You Get What You Encourage . . . and Tolerate
Several years ago, a well-known, high-end retailer wanted to move toward more of a collaborative, team-oriented selling approach. Historically, each sales professional had been primarily an individual contributor. A meaningful part of their compensation was based on their own sales, and they tended to view certain customers as their own.
What happened when the sales professionals were first asked to work more collaboratively? We visited several of their stores and unobtrusively watched them in action. Here’s an example of what we noticed.
A customer entered a store carrying a shopping bag with the store’s logo on it, a good indication that she was there to return a previous purchase. As she approached one of the sales counters, the salesperson answered the phone, and as a result, he wasn’t available to help process the return. Seeing this, the customer veered diagonally and approached a sales rep at the next counter. But there’s a catch. We were close enough to notice that the phone had not rung! The first sales rep knew that if he spent time helping the customer return a prior purchase, he might miss the opportunity to make a sale to a paying customer. And if one of his big spending “regulars” came in during that time, he’d be unavailable and might miss a big sale. To avoid that risk, he pretended to answer the phone. Unsurprisingly, the phantom phone call ended the moment the customer approached the other counter.
Was the sales professional’s behavior irrational? He might not have been doing what was best for the company (or the customer), and he certainly wasn’t being a good team member, but his actions weren’t irrational. In fact, he was responding in a manner that was consistent with the conditions in which the sales team operated. The store was staffed with capable people, but the cultural norm was that each person was primarily on their own. Moreover, the way rewards and promotions were distributed reinforced individualism. The salespeople with the greatest sales volume made the most money and were most likely to be promoted. Handling a return or taking the time to help another salesperson with “their” sale was not reinforced by either informal norms or formal human resource practices. As you might imagine, this frustrated those sales professionals who had a collective orientation and who ended up absorbing many “team first” tasks, such as handling returns, that adversely affected their own compensation.
Asking the sales professionals to work together as a team was insufficient to move the needle. They were well trained in their individual jobs and possessed most of the skills they would need to work as a team, but the conditions inhibited teamwork. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Upton Sinclair was fond of saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” It was only when the company modified the conditions that the sales professionals’ behaviors started to change.
This chapter is about conditions—the context or environment in which a team operates. Conditions include tangible elements such as organizational policies and practices (e.g., that guide compensation and promotion decisions), resources (e.g., are enough people assigned to the team, does the team have access to the information they need, do they have ample time), and less tangible elements such as senior leader support and organizational culture.
No team works in a vacuum. Some of the conditions they experience may be favorable and serve to facilitate or enable team effectiveness. Others can act as constraints or inhibitors. We encourage you to monitor the conditions that can affect your team and to do all you can to ensure they are as favorable as possible. But let’s also acknowledge that some things can’t be changed. These are the “givens” that your team may need to learn to work around. As you’ll see in this chapter, it is helpful to think about conditions as operating on two levels: the broader organizational or business unit level and the local, team-specific level.
Thought Experiment. While reading this chapter on conditions, ask:
• Which conditions can have the greatest influence on your team, either as enablers or inhibitors?
• Which of the “local” conditions should you try to improve for your team? Why?
• Which conditions will you need to accept (not dwell upon!) and try to work around?
• If you are in a position to influence the broader “organizational” conditions, what changes would enable teams to be more effective throughout the business unit or organization?
Conditions are probably the least studied of the drivers that we explore in this book. But based on our experience and drawing upon research that has examined organizational culture, human resource management practices, change management, and psychology, we conclude that conditions matter a great deal. They influence the extent to which people are willing and able to coordinate with one another, as well as the degree to which a team learns, adjusts, and innovates. They establish whether the team has adequate resources to accomplish their mission. When conditions are highly unfavorable, even good teams can fail.
When conditions are more favorable, teams exhibit significantly more learning behaviors as Chris Wiese of Georgia Tech and his colleagues discovered in their meta-analysis of 54 studies and over 4,800 teams. Learning behaviors help a team adapt and perform effectively over time.
