Phil Agnew (3:39)

Colin writes how using this model on real teams causes all sorts of problems. And one study highlights these problems quite well.

Colin Fisher (3:47)

Connie Gersik did some classic studies where she was taught this model the same way a lot of us were in graduate school. She had worked in a lot of real teams as an executive and said, that's not my experience. I don't think that's what teams do. And she went out and gathered data from work teams that have a set deadline in time and found that they did not follow this pattern. Instead, what would happen is groups came together and that in that very first meeting, norms would emerge, and they'd emerge almost instantaneously. So where people sit that we've all been in meetings, where everyone comes in and then you kind of sit in the same seat every time you're in this particular group or this particular meeting. For some reason, whoever speaks first tends to keep speaking first. Whoever speaks the most tends to speak the most. Whoever speaks the least doesn't talk very much. Whether we make small talk at the beginning of meetings or whether we're kind of all on our phones pretending we don't see each other, those kinds of norms, they tend to be very sticky. They emerge very quickly, and they emerge, you know, really without much conscious awareness. And then they just kind of persist until about halfway through any task when we look up at the clock or calendar and go, oh, my God, half the time is gone. We better do something different. And then there's kind of this opportunity for change. And then those new norms stabilize, and we keep doing that until the end.

Phil Agnew (5:16)

The study suggests that interpersonal trust is not really needed before working together, that all types of groups can perform well without this forming and storming stage, and all you really need is social norms. These norms form naturally in all groups. In fact, the keyboard you write on is a result of a giant shared social norm. It's a great example of how social norms guide our behaviour. Colin writes that if you open the settings on your iPhone keyboard, you will actually find more than one keyboard option. You will find the default QWERTY keyboard, which is probably what you use. It's what most people use. It's what I use as well. But you'll also find the Dvorak keyboard. So the QWERTY keyboard, which is the most popular one, it wasn't actually designed to make finding letters very easy. The configuration arose in response to telegraph operators outdated Morse code habits. But the University of Washington professor August Dvorak, thought there was a better way. In 1936, he created an alternative layout for letters and numbers that he claimed increased the speed because it reduced finger motion. Essentially, the main difference was that uncommon letters. So these are letters like L, F, K and X. If you're familiar with Scrabble, you'll know those are uncommon. He put those in the bottom row so that most words only required using the top two rows, which just made it easier to type. And there was good reason to think he was right, because in 1976, Barbara Blackburn earned the Guinness World record for fastest typist typing 212 words per minute, but specifically using the Dvorak layout. Nobody is beaten at using the QWERTY layout, and yet we all still use the QWERTY layout, not because it's best, but because it became the norm. Colin links this story about keyboards with how groups operate. They find a norm and stick to it, usually very early on, much before any storming, forming and adjoining could even take place.

Colin Fisher (7:12)

And so this was a very different model tour, from a kind of gradual change in groups to saying, now, actually, groups in organizations, when they have deadlines, they tend to meet and they get right to work. And however they end up working from the beginning tends to persist for a while. And then there's usually some point of punctuation where there's some important interim deadline or important event that allows change to come in and then we keep going that way. So this kind of Tuckman model influenced a lot of team training, develop and what we now refer to as team building that kind of works on this assumption that we need to develop really good interpersonal trust before we can work together. And that, to me, is the kind of problem of the legacy of the Tuckman model. And it's not that interpersonal trust is bad, that of course it's better when we trust one another, but that the meaning of trust has kind of two different facets. And that one facet is, you know, kind of the common use of the word where it's like, I trust you with my deepest darkest secrets or I kind of trust that you have my best interests at heart. And that's what we would call relational trust. But there's also task based or instrumental trust, which is I trust that you're going to deliver your part of the work at a certain standard to a certain quality at a certain time. And that those two kinds of trusts, the relational and the instrumental, they don't always go together with the same person. That if you think about, you know, your closest family and your closest friends and then say, well, would I trust them to be part of my work team? It's like, well, yeah, sometimes, right? But not, not all the time. I can certainly think of lots of people I'm, I trust relationally that I would need to see some evidence that they can do a certain kind of work and I could collaborate with them. And so this idea that we need to do trust falls, that we need to, you know, kind of share our deepest darkest secrets before we can work together is this kind of negative legacy of Tuckman's model.

