CHAPTER 6

Work Success

My model for business is the Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.

—Steve Jobs

The Wealth in “We”

At no time in the business world do we more readily recognize the value of the word “we” than in those moments when everything is about to fall apart. Take, for example, a routine flight in February, 1989 that suddenly became anything but routine. United Airlines Flight 811 departed from the Honolulu Airport as usual, but within minutes of takeoff, a forward cargo door blew out, creating a gaping hole in the side of the aircraft. A portion of the cabin floor caved in, 10 seats were ejected from the plane, and nine passengers lost their lives. The reason that the plane, the crew, and the remaining passengers survived, according to Captain David Cronin, was the training he and his team had received called “command leadership resource management.” In this extensive course, airline captains are taught to ask the copilot for input in emergency situations, and copilots are advised to challenge any decisions that they believe to be incorrect. The nightmare on board Flight 811 lasted less than 25 minutes, and during those minutes, the captain and first officer conferred steadily and debated strategy. In more than one instance, Captain Cronin agreed that the first officer’s suggestion was on target and their shared decision-making led to the safe landing of the stricken plane. As Captain Cronin, a United Airlines veteran with 35 years of flying experience said, “In the old days, the other crew members didn’t speak or do a thing until the captain told them to. Those days are now over.”¹ Problem solving in businesses is a team sport. No one wins unless every player is doing his or her part.

Although many people appear to recognize the value of collaboration in business, there persists a common belief that there are certain men and women who accomplish great feats and achieve success in business on their own. Although this may occasionally be true, more often successful individuals have had enormous help along that way. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always survive a later recounting.

A hundred times every day, I remind myself that my inner and outer life depends on the labor of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.

—Albert Einstein

I first began to mull over this idea in greater depth while reading a book called The Winner Within, written by one of the greatest basketball coaches in NBA history, Pat Riley. Of course, anything Coach Riley has to teach about excellence is certainly worth a serious look. However, there was one sentence in the book that I thought was quite mistaken. The statement read, “It is much harder to truly act alone and succeed today in the way that entrepreneurs such as Thomas Edison or Henry Ford did in times past.”²

In order to help you understand my perspective on this, let’s take a brief look at the journeys that Edison and Ford took on their paths to business success. To begin with, Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb. He was actually working under one as he struggled to improve it. As a result, when he applied for his first patent, it was rejected because the light bulb had already been patented! What Edison did accomplish, however, was nothing less than genius. He improved on the work of others. He reached out to those who had achieved past success and built on their work. On his 80th birthday, Edison was asked which of his inventions made him most proud. An interesting question for someone who held over 1,000 U.S. patents at the time! He responded, “The use of the team in the laboratory.” Edison worked with a total of 14 collaborators and, when his lab disbanded, he never invented again. His assistant, Francis Jehl, remarked, “Edison is, in reality, a collective noun and means the work of many men.”³

When Henry Ford decided that he wanted to build automobiles, there were close to 100 manufacturers who were already building the machines, all by hand. Recognizing the extensive challenges, at one point Ford contemplated quitting. However, the woman he called his “true believer” (later to become his wife) convinced him to persist. So Ford went to work with his mentor, Thomas Edison, who talked him out of building an electric car and instead to encouraged him to build a gas-powered engine (you can decide how you feel about that!). Ford was making little progress until an observation in a meat packing plant in Chicago provided the inspiration needed to revolutionize the world of car manufacturing. Bill Klan, a junior mechanic in Ford’s employ, watched butchers as they disassembled a carcass, with one butcher cutting off the breast, another the thigh, another the rump. Observing this, Klan foresaw its potential in building cars. Armed with this new inspiration, he approached Ford and together they decided that, if meat packers could disassemble a carcass in one direction, it was entirely possible that Ford and his team could build a car with a line going in the other direction. With this mix of support and collaboration among numerous people, the automotive assembly line was born.

Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were not isolated creative geniuses. They were more than that. They were brilliant collaborators who never stopped looking for new ideas and asking for help all along their paths to success. Not only did they actively seek out support, but they perceived doing so as a strength rather than a sign of weakness.

