Milking Productivity From Groups

photo by robert francis

An excellent post at PsyBlog on the effects of group dynamics on productivity.  Basically, the more people you add to a group the less effective the group becomes when the workload is additive. One interesting study showed that when people were asked to clap or yell as loud as they could their output in a group of six or larger was 1/3rd of what it was on their own.

As the author notes, “… a group problem-solving session relies on the brains of the best people in the group – social loafing wouldn’t necessarily reduce productivity in this group as markedly.”  So this doesn’t wholly apply to our knowledge businesses, but I think we can all remember times when we were guilty of this or saw it in others in a group.

The post recommends several ways to minimize the effects of social loafing, including:

1. Make it known the task is important
2. Foster a group identity / belonging to the group
3. Make the contribution of other members well-known so as to decrease the ‘sucker effect’

All good, but there are a few worth adding.

1. Assign a communicator. Team construction is vital.  Having a communicator on the team who’s primary job isn’t necessarily measured in output, but rather whether everyone is aware of what others are doing, is a start.  His job is to make sure everyone knows the latest developments and thus implicitly communicates the accomplishments of others on the team so as to minimize the ‘sucker effect’ even further.
2. Frequent iteration. Apply the Agile method of software development to your team.  Break large tasks down into daily or weekly deliverables.  Assign the responsibility for the task to the individual.  If it requires the team to collaborate it is still that individual’s responsibility to get everyone together to accomplish the assignment.  Deliver something every week and iterate as required.
3. Show your work. Time should be set aside for each individual to ‘present’ their contribution to the rest of the group.  Even if it’s just thought starters, the contribution should be formally recognized so that it is visible to every member.
4. Limit group size. Seems obvious, particularly given the graph on the PsyBlog post that shows individual effort halves in groups of 8 or more.  Group dynamics expert and HBS luminary, J. Richard Hackman, found that the optimal group size is 4.6.  Obviously, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish but err on the side of too small and you’ll force everyone to shoulder more of the load.
5. Relinquish ownership. Unless ownership of the project and the subsequent success or failure is fully granted to the group, individual’s will have some cover to hide behind.  While the output/goal may be dictated by someone outside the group acknowledge there are many ways to arrive at the same destination.  Grant the freedom to determine that path to the group and let it be known that the rewards and recognition are all theirs.

If other solutions have worked for you please leave them in the comments for others to see.

Visible Leadership

This has been sitting in the queue for a little while, but I wanted to point to a great post by Fred Wilson on making all big decisions only after a face to face interaction.

His context is checking references, but I’d like to expand upon it further.  This post was a screaming reminder of how important our physical presence is and how it changes the tenor of our conversations.

Leading teams requires face to face communication.  Leadership is about more than the content of the communication.  A well crafted email or IM is great.  But that rarely inspires someone to go the extra mile.

photo by seite-3

Leadership is bequeathed based on how you make the other person feel.  It’s far easier to show appreciation, respect and interest in another when you’re communicating with both your actions and your words.

1. Walk around. Don’t underestimate the power being the one who takes the initiative.  It’s a humbling move that says you respect the other person enough to make the effort to see them.
2. Leave your door open. Your physical space says a lot about your approach to work.  A closed door gives off the aura that you’re guarded.  Information can then only flow outward when you open door.  Find ways to make yourself even more accessible.  Is it reasonable to sit with your team?
3. Be present and interested. Approach people even when you don’t have anything business related.  If you’re only around when you need something then it creates a very transactional, one-way relationship.  You’re not an airline and they aren’t your customer.  Care a little.
4. Ask for their opinions. It’s work.  You don’t have to be drinking buddies, but it’s hard to respect someone when they don’t care about what you have to say.  Solicit their opinions in an informal setting – like when you’re hanging over their cube.
5. Show thanks. When a job is done well, thank them.  Yes, it is their job to do their job.  But showing appreciation doesn’t kill you and shows that you recognize when they put in some good thinking and effort.

Our communication patterns have changed.  It’s way too easy to use email or IM out of a misguided sense of efficiency.  But…

Don’t forget your shoes.  They are the most important weapon in your leadership toolkit.  Wear them out.

Leading By Love

John Maeda is the President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD aka rizz-dee) and is one of the better tweeters out there.  He almost always has something thought-provoking to say.  Impressive given the 140 character constraint.

