Making Meetings More Efficient: The Power of Straw Polls

Efficient decision-making is the cornerstone of productive meetings. One tactic often used to improve this process is the use of straw polls to gauge opinions before delving into detailed discussions. Straw polls can streamline the decision-making process, for instance by quickly revealing that all group members are in agreement, and can improve the quality of the outcomes. Let's explore how managers can harness the power of straw polls, particularly multivoting, to make their meetings more efficient and effective.

 

The Benefits of Straw Polls

Straw polls are preliminary votes taken to see where people stand on an issue before engaging in detailed discussions. This technique is widely used in various settings, from juries to corporate boardrooms. Research from Michael Johnson of the University of Washington and his colleagues suggests that straw polls can significantly impact the quality of group decisions, depending on the voting method employed.

 

Different Types of Straw Polls

Researchers identified three primary types of preliminary voting methods:

 

Plurality Voting: Each participant selects one option. This method is common but often the least effective in reaching optimal decisions.

 

Ranked-Choice Voting: Participants rank options in order of preference. This method can provide more nuanced insights than plurality voting.

 

Multivoting: Participants have a set number of votes they can allocate across different options. Each participant allocates those votes among the different options to reflect their degree of certainty/preference. This method was found to be the most effective in leading to better group decisions.

 

Why Multivoting Works Best

Multivoting stands out because it encourages deeper consideration of each option before discussions begin. In a study simulating counterterrorism teams, groups using multivoting were more likely to identify the most threatening suspect correctly. This method requires participants to process information more critically, leading to more thoughtful and informed discussions.

 

Multivoting also helps mitigate "groupthink," a phenomenon where the desire for harmony or conformity results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. By allowing participants to express varying degrees of preference, multivoting keeps the decision-making process open and encourages diverse viewpoints.

 

Steps for Effective Use of Straw Polls in Meetings

Here are key steps managers can take to implement straw polls, especially multivoting, in their meetings:

 

Introduce the Concept: Explain to your team the purpose and process of straw polling. Emphasize that it’s a preliminary step to gauge initial opinions and foster deeper discussions.

 

Choose the Right Method: Depending on the decision at hand, select the appropriate voting method. For most scenarios with a manageable number of options, multivoting is recommended.

 

Set Clear Guidelines: Provide clear instructions on how participants should allocate their votes. For example, if there are three options, give each participant ten votes to distribute as they see fit.

 

Conduct the Poll: Have participants submit their votes anonymously to avoid social pressure and bias.

 

Analyze and Discuss Results: Review the distribution of votes with the team. Use this as a starting point for a detailed discussion, focusing on why certain options received more or fewer votes.

 

Encourage Open Dialogue: Foster an environment where team members feel comfortable discussing their reasoning. This helps uncover underlying insights and promotes a thorough evaluation of all options.

 

Make the Final Decision: After the discussion, conduct a final vote if necessary. The initial straw poll should have helped clarify preferences and facilitated a more informed decision.

 

Practical Applications

Multivoting can be particularly useful in scenarios such as:

 

Hiring Decisions: When choosing among a few candidates, allow team members to distribute their votes based on their assessment of each candidate’s strengths.

Project Prioritization: For teams deciding which projects to pursue, multivoting can highlight the most promising initiatives.

Strategic Planning: When evaluating strategic options, multivoting can help surface the most viable paths forward.

 

Conclusion

Straw polls, especially multivoting, are powerful tools for enhancing decision-making efficiency in meetings. By encouraging deeper initial consideration and reducing groupthink, they lead to better, more informed outcomes. Managers should integrate these methods into their meeting protocols to foster a more effective decision-making environment.

 

Implementing multivoting may require a shift in how meetings are typically conducted, but the benefits far outweigh the effort. By leveraging this approach, managers can ensure their teams are making the best possible decisions, ultimately driving better results for their organizations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maximizing Team Effectiveness: The 60/30/10 Rule Explored

 

Leaders and managers in are constantly seeking effective strategies for team development and management. One pivotal concept that emerges from the academic work of Wageman, Hackman, & Lehman (2005) is the 60/30/10 rule. This framework offers a pragmatic approach to enhancing team performance by allocating focus on team design, launch, and ongoing coaching.

 

Understanding the 60/30/10 Rule:

The 60/30/10 rule posits that 60% of a team's effectiveness is determined by its design, 30% by how it is launched, and the remaining 10% by ongoing coaching and leadership. This rule stems from extensive research and provides a clear roadmap for managers striving to build successful teams. 