Although reaching for support may have seemed to come naturally to these inventors, others may not always find this easy to do. Take cardiac surgeons, for example. These medical professionals are often perceived as stoic and independent—possibly very necessary character traits to have when you literally have patients’ lives in your hands on a daily basis! However, one group of these surgeons at the Mayo Clinic speculated that by working together, they may be able to cut costs and improve quality of care for their patients. With this in mind, they began a broad-scale comparison of how they were using blood transfusions in their work. After sharing perspectives and discovering important differences, they negotiated and created a standard protocol for use with various types of patients. Within a year, they’d reduced transfusions by 50 percent and reduced the risk of transfusion-related kidney disease by 40 percent. During the course of three years, they saved the Mayo Clinic $15 million dollars!⁴

Research on the effect of teams on surgical success rates makes an even more dramatic case for the power of support in achieving successful results. For example, a study completed by Huckman and Pisano examined the success rate of 203 cardiac surgeons who conducted a total of more than 38,000 heart surgeries.⁵ To clearly identify which factors most influenced the success of the surgeries, researches focused on a single type—coronary artery bypass grafts. When the data was analyzed, the findings were clear. The major predictor of surgical success was not how many of these operations a surgeon had performed in the past, but instead, the number of these surgeries that he or she had performed at a specific hospital. Although many of the surgeons operated at more than one hospital, investigators found that the majority were most successful at the hospital where they completed the most procedures. This was attributed to the effectiveness of the surgical team. When a surgeon operated frequently with the same group of nurses and surgical technicians, they all had an opportunity to learn one another’s strengths and weaknesses. As a result, they discovered how to work together most effectively. In the end, it was the team that made the surgeon and outcomes successful.

The effect of teams on the performance of individual “stars” has been noted across many other professions as well. Take, for example, the wizards of the financial world. Boris Groysberg, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Medical School, followed the careers of 366 “star analysts” across multiple investment firms.⁶ These were high performers whose clients prospered under their guidance. What made these analysts the object of Groysberg’s study, however, was that they each took their fame and fortune and moved to another firm. Following the transition, most of them failed to maintain their exceptional results and the firms who hired them lost millions. There was one small group of star analysts, however, who sustained their status. These were the ones who took their teams with them. What made these people “stars” was not simply their own individual talents, but their ability to create and sustain high-functioning teams who could help them in accomplishing exceptional goals. In these new settings, having immediate access to well-cultivated relationships and professional support in achieving their goals was especially advantageous.

It is not just routine for thriving individuals and organizations to have rich, plentiful support systems (we’re speaking in terms of quality of course), but also for them to see asking for and receiving support as a sign of strength. Consider, for example, the success of Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios. Ed Catmull, President of Disney Animation and CEO of Pixar, was first and foremost a dreamer. When he achieved his PhD in computer science, he envisioned making full-length, animated movies using the newest technologies. His dream had no chance of reaching fruition, however, until he caught the attention of film producer George Lucas, who hired Catmull to reap the benefits of his technological skill and artistic vision. Seven years later, with the vision and financial support of Steve Jobs backing him (Pixar would have gone bankrupt long before completion without Jobs), Catmull hired a talented animator named John Lassiter who had been previously fired by Disney Studios. With support from all sides, Catmull and his team developed the technology and animated films that fulfilled his dreams.

Lassiter, who today is the Chief Creative Officer at Pixar, is undeniably a genius as well. Like Catmull, he recognizes his genius as only one part in the amazing success of Pixar. Notice how Lassiter describes their process for achieving success, especially how often the word “we” shows up: “Because we are a culture of inventors, nothing is standard operating procedure for us. We constantly reevaluate and re-examine everything we do. We go back and study what works and what didn’t work, and we get excited about what didn’t work because, for us, that’s a challenging new problem to solve.”⁷ Catmull, too, has described how essential it is to build supportive relationships in organizations: “Of great importance—and something that sets us apart from other studios—is the way people at all levels support one another. Everyone is fully invested in helping everyone else turn out the best work. They really do feel that it’s all for one and one for all.”⁸

Seeking allies in the workplace often requires imagination. Consider the birth of Arthur Fry’s Post-it notes. What now seems like an obvious success story was originally met with little enthusiasm at 3M when it was first invented. In fact, his supervisors rejected it. Not to be deterred, Fry reached for support to an unusual source. He gave his bosses’ secretaries Post-it notes to use in their daily work and then, months later, informed them that the product was no longer available. By that time, of course, they had already discovered the immense value of the product and they prevailed on their bosses to reverse the decision. From there, the Post-it became one of the most successful products 3M has ever launched!

Successful collaboration sometimes defies traditional barriers. Reaching for support may occur not only within organizations, but between them as well. Toyota is famous for this unusual type of collaboration. For example, they go out of their way to teach quality control, share proprietary information, and build life-long relationships with not only their employees, but their suppliers as well. This perspective may have been developed when the company was rebuilding out of the rubble of World War II and they were dependent on, and vulnerable to, their suppliers for their continued existence. They worked diligently to create trusting, dependable relationships. Toyota still views their suppliers as part of their support system today—they strive to be loyal and expect loyalty among all their connected organizations.