Phil Agnew (9:31)

There's a famous Barry Straw study that Colin cites in his book to prove this point. In the experiment, groups solved a financial puzzle and were randomly told that they even did very well, so that they were in the top 20% performers or that they did very poorly, so they were in the bottom 20% of performers, and that was regardless of their actual performance. So group one, there's average, but they are told they performed really well. Group 2 also performs at average, but they are told they performed extremely poorly. Objectively, there is no difference in the group's performance. They both actually achieve the same output, but the perception of the individuals in the group is drastically different. Groups that thought they did well reported being far more cohesive, reported being better communicators. They reported being happier with their teamwork even though nothing about their actual group process differed. Those who thought they did badly, reported being far less cohesive, reported having worse communicators, even though their actual performance was the same. This challenged Tuckman's famous forming, storming, norming and performing model, which suggested that teams must build trust before achieving results. In reality, it is the success of that creates the cohesion, not the other way around. Winning teams tend to like each other more because they have so much success while losing teams, because they are losing, often fight and blame one another.

Colin Fisher (10:53)

The evidence is that the best teams either they get right to work and they just have lots of points of reflection and learning built in where they're talking about what's working, what's not, or that you have high fidelity simulations. And you see this in sports and you see this in music. You see this in the military where there's a lot of practice, there's sometimes there's training camp, there's rehearsal, and that's usually how teams get better. And that's how teams get built. Not by going off to a ski resort and hanging out for a week with our teammates. That can be great and that can be fun, but if you're counting on it to improve team performance, you know, the evidence is just that there's not a lot of data behind that assertion.

Phil Agnew (11:41)

And Colin had a real world example of the Tuckman model failing. It's the story of an Olympic basketball team that tried to build interpersonal trust, followed the Tuckman model, but ended up as an unprecedented failure.

Colin Fisher (11:55)

In 1992, the rules for Olympic basketball and specifically for the US changed where professionals were allowed to play in Olympic basketball. At the time, the US professional league, the NBA National Basketball association, was really dominant in the world that basketball hadn't caught on to the extent around the world that it has today. And so once professionals were allowed in, in 1992 the US assembled what was called the Dream Team with all the most famous players, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, all playing together on one team. This group may well be the greatest team ever assembled in the of team sports. And you know, it was the talent disparity between the US team and other teams was so wide that there was just no contest for a little over a decade. Then in 2004, the US assembled a team. You know, they'd won every gold medal between 1992 and that 2004 Olympics. They assembled a team that, you know, not everybody had agreed to sign on for that one. They were some of the best players that said, no thanks, I'm not going to be a part of this Olympic team. But it was still a very accomplished team that, you know, by any measure of individual talent was still by far the most talented team in the Olympics. And this team lost its first game to Puerto Rico, which is a much smaller country, obviously with much less accomplished basketball player individual players. It's finally happened. The United States loses an Olympic player with NBA players and you know, for the US this was a huge embarrassment. Lots of people are talking about the American men's basketball team this morning. It was by any stretch of an imagination a complete upset and an embarrassment. They, they ended up losing a couple more games, which is more than the US Team had lost, you know, for, for quite some time. Their third loss of these Olympic Games. Prior to Athens, the United States men's basketball team had only lost twice in its history. They lose three times in. Even though they won the bronze medal. It was seen as this huge failure and a huge embarrassment for US Olympic basketball. And it was called by some commentators, yeah, they were called the Dream Team, but now some people are calling them the Scream Team. How this relates back to the idea of team building is they did a lot of things that if you believe in this kind of we need to build trust and get to know each other to succeed. They were doing a lot of those things. So they did, you know, the kind of off site living and training. They, they had this big yacht where they, they lived on and they worked there and they had a basketball court where they could practice at all hours. They really got to know one another much better and became good friends during this process. But it really didn't help them during the tournament. And in fact, as things were kind of going south a lot, there was a lot of public squabbling that came out. The coach and some players weren't getting along. A lot of people at the time were like, well, does this team just have bad chemistry? Why does it have bad chemistry? What happened? I think that explanation is a little bit mistaken. And it kind of shows again how we kind of have this theory of what works and tell it doesn't work. And when we see a team fail, then we start to kind of look for why it's failing. But the same thing's happening within the team that the idea that the team had bad chemistry and therefore played bad may or may not be true. That there's a lot of evidence that instead when we're on the team we can see how we're performing, especially with something like basketball that we can observe whether we're playing well or not. And when we're not playing well, when we're performing badly, we're more prone to negative attributions of one another to saying negative things and that it's not chemistry first, performance second. That the two are a never ending circle, especially when collective performance is observable.