Team Design (60%):

The foundation of a high-performing team lies in its initial design. This involves first creating a real team (characterized by clear membership and boundaries, and requiring interdependent work to achieve their goals), selecting team members with complementary skills, and ensuring a clear and compelling direction. After the these initial “team essentials” are decided, team design then focuses on providing the structure and support necessary for effective collaboration. This initial work demands significant attention from leaders, as a well-designed team is more likely to navigate challenges successfully and achieve its objectives. 

Team Launch (30%):

Launching a team effectively is the second critical phase. This includes activities such as articulating clear goals & priorities, defining roles and responsibilities, establishing norms, and building initial momentum. This is also a good time to outline key performance measures and deadlines and establish critical workflows and dependencies. A successful launch sets the tone for team interactions and can significantly impact the team's trajectory.

Ongoing Coaching (10%):

Finally, ongoing coaching & leadership, though contributing to a smaller portion of the team's effectiveness, is vital for sustaining and enhancing performance. This involves providing feedback, facilitating conflict resolution, and helping the team adapt to changing circumstances. Effective leaders do this to reinforce the team's direction, support skill development, and ensure the team remains aligned with its goals.

Prioritize Team Design:

Given that so much of a team’s effectiveness hinges on its initial design, leaders should invest time and resources in getting this right. Be clear about the team’s goals and how they align with the skills and experiences of key team personnel. This includes considering individual competencies, the team's size, and the diversity of perspectives. Think about what systems your organization has in place to support actual teamwork, such as team conference rooms (or virtual meeting spaces), training and incentives to support good team membership, and individuals who can act as team coaches.

Effective Team Launch:

Launching a team is more than a kick-off meeting. It's about setting clear expectations, fostering a shared vision, and building a strong team culture from day one. Team leaders need to be proactive in facilitating these elements to ensure a smooth transition into the working phase.

Ongoing Coaching Still Matters:

While it’s a smaller part of the overall model, ongoing coaching should not be underestimated. Regular check-ins, feedback sessions, and adaptability to change are crucial for maintaining team morale and performance.

 

The 60/30/10 rule provides a structured approach to team management, emphasizing the importance of the initial phases of team development. By understanding and applying this rule, leaders and managers can significantly enhance their teams' effectiveness, leading to improved performance and success in achieving organizational goals. This framework underscores the need for strategic planning in team formation and the pivotal role of leadership in guiding teams through their evolution.

 

Navigating Work-From-Home Resistance: Strategies for Success

As the debate between remote work and returning to the office heats up, many professionals find themselves advocating for the flexibility to work from home. Despite its proven benefits, there's a significant pushback from managers who are inclined towards traditional office settings.  This friction requires a strategic approach to convince higher-ups of the merits of remote work while ensuring productivity and effective communication. Let's outline three critical strategies to overcome resistance, excel in a work-from-home setting, and reassure your manager about your productivity: establishing clear contracts about work outputs and goals, managing communication with multiple stakeholders, and ensuring your productivity is visible to your manager.

1. Craft Clear Contracts about Work Outputs and Goals

The cornerstone of a successful work-from-home arrangement, especially in the face of skepticism, is clear expectations. A well-defined contract or agreement outlining your work outputs and goals can be a game-changer. Many news articles over the past 2 years have outlined managers’ concerns about work-from-home, and many of those concerns boil down to “I’m not convinced that employees who work-from-home are as productive as those here at the office. This requires you to work with your manager to set clear goals, update your manager regularly on your progress, and demonstrate your adaptability to changing needs.

Set Specific Goals: Collaborate with your manager to define SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). These goals should include project deliverables as well as stakeholder satisfaction metrics (e.g. what do your team members, customers, or other stakeholders think of your work and how you treat them?). Make sure that you have opportunities to collect data on these metrics periodically, to give yourself time to adapt and improve. 

Regular Updates: Agree on a framework for frequent updates. Whether it’s through weekly virtual meetings or reports, these check-ins are vital for staying aligned with your manager's expectations. These updates should include time for you to briefly discuss your progress, as well as raise any difficulties you are experiencing. Don’t flinch away from these problem areas or attempt to hide them, but instead raise them with your manager along with your thoughts about the best way to go about solving the problem, while asking your manager for their thoughts and feedback. 