Conditions also influence a team’s creativity, innovativeness, and performance. In a study of 104 teams across 14 companies in South Korea, Yuhyung Shin and researchers from Seoul National University found that team culture played a key role in determining creativity and performance levels. And a study conducted by Doris Fay, Helen Shipton, Michael West, and Malcolm Patterson found that manufacturing teams in the United Kingdom were more innovative when conditions allowed them time to engage in thoughtful reflection.
When employees perceive their work environment to be supportive, positive things happens. James Kurtessis and a team of researchers conducted a meta-analysis on the effects of “perceived organizational support.” When perceived support is higher, employees are more likely to trust their coworkers, leaders, and employer. They more strongly identify with the organization, and more employees go beyond their required job responsibilities to help the team and organization succeed (e.g., maybe they’ll handle more customer returns!). Of course, trust and identity are enablers of teamwork. When trust is higher, it is easier to collaborate. When employees identify with the organization, they are less likely to think only about themselves. And when team members go above and beyond their own job requirements, it promotes team cohesion and effectiveness.
On a more tangible note, resourcing is a “condition” that directly impacts performance. If a team lacks access to critical information, necessary equipment, or other resources, performance will almost certainly suffer. And when a team is understaffed, even well-intended team members may lack the “bandwidth” to backup and help one another.
Collectively, the research on culture and the work environment confirms a well-known axiom in psychology—the social context creates potent forces that can constrain, encourage, or otherwise guide human behavior. That is true for teams as well as individuals.
Collectively, the research supports what we know intuitively—conditions have a significant impact on our behaviors.
Psychologists like to say that behavior is a function of both the person and the situation. But how much does a situation influence behavior? That depends on the “strength” of the situation. Social psychologist Walter Mischel advanced the concept of situational strength to describe the relative power of a situation to control individual behavior and minimize the influence of personal attributes such as personality (you may know of Mischel as the Stanford researcher who conducted studies with children using marshmallows to explore delayed gratification).
To assess situational strength, you need to look beyond the objective characteristics of the situation and consider the way people “see” and interpret a situation. Perceptions may be consistent with objective reality, but not always. For example, in the same situation, two people can pick up on different cues, or they may see the same cues, but interpret them differently. From a psychological perspective, the perceptions and interpretations of the players are what matters.
Some situations are so strong they essentially mandate behaviors, others only offer hints or “nudges” about what to do, and weak situations may offer no clues about expected behaviors. A situation is considered to be “strong” when everyone involved is likely to see it and interpret how to behave in the same way and when it clearly incentivizes those behaviors. In other words, strong situations are much more likely than weak ones to induce conformity. The stronger the situation, the less behavior is determined by personal preferences or personality. For example, let’s consider what happens when we drive a car.
You are driving along and approach a four-way stop sign at a busy intersection. What do you do? It doesn’t matter if you have an assertive personality, you will almost certainly stop your car at that intersection. All drivers at the intersection are likely to interpret a stop sign in the same way. It evokes a similar understanding of what is expected (“I need to stop and wait my turn”), and the situation incentivizes stopping due to the physical and legal consequences of ignoring it. But what happens when a driver approaches a yield sign? The majority of drivers slow down or even stop, allowing others to proceed first. But assertive drivers may behave more aggressively, perhaps even speeding up to claim “their” spot as they merge into traffic. The situational cues are fairly strong, but not as strong as at the stop sign.
Now consider how people behave when driving on a multilane highway. Have you noticed how some people stay in the passing lane even though they are driving slower than everyone else? Eduardo does that quite often, much to Scott’s dismay. Driving slowly in the passing lane is a rarely enforced infraction, and there are no tangible reminders to cue people to move over (unless you count the people who honk their horn at Eduardo), so personal preferences guide behavior on the highway much more so than at a stop sign or even a yield sign. The same is true for teamwork. Some situations send very strong signals that encourage or discourage people to collaborate with one another. Other situations send weak signals about what is expected.