We do not just build cars, we build people.

—Toyota

Automobile companies in the United States, on the other hand, tend more often to treat suppliers as competitors. They may pit one against the other when trying to get the cheapest price possible. An article in the Harvard Business Review described the differences between Toyota and American car companies’ relationships with their suppliers this way:

It (Toyota) treats key suppliers as long-term partners, shares development work with them, and sticks with them over the long term. When a Toyota supplier is struggling, Toyota sends in its own people to help. In sharp contrast, U.S. auto companies have generally treated their suppliers as adversaries. They keep them on a tight leash. They typically offer them short contracts and all too often base their purchasing decisions largely on price. When a supplier has a problem, the U.S. auto company’s typical response has been to terminate the contract.⁹

Toyota’s reign as the largest and most profitable car company in the world may be due, in part, to their philosophy of embracing supporters outside of traditional barriers.

Recognition of the need for collaboration and mentorship in business is not a new idea. The mentorship necessary to build and fully master a skill or trade, in fact, was provided systematically in the practice of apprenticeship, which was epitomized by the guilds that flourished in the 1400s in Florence, Italy. If parents wished their child to become a painter, a weaver, or a goldsmith, the child was sent by the age of seven to live with a master craftsman for a period of up to 10 years. Daniel Coyle described this process in his book The Talent Code:

An apprentice worked directly under the tutelage and supervision of the master, who frequently assumed rights as the child’s legal guardian. Apprentices learned the craft from the bottom up, not through lecture or theory, but through action: mixing paint, preparing canvasses, sharpening chisels. They cooperated and competed within a hierarchy, rising after some years to the status of a journeyman and, eventually, if they were skilled enough, a master. This system created a chain of mentoring. Da Vinci studied under Verrocchio, Verrocchio under Donatello, Donatello under Ghiberti, Ghiberti under Baldovinetti, and so on. All of them frequently visited one another’s studios in a cooperative, competitive arrangement that today would be called social networking.¹⁰

Although a return to apprenticeships in business today may not be practical, the idea of mentorship remains invaluable not only in the business world, but in many other areas of life as well. Reaching for support by observing others, collaborating with them, and seeking out mentors who can help you to develop your knowledge and skills or your products and services are critical for long-term business success.

Giving Support

So far, we have focused primarily on identifying your needs and developing the courage to ask for the help. As you begin to reach out for support in the business world, however, you will quickly discover that the other half of this essential skill is to be able to give help to others when it is needed. For any organization, team, or individual to succeed in the workplace, it is not only essential that team members be willing to ask for support, but they must also be invested in giving support to those in need. Some enlightening research on the importance of this is captured in Adam Grant’s book, Give and Take.¹¹ Early in the book, he asks a compelling question that I will now ask you: Do you think givers are the most productive, most successful employees in an organization, or are they the least productive, least successful members?

The surprising answer is “yes!” Both are correct. Givers tend to migrate both to the top and the bottom on a scale of successful employees. What is the primary difference between those who are most and least successful? Givers who thrive are those who are able to set limits on what they will give to whom, and when, so that they are not giving beyond their capacity at their own expense. Givers who find it challenging to set limits often help others at the cost of getting their own work completed or goals realized.

Analyzing the comparative values of giving and taking in the workplace becomes even more complicated when the data is mined further. In a study of medical students’ school performance, for example, it was discovered that the students most generous with their time and resources were generally less successful overall in terms of grades during their first years.¹² However, as training continued, the givers became the most successful students in the class. What do you believe might underlie these findings? A look at the learning structure may provide the answer. During the first two years of medical training, classroom education, studying for and taking tests, and competing against other students for recognition by professors are primary areas of focus. During these years, the givers helped others to study and they shared their resources. After that early period, the remainder of a medical student’s educational training (and their subsequent medical practice) is dependent on working with others—cooperating, collaborating, and putting patients’ interests ahead of getting credit for work or being more compelling than other students.