Phil Agnew (16:11)

Colin in his book explains a study by the legendary researcher Sheriff that highlights what actually happens when groups form there's not really a forming, storming, norming, performing mode. It's just norming. Sheriff in his 1930s studies SAT participants in a completely dark room and asked him to estimate how much a tiny dot of light in this dark room was moving. Now, in reality, this light didn't move. It never moved in any version of the experiment. But there's this illusion called autokinetic that makes these small dots of light in a tiny room appear to move a small amount. That's why sometimes if you're looking at a star, you might think it's moving, when in reality it's not. For the experiment, half the participants sat in the room alone and they were asked to estimate how much the dot was moving. The estimates made by those who were alone were, were wildly different from those who made estimates in a group. So those who made the estimates alone would say sometimes that it moved 8 inches, and others would say that it just moved one third of an inch. The other half of participants were placed in groups like I said. And here Sheriff found that whoever spoke first in the group would then heavily influence the group. And all the others would quickly cluster around that initial estimate. If someone said 8 inches first, all would agree with that answer. This remained even when the individuals were taken out of the group and asked to estimate the movement of the dot again by themselves, they would still follow whoever spoke first in the group. People quickly and unconsciously adopt group norms, even for weakly held beliefs. But Colin reckons that that 2004American Olympic team didn't have time to build the right norms.

Colin Fisher (17:51)

Not only did that team building not work, but it was starting way too late that by this time in 2004, the rest of the world was improving at basketball quite a bit. They had set national teams that practiced together not for a few weeks, but for months or for years. And international basketball had some quirks that were different from the NBA and that a couple of those quirks were it emphasized three point shooting more and that there was kind of a different kind of zone defense that was permitted in international competition, that was not permitted in the NBA. But the U.S. olympic team wasn't composed with these differences in mind. They did not load up on three point shooting. They didn't have players who understood or appreciated the differences that these kind of different defensive rules would make. And so even though it was a talented team on paper, it was more of a talented collection of individuals that didn't really do this diagnosis of what skills does the task demand? And have we made sure that we've assembled a team that has all of those skills. This lessons were then taken into the 2008 team which became known as the Redeem Team. They then assembled the team much more carefully that they trained together for much longer. The 2008 team was able to succeed where the 2004 team failed by kind of taking some of these lessons on board.

Phil Agnew (19:19)

The Tuckman model doesn't really apply in the real world. High performing groups don't all have to go through a forming, storming, norming and performing stage. And team building exercises that try to guide groups through these phases seem to fail because of that. However, this leads to a good question, which is what specifically makes a group perform to its highest level? Well, later Collins says that to perform to a high level, groups need a lot of emotional intelligence and he gave me a test to measure how effective I would be in a team. You'll hear all of that after this quick break. The podcast I'd like to recommend today is the DTC Pod, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The DTC Pod is a pod that is all about direct to consumer companies and products. If you're in E commerce, if you create sites where you sell stuff direct to consumers, this is a podcast that you definitely should listen to. If you're interested in learning the stories behind your favourite D2C brands, then this is a podcast where you'll be able to find and understand those success stories. So go and listen to the DTC Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. If your job is measured by the effectiveness of the content you create, then you have to check out the Audience Connection Podcast hosted by Ollie Atkinson and Lydia Chan. They've got over 30 years of real world experience between them, helping brands connect better with the people that matter. Each week they are joined by marketing and communication leaders from the world's largest brands, as well as behavioral scientists to reveal how great content sparks action and builds lasting connections. And I was one of their guests on one of their most recent episodes. So if you need your content to stick, go and subscribe to the Audience Connection wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. So far we've heard that the Tuckman model for building a group won't make the group more effective, but what does make a high performing group? Well, Colin says it's something called social sensitivity.

