A few months ago I wrote about some interesting findings from MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence. Looking into what supports group intelligence, the researchers found that individual intelligence of group members did not impact group intelligence as much as having more women on the team. (Want to increase the collective intelligence on your team? Invite more women!)

Anita Wooley and Thomas Malone were cautious to point out that this correlation has less to do with gender as such as with some kind of social sensitivity that is more likely to be found among women. That’s where another study published by the British Royal Society comes in: Its finding, in blunt terms, shows that testosterone makes women more egoistical. Researchers of the University College London asked women to take testosterone (or a placebo) and assessed their collaborative behaviors. The researchers found that women who received testosterone tended to insist on their opinion and showed less cooperative behaviors.

These findings aren’t a verdict on frequently observed gender patterns. Biological factors influence but don’t determine social behaviors. We have a choice – whether it is to collaborate with non-collaborators or to curb competitive group behaviors that impair group intelligence.

We are reminded of the job at hand to make a positive difference on the team’s ability to perform better than its members. Here are two concrete, actionable conclusions for your team:

• Distribute “airtime” equally – i.e. make sure no one dominates the discussion. (That’s, by the way, the second top factor for increased group intelligence Malone and Wooley found.)
• Cultivate social attunement – i.e. put yourself repeatedly into the shoes of your team members. Being emotionally connected mitigates egoistical decision-making and thus increases collective intelligence and team performance.

Collaboration, it turns out, is as much a predisposition as it is a habit of excellence.

More accurately, but surely less provocatively, these articles challenge not collaboration itself but how we approach it. The overlapping criticism of both articles revolves around the beliefs that avoiding criticism and relying on group-based interactions such as brainstorming will lead to better outcomes. And, as pretty solid research suggests, the authors have indeed a point. We concur: Our experience with teams and organizations led us to pick the quote on our home page: “The biggest predictor of company failure is complacency.” Few teams have the courageous conversations and the creative conflict that would make them great. But is it really one way to collaborate over another? Let’s look at the shades of grey:

• False: Teams should avoid conflict.
• True: Teams should avoid the wrong kind of conflict such as emotionally loaded (“affective”) conflict over personality or procedural conflict over routine tasks. They should, however, have the right conflict. That is, engage in exploring multiple perspectives, in playing with possibility, in daring to be over the top, and in pointing to what needs improvement.

• False: Team members should criticize each other more.
• True: This statement needs qualification. A structured debate can yield better results, as research clearly suggests. But you want to have a debate that opens up joint problem-solving rather than shuts down individuals! Ideas have been around for a while. A favorite is “dialogue vs. debate“.

• False: Brainstorming doesn’t work.
• True: Poorly done brainstorming doesn’t work.
  Both articles criticize brainstorming for its tenet of “not criticizing ideas”. I rarely see proper brainstorming happen and believe that brainstorming’s bad reputation results from it being performed poorly. Here is a primer of how to do proper brainstorming…

• False: Working in a group is advantageous over working individually.
• True: You will need both to succeed. And true: Too few of us have quality “alone time” to do some serious creative thinking that springs from immersing yourself deeply and without interruption. Group time cannot be a substitute for this. Any research on cognitive diversity and problem-solving preferences shows that people’s preferences represent different polarities. Think MBTI – introverts and extraverts prefer different work environments. We approach problem-solving cycles differently. We need opportunities to do our individual reasoning – but then build on each other’s ideas for the highest possible group intelligence.

Social scientists and marketing researcher have been studying forms of manipulation for quite some time now. There are some interesting findings you can use to “manipulate” yourself in sticking to your resolution. One is based on the concept of the shaken self. While the “think positive” paradigm has its place, looking at our shortcomings and unfulfilled goals can be more effective in helping us reach our goals.