One of his latest was:

Met CEO of RI mfg firm Tacohvac when asked “How do you lead your people?” Responds, “I don’t *lead*. I *love* my people.”

If this is a little too touchy-feely replace the word love with respect or like or know.  All work.

The difference between leading and loving is subtle.  Of course, the CEO is leading.  But his primary motivation is to do right by his people rather than always be right in front of his people.

photo by jan.gosmann

By truly caring about his people his people don’t have to wonder about his ulterior motives.  They aren’t deconstructing his intent and looking for what’s in it for him.  They trust him.  And when he asks for something to be done, it will likely get done better.  People have a  sense of reciprocation that will compel them to do better work rather than a sense of duty to check the boxes.

Relationships are two-way streets.  And working relationships are no different.  If someone cares about you, you’re going to care about what you give in return.

In order to lead, you must have followers.  If it’s not genuine it won’t work, but a few thoughts on starting to lead by love:

1. Know what motivates your ‘followers.’  Align their interests and goals with the vision.  It’s not easy.  It takes a lot of time to do for each individual.  That’s why we have so few great leaders in our businesses.  Take care of your people and they will take care of you. Recognize that people work for themselves, not for you.  You are merely renting their time.
2. Be fair. CEOs paying themselves big bonuses while simultaneously ‘right-sizing’ is foolhardy.  It’s the modern equivalent of finding a freshly killed woolly mammoth and eating all but the hind leg before splitting it up for your starving village-mates.  You already have a big title, you don’t need to prove your (ahem)  ‘superiority’ with flashy, outward displays of your differences.  To  note, the CEO above drives a Smart Car.
3. Be transparent with your own motivations.  Help people understand you, how you think and what you want to do.  Trust people with that information.  The less people have to read into what’s behind your words and actions the less they have to invent.  And what we imagine is always more conniving, more evil and more vindictive than the truth.

Of the people you’ve followed, did they take an interest in you and how you fit into the vision or just themselves?  Exactly.

What have I missed?  Please let me know in the comments.

Make Yourself Redundant

Layoffs abound and people are worried about their jobs.  What should we do?  Probably the exact opposite of what our instinct tells us.

Forget hoarding information, carving out a small fiefdom and just putting your head down in order to become indispensable.  That’s the mentality of the weak and scared.  It’ll not only hurt the quality of your team’s work, but that fearfulness will be sniffed out a mile away.  How you treat others will subtly change and suddenly you’ll find a bulls eye on your back.  Everything you were trying to prevent will come to fruition.

Your goal shouldn’t be to keep the machine running.  Yes, you should focus on doing good work, but that only takes you so far.

Instead make yourself redundant.

Coach someone on your team to do your job.  Optimize processes in order to eliminate yourself as a bottleneck.  Do something extraordinary that increases your company’s return on their human investments.  You’ll have little ‘competition’ and your achievements will be more likely to get noticed.

photo by marielito

Doing these things has the upshot of inspiring the people on your team by challenging them to take on more responsibility, gets them in the mindset of looking for solutions to the company’s problems and frees you up to proactively work on bigger picture projects and ideas you’ve wanted to tackle but haven’t had the time.

If you’ve been able to accomplish making yourself redundant then you’ve done something of real value.  You’ve proven your leadership chops, coaching abilities and saved the company money.  That’s something that not everyone has the guts to do and will enable you to stand out.  Not something that’s in a job description but who gets noticed just for doing their job?

Not to mention these things are 100% transferable and something far more valuable than that last PowerPoint deck that you can take with you to a new company.

For a little inspiration on getting started check out this excellent post from Steve Farber on the ‘Greater-Than-Yourself Project.’

The ‘A’ Player Myth

There is quite a lot of chatter on the paradox of hiring ‘A’ players in a downturn.  Briefly summarized, hiring is harder today because the number of schmucks has dramatically increased while the true talent has remained constant.