Colin Fisher (21:29)

Social sensitivity is a facet of what some people call emotional intelligence, which is our ability to detect the emotions of other people without Being told. So it's tested with, actually a really fun test that you can find online called Reading the Mind and the Eyes. And you're given just a picture of somebody's eyes and only their eyes. And then an option, multiple choice of how that person was feeling at the time. And of course, the researchers know how the person reported actually feeling. And you're given, like, 30 of these. And then your score on that is your social sensitivity score.

Phil Agnew (22:09)

Okay. I thought I would take this test myself live on the show to see how it works. So in front of me, I've loaded up the website. I've dropped the link to this website in the show notes if you want to take the test as well. And like Colin says, I can see a picture of someone's eyes. All of the pictures, I think, on this website are black and white. I'm given four options. Four individual words I could pick to describe these eyes or the expression that these eyes are giving off. The options are jealous, panicked, arrogant, or hateful. It's not. I wouldn't say. It's totally obvious to me what the expression is. I think it could probably be jealous or arrogant. And I'm guessing that most will be like this, that it will be quite hard to tell that there'll be two potential answers that it could be. But to get started, I'm going to go with jealous. All right, I'll now answer the remaining 36 questions and let you know how I get on. Okay. Well, I have my results. The test took me 280 seconds. They purposely measure the time it takes. I think that's part of the test. It helps you understand how quickly you're sort of understanding people's emotional states. And they also tell me how many correct answers I got. I found this a bit interesting because I assumed that there wouldn't be one correct answer, assumed that there could be multiple correct answers. But no, apparently there are individual correct answers. And I've got a score based on that. So I got 31 out of the 36 faces correctly. I correctly stated the right emotion, I guess, 31 times. Now, I've since Googled what this means because it wasn't very clear on the website. And I've read that it means that I am slightly above average at reading emotions, which is lovely. I'm very happy to hear that I'm not exceptional. That would be getting about 34 to 36, but it's a good score. However, this score does not just mean that I'm good at reading emotions. Colin says that researchers have found That a high score in this test can actually make individuals more effective in a group.

Colin Fisher (24:03)

There were researchers led by Anita Woolley at Carnegie Mellon who were looking, you know, what predicted collective performance, team performance. And so what the researchers did is they measured individuals on almost every trait that anyone had ever hypothesized might affect team performance. So big five personality traits and things that a lot of people thought might matter were things like conscientiousness, things like the balance of introverts to extroverts on the team. Those were things prior research had thought about. Even intelligence itself. Individual intelligence is something that you might think helps team performance across a variety of tasks. But surprisingly, none of these traits, when you looked at the average level on the team or even the maximum level on the team, predicted this collective intelligence, which is the team performance across a wide variety of tasks. And the only thing the researchers found that predicted was the average level of social sensitivity on the team. This is thought to be the case because one of the big problems in teams is staying coordinated and communicating enough about what our current state is, what our current understanding is, what we're excited about, what we're not excited about, whether things are going well and going poorly. And so when we have a high level of social sensitivity on the team, that means we don't have to communicate explicitly about all these things that we have a pretty high level of members able to intuit, oh, you know, that Phil doesn't think things are going so well right now, I better slow down or check in with him without us needing to explicitly tell one another that. And that appears to be a really useful thing when a team has a high level of social sensitivity.

Phil Agnew (25:58)

Woolly and her co authors measured every trait they could find to predict team success and every way to combine them. They looked at averages, minimums, maximums, variation, and of all these traits, only one emerged as a predictor of group effectiveness. And that was social sensitivity. Social sensitivity is that ability to detect others emotions through non verbal cues. In other words, if you are good at reading others emotions intuitively and quickly, you are probably very socially sensitive. That's what the reading the mind and the eyes tests looks to measure. Colin writes that as far as we can tell, social sensitivity doesn't have much to do with individual intelligence. But it is the key to collective intelligence, a group's ability to perform effectively across a variety of tasks. In the book he makes the point that a group with many members of high social sensitivity will probably outperform a group with individuals that are of course higher intelligence.