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, provides an excellent summary of the powerful effects of giving support in the workplace: “It seems counterintuitive, but the more altruistic your attitude, the more benefits you will gain from the relationship. If you set out to help others, you will rapidly reinforce your own reputation and expand your universe of possibilities.”¹³ Francis Flynn, in a research project reported in the Academy of Management Journal, reiterated this after investigating the productivity levels of a group of telecommunication engineers. He discovered that the most successful engineers, as measured by both productivity level and respect among peers, were the ones who gave generously to others and helped others the most—they recognized that asking for help was essential and they rewarded other staff for reaching out.¹⁴

The impact of giving, of providing support in the workplace was also evident in the findings of a study conducted by Google, who set out to investigate their best and worst managers. Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President, described the initiation of the research as follows: “The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are happier—they do everything better. So the biggest controllable factor we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they made things happen.” During the study, they collected over 10,000 observations. What they culled from the research they termed “the eight skills of the best managers.” Bock said, “In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper of a technical expert than the people who work for you. It turns out that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison.”¹⁵ What they discovered, in fact, was that the best managers—those with the most productive teams—were doing three things. They were meeting often with their employees, they showed an interest in people’s personal lives, and they asked many questions rather than just giving commands or instructions. What this suggests is that providing support to your team is not just a nice thing to do, but an essential component in building organizational success.

Following is a brief exercise to help you as you begin to become more aware of your skills in this area of giving support to others:

Consider the following questions:

1. Do you believe that givers or takers are more productive and successful in your work setting? In your organization, which colleagues and managers do you see as givers and takers?

2. Do you consider yourself a giver, a taker, or both?

3. Are givers in your organization able to set limits on giving?

4. If you are in management, do you meet frequently with your team, ask many questions, and show an interest in people’s personal lives?

In addition to improving outcomes for organizations, giving support has surprising health benefits that rival the benefits of reaching out and asking for help. One rather dramatic study illustrating this followed the lives of 846 adult men and women in Detroit during a five-year span. At the start of the study, all of the subjects listed how many stressful events had occurred in their lives during the previous year. They were also asked to estimate how much time they spent supporting others in their community. Five years later, when researchers looked at how many of the 846 were alive, they found that the subjects who reported very little giving to others were 30 percent more likely to have already died compared to the givers.¹⁶

Work Stress

One of the most intriguing studies of workplace stress was undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s at the Illinois Bell Phone Company. Two researchers, Salvatore Maddi and Suzanne Kobasa, chose a high-stress group of executives (mid- and upper-level executives) to follow during the time when the monopoly that Bell had enjoyed for a period of time was at an end. All subjects were male, a somewhat typical distribution at that time, and the occupations of the executives included a wide variety of professionals, including accountants, lawyers, financial analysts, engineers, sales supervisors, and others. The study question was, “How would each of these leaders fare when all the rules changed?”¹⁷ During the eight years of the study, each executive was contacted a minimum of five times for participation in intensive interviews. Questions asked probed descriptions of the managers’ physical states and their attitudes toward the huge professional challenges they were facing.

The interviews were extensive. As several of the interviewers described the process: “We got information about not only our executives’ stressful life events, but also factors of personality, social supports, coping efforts, health practices, constitutional strengths and weaknesses (assessed through family medical histories), and physiological functioning. Data on physiological functioning and constitutional status came from medical examinations.” Findings from the project revealed that the external stress of the upheaval at work did not explain nor predict an executive’s work performance or physical health. Instead, the executive’s attitude was the factor that was highly predictive. From the data, researchers identified “The Three Cs”—commitment, control, and challenge. Hardy executives felt a commitment to their work and to their families. They felt optimistic that they could gain control of difficult situations, and they tended to perceive these difficult situations as an exciting challenge.

To achieve and maintain these three Cs, social support was perceived as crucial. By “support” the researchers were referring not only other people at work, but also each manager’s childhood experiences in being able to reach for and receive support. Findings of the study suggested that the development of “hardiness” was a direct result of the executives’ experiences in childhood. The parents of successful executives were described as supportiv and accepting, showing interest and encouragement. Less hardy executives, those who had developed physical and performance problems, had parents who were frequently described as “hostile, disapproving, or neglectful.” What the research revealed was that having nurturing parents in childhood provided many of these executives, decades later, with important tools for mastering life’s challenges.

Regarding support in the workplace, the authors noted: “In coping transformationally, it helps to have the warm appreciation, encouragement, admiration, and goodwill of other people around you. But, in addition to encouragement and goodwill, there is another aspect of social support that can increase transformational coping: the know-how and resources that come from associating with capable people engaged in efforts similar to your own.” The authors were very clear about the fact that having someone who merely sympathized with a person’s frustrations and agreed that life was difficult would not be helpful. They stated, “Only the kind of support that encourages someone to appraise stressful events optimistically and act decisively to change them qualifies as a resistance resource.” Resistant resources describe any tool an executive used to stay physically healthy and effective in the workplace. This now famous research made the powerful case that it is not stress (fear) itself that determines our outcomes both physically and vocationally, but rather the types of support we have available to us and our skill in addressing it.