Finally, be prepared to be adaptable. Your colleagues who work in the office are exposed to and participate in a number of real-time conversations, both formal and informal, about changes to products, projects, and internal procedures. Remote workers often miss out on these conversations, especially when they are not yet formalized. This means that you may get caught off-guard by certain changes. Your ability to successfully roll with these changes and adapt to them in a positive manner will be critical for your manager to develop trust in you as a remote worker. 

2. Manage Communication with Multiple Stakeholders

When advocating for remote work, emphasize your communication strategy. With stakeholders ranging from team members to clients, clear and consistent communication is essential.

Diverse Communication Tools: Use a mix of communication tools appropriate for different types of interactions, such as emails for formal communications and instant messaging for quick queries. When possible, choose real-time communication tools that allow you access to non-verbal information (e.g. facial expressions, tone of voice, etc.). But this doesn’t mean that everything needs to be a videoconference – sometimes a short phone call can work just as well and, for most of us, this feels less formal. 

Establish Communication Norms: Set clear rules about your availability and expected response times, balancing transparency with the need for work-life balance. This is especially important for those who work with colleagues in different time zones, or those who rely on work-from-home to care for other family members. 

Proactive Engagement: Actively reach out for feedback, participate in discussions, and offer assistance. Similarly, reach out to your manager and colleagues to learn about different aspects of the project, not just what you are working on. This proactive approach keeps you connected and demonstrates your interest in and dedication to teamwork and the project itself.

3. Keep Your Productivity Visible to Your Manager

In a remote setting, ensuring that your contributions are recognized is crucial. Visibility can be a key factor in reducing managerial concern about work-from-home arrangements.

Track and Showcase Your Progress: Utilize tools to track your tasks and share your progress. Regular updates can provide tangible proof of your productivity. This can through project management tools, sharing customer feedback, or just a simple spreadsheet. Share this information periodically with your manager to keep them informed and to ask them for feedback.  Similarly, make sure to be vocal about specific successes you had. Whether you beat a challenging deadline, used or developed a new solution to a technical challenge, spent time assisting a colleague or received a rave review from a customer, make sure your manager knows about this!

Conclusion

Overcoming resistance to work-from-home arrangements requires a strategic approach focused on clear communication, goal alignment, and visibility of productivity. By adopting these strategies, you can effectively negotiate for remote work and excel in your role, demonstrating that productivity and success are not confined to the traditional office space.

Designing Success: Key Strategies for Launching a Virtual Team

The inception of a virtual team is a critical phase that sets the tone for future performance and success. As the world increasingly embraces remote work, leaders are tasked with the challenge of not just managing, but successfully designing and launching virtual teams. This post focuses on the essential strategies that leaders must employ to ensure their virtual teams are structured for success from the outset.

Designing a Virtual Team:

1. **Define Clear Objectives and Roles**: Before a virtual team kicks off, it’s crucial to establish clear objectives. What is the team's purpose? What are the expected outcomes? Alongside this, defining specific roles and responsibilities for each team member helps avoid confusion and overlap, ensuring a smooth workflow.

2. **Selecting the Right Team Members**: The composition of your team is pivotal. Choose individuals not only for their technical skills and expertise but also for their ability to work independently, communicate effectively, and collaborate in a remote environment. As part of the team launch, make sure everyone knows why each person was chosen and what they will bring to the team.

3. **Establish Communication Norms**: Effective communication is the lifeblood of virtual teams. Set guidelines for how and when the team will communicate. What should team members expect for regular meetings? What communication tools should be used for other interactions? What is the expectation for timeliness in responding to different types of communication (especially important for teams that span multiple time zones and cultures)?

Establishing these norms early on prevents misunderstandings and ensures everyone is on the same page.

4. **Build a Strong Team Culture**: Cultivating a strong, shared culture in a virtual team is challenging but essential. Create opportunities for team members to interact informally and get to know each other beyond this specific project. This can include virtual coffee breaks or informal online gatherings. Remember that not everyone feels comfortable sharing their personal lives – consider setting up time for team members to talk about other work projects they are/have been involved with. 

5. **Set up Systems for Collaboration and Accountability**: Implement systems that promote collaboration and hold team members accountable. This includes regular check-ins, shared digital workspaces where progress can be monitored, and clear metrics for evaluating performance. Remember that as a leader you should be focused more on outcomes than activity. 