Consider this:

• One person is asked to write a short essay highlighting his healthy life habits. He does so. Afterwards, he’s offered a choice of two small rewards for his work: an apple, or a pack of M&M’s. He makes his choice and leaves.
• After that, another person is asked to write a short essay highlighting her healthy life habits. As she’s about to begin, the sociologist asks her to write it with her non-dominant hand. After she does so, she is offered a choice between an apple or a pack of M&M’s.

The second person is significantly more likely to make the healthy choice. Why is that?

In this study from Stanford, social scientists explore the effects of a “shaken self”: At its core lies our need to bolster our self-confidence. The act of writing about one of your virtues with your non-dominant hand induces a temporary state of lower confidence in the trait you’re writing about. The test subjects who wrote with their non-dominant hand tended to choose rewards that would bolster their self-image with regard to the virtue they were writing about.

So how does this help you or your team to do better in pursuing aspirations? Here are some keys:

• You are more likely to make an extra positive effort when you are in shaken state.
• So shake yourself. Personally – or if you wish to bring this to your team – collectively. Take the proverbial “look in the mirror”, use 360 tools, invite external feedback. Anything that grounds you in a reality less tainted by wishful thinking but by the reality of what you bring to your life and the people in it.
• Once you are shaken – considers what really matters to you now or in the future. List some options that you see to take action.
• Pick the option of your choice with a commitment to pursue it for a week/month/quarter.
• After that period, take stock, shake yourself, and reconsider your options anew.
• Make a new commitment for a limited period of time…

Many cognitive biases make us prone to manipulation – but we can also use them to manipulate ourselves to reach more effectively goals of our own.

Reminding ourselves of our shortcomings or off-target goals is not necessarily a downer. It can very well be rocket fuel to build tenacity of purpose.

Happy exploring.

What makes team members team players?

Collaborative Coaching and Resonance Strategies combine their experience in organizational/team effectiveness and in employee research to explore this question.

While team-based work has become the predominant form of collaboration, few teams truly know how to collaborate. Many just go through the motions.

The “problem” is that collaboration cannot be mandated. It’s a decision people make and this decision is as much emotional as it is rational. And that’s why we ask for both – rational and emotional drivers for team collaboration. Resonance® provides a unique and powerful survey methodology that helps us explore behaviors and motivations of team players.

Resonance survey methodology emulates the brain’s natural processes by asking for spontaneous emotions and then combining rational thinking. The combination of qualitative and quantitative, rational and emotional feedback allows powerful conclusions about structural and emotional enablers for a collaborative team culture. We are using a brand new metric – net passion that explores the gap between the ideal and the actual experience of collaboration team members have on their teams.

We had a number of interesting insights during our first pilot study focusing on team collaboration in cross-generational teams:

• More than half of our sample of 100 respondents yearned for more cross-generational diversity on their teams.
• Those who desire more cross-generational teams feel actually also less engaged.
• On teams where ages differ more widely spanning several generations, team members more often find that workload is not shared effectively – leading to a sense of “under-accomplishing”, i.e. falling short of their own expectations in terms of results.

Let’s look at that last point: Making progress in a given day is the single most important contributor to people ending their workday with positive feelings.

Moving ahead occured on 76% of people’s best-mood days. By contrast, setbacks occurred on only 13% of those days. On bad days, these numbers are literally flipped. (Source: HBR May 2011, The power of small wins)

In other words, you can’t cultivate a collaborative team culture without enabling small wins for team members. But will individual progress support team collaboration? What supports your experience of ideal team collaboration?