In some instances, it is impossible to get things done without collaborating, so teamwork is essentially “baked into” the work, and a certain amount of coordinating will always take place. For example, on a manufacturing assembly line, where product moves from one person or station to another, these isn’t much room for individual freelancing. Similarly, in underground long-wall coal mining, there are inherent coordination requirements that must be followed to ensure the safety of all involved. Everyone is aware of these requirements—they are baked in.
Even when teamwork isn’t baked in, if coordination requirements are clear and teamwork breakdowns have serious consequences, the situation provides a strong nudge that encourages cooperation. For example, in deep-sea saturation diving, small teams of divers work together performing maintenance and construction tasks hundreds of feet below the surface of the sea. A dive team often consists of three divers, who descend together in a diving bell. One team member stays in the bell while the other two perform undersea work assignments. The “bellman” is the first line of defense to ensure the safety of the other divers. Team members rotate positions, so one day a person may be a diver and the next day, a bellman. Given the danger of the job and the fact that team members rely on each other so deeply (pun intended), monitoring and supporting one another doesn’t feel optional. Even a naturally selfish person will collaborate when the cues are strong enough.
Keep in mind that “strong” doesn’t mean positive; it means influential. You can have a strong situation in which many of the cues reinforce “me-first” behaviors. We’ve seen organizations where the policies (e.g., the use of a forced distribution rating system), social norms (e.g., managers won’t eat lunch with “underlings”), and career-related decisions (e.g., promoting toxic employees because they generate revenue) encourage competition and discourage cooperation.
In most settings, the nature of the situation (“conditions”) combines with the attributes of the people involved (e.g., “capabilities”) to determine if a team will work together successfully. So, let’s take a closer look at the conditions that matter, including ones that send signals (strong or weak) about whether being a team player is truly valued, whether it is okay to be a jerk, and whether it is acceptable for junior people to speak up. We’ll also take a look at the conditions that can tangibly enable or constrain teamwork, such as the availability of resources and time. There are a dozen or so meaningful organizational and local, team-specific conditions that should be on your radar screen. You can read about these in the following discussion, and in the Tools section, you’ll find a set of Diagnostic Questions you can use to review the conditions that currently exist within your organization.
Some conditions can influence many teams simultaneously. For example, company or business-unit wide policies and practices (e.g., about rewards) and senior leadership behaviors and communications (e.g., do senior leaders work well with one another) send widespread signals that can confirm or refute the importance of teamwork. In the following text, we describe these conditions and provide a set of questions you can use to assess current conditions and stimulate a conversation how to improve them.
As you read this section, we encourage you to reflect on the organization-wide signals that you experience. Do they support or inhibit teamwork? Which could be improved?
When policies and practices are designed to work in an integrated manner and reinforce a common message, they can send a “strong” signal about expected behaviors. How do policies and practices influence teamwork? Let’s look at five of the most salient ones.
1. Hiring. As job candidates go through the recruiting and screening process, they get their first glimpse at how teamwork is viewed in the organization. If they are never asked about their teamwork skills and experiences and instead are only assessed on their technical expertise and individual accomplishments, it sends an early signal that teamwork is relatively unimportant. The message is, “You don’t get a job at our company because we think you’ll be an effective collaborator, you get it because of your individual expertise.” Do your interview protocols and assessment tools assess teamwork skills?
In addition, managers and employees who actively participate in the hiring process learn about the pool of candidates and eventually see who was chosen. Each hiring decision can provide subtle signals about the importance of teamwork. For example, does your company seem comfortable hiring people with strong technical skills but who demonstrate no signs of being a team player? Do they ignore warnings about a candidate’s selfishness or incivility? If this happens with some regularity, it doesn’t matter if employees have been told, “We value teamwork around here,” because they see that hiring practices contradict that statement.
2. Onboarding. Every new hire goes through some type of onboarding experience, formal or informal. Formal onboarding is intended to communicate to a new hire what to expect and what is expected of them, so it sends initial signals about teamwork. But even if a new employee doesn’t don’t go through a formal orientation, they certainly will experience an informal onboarding process with their own team.