6. **Encourage and Model Effective Leadership**: As a leader, your behavior sets the tone. Be proactive in communication, transparent in decision-making, and supportive in addressing challenges. Your approach to leadership will directly influence the team’s dynamics and effectiveness.

Launching a virtual team involves more than just bringing together a group of remote workers. It requires thoughtful planning, the right mix of people and technology, and a focus on creating a cohesive, effective work environment. By following these strategies, leaders can design virtual teams that are not only equipped to tackle their tasks but are also engaged, collaborative, and aligned with their objectives.

Are you in the process of launching a virtual team, or have you recently done so? Share your experiences and insights in the comments below. 

 Want more creativity from your team? Do brainstorming right!

 

Creativity, and the innovation that stems from it, are increasingly valuable for all organizations these days. Some folks even go so far as to say that creativity & innovation are “the engine of growth”. But how do we help our teams actually become more creative?  There is lots of advice out there, such as “encouraging a growth mindset”, building greater trust within the team, and reducing meetings to block out time for creativity. These are all helpful ideas, and I’m not disparaging any of them. But another, simpler, strategy is to go back to a technique most of us are familiar with and have used in the past (or so we think): brainstorming.

 

Brainstorming as a tool and technique goes back to the 1940’s and the work of Alex Osborne, an advertising executive. Osborne formalized the technique in his 1953 book Applied Imagination. In this work, he described the brainstorming technique and laid out the 4 rules for effective brainstorming. Now normally, when I tell people that there are “rules” for brainstorming, they are quite surprised. After all, brainstorming is supposed to be about creativity, new ideas, and even breaking down the rules, right? But following the rules helps to ensure an effective brainstorming process. 

The four rules of brainstorming were set out in Osborne’s 1953 book and are relatively simple.

1)    The more ideas, the better. This is an easy principle of brainstorming to accept. The basic idea here is that the more ideas we have to work with, the greater chance we have of finding an idea that meets all of our criteria in the end. So we sit down and get as many ideas out as possible.

2)    The crazier the idea, the better. This is also an easy principle of brainstorming for folks to accept. Indeed, this is what we often are looking for when we set down to “brainstorm”, is for someone to toss out that really crazy, off-the-wall, creative idea that will lead to the next iPhone, Tesla, 3-D printer, or similar. As more ideas come out on the table, we increase our chance of getting these truly innovative ideas. But we also need to explicitly give people permission to come up truly outlandish ideas, as opposed to censoring their ideas to fit into the constraints that we have (or believe we have). 

3)    “Piggy-backing”, or building on someone else’s idea is welcome. As we listen to someone else’s idea, we often have thoughts about how we could add a little twist to it. This may not count as a “new idea” from an intellectual property perspective, or as we think about “who to give credit to”. But from a brainstorming perspective this is encouraged because these slight variants give rise to other ideas as people continue to build on and react to what others have said.  In my experience, some teams are perfectly okay with this rule. Other teams have a harder time with it, often when team members  feel competitive pressure to come up with the “most” creative idea as individuals, or that they are being evaluated or judged based upon the creativity of the ideas that they come up with individually. If this is happening in your team, you need to do some work moving people from a sense of individual performance to team-based performance.  

4)    Deferring judgement on any idea until all the ideas are on the table. This is the rule that most groups tend to have the most difficulty with. Whether the judgement is a simple “oh, that would be too expensive”, or even a positive “hey, that’s a great idea!”. Once anyone within the team evaluates an idea, all the team members start to evaluate their ideas before they share them. This then leads to fewer ideas overall, and fewer truly innovative ideas. Numerous research studies have found that evaluation apprehension (the fear of having our ideas criticized by others) leads to a significant decrease in both the quantity and quality of ideas that come forward in a brainstorming session. 

So what does this mean for you as a leader? First, understand that as a team leader you have some responsibilities in terms of how the brainstorming session is designed. For example, how large and how diverse a group do you want in the brainstorming session? What background information do you want people to be familiar with beforehand? Are you able to bring in an outsider to help facilitate the session or will you do it yourself?

 

Second, make sure that your team members are familiar with, and truly understand, the 4 rules. An effective brainstorming session is more than simply bringing people together and hoping for spontaneous creativity. Make sure to tell them that they won’t be judged by what they say, and that any idea (even those that might seem impractical or even infeasible) are welcome. Talk to them about the role of the facilitator, and that person will be doing during the process. 