While I can’t deny there is more noise I frankly think it’s the wrong conversation to have. The mantra of hiring only ‘A’ players is a fallacy that has gotten us into trouble.  To lay my biases on the table early, they are:

1. We have a totally misguided perception of what ‘best’ means so hiring the ‘best’ isn’t really doing us any favors
2. A team comprised strictly of ‘best’ people isn’t a team
3. A concerted need to hire ‘only A people’ means you’ve given up on developing talent
4. (More like 3a.) Hiring ‘only A people’ means you see people as cogs in a wheel – true A talent probably shouldn’t work for you

To set the table, I think there are two viewpoints on this topic:

photo by Fred Armitage

The first advocates the traditional ‘A’ player mantra and sees a fixed world.  We all have a fixed ability and what we’ve have shown in the past is all we’re capable of in the future.  What you see is all you get.  The onus for being engaged and kicking ass at work falls squarely and solely on the worker.  They get a paycheck, it’s up to them to earn it.  If they can’t, we’ll find someone who can.

The other view sees a dynamic world.  Where actions do indeed have equal and, in this case, not-so-opposite reactions.  While we may have ceilings on our potential, we are not limited to what we have done in the past.  After a certain level of basic intelligence (a hurdle many – but certainly not all – knowledge workers will clear) we can flourish when properly utilized and engaged.  Engagement and ass kicking is a two way street.  The worker must bring the right abilities to the table, but those abilities won’t be fully utilized unless the worker’s needs are met.

Needless to say, I’m in the latter camp.

Now to expand upon my three and a half biases above.

First, how we currently define ‘best’ only evaluates one’s skills.  It doesn’t credit people with having an appetite for learning.  It doesn’t acknowledge that people can be good at something other than what they’ve already done.  It accepts ‘any means necessary’ in order to accomplish a task.  It rewards the hoarding of information and the loud, chest-thumping, spotlight-seeking blowhard.  Skills and knowledge are only part of the equation in most corporate situations.  And you can get by with them if you have a bunker to isolate these lone wolf geniuses.  But if you expect them to contribute on a team you also have to add how they work with others to the evaluation.

photo by ooOJASONOoo

Dovetailing into my second bias, the attributes that make our teams successful are the antithesis of how we reward individuals.  I’ve worked with several ‘A’ players who I’d politely classify as assholes.  They only cared about the greater good of the team in the sense that they could take credit for something and use it to feed their egos and propel their careers.   Who wants to work with that guy?  Who wants to actively work against that guy?  He may be good at what he does, but he brings down the effort and talent level of the people around him.

Teams are successful when information flows freely, people trust the team not to use their idea larvae against them and there is mutual respect that allows those larvae to breathe another breath and potentially bust out of the cocoon.   Not exactly what jumps out at us on a resume or at the heart of the questions we ask in an interview.

photo by DavidDMuir

Finally, the idea of player development goes out the window if you’re only look for ‘A’ players.  You believe rewarding these people is a matter of throwing more money or a bigger title at them.  You’re rewarding the selfishness and ever-ballooning ego by throwing gas on that fire.  Under our current evaluation system, you haven’t hired ‘A’ players that care about your business, you’ve hired mercenaries that care about themselves.

True ‘A’ people are motivated by more than extrinsic rewards. By not taking the time to understand that you’ve essentially cut off the long-term, sustainable avenues for true ‘A’ players to get rewarded.  True ‘A’ players are the intellectually curious who want to tackle new challenges.  Yet, you haven’t taken an interest in them, their career or their goals.  You don’t have the inclination to help them acquire new knowledge or skills because you believe those are fixed.  You haven’t set up the structure by which ‘A’ players can challenge themselves in an unfamiliar role or the support for them to succeed should they happen to accidentally get there.

This is already too long so I’ll end with this.  How many championships have the Yankees been able to buy with the ‘A’ talent on the free agent market in the last decade?  Their string of championships in the late 90s were the result of the players they had taken the time to coach/mentor through their minor league system. The business of hiring the best of the best doesn’t win when we incorrectly define ‘the best’ and wind up with people unwilling to do the little things that help the team, but hurt individual stats.

I’ll hedge my bets by saying that these aren’t wholly universal truths, but our current behavior is prevalent enough that I don’t feel badly making these blanket statements.

The morale of my soapbox rant is to reevaluate what it means to be great.  Judge not just the on skills on brings, but how they affect those around them.  And put the effort in to elevate the game of your existing team.  They may not all have the motivation and intellectual horsepower to go from a B to an A player, but you can’t expect them to get there on their own.  It takes two to tango.  An ‘A’ leader understands that.

Feel free to set me straight.