Sometimes onboarding simply consists of the new team member being told by the team leader, “Here’s your desk,” which sends the message, “Don’t expect teammates to help you.” In contrast, if team members are involved, helpful, and supportive of the new hire during the first few weeks, it increases the likelihood that the new team member will conclude that working cooperatively and helping teammates is an expected norm.
3. Promotions and opportunities. People generally believe more of what they see than what they hear. One tangible manifestation of the relative importance of teamwork is seen when people get promoted.
Show us who gets promoted in your organization, who gets the desirable developmental opportunities, and who is given choice work assignments, and we can tell you if teamwork is really valued. Employees pick up on these signals as well. If teamwork is important, then how well someone collaborates should make a difference when deciding if they are worthy of a promotion. When the “me-first” people get the choice assignments and promotions and great team players get overlooked, it sends a powerful message to everyone. As a character in Swedish novelist Fredrik Backman’s book Beartown said, “Culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit.” Permitting selfish people to get ahead can define your culture in unintended ways.
4. Performance management. During the performance management process, employees receive feedback from and engage in discussions with their team leader. Some fairly strong signals get sent in that process, which conveys the “real” expectations about teamwork. Some of the signals surface during the formal performance review, while others occur during informal performance management discussions.
Consider how the following elements might discourage teamwork. The company’s rating form doesn’t include any reference to teamwork or collaboration. The goals that get established are exclusively about individual accomplishments. Team members are never asked about who has been helpful to them. Performance review discussions focus strictly on individual performance. And a forced distribution rating system is used, where a certain percentage of employees must be designated as underperforming. Hmmm.
A company can say that teamwork is valued, but if the performance management process is all about “me” and not at all about “us,” employees will learn what really counts. Australian software company Atlassan revised their performance review process to strongly weight how each employee impacts others on their team. Their intent is to signal that they will no longer tolerate brilliant jerks, employees who produce results by making things difficult for everyone around them.
5. Rewards and recognition. In “strong situations,” behavioral expectations are clear and incentivized. Compensation and reward decisions, both financial and nonmonetary, are intended to clarify and reinforce behavioral expectations. In practice however, rewards can have unintended consequences. If a team member is told that he needs to contribute to the team but is only rewarded and recognized for his individual accomplishments, we can’t fault him for concluding that teamwork isn’t really an expectation. The message is, teamwork may be nice, but it’s not what really matters around here.
Of course, many individuals are intrinsically motivated to collaborate, support their teammates, and think “we before me,” but the way that rewards and recognition get distributed over time sends signals that can crush or enhance that motivation. We acknowledge that it is hard to design effective reward systems. At a minimum, we encourage you to consider if your company’s reward and recognition system is inadvertently discouraging people from collaborating.
6. Leadership development. While teamwork isn’t just about the leader, the team leader does play a disproportionately large role in determining a team’s success. How do managers and project leaders learn how to become effective team leaders? While a few people may “naturally” figure it out, most need some guidance, so a key condition for driving effective teamwork is having the right leadership development practices in place to build key team leader competencies.
How does your organization prepare people to become effective team leaders? For example, does your leadership training teach people how to lead a team, or does it mainly focus on managing individuals and making business decisions?
What about the role of senior leadership? Even when senior leadership is hidden away on the top floor of corporate headquarters, their behaviors and communications can be surprisingly influential in establishing whether teamwork becomes an organizational norm. In some ways, senior leadership sets a cultural tone and creates the overarching conditions for teamwork throughout the rest of the company.
1. Modeling of behaviors. Although much of what senior leaders do on a day-to-day basis may be invisible to most employees, their behaviors still find a way of influencing people throughout the organization. A team of European researchers, led by Anneloes Raes, examined over 60 top management teams. They found that when members of the senior leadership team worked together in a cooperative manner, employee satisfaction and retention levels in the organization were significantly higher. This happened even though most employees didn’t interact with the senior leaders! Apparently, what happens behind closed doors doesn’t stay behind closed doors. Stories about senior leadership makes its way through the organization.