 

Finally, follow up on that by your behavior in the brainstorming session. Demonstrate the rules of brainstorming by piggy-backing off others ideas and putting truly crazy ideas out there. If you or your team is relatively new to true brainstorming, consider having a “warm-up round” first where you work on an unrelated problem, to practice the behaviors of putting ideas out there as quickly and with as little filtering as possible. 

 

Finally, remember that while brainstorming can be an excellent tool, there are plenty of variants out there as well that may be more appropriate for you to use in your situation. For example, if you have a large group and you think people will be talking over each other, or putting ideas out faster than they can be captured, you might consider the “nominal group technique”. If you want to use the brainstorming process to have team members realize the connections between their ideas and viewpoints (for example, if members believe there is conflict or tension within the team), consider using team mind mapping. If you want the brainstorming process to help your team get more comfortable with both coming up with and critiquing ideas and plans, consider the “sub-team” approach – break your team into 2 or more smaller sub-teams. Give the sub-teams time to come up with a certain number of ideas, then have each sub-team present what they think is their best idea for discussion, feedback, and improvement in the larger team session. 

 

Ultimately, the idea generation technique you use will depend on your specific goals and the problems or constraints you have to work with. But a common key across all of these techniques is forcing people to suspend judgement for a period of time to let ideas come out. The more you can do as a team leader to cultivate that sort of intellectual openness and psychological safety in your team, the more creative and innovative thinking you will start to see from your team members. 

Questions to ask when your team is having trouble

 

 A recent article in Harvard Business Review titled "6 Questions to Ask Yourself When You're Frustrated with Your Team" provides some excellent advice about how you might change your own behavior as a team leader. But like so many articles on managing people (either as teams or as individuals), it focuses almost entirely on managing interpersonal interactions and not nearly enough on the importance of creating a context that sets people up for success.

A former mentor of mine, Harvard University psychologist Richard Hackman, once opened a keynote speech by saying that managers shouldn't try to motivate people to change. Instead, he said, managers should focus on putting in place conditions that made positive outcomes more likely, and negative outcomes less likely. He described what he meant by this in his book Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances, in which he described what he found through his research on teams in a variety of different industries and settings, from airline crews to intelligence teams to symphony orchestras. Through his research, Hackman identified several critical conditions that supported successful teams across all these very different contexts. In this blog post, I will focus on the first three, which Hackman termed "The Essentials". 

1. Having a Real Team. Real teams have well-defined, stable membership. The team and its members have the authority to conduct their work and make critical decisions without always needing "permission" from someone at a higher level. Finally, real teams conduct their work in an interdependent manner - meaning they do much of their work together, as opposed to coming together in periodic meetings to share updates. So as you look at an underperforming team, ask yourself questions like - do they have a core, stable membership that gives them the consistency needed to learn over time? Do they have the authority they need to complete the task without constantly waiting for external approval? If this appears to be the problem, consider helping the team stabilize its membership. This is often done by reducing the size of the team. 
   
   
2. Having a Compelling Direction. Team members are motivated by having a shared task that is clear, challenging, and consequential. They have been charged with completing specific goals, but have not been told to use specific means to reach those goals. As you look at the team, ask yourself if there is a clear, shared endpoint at all the team members are working towards? Will the challenge of reaching that goal require the team members to work with and learn from each other? Does the team have the authority to manage their own work in terms of how they meet the goal? If this is an issue, help the team by providing clarity around the end goal, and explaining the importance of the project to the organization.
   
   
3. Having the Right People. A major reason that teams work well is that they bring together a diverse group of people in terms of backgrounds, perspectives, and skill sets. But to do that, team members need to have (and trust that all other team members have) certain base levels of skill and competence in their own specialties. When teams don't have the right people, it sometimes is because one or more individuals don't have the knowledge, skill, and ability you thought they had. However, just as often it is because there are too many team members who are just too similar in terms of the skills they bring to the table, their training and the way they solve problems, or the perspectives that they bring. Take a close look at how people were selected for this team, who was chosen, and why? Was it truly based on their knowledge, skill, and ability? Or have some individuals become the "go-to" people for your team?