“They say ‘practice” makes perfect.’ Of course, it doesn’t. For the vast majority of golfers it merely consolidates imperfection.”
Henry Longhurst

The phrase, “leverage your strengths” has become commonplace in the language of talent development positive psychology. By now you pretty much want to believe that the secret of success is to become more of who you already are–even if you happen to be sociopathic.
Those who “push” this attractive philosophy simply are saying that the best way to do good work is to do what you are intrinsically good at–not necessarily what you are interested in doing.
We now have measures of your “signature strengths” (Seligman) and ways to “discover” your strengths (Buckingham & Clifton). It does seem to be true that deploying our “signature strengths”does seem to have a significant clinical impact on raising our psychological well-being ((Seligman, M, Steen, T., Park, N, & Petersen, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60, 410-421)).
But, is also seems to be true that strengths overdone can become our weaknesses.
My friend and CEO of Personal Strengths publishing has made a career of selling a widely used and popular style tool called the Strength Deployment Inventory(SDI) that has conceptually is based on this premise. If you emphasize being too direct, then others might experience you as autocratic, inflexible and pushy. If you are emotionally controlled and calm in the face of stress others may see you as uncaring, non-responsive and possibly even fearful. If you practice being inclusive, participative and involving others in decision making you might find you don’t make independent decisions or take risks without input from others.
In a recent HBR article, Kaplan & Kaiser show that it is just as detrimental to overdo a strength as it is to under do it–those expressing the “right amount” of a strength showed an associated with a measure of leadership success ((Kaplan, R. & Kaiser, R. (2009).Stop overdoing your strengths. Harvard Business Review. February 2009, 100-103)). As they point out, leveraging and emphasizing strength might lead to actually interfere with being flexible of adapting any behavior at the other end of the continuum. If you receive feedback that you are admired for your perseverance in the face of ambiguity and challenge you might find that “letting go” and backing off won’t come easy–even if it is clear that ” repeatedly banging your head against the wall” creates a dent in the wall and a possible concussion that further impairs your reasoning and thinking.
We have looked at this “leveraging strengths” concept from an interesting angle in the last few years. In our use of 360 feedback assessments we have an interpretation based on the Johari Window concept that shows self-ratings compared to others who provide feedback in a graphic manner.
We can classify individuals into four types based on the profile that emerges from their self-other ratings. We have polite labels for these quadrants that include:

1. Potential Strengths–Underestimation of self-ratings compared to others
2. Confirmed Development Areas–both self and other ratings are low
3. Confirmed Strengths–both self and other ratings are high
4. Potential Development Areas–Self ratings are inflated relative to others

When we find individuals who are the “Underestimators” and have a substantial number of competencies appearing in the “Potential Strenghts”quadrant as we show above, our feedback meetings are pretty predictable.
First, we find that almost all of the clients with this profile tend to display strong perfectionist tendencies, set high goals for themselves and others and are very self-critical.
Second, they tend to be “hyper-vigilant” to the negative things in their report as if they are trying to confirm they really aren’t as strong or solid as others experience them to be.
In short, they tend to blow off all the “strengths” as seen by others and dwell on anything that isn’t perfect in their report (or the one open ended comment that is neutral out of 25 that are overwhelmingly positive and ruminate on it for years).
No matter what we try to do, these clients won’t leverage their strengths as seen clearly by others. All they want to do if focus on what they see is their “developmental opportunities” or weaknesses. Yep, even when they “discover” their strengths they just tend to glance beyond it and move to “what they don’t do very often or very effectively.
I’m sure some of these clients had parents who focused on the one “B” they got on a report card when the rest were all and “A” or pointed out the “soccer goal they missed” even though they made the only other one in the game.
So, maybe we need to stop the love affair with this concept of “leveraging strengths” as appealing as it sounds.
Not everyone is a winner even if you have a 6th place ribbon to prove it….Be well….

Dr. Ken Nowack is a licensed psychologist and President & Chief Research Officer of Envisia Learning, a leading provider of results-oriented, 360-degree feedback tools. Ken blogs regularly at Results vs. Learning, a blog for results-oriented practitioners.

Say – in your particular work context – you need to work with people who bring the spirit of collaboration to your project. Good news. Reasons to collaborate are manifold – and you may find Yochai Benkler’s new book “How cooperation triumphs over self-interest” a valuable read to see such causes in action.