Senior leaders also send signals through their personal behaviors. If a leader yells at subordinates or talks disparagingly about colleagues, it sends the message that incivility is acceptable. Peter Pisters, the CEO at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, recently told his employees that they will never see him raise his voice. He appears to understand the detrimental effect incivility can have on collaboration.
2. Communications. We’ve said that behaviors generally matter more than words, but senior leader communications are carefully scrutinized by employees for clues about what’s important. The nature and content of senior leader communications can reveal insights about the importance of teamwork. Do they emphasize how teamwork is needed for the business to be successful? Do they tell stories that feature successful collaboration and teamwork, or do they only focus on individual accomplishments?
Employees are sensitive to cues that indicate senior leaders are not on the same page, so consistency of communications also matters. For example, when members of a leadership team return from a planning meeting, and each leader delivers a different, unit-centric message to “their people,” employees compare what they heard and uncover the discrepancies. When that happens, employees can easily conclude that senior leadership isn’t unified and doesn’t work as a team, leading them to think, “Why should the rest of us try to collaborate, if they don’t?”
3. Creating psychological safety. Throughout the book we’ve emphasized the need to establish psychological safety, because the research provides a compelling picture of its importance. Psychological safety starts at the top. Senior leaders set the tone when it comes to psychological safety.
To what extent do senior leaders make it easy for others to speak up, voice concerns, and offer divergent opinions? If top leaders typically crush dissention, chastise others for bringing bad news to them, or publicly berate people for making a mistake, that style of leadership trickles down level by level, making it harder for team leaders throughout the organization to establish psychological safety.
Before we move on to team-specific conditions, we want to say a few words about two other subtle cues that send signals about teamwork. These cues are generally “weaker” than the ones we previously discussed, but they can provide nudges that encourage or discourage collaboration.
• Who eats meals or drinks coffee together? In many high schools, cliques of kids cluster together at lunch. The athletes don’t sit with the science wizards, who don’t sit with the musical kids, etc. As a result, you won’t see much “cross-clique” communication or collaboration in high school.
That same phenomena can be seen in some corporate settings. If the norm in your organization is for managers to only eat meals with other managers, it tends to reinforce the hierarchy. If employees only have lunch with members of their own department, it can reinforce silos, amplify a potential fault line, and make cross-team coordination just a little harder. Interestingly, Kevin Kniffen and his colleagues at Cornell University found that firefighting teams that shared meals together more frequently reported slightly higher performance. To be fair, the firehouse is a unique place, and we don’t think eating together will help your team overcome performance problems. But who you spend time with at lunch or over coffee can send a subtle message to others about where the collaboration boundaries lie.
• What does the physical workspace look like? The configuration of the work environment can also send subtle but interesting signals about hierarchy and teamwork. For example, in some military meetings, there is a clear distinction made between the individuals who are and are not given chairs with wheels. The implied message is, if you don’t have wheels, you should probably be quiet. When Scott led a session with senior leaders at the US Naval War College, he asked the people with wheels (high-ranking) to turn and face someone without wheels (lower ranks) and work together on a problem, which initially created some angst! As an aside, we’ve noticed that military leaders are every bit as competent as their counterparts in the private sector. Most of them have learned how to keep the hierarchical culture from inhibiting team performance.
Chairs aren’t the only physical features that send signals about hierarchy or can make collaboration a bit easier or more challenging. Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, and founder and CEO of the financial services and media company that bears his name, is also one of the wealthiest people on the planet. Yet at Bloomberg’s new European headquarters in London, his desk is no larger than any other employee’s desk. When designing that building, they also intentionally built in a large number of locations where small and mid-sized groups can assemble to work together. They were quite conscious of how the physical space can affect collaboration and tried to make it more of an enabler than an inhibitor.