Hiring Practices

Assessing potential employees to determine whether or not they possess the critical skill of asking for and giving support is not always easy. In my work as a business consultant, I have found two strategies that seem to work particularly well in accomplishing this. Not long ago, I was interviewing the CEO of one of the largest companies in Europe and I asked him how he goes about choosing his key employees. I was somewhat surprised when he said, “I ask them only one question.” Puzzled, I asked him what it was. He said, “By the time the candidate gets to me, their technical competence has been determined. So I simply ask them, ‘Please tell me one accomplishment you are proud of.’ ” This answer did not satisfy my curiosity. “If they are good enough to have made it to an interview with you,” I said, “then they must have a very long list of accomplishments. What are you listening for?” His answer made perfect sense. “I don’t listen to the whole sentence, just the first word. Does the candidate start the sentence with ‘I’ or ‘we’? If they think they can accomplish anything in life on their own, they are a fool, and I don’t want fools working for me.”

In another instance, I was consulting with management staff for an airline that was interviewing flight attendant applicants. The process they used to achieve hiring success was unique. They would ask four or five applicants to come into a room and sit on chairs circling each other. They then asked each applicant to stand and give a short speech on why he or she wanted to work for the airline. Skeptical about this approach, I asked, “What’s your reason for doing this? The job doesn’t typically involve public speaking—the only flight attendant giving passengers instructions is reading from a script.” The interviewer’s response was much wiser than my question:

We don’t really listen to what the person who is standing is saying. We watch what the other applicants are doing. Are they keeping eye contact, nodding at the correct moments, looking away, or looking at their watch? What we want to know is, what they will do under duress? We want to be certain that if a fellow flight attendant is at the back of the plane dealing with an unruly passenger, the applicant is someone who will come to help rather than find some excuse to stay in the front galley.

When interviewing candidates for important positions, many successful organizations reach out to staff at all levels for help in determining who might be the best fit. Southwest Airlines, for example, is proud of its approach in selecting employees who have the potential to work well together at all levels. In fact, I have overheard two of their past CEOs tell the exact same story with great satisfaction. Southwest had just completed interviews and was preparing to hire a new pilot. However, one of the secretaries who had taken his phone calls during the interview-scheduling process stated that this pilot had been rude to her on more than one occasion. That one piece of information from one office staff person was enough to doom the pilot’s entire career at Southwest Airlines.

Whole Foods, another undeniably successful organization, demonstrates similar care in consulting relevant team members before hiring. They do not hire new employees until the staff in the new hire’s intended department has vetted them. Team members evaluate them to decide if they will stay. This sort of multilevel collaboration achieves two important goals. First, the process helps to decrease fear. Not only do staff members at all levels get to know a potential hire, but they also feel that their input is valued. Each of these factors reduces fear in the hiring process. Second, and in turn, management receives valuable input, an essential form of support, from those most critical in assuring the hire’s success.

Rewarding Support

Successful organizations not only reach to their employees for support and encourage staff to reach out to one another, but they also find creative ways to reward employees who support the organization or fellow employees. Take Enterprise, for example, one of the largest rental car companies in the United States. Enterprise has four main criteria that they use to assess a manager’s suitability for promotion. The first is customer satisfaction; the second is branch growth; the third is branch profitability; and the fourth is “the number of promotable management candidates developed at the branch.” This fourth measure is especially important. It encourages managers to view their staff members as protégés, people to be mentored. When we stop to consider this, we realize that mentoring and developing others is essential to achieving success in all the other areas as well!

Reducing Error

Every organization strives toward perfection, but “high reliability organizations” (HROs) do more than just strive. They must actually achieve near perfection or lives will be lost. HROs are organizations such as aircraft carriers, nuclear power plants, and hospital emergency departments—workplaces where team efforts may cause or prevent injury or death. These types of organizations were extensively studied by Dr. Karl Weick and his findings are reported in the book Managing the Unexpected. Weick discovered that there are two organizational skills essential for achieving a workplace as close to perfection as we humans are capable of realizing. The first is that companies and managers must pay close attention to mistakes while they are so small that they do not appear to be particularly important. The second is that the organizations must make it safe for employees to bring their doubts or slip-ups to management without fear of punishment. He described the overlap between these two essential factors as follows:

HROs are aware of the close tie between sensitivity to operations and sensitivity to relationships. People who refuse to speak up out of fear enact a system that knows less than it needs to know to remain effective. People in HROs know that you can’t develop a big picture of operations if the symptoms of those operations are withheld. It makes no difference whether they are withheld out of fear, ignorance, or indifference. All those reasons for withholding tend to be relational … people need to feel safe to report incidents or they will ignore them or cover them up. Managerial actions such as encouraging questions and rewarding people who report errors or concerns can strengthen an organization wide culture that values reporting.¹⁸

In one study supporting this contention, investigators examined the number of errors occurring on hospital nursing units and analyzed these in relationship to the perceived confidence nurses had that reporting them would lead to system improvements rather than punishment. Initially, those units where nurses felt safest had the most reported errors. However, across time, those same units experienced the least number of mistakes. Researchers concluded that the freedom to report challenging issues and mistakes led to solutions and fewer mistakes, whereas on the less safe nursing units, mistakes were ignored or hidden and, so, grew with time.¹⁹

It is utterly impossible to achieve success without making mistakes along the way. Organizations that recognize this fact and encourage employees to share their mistakes when they are still small tend to reduce errors and reap large long-term rewards. Although Toyota may not be considered an HRO, the organization is famous for creating a safe environment and encouraging front-line employees to bring problems to management immediately. To achieve rapid communication of problems, they have used the Andon Cord system, an emergency cable strung above assembly lines. This has come to symbolize the built-in quality of the Toyota Way.²⁰ When an assembly line staff notices any problem, large or small, that person pulls the cord to summon managers and others to fix the problem immediately, before the customer is the one to discover it. The Andon Cord is symbolic of the partnership Toyota fosters between labor and management and a proven way to increase workers’ perception of safety in reporting mistakes. (Note: In 2014, this was replaced with a yellow call button, which maintains this model of efficiency.)

As previously mentioned, it is impossible to achieve success without making mistakes along the way. This obvious fact raises two questions: First, when you make a mistake are you curious about it or critical of yourself? Second, in your organization, is it safe for people to ask for help and admit mistakes without fear of punishment? In Chapter 9, we will discuss how to “reprogram” the brain so you can stay curious and compassionate in the face of mistakes. In the meantime, if you are in a leadership position, consider these questions: How do you make it safe for your people to bring their mistakes to you? Do your team members feel free to bring their questions, concerns, and mistakes to you and your organization? As you explore this thought further, you may want to consider asking some of your key employees to share their perceptions in this regard.

Systems for Support

Successful leaders recognize that they play an important role in their companies but, more importantly, they appreciate that they share in the success of the whole organization. For this reason, many companies have worked hard to build in rituals for support traveling in both directions. Recall, for example, how the best airlines train their pilots in crew resource management strategies, advising the captain to ask for help when doubtful and encouraging the first officer to challenge decisions that do not appear to be safe. There are other professions, quite diverse, that would benefit from building stronger support protocols as well. The field of education may provide us with a good example. Turnover in American education is high, averaging 40 to 50 percent in five years. Novice teachers are frequently left alone to develop their skills with little assistance from mentors. In Japan, however, the turnover is much less. There, they employ a technique called jugyokenkyu, which means “lesson study.” In this model, senior teachers sit in on one another’s classes and provide detailed feedback regarding the successes and opportunities noted. In most advanced countries, many of which have students who consistently outperform students in the United States on tests, more time is provided outside of the classroom for teachers to help one another develop additional skills. One critic of American teacher education wrote: “Teaching is all consuming, and that absorption is part of the joy of the job. But if teaching is to be a profession of the mind (as well as of the heart) that retains top talent and delivers results on the same level that other countries boast, the people who spend hours with our children in the classroom also need what they currently don’t get: the hours with peers and mentors that are essential to improving their craft.”²¹ Organizations who want their people to succeed make it a priority to develop systems for employee support.

One dramatic example of the value of providing systems of support comes from a General Motors factory in Fremont, California.²² The factory opened in 1963 and, before long, it became one of the worst-performing factories in the General Motors system. Absenteeism, substance abuse, low productivity, and even lower quality were the norm. Labor-management strife was ongoing and GM closed the factory with some relief in 1982. Then, in 1983, Toyota and General Motors struck up a deal for a very strange partnership. Toyota agreed to build GM cars in Fremont using Toyota management techniques and GM’s parts and design. Why, you might ask, would such an odd coupling occur? GM was eager to learn Toyota’s strategies for building high quality cars and Toyota wanted to reduce trade friction with the U.S. and determine whether or not they could effectively export their management system and sustain their high quality with an American work force. Reluctantly, Toyota took back all of the employees that GM had found so difficult. But the changed system worked—dramatically so. Absenteeism and substance abuse stopped, productivity was twice what it had been, and the quality was the highest of any GM factory in the world. Even better, the turnaround took only two years.