But what if one individual does not play nice? Should you still collaborate?

Two interesting facts:

1. Few people actually consciously choose their collaboration strategy.
   In fact, in a variety of experiments roughly “50% or participants systematically and predictably behave cooperatively… A good number of these participants cooperated unconditionally – even when it came at a personal cost.” [The unselfish gene” by Yochai Benkler, Harvard Business Review August 2011].
2. How you are primed makes all the difference.
   In another set of experiments, participants were either told to expect collaboration (“community game”) or competition (“Wall Street game”). In the community game, 70% started as collaborators – and continued this strategy regardless of other players’ behavior. In the Wall Street game, the opposite happened. 70% played as competitors and stuck to it. Among the 30% starting as collaborators, 50% switched their strategy to competition.

I would argue that indeed we should choose how and even whether to cooperate – but not only when we expect to be in a competitive environment but any time we are confronted with a lack of cooperative response. Why? Because even if we are predisposed to be cooperative (as Benkler and others with a hopeful view on social behavior point out), we need to build an environment that sustains that predisposition. Leniency may erode such a culture.

Axelrod, in his seminal book “The evolution of cooperation” lists two crucial levers for building a collaborative culture: “Reciprocity” and a “large shadow of the future” – or in more common terms tit-for-tat and bring-the-price-for-defection-to-the-now.

It’s our job as leaders and collaborators to strengthen and maintain organizational and team cultures that reinforce collaboration and discourage – in the language of game theory – “defection”.

Clearly, encouragements to cooperate should not only focus on external pay-offs. As Benkler remarks, “we need people who aren’t focused only on payoffs but do the best they can to learn, adapt, improve, and deliver results for the organization.” But depending on the emotional maturity of your team’s or organization’s culture, you may start with Axelrod’s findings: Running dozens of different game strategies in the prisoners’ dilemma ranging from highly competitive to permissively cooperative, Axelrod found that quickly and consistently responding to provocation along with later forgiveness and clear signalling of future behavioral expectations created the most successful game strategy for playing an inter-dependent game.

What makes work more meaningful? “Help your co-workers and staff see progress.” In their research on ways to increase team productivity, Teresa Ambile and Steven Cramer found that small wins matter. (Harvard Business Review, May 2011, “The power of small wins”)

Making – even small – progress proved to be the overwhelming factor for how satisfied people felt at the end of the day. (So plan accordingly.) But it’s not just about progress. It’s about progress within a context of meaningful work.

In short: If you as a leader – formal or informal – consider it your job to increase individual and team effectiveness, then you are also a chief meaning officer.

How connected are you and the people around you to the mission of your team, division, or organization? While most places have a statement of purpose in place, too few can relate their activities to it.

We recently facilitated a strategy retreat with business leaders. Besides considering objectives, scope and competitive advantage, much thought was given to how the new strategy would have to be communicated across five levels of the organizational hierarchy – communicated in ways that allow everyone to relate their work responsibilities with the revised strategy. What’s commonly referred to as “line of sight” is way too often a walk in the dark for those not at helm.

Ambile’s and Cramer’s research corroborates our gut feeling about a few crucial leadership behaviors that support a sense of meaning. Imagine a 360 assessment: Perhaps the following behaviors are evident, but do they really happen?

• Don’t dismiss but actively acknowledge people’s contributions and ideas
  While many aspire to “diversity of thought”, “open dialogue”, and “collaborative spirit” take a hard look at the behaviors that really happen around you. How quickly is an idea dismissed by not building on it? Would you like to be the devil’s advocate on your team? How much sincere appreciation goes around and do you celebrate success?
• Increase sense of ownership
  How often do reassignments happen? How small are the packages people are expected to deliver? Is hyper-specialization eating into people’s ability to relate the bigger picture?
• Create closure – before shifting focus or priorities
  When you look at the image next to this paragraph, your mind will automatically complete the form. Our brains are hard-wired to seek closure.
  For many, however, work priorities and expectations change so often that it feels like there they will never see the light of the day. 64% of participants in booz&co’s strategy coherence survey struggle with conflicting priorities. Consider your culture: How much foresight and planning happens? How strategic is it? Is there a commitment to a defined scope that shows what to say “yes” or “no” to? If you really need to shift focus, summarize what was accomplished rather than just dropping it.
• Communicate the possibility of unexpected changes in customer/market requirements
  “Working for naught” is highly frustrating for any one of us. Taking contributors whose efforts went to waste seriously does not only mean informing them as early as possible about such changes – but also about reasons why those changes were unexpected.