Organizational conditions set the stage for collaboration and provide the overarching backdrop and big picture message about teamwork. But each team also operates within their own set of local conditions, experiencing differing degrees of resource availability, time availability, authority levels, and their own assigned mission. These team-specific factors can create a “strong situation,” where in some cases, a team cannot be successful until conditions are improved.
Local conditions can be quite powerful. We’ve seen oases of outstanding teamwork within individualistic or punitive organizational cultures, as well as the opposite—teams that struggled to work together despite operating within highly collaborative organizational cultures. Here are four of the most salient team-specific conditions to keep an eye on:
1. Resources. While obvious, it is worth stating that if a team is understaffed, underbudgeted, and/or lacks access to critical information or equipment, it is almost assuredly going to struggle. Its resilience will be tested, and its performance will be adversely affected. It is really difficult, and in some cases impossible, to “team away” a severe lack of resources.
A scarcity of resources can also lead to selfish behavior, as team members compete for what little is available, and subsequently trust often declines. In a highly constrained environment, a team needs to focus attention on garnering additional resources, prioritizing existing resources, and generating creative ideas for getting things done.
While a lack of resources creates problems, an abundance of resources doesn’t guarantee higher levels of team effectiveness. When Scott and a colleague conducted a study of state agencies, they found a curvilinear relationship between resources and innovation. When resource levels were very low or very high, innovation levels were lower. It seems that when resources were quite low, they were unable to adapt, and when resources levels were quite high, they didn’t feel a need to adapt. So throwing additional resources at a team isn’t always an effective way to improve team performance—but ignoring a significant lack of resources will almost always result in poor performance.
2. Time availability. You can think about time as a specific type of resource that can greatly influence teamwork. Consider the following thought experiment.
Imagine that we have asked you to “team up” with two other people. We’ve given each of you two tasks to perform. If you focus and work briskly, each task should take around seven to eight minutes to complete. We tell you to “work together” and give you a total of 15 minutes to complete all the tasks. Your own tasks will take up virtually all the time allotted. How much coordination is likely to take place? Under those circumstances, the lack of any “free” time creates such a strong constraint, it is almost impossible for you and your teammates to coordinate. The moral of the story is, it is unreasonable to expect people to monitor, assist, and collaborate with their teammates when they have no time to do so. Recall the research with manufacturing teams in the United Kingdom; teams that had time to reflect performed better. Coordination takes some time.
3. Autonomy/decision-making authority. A team is typically granted a certain amount of autonomy to make decisions. The boundaries may be explicitly communicated, but not always. Some teams learn by making decisions and then getting “feedback” when they overstep the unstated bounds of their authority.
Some organizations consistently attempt to push decision-making authority as far down the hierarchy as possible, and as a result, many of their teams feel empowered. Other organizations are more reluctant to delegate authority. When a team lacks adequate autonomy, they often spend an inordinate amount of time seeking approvals and “managing up” to decision makers. Insufficient decision-making authority can significantly constraint team performance.
The question for any team is whether they have ample authority to make the decisions they need to make in a timely manner. If not, they should clarify where and why a little additional autonomy would help and make a case for it up the chain of command.
4. Team mission/purpose. Teams are typically formed with an intended purpose or mission. When the team has a mission that is compelling, engaging, and clear and when that mission can’t be accomplished through individual excellence alone, it is likely to encourage team members to think and work more collaboratively.
When a mission is compelling it makes it easier for team members to identify with the team. That’s important. A meta-analysis conducted by Jessica Mesmer-Magnus and her colleagues revealed that when team members identify with their team, it has a positive influence on team effectiveness. If a team’s mission is not obviously compelling, the team leader should help the team clarify the types of contributions they do or could make and attempt to establish a sense of team identity that they can all rally around.
We’ve worked with teams that have big, compelling, team-oriented missions, including teams that treat cancer patients or help send astronauts into space. But a team’s mission need not be that grand for the team to have a unifying sense of identity. For instance, we’ve seen accounting, manufacturing, and customer service teams that possess an engaging, unifying sense of purpose. Purpose and identity can help a team succeed.