So what did Toyota do to accomplish this? In addition to the Andon Cord, they provided a system of support that empowered workers. Managers at the old GM plant had walked the floor, telling workers what they should and shouldn’t be doing. The Toyota-trained managers, on the other hand, believed that their role was to support the ideas and suggestions of the workers. A new system was put into place and staff were trained to help and critique one another. As reported in Economic Perspectives:

Toyota divided the workforce into 350 teams, each consisting of five to seven people and a team leader. All workers had been taught techniques for describing and analyzing physical tasks. Team members design all the team’s jobs, time each other with stopwatches, and explore ways of improving their own performance. They then compare their results with those of the other shift at the same workstation. This process goes on continually. Team members are trained to do each other’s jobs and regularly rotate tasks among themselves.²³

Healthy Employees

After reading the last chapter, I hope that you are completely convinced that relationships, and the ability to reach for support, have far-reaching effects on our health. A powerful example of this was demonstrated in a study focusing on the work life of traffic enforcement officers (sometimes referred to as “meter maids”). Now, it doesn’t take much imagination to envision how incredibly stressful (fearful) this sort of job might be. Dr. Elizabeth Brondolo studied the stress response in 70 of these officers in New York City.²⁴ For this investigation, the subjects were asked to wear portable blood pressure devices to monitor their physical arousal (stress) throughout their workday. Findings revealed that both male and female traffic enforcement officers experienced better health responses when they perceived support in their work environment. Even in the presence of irate automobile owners, women officers who described their supervisors as supportive presented dramatically lower blood pressures compared to those who did not perceive this sort of support. For male officers, describing their fellow officers as supportive was the best predictor of low blood pressure on difficult days. What these findings suggest is that a person’s perception of support can have a significant effect on employee health as well.

Conflict: An Essential Ingredient

It’s far better to learn about problems from colleagues when there’s still time to fix them than from the audience after it is too late.

—Ed Catmull, President, Pixar Studios and Disney Animation

Recall from our earlier discussion that one vital component in all supportive relationships is “rejection,” which includes giving and receiving meaningful feedback. Ed Catmull devoted much of his insightful book, Creativity, Inc., to describing exactly how a leader can make an environment safe enough so that team members feel able to constructively criticize one another’s ideas, accept critical feedback, and achieve positive results.²⁵ One of Catmull’s first tasks after assuming leadership of Disney Animation was to teach writers and animators how to effectively give and receive critical feedback. He believed, as do most successful leaders, that disagreement is an essential component in achieving success.

The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.

—Peter Drucker

Constructing collaborative teams is a complex enterprise. Creating a safe environment for individuals to admit ignorance, ask for guidance, and develop trust among employees to a level where people feel free to disagree is an even more difficult task. Putting people together who know each other well can make this even more complicated, because teams who have long-established, trusting relationships may be especially hesitant to disagree with one another. They may put the comfort of their relationships ahead of the need to engage in conflict. This was well-illustrated in an experiment conducted by Brian Uzzi at Northwestern University, who was seeking to identify the ideal team composition to maximize creativity. To explore this factor, Uzzi investigated the teams that come together to produce Broadway plays. These teams are, by necessity, multidisciplinary. They involve artists with a variety of skills such as music, acting, choreography, and set design, as well as business professionals like those in marketing, finance, etc. Both artistically and commercially, Uzzi sought to discover what quality of relationships led to the most successful outcomes. His question was, “Do teams that have worked together in the past create better results than teams with no familiar members?” To answer this question, Uzzi examined the team composition of every Broadway musical between 1945 and 1989, which included 474 plays—a worthy sample!

What he discovered was that, because theatre is comprised of a relatively small community, there is much overlap from one play to the next. In an article in The New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer summarized Uzzi’s intriguing findings: “Uzzi devised a way to quantify the density of these connections, a figure he called Q. If musicals were being developed by teams of artists who had worked together several times before—a common practice, because Broadway producers see ‘incumbent teams’ as less risky—those musicals would have an extremely high Q. A musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q.”²⁶

According to the data, relationships among collaborators emerged as a reliable predictor of Broadway success. If the Q score was too low, say a 1.7 on a 5 point scale, the failure rate was high. These findings were expected. What was surprising, however, was that if the Q score was too high, above 3.2, productions also had a high failure rate. If people worked together too many times, they grew too close and comfortable with one another and creativity suffered. The “bliss point,” as Uzzi called it, was a score of between 2.4 and 2.6. Teams with these scores were three times more likely to succeed compared to those with low or high Q scores. Lehrer’s article quotes Uzzi’s description of the “bliss point teams.” He writes: “The best Broadway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships. These teams had some old friends but they also had newbies. The mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently—they had a familiar structure to fall back on, but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.”