With all the hopes and promises of open innovation, team-based creativity, and peer-driven collaboration, effective ways to increase collective intelligence are hotly debated. One repeatedly replicated finding is that IQs of individual members don’t correlate with a group’s collective intelligence – measured by its ability to solve complex problems and to make effective decisions.

In other words, teams are more than just a collection of top talent.

This month’s recent Harvard Business Review adds a stunning piece of data to the debate about what makes a team smarter. More women!

Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone show evidence of a female factor, plotting the collective intelligence scores of the 192 teams they studies against the percentage of women on those teams. Teams with more women tended to show above average collective intelligence scores.

The point here is not so much gender itself but social attunement. Remember the example from Freakonomics? Buying books about raising a child doesn’t make you a better parent. Even reading these books doesn’t necessarily make you one. What counts is that you want to learn more about good parenting.

What makes extraordinary teams stand out is not (just) the individual talent – but the ability to listen to each other, share criticism constructively, or to build on others’ ideas. High performing teams don’t talk about diversity of thought, they live it.

Recently, while doing research on gender differences among leaders, I found the data shown in the picture above. The Center for Creative Leadership had compiled the MBTI® types of more than 30,000 leaders and found the four predominant types shown. While these four types comprise only 22% of the general population, 58% of all leaders find themselves in these categories.

But there is more: Each of these types is a lot more popular with men than with women. In fact, women are outnumbered by a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio.

The effect? Current leadership culture – or perhaps unconscious bias – mean that “thinking” and “judging” are heavily overrepresented. With it comes the emphasis on rationality rather than social attunement, on closure, on planning, on be bright – be brief – be gone rather than on process, on the exploration of options, on adaptability.

Inviting more women into teams results in breaking up this “mono-culture”.

So, after all, perhaps the finding that more women on teams increase collective intelligence isn’t so surprising after all.

In my work with teams I often hear the same complaint: “we aren’t strategic enough.” I have heard this from Fortune 500 leaders as much as from not-for-profit board members.  I have heard this from individuals as well as managers.

Why is this such a common problem?

First off, teams are often focused on one of two sides of a continuum. Either they are focused too much on factors that are either beyond their control (e.g. company policies, board decisions, market trends, SOPs) or they are focused on issues that are far too detail-oriented (e.g. “Why do you need these extra two weeks?”, “How will you team implement this?” ). In my experience, this can be due to lacking clear decision-making processes, but it can also be due to avoiding more difficult conversations about how much control one party wants over someone else’s functional area. As a result, high-level issues within the control of the team are left for side-bar conversations at best or are not discussed at all, at worst.

Decision consultants such as the Strategic Decision Making Group suggest actively discussing a “decision hierarchy”. Focusing on this “middle zone” allows teams to have the strategic discussions they need to come to conclusions about the decisions to be made.

Questions that teams can ask themselves:

• Are we talking about things beyond our control, like company policies? (It’s okay to vent when necessary, but we need to accept what’s outside our circle of influence.)
• Is there really a need for me to be part
• Are we “in the weeds”: are we focused on the details of execution versus sitting at the “helicopter view”?
• What decision/s would get us closer to our primary objective?
• What decision/s would get us away from our primary objective?