We’ve highlighted 12 of the most influential organizational and team-specific conditions that can impact on team effectiveness. But it helpful to remember that organizations and teams exist inside a broader cultural context. Norms of behavior are not identical throughout the world, and those differences can impact how individuals work together. You can think of cultural norms as one of the conditions that a team must navigate.
Many researchers have examined cultural differences, including Daniel Balliet and Paul Van Lange, from the University of Amsterdam. They conducted a meta-analysis of 83 previous studies, examining how trust, punishment, and cooperation work in 18 different societies. One of their findings was that punishment was more likely to promote cooperation in societies where trust is high. We suspect that when trust is high, punishing someone is interpreted as being done for the larger good rather than to maintain personal power. While their meta-analysis examined societal rather than team-level behaviors, it was a useful reminder that norms vary around the world, and as such, team members may interpret situational cues and actions differently in different cultures.
For example, consider societal norms about “power distance.” High power distance means that people with less power accept that others have greater power than they do, and as a result there tends to be greater deference to authority. In lower power distance cultures, such as The Netherlands, it is more readily acceptable for people with less authority to speak up. In contrast, countries such as Malaysia or Panama tend to demonstrate higher power distance. In general, it is usually easier to establish psychological safety in cultures with lower power distance than in cultures with a stronger deference to authority. But imagine the challenge of creating psychological safety when some team members come from cultures with high power distance and others have grown up in a low power distance culture.
On a more parochial level, the way cues are interpreted can vary across cultures. Remember the driving analogy? If you’ve ever driven in New York City, you may have noticed that traffic signals don’t carry the same weight as they do in many other places. To a New Yorker, a red light might mean, “Squeeze one more car through the intersection,” and a yellow light doesn’t mean caution, but rather, “Hurry up before the light becomes red.” When people from a more law-abiding location drive in New York City, confusion often occurs, typically accompanied by the sounds of New York drivers cursing. This is analogous to what can happen in cross-cultural teams when team members have grown up experiencing different norms about speaking up and deference to authority, but perhaps with less cursing.
A vast array of cultural norms can surface in a cross-cultural team. Some of these difference are relatively minor. For example, do we shake hands when we meet, should we engage in small talk at the start of meetings, and is it appropriate for me to ask about your family? Others can lead to more significant problems. For example, in some cultures it is rude to end a conversation before the other person is ready, which means I might be late to my next meeting out of respect for the person with whom I’m currently meeting. If all the parties at my next meeting share those cultural norms, they probably understand why I’m late. No problem. But, if the people in the next meeting are from a culture where a person is expected to end their prior meeting “on time” to arrive “on time” at their next meeting (e.g., in much of the United States), they will probably interpret my late arrival as a show of disrespect. My well-intended behavior probably cost me points from my trust account.
We saw first-hand how cultural differences manifest themselves when we facilitated a meeting of managers for a global company. Within the larger room, participants had been assigned to small working groups. The groups represented the way the company’s business was structured, so people were assigned along geographical lines. For example, one table had managers from northern Europe, another from southern Europe, a third was from Japan, etc. We had them discuss a series of business challenges at their tables, with time allocated between topics for them to share their thoughts with the larger group. Here’s what we observed. Whenever we ended a small group discussion period, participants at one of the tables loudly continued their conversation. They truly seemed to be enjoying the disagreements they were having! To stop them, one of us would walk to their table, put our hand on the shoulder of the person who was talking at the moment, and announce, “We’re starting the large group discussion now.” In contrast, at another table, we learned that we needed to give the managers time to warm up before they were comfortable tackling the problem. It was important for them to uncover who had the most seniority at the table. When they disagreed, they did so very carefully and quite respectfully. If you are aware of the different cultural norms around the globe, you might be able to guess which tables responded in which manner. There wasn’t a right or wrong in this instance, and not everyone behaved consistent with the norms of their region, but it was easy to see the ways broader cultural expectations influenced how each team behaved.
