving them a forum for dialogue. In many settings, people simply don't speak up. Groupthink occurs even in diverse teams at times. Yes, you have to get the composition right, but group dynamics do not take care of themselves. They take hard work on the part of a leader. Leadership matters! Process matters!
Melissa Valentine and Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School have published an intriguing new working paper about team effectiveness. Valentine and Edmondson explore a concept that they call "team scaffolds" in this paper. The scholars ask the question: "It is increasingly necessary for 24/7 shift operations to include some component of team-based work. But how can organizations support such work among constantly changing groups of people in a setting where stable teams are not feasible?" They examine this question by studying an urban hospital's emergency room. However, the findings apply to other settings in which people often work in unstable/transitory teams.
The scholars begin by pointing out that many organizations cannot design and use stable teams for certain types of work. How then can they make these teams effective, given that the team design literature suggests a certain level of structure and cohesion boosts group performance? Valentine and Edmondson explain that scaffolding proves quite effective in the emergency room setting that they studied. Team scaffolds consist of "a bounded role set with collective responsibility for interdependent tasks." In other words, team roles have been so well-defined that members can step into a role and interact effectively with their peers, even though they haven't worked together as a unit on a regular basis.
The emergency room in the study underwent a major transformation. The ER did not have a team structure prior to the change. Patients were treated in a sequential/linear process with various functions performed by different staff members who did not work as a team. The hospital changed its organization structure, creating what they called "pods" - a physical location with dedicated computers, counters, supplies, beds, and crash rooms. The authors explain:
The pods were each staffed by one attending, one in-charge resident and possibly another resident or intern, and typically three nurses, one of whom was designated the “Pod Lead.” The pods themselves were stable structures that persisted over time, but the staffing of the pods changed constantly. Within some five-hour periods, all of the individuals staffing the pod composition may have turned over completely as a result of shift changes staggered across roles. The nurses, residents, and attendings (collectively called providers) were assigned to a pod at the beginning of each shift. Provider pod assignments were made more-or-less at random, and a provider may have been assigned to a different pod every shift. Their “pod mates” were typically different every shift as well. Education tended to happen within each pod following the redesign, rather than through a department-wide formal rounding process. The attending and resident worked closely together as they cared for patients and informally rounded together several times during the shift, as well as during the shift change between attendings or residents. Note that the pod system connected a clearly defined set of roles (the attending, one or two residents, and three nurses) with collective responsibility for a set of tasks (the patients assigned to the pod) bounded by a shared physical location.
What happened as a result of the structural transformation? Valentine and Edmondson found that patients’ average time in the ER fell by nearly 40% after implementation of the pods. The key, though, is that these pods did not constitute stable teams. However, people worked together quite effectively in these group structures. The authors argue that the well-defined boundaries and roles facilitated effective coordination.
Many people have embraced aterrific HBR article written a few years ago - "Who has the D? How clear decision roles enhance organizational performance". I think the article is excellent. It provides practical advice for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of decision-making processes. As they argue, it's so important to figure out who has the decision rights/authority before getting too deep into deliberations on a complex issue. I do think a word of caution is in order though. If we are too quick to frame a crucial meeting(s) as a decision moments, we risk having advocacy crowd out all inquiry. In other words, people may focus so much on winning the argument that the group as a whole stops learning about the problem, or about each other's perspectives and knowledge. Jumping too quickly into decision mode sometimes means that teams frame decisions as go/no go situations, rather than creating and considering multiple options. We sometimes have to remind a team that they may need to do some more collective and collaborative inquiry into the nature of the problem before shifting into individual advocacy mode. I'm not arguing for a go-slow approach. I'm simply recommending that groups remember that focusing too quickly on the "d" can lead to entrenched and polarized camps locked in a dysfunctional conversation without having shared ad integrated all the data and knowledge required to make a sound choice.
Susan Cain wrote a very provocative article for the New York Times this weekend. It was titled, "The Rise of the New Groupthink." Cain explains that, "Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in." However, Cain argues that many creative people are quite introverted, and they enjoy working independently and privately. Some creative individuals thrive as "lone geniuses." Privacy and solitude makes them productive, while constant interruptions can be very problematic. Cain cites the work of K. Anders Ericsson, a scholar who has examined how people become world class experts in particular fields through deliberate practice. Cain concludes from his research that, "The best way to master a field is to work on the task that’s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is alone."
Cain also argues that teams often do not achieve their potential; they do not outperform the results that could be achieved by best individual members working alone. Indeed, much research has shown that teams often experience "process losses" - i.e. 1+1 should equal more than 2, but somehow those synergies often don't materialize in teams. 1+1 might even add up to less than 2 at times. She points specifically to the process of group brainstorming, whose results often do not meet expectations according to many studies.
Cain acknowledges that many of our toughest technical and scientific problems no longer can be solved by the "lone inventor" working in their garage. Collaboration has become necessary to make progress on many complex challenges of our time. However, she argues that we have to strike a balance in the way we organize ourselves in workplaces, schools, and other institutions. We need to provide the space for collaboration to occur, but not inundate people with meetings. We have to give people, particularly creative introverts, the opportunity and the venue to work privately and without interruption at times. At the same time, we want to provide the opportunity for the mixing of ideas to occur and the sharing of knowledge. It's a delicate balance, but I believe Cain is right in arguing that we must strive to achieve it.