Facilitating discussions about what this team’s “middle zone” is and how the team knows that it is on or off the mark make a huge difference to the effectiveness of a team. The more a team can share a common vocabulary (“hey everyone, is this discussion putting us in the weeds?”) and can have a meta-conversation in the moment (“what are we doing in this meeting, right now, that’s undermining our ability to be strategic?”) the more likely the team is to actually remedy the issue that compromises them. In fact, one team we coach established a “strategy altimeter”: During important discussions, one person would make sure that the level of the discussion what not too high or too low. That role would rotate among team members. Teams need observable criteria that tell them when it is “flying too high or too low”. When was the last time your team had such a discussion?

The other issue I see frequently is that saying “we are not strategic enough” is actually code for something else entirely, or in fact looks like the team lacks strategy but what’s really undermining the team is related to team structure or dynamics. To this point, a team can ask themselves the following questions:

• Are our roles and responsibilities potentially too vague or overlapping so as to create confusion, frustration, or even blame?
• Are our decision-making guidelines clear? Do we know who is responsible for making certain kinds of decisions, who should be consulted on decisions, who should be advised, and who should be informed? (also known as the “RACI” system)
• Are there personal dynamics on the team that are undermining our effectiveness? For instance, do people gossip about one another behind closed doors? Are there personal vendettas or grudges? Is trust lacking between team members?
• Are people so overworked that they are mired in the details of getting work done and lack the staff to appropriately delegate so they can act at a higher level?

The next time you think your team isn’t strategic enough, consider what may be contributing to that phenomenon.  It’s only through an accurate diagnosis can you come up with an effective cure.

Tapping the promises of diversity of thought, crowd-sourcing, and of co-created, open innovation hinges on answers to these questions which have been at the center of much fascinating research. One different perspective is presented in “The Smart Swarm” by Peter Miller, a highly fascinating exploration of how animal swarms communicate and “negotiate” to make collective decisions.

What Miller and others find is that swarms do a really fine job at mastering the complex challenges they face. In fact, their strategies are so effective, that approaches to solve highly complex problems such as the optimization of airline networks are modeled on swarm tactics.

To put it provocatively: Bees tend to better than most teams in many ways. One area where bees excel is the friendly competition of ideas.

Researchers investigated how a bee swarm decides where to build their next hive – a question as crucial to survival as it gets. What they found is that highly specialized agents – scouting bees – take on the task of selecting a new site, come to their conclusion, and then advocate for their choice. So far, this looks familiar.

But once conflicting preferences are found, something quite different happens: Before continuing to advocate for “their” choice of location, each scout explores the alternative preferences of their fellow scouts: Literally, all scouting bees visit the sites that other scouting bees suggested for the new hive.

Few teams have such a culture of a friendly competition of ideas. Advocacy is the norm, fierce advocacy rarely an exception. Once the personal preference is established, arguing against alternatives dominates the decision-making process. At worst, this takes the “I am right” form. No visiting of “alternative sites” – neither figuratively nor mentally.

Replacing an advocacy-approach to decision-making with a “friendly competition of ideas”-approach could markedly improve the quality of decision-making for many teams. What could this look like?

• Make team members responsible for finding options and alternatives – not for looking for “the best choice”
• Identify and explore strategic alternatives before trying to settle on a one option
• Create transparency about the value measures that will be used to measure trade-offs and to select among alternatives

A frequently cited leadership insight touches on a core responsibility of a leader: Rather than leading followers, a leader’s job is to cultivate leaders. Could that mean that a core responsibility of a decision-maker is not (just) to make decisions but to cultivate a climate in which decisions can be made?

A recent post (“The Evolution of Cooperation in Teams”) looked into how collaboration can emerge not as a result of someone’s direct effort but due to putting the right culture in place. It turns out that curbing vertical control and encouraging the exploration of competing alternatives helps teams to substantially increase the quality and effectiveness of their decision-making.

Bees can do it and so can ants. Can we?