We can’t do an adequate job of covering the various cultural differences in this book. If you are working with a cross-cultural team or if you will be joining a team in a different part of the world, we encourage you to talk to your colleagues about the cultural norms you may experience. Recognize that your typical way of operating might be interpreted quite differently by your new colleagues!
Remember the story about the sales professionals at the start of this chapter? They were being asked to work as a team, but organizational and local conditions failed to support those expectations. In fact, some of the conditions, such as their compensation policy, were in direct conflict with the company’s desire to promote a team-oriented sales approach.
Fortunately, when they made some changes, we started to see the emergence of more collaborative behaviors. One change they made was to establish a certification program for all their sales professionals. Each salesperson would maintain a portfolio that documented their sales performance as well as their contributions to the team, including indicators that they handled their fair share of returns and supported their colleagues. As the sales professionals attained higher levels of certification, their compensation percentage would increase, so there was a positive consequence to being recognized as a more complete contributor to the team.
Senior leadership communicated their support for the effort. And more important, their behaviors demonstrated their commitment. A tipping point occurred a few months into the change. One of the long-tenured sales professionals who generated a lot of revenue said that he didn’t want to participate in the program. He felt that because he made a lot of sales and had been around a long time, he shouldn’t need to do the “other stuff.” To senior leadership’s credit, they told him that they were confident he could succeed as part of a team, and they wanted him to be part of the company’s future, but if he didn’t participate in the certification effort, there wouldn’t be a job for him. Period. He eventually decided that he could succeed in the team environment and completed his certification requirements. Most important, the rest of the organization learned that leadership would not tolerate “It’s all about me” behaviors, no matter how much revenue a person generates. The conditions made the expectations clear and easy to interpret and incentivized teamwork behaviors. Teamwork had become baked into their job.
Conditions can have a major impact on teamwork behaviors and team effectiveness. We’d go as far as to say that organizations get the behaviors, cognitions, and attitudes that they develop, promote, tolerate, measure, and reinforce. Some conditions can affect many teams simultaneously (organizational conditions) and others may affect a single team (local, team-specific conditions). Here are a few implications from this chapter:
• The nature of the situation (conditions) combines with the attributes of the people involved (e.g., capabilities) to determine if a team will work together successfully When a situation is very strong, everyone involved is likely to see and interpret how to behave in the same way, and there are incentives for behaving appropriately.
• The stronger the situation, the more likely it is that people will behave as expected, regardless of personal preferences. Some conditions send strong signals about teamwork; others send weak ones. Some conditions send the message that teamwork is unimportant.
• We described several organizational conditions that influence team effectiveness—five policies and practices (i.e., hiring, onboarding, promotions and opportunities, performance management, rewards and recognition) and three related to senior leadership (e.g., modeling behaviors, communications, establishing psychological safety). These conditions can facilitate or inhibit teamwork throughout the organization, so it makes sense to monitor them centrally and engage senior leadership in addressing any gaps or unintended consequences that surface.
• We also described four local or team-specific conditions, three of which—resources, time, decision-making authority—can place significant constraints on a team’s effectiveness. It is almost impossible to “team away” a significant lack of resources and unreasonable to expect team members to monitor and support one another if they barely have ample time to complete their own assignments. Monitor these conditions locally and focus on how to remedy deficiencies. If you can’t improve them, brainstorm how to work around them creatively, knowing that it is really hard to work around severe deficiencies!
• The fourth team-specific condition is mission/purpose. Having a clear, compelling mission provides the team with a common identity. That sense of identity can often stimulate teamwork, particularly if team members must work together to attain the mission. If your team doesn’t have a clear, compelling mission, spend time clarifying the contributions the team does or could make and use that to create a sense of team identity.
• If you work with team members who may have learned different cultural norms (e.g., about deference to authority, timeliness), try to learn about those norms so you can be an effective contributor. People who have experienced different norms may act differently than you do and interpret your actions in ways you did not intend. Consider the broader societal norms that have shaped you and your fellow team members.