Colin Fisher (26:52)

Now that said, I don't want this to start a trend of organizations all measuring social sensitivity and trying to assign teams based on it. Because as with a lot of these statistically significant effects in studies, it's still more important that you get people with the right knowledge and skills to do the task. And if you don't get the right knowledge and skills to do the task, the social sensitivity isn't going to matter that much. You really need to focus on that first and that you need to focus on kind of other structural elements of the team, like not making it too big, like making sure you have this kind of diverse set of perspectives there that creates the potential for synergy.

Phil Agnew (27:35)

So social sensitivity won't guarantee success. A group full of people who have never played basketball but scored well for social sensitivity will not win the NBA. But a high quality basketball team with good social sensitivity will probably outperform a similarly matched team.

Colin Fisher (27:52)

But that assuming we've got that right, social sensitivity then makes a difference above and beyond those things. But it's also, if you feel like you're not a socially sensitive person, all hope is not lost. You're not doomed to be a bad team member or poor collaborator. If you don't know how other people are feeling, you don't know what they're thinking. There's an easy solution which is ask questions are kind of the superpower substitute for social sensitivity. And that a team that asks a lot of questions, listens to the answers that other members give can do just as well as one that people can read each other more easily without telling one another. So don't redesign your whole organization around this finding just yet. But do you know, give some thought to the importance of paying attention to what other people are thinking and feeling and adjusting your behavior in response. And if you don't know, there's an easy way to find out.

Phil Agnew (28:51)

Colin writes how socially sensitive people can adjust their own behaviour to accommodate their fellow group members feelings. If someone is overwhelmed, they can see that they need help. If someone is really enthusiastic, they can follow their lead. Although there are other ways to be a stellar teammate, social sensitivity is the trait scientists have found that seems to predict the best group effectiveness across a wide variety of tasks. And gaining social sensitivity can be EAs. Maybe you can just intuitively tell how another is feeling, but if you can't, or even if you think you can, you should probably just ask how others are feeling. However, social sensitivity isn't the only thing that boosts performance. To end our discussion, I asked Colin about his old Mentor Richard Hackman and Hackman's work on studying how the type of task or job we are given can dramatically alter our performance.

Colin Fisher (29:42)

So task characteristics, this is actually where Richard Hackman's research went and came up with what's become known as the job characteristics theory or task characteristics theory. And it's exactly the same things that make work inherently motivating. So it's not just about whether the person's motivated, it's not about whether there's a leader shouting at you. It's not just about rewards and punishments that we find some kinds of work more motivating than other kinds of work, and that there's predictable characteristics for what we would call well designed work. And that one is, it's not simple in the sense it's not routine, doing the same thing over and over. So it has what we call task variety. It's the difference between, you know, back when we had to stuff letters into envelopes or we're just, you know, out shoveling the snow in the driveway. These are things that there's not a lot of variety to the task. There's also task identity, which is we need to be given a whole piece of work. So when you give groups an assignment like is common in organizations like hey, write a report and you're going to submit this report by this date, but then you don't know what happens to it. You don't know what its impact on the world is. I've certainly been a part of these kind of committees at the university. You really, you never find out you're asked to do something and you don't know what happens to it. It this is inherently less motivating work than work where you can see the contingency between your labor and some end user of that research or some impact on the world. So we want to have task identity in our tasks. We also need to have perceived importance or meaningfulness that if we think our work is not meaningful, we're of course going to work less hard than if we think it's important. And often at work that importance is something we need to talk about, make sure everybody understands similarly. And then we also need to give people autonomy, especially we need to give groups autonomy on how they do the work. And that's because when teams are given a process for exactly how they need to do something and they become focused on that process, they're no longer accountable for the results of it. So if something goes wrong and we're a team that's been really micromanaged and told we need to do steps one through 23 in order to get to the end and we're judged on whether we complete those steps. If the product's not good, we can blame whoever gave us that process. We don't experience our own accountability for the outcome and therefore we work less hard on it.