Thinking about improving your teams by focusing on issues of overall team design has multiple benefits. For starters, focusing on team design allows you to improve the team for the long term. By changing one or more underlying conditions, you remove a problem as opposed to trying to "manage" that problem. So it requires less of your time and effort down the road. Importantly, focusing on underlying issues of team design also helps you (and others) think of poor team performance as being caused by poor conditions (which you can fix), as opposed to poor team members (which you can't). This then leads to lower levels of conflict between you and the people on the team, as you aren't thinking of them (or your own leadership) as the "problem". 

I'll be writing more about various aspects of team design in a later post, so keep looking!

3 Steps to Improve Your Team Debriefs

 

After Action Reviews (AARs) were institutionalized as a practice in the 1970’s by the US military to formalize learning from experience and improve team and unit performance. Their use contributed to significant performance increases, causing this innovation to be rapidly adapted outside the armed forces. But is your organization using them correctly?

 

The AAR was developed as a more participatory alternative to a supervisor driven performance critique. The idea being that by having the critique be driven by team members, rather than a supervisor, a more complete picture of events and interactions can be developed and shared. This shared understanding, in turn, leads to the opportunity to make changes in plans, routines, resources, and interactions, leading to improved performance. The good news is that AAR’s have been shown to improve performance by up to 25%. 

 

But what if your team reviews could be helping you even more? Recent research by Angus Fletcher of the Ohio State University, Preston Cline from the University of Pennsylvania, and Matthew Hoffman of the FBI, conducted in partnership with the US Army Special Forces and described in this article from Harvard Business Review, shows a path forward. 

 

The core strategy they identify is to create greater accountability within the team by developing a clear, shared understanding of what happened. To do this, they advocate 3 steps.

 

1)    Focus on people, not process. Addressing an abstract, impersonal process may feel “safe”, especially early in a team’s life. But that impersonal safety also leads to a lack of passion. Instead, they suggest you personalize the impacts of what happened, and what change could achieve. Do this by focusing on team members, customers, and other stakeholders. Bring their experience and perspectives into the review to highlight the importance of improvement.

2)    Focus more on what happened rather than what could be done. Traditionally, AAR participants spend roughly 25% of the review discussing initial expectations and the instance/performance itself, and 75% of the review focused on the performance gap and what to change. Fletcher, Cline, & Hoffman suggest flipping that ratio to spend much more time ensuring that everyone has a clear, shared sense of what actually happened and that everyone shares their perspective – especially those with divergent points of view. Doing this increases available information, decreases defensiveness, and reduces what psychologists refer as Shared Information Bias. This allow problem areas to be defined with greater clarity and develops a shared focus for creative problem solving later on.

3)    Get clarity and triangulation. Whether someone is claiming credit for a positive outcome, or assigning blame for a negative one, make sure they are clear about how/why “behavior A” led to “outcome B”. What other factors might have influenced the outcome? What other outcomes did this behavior cause? Do others who saw or were present for this behavior agree with this logic?

 

Adding these features to your team debriefs may feel uncomfortable at first, but over time will lead to a greater focus on change and accountability for you and your team. 

Problem people, problematic environments

Anyone who has ever taken a class in organizational behavior, teamwork, leadership, etc. knows that frustration that comes when the instructor is asked a question and the answer is some variation of “it depends…”  There are very few truly reliable answers, answers that cut across contexts, in our field.

One of those truly reliable answers, comes from some of the early work of Kurt Lewin (1890-1947). In 1936 Lewin first proposed the theory that B=f(p*e); that is that for any given person, their behavior (B) is a function of the person (p) (or rather their personality) and the environment (e).

While it easy to look at this theory know and say, “of course, that is just common sense.” One needs to remember however that in the early 20^th century, psychologists (and indeed many others) were fully immersed in the “nature vs. nurture” debate. Freudian psychology, advances in psychological testing such as the IQ test, and longer held traditions such as Plato’s philosophy of the mind and religious beliefs about the soul fueled many people to believe that people behaved in certain ways because that was simply “who they were”, that certain behavioral patterns were inherent in an individual because of genetics, early childhood environment, predestination, etc.

In contrast to the “nature” side of the debate, those on the “nurture” side looked to the philosophy of Aristotle, Locke, and the learning theories developed by initially by Pavlov, Thorndike and others. They argued that human beings are highly pragmatic and shape their behavior in response to the environment. These arguments ultimately led to Pavlov’s theory of operant conditioning or behaviorism, that behavior is purely a function of punishment and reward.