So, are the most creative teams composed of people who consider one another friends? The answer to this is both yes and no. Friendship can encourage or impede people’s tendencies to the reach for critical support. A study of team performance conducted by Joe Labianca and colleagues at Yonsei and Hansung University also explored the effects of friendship among team members.²⁷ They investigated the effectiveness of 60 teams at 11 companies across a variety of industries. What they discovered, similar to Uzzi’s findings, was that wholesale congeniality can make teams less effective. In this study, the most effective teams were comprised of at least 50 percent members who considered each other friends. However, as the percentage of team members who considered themselves friends approached 100 percent, their performance dropped dramatically. The authors summarized, “Such groups suffer because they are insular, impermeable to outside influences, and unhealthily self-reliant.” They stated that the friendships that benefit these teams the most are formed outside of the group. By interacting with managers and staff in other departments, group members are able to bring back to their groups strategic information, task-related advice, and political and social support that help groups to achieve success. The authors suggested that, as the number of friends in a business group increases, it’s important for management to recognize the risks and appoint as least one member to act as “devil’s advocate” who can look for flaws and share concerns regarding team decisions.

When encouraging conflict, it is also essential to establish an environment that supports successful resolutions. One of the most critical skills in conflict resolution is the ability to maintain curiosity about the other person or position, demonstrating respect for their perspectives and needs. We explored this idea earlier in the gourmet guide (Chapter 4). When there are heated emotions around the table, asking questions is often not easy. However, numerous studies support the value of making inquiries and showing interest in and understanding of one’s opponents in order to achieve business success. In a nine-year study comparing “excellent” vs. “average” business negotiators, for example, negotiations were taped and then evaluated. Not surprisingly, it was discovered that the outstanding negotiators spent twice as much time asking questions compared to average negotiators.²⁸

It is not only the ability to ask good questions that underlies business success, but the willingness to state opinions as well—especially those outside of the status quo. One recent study investigated what the authors called “observable candor” in teams at large U.S. banking firms. Business consultant Keith Ferrazzi evaluated team performance at six banks, measuring the degree to which members were able to effectively disagree with one another. What he found was a direct correlation between the members’ willingness to disagree and their individual performance at work during the recession of 2008 and in the years that followed.²⁹ In response to these findings, Ferrazzi offered three suggestions to enhance candor in the business environment. The first was to divide teams into smaller groups of two to three individuals for part of each meeting to brainstorm solutions. He had observed that in groups of five or more people, one or two individuals were likely to dominate the conversation. As a result, other members tended to fear disagreement. He next suggested that groups elect a “Yoda” (remember the wise character from the movie Star Wars?), whose role is to “notice and speak up when something is left unsaid.” The “Yoda” is also tasked with providing feedback to people if their candor is not constructive or if it is rude. His final suggestion was that teams set rules or specific guidelines as to how candor is to be expressed. For example, rather than bluntly disagreeing, team members might introduce ideas with phrases such as “I wonder if …” or “Can I suggest another way of looking at this?” According to Ferrazzi, these steps tend to result in more successful, more effective teams.

Remember that not all conflict is bad. In fact, it is one of the most important types of support we can provide in business and it is a necessary component in achieving organizational success. What is most important is not which rules a team chooses for managing conflict, but that they have well-defined, consistent rules so that healthy conflict can occur and lead to better decision-making.

Summary

The successful person often discusses fear and support in the same breath. In an interview with the New York Times, Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, was asked, “What advice would you give to somebody about to become a CEO?” He responded:

I would say the following: Very few people … get into that seat and believe that they are now qualified to be the CEO. So everyone you meet has a level of insecurity. The level of insecurity that you have is a strength, not a weakness. The question is, how are you going to use it? For whatever reason, people believe that when they get to that spot they have to know everything. They’ve got to be in total control and can never show weakness. I would say one of the underlying strengths of a great leader and a great CEO—not all the time, but when appropriate—is to demonstrate vulnerability, because that will bring people closer to you and show people the human side of you. In order to demonstrate vulnerability, you have to make sure you have people around who will never use that against you, because you trust them and they trust you. So the ability, behind closed doors, to have open and honest conversations with your team about the concerns you have, the fears you have, and the opportunities, is the balance one needs to succeed.³⁰

My real talent is in picking people.

—Jerry Seinfeld