Phil Agnew (32:26)

To recap a task that motivates us and a task that is so effective that it'll increase our performance needs to happen have four components to begin with. It cannot be simple, it has to be challenging. Shoveling snow isn't enough. There needs to be some complexity there. Second, we need task identity. In other words, we need to see the results of our labours. For a cook that's probably watching someone enjoy the meal that they have cooked, or for a podcaster like me that's reading review of this show. Thirdly, we need the task to have perceived importance or meaningfulness. And finally, we need autonomy. We need to feel ownership over both the task and the results.

Colin Fisher (33:03)

When we have the these elements of tasks, it makes work more motivating for teams. And that when we give teams simple tasks or things where it's not a whole piece of work, or things where we're telling them exactly how they have to do their work, they're going to be less motivated than if they're given better design tasks.

Phil Agnew (33:26)

Colin, in his book, provides research that backs this up. He cites a meta analysis by Hackman and Oldman covering 259 different studies, including studies on 200,000 natural human beings. It found that these task characteristics are extremely powerful. They explain 34% of the variance in job performance and 55% of the variance in job satisfaction. In other words, you are going to be far more happy if you're in a job or doing tasks that have those four components. Colin writes that these are ginormous effect sizes. He says that many well known scientific articles feature effect sizes of 1 or 2%. Task characteristics have a stronger effect on the collective effectiveness than smoking has on cancer risk, for example. To make someone better at their job, it's best to change the task characteristic. To make a team perform better, it's best to develop social sensitivity. And when you form your next group, do not assume that you need trust exercises and storming workshops. Just spend more time setting norms that encourage social sensitivity. Asking how your other group members are feeling will be far more effective than a trust fool. That's all for today folks. I really hope you enjoyed today's episode of Nudge. If you did, you will love Colin's fantastic book. The Collective edge. Here he is sharing a bit more about the book.

Colin Fisher (34:51)

The book is about all the way that groups and teams are influencing our lives and that they're influencing our lives in both really obvious ways. Like we're part of groups like our families, our friend groups and our work teams. But group dynamics are also influencing us in much more hidden, invisible ways. And so I wanted to write a book that really tells the story of group dynamics because I think right now so much attention is given to how we think as individuals, how we can improve ourselves as individuals, or occasionally we get these really high level books about whole organizations or society as whole. But these this kind of small group level really gets skipped over and there's been so much great science about this that I feel like people just don't know the whole story about.

Phil Agnew (35:41)

We've shared a lot of that great science in the past two episodes, but there is much, much more in his book. I've left a link to the book in the show notes before we wrap up. A quick recommendation if you want something to queue up after this, check out the podcast the Audience Connection. It is a brilliant new show. I recently was a guest on the show and I really enjoyed the conversation. Oli, the host is outstand. Our conversation was one of the best I've had on a podcast I've guested on in a long time. So after this, if you've got no more episodes of Nudge to listen to, pop open your podcast app and search for the Audience connection. You can find my episode on there, which I really enjoyed, but you can also find other episodes that I think are fantastic. Give it a spin. I think you'll find it more than worth your time today. All right, that is all folks. Thank you for listening to today's episode of Nudge. I've been a little slow getting back to emails and working on the podcast over the past few weeks. I got married last Saturday, which takes up a surprising amount of time but has obviously been a wonderful and incredible and really enjoyable experience. That said, because that is done, I can put a lot more time back into the show now. So expect some really exciting episodes coming up. I've got the researcher Adam Galansky, I've got Richard Shotten talking about his new book, Sunita Sar is coming on talking about her best selling book, and I've got Michael Hallsworth from the Behavioural Insights Team on as well. Lots of really good guests coming up and lots to enjoy Joy over the next few months. So I really hope you enjoy Nudge. If you are please Please do leave me a review and let me know what you think. As I mentioned earlier, that really does help me enjoy my job more and give me more task characteristics that help me perform better. But even if you don't leave a review, thank you for listening. I'll be back next Monday with another episode. Cheers.