Lewin’s “middle road”, that behavior is based upon both an individual’s personality and their environment, helps us to realize how complex human behavior actually is. Not only does a manager need to come up with potentially a different motivation/reward system for every individual (because people are motivated individually), one needs to realize that events will happen in the work environment which will impact the behavior of even the most focused, most dedicated worker. The problem is how does the manager interpret and react to those situations?  Our tendency (as I will talk more about in a later post) is to interpret these incidents by focusing on the “p” in Lewin’s equation – that a person’s behavior is due to their own motivation, personality, goals or values. However it is critical to remember that sometimes people are simply reacting to the environment around them, whether that be reward systems, deadlines, authority figures, or other aspects of their environments.

The solution then, when encountering a person engaged in problematic behavior, is to first understand whether this particular behavior stems primarily from the person or the environment. Only then can you take the appropriate actions to try to change the behavior.

The functions (and liabilities) of hazing

I don’t wan this blog to be dominated by news about sports teams, as they are only one type of team and are not representative of most of the teams that are in the work world. However recent news events from the sports world do periodically provide great opportunities for us to reflect on teams in general, what makes them work, what we expect of team leaders, etc.

Just this past week there has been a flurry of information about hazing in the American National Football League (NFL). For those of you who haven’t followed the story; Jonathan Martin, a player for the Miami Dolphins, threw down his tray in the team cafeteria and left the team practices without speaking to anyone after being the butt end of what some on the team describe as a series of pranks. These “pranks” reportedly ranged from the use of racial slurs and epithets (Martin is black), a staged event where multiple white team members got up and left the table as soon as Martin sat down, and a series of text messages from one team member in particular (Richie Incognito) that included a variety of threats to Martin and his family.

On the sports radio channels, there have been a lot of people calling in and giving their opinions on whether or not the actions by Incognito and other team members or the reactions by Martin are appropriate given this particular context and the “macho” culture of an NFL team.  While many people (and radio hosts) condemn the actions of Incognito in particular; others also condemn the reactions of Martin, stating that he should just accept this as a natural part of the “hazing” that occurs in this type of culture, and that these types of actions are designed to test the “mental toughness” of new players.

I have never played professional football, so I won’t try to speak with authority on the culture within an NFL team, what is or is not appropriate language, etc. I will however talk about the use and function of “hazing” rituals within teams, as these rituals happen in all sorts of different organizations.

Hazing rituals play a valuable role in organizations. They communicate important information about group norms and expectations, establish and enforce status hierarchies, and reinforce key values. But most importantly, these rituals establish a sense of community. In an organization where people enter as a cohort group (for example a fraternity or sorority, or a military boot camp), the hazing rituals help to establish bonds between the members of the cohort as they all go through the experience together.  In other organizations where members enter one at a time, these rituals reinforce that the individual is a junior member of the team; and that while senior members of the team will engage in this hazing of the junior member, they will also protect that junior member of the team from significant threats coming from outside the team.

These rituals are not intended to test the “mental toughness” of team members; and there is an important reason for that. The actions of Incognito and others served to isolate Martin, which does indeed “test” one’s mental toughness. Isolation is used as an interrogation tactic by police, military and intelligence units as a way to break down an individual. In order to build a team, however, you do not want your team members to feel isolated. You want them instead to always believe that they can always count on their team members for help and support. This way, they become more comfortable engaging in risky behavior (for example, putting one’s body in front of multiple 270 pound defensive ends) and committing themselves to the goals of the team, knowing that in turn the other members of the team will protect them.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychology, made a very interesting point about the importance of feeling like you are a part of a larger unit. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud commented that most military leaders felt that the perception of panic within a military unit led to the dissolution of the unit, and that therefore one must act directly to reassure the members of the unit that they would be successful. Freud however noted that this thinking was backwards. It isn’t that panic leads to the dissolution of the unit. Instead, it is that the realization that we are not in fact a single unit that leads to the perception of panic. From the beginning of human history, one of our biggest advantages against predators that were larger, stronger and faster than us was that we were able to coordinate our collective efforts to act as a single unit, a team if you will. When we act as a team, we become bigger and stronger, and better able to deal with a variety of external threats.

Therefore from the perspective of the Miami Dolphins, the biggest problem with this incident is not that there may be one individual player who is treating others badly, or even that there may be problems with racism within the team. The biggest problem is that there are behaviors going on that are designed to isolate individual players, preventing them from integrating with the team. And when that happens, you are always going to be playing at least one man short.