Why Superstars Struggle to Bond with Their Teams

From the moment you start each workday, you’re subject to two basic human impulses: to excel and to conform.

If people in your immediate environment are amazing performers, you might be able to do both at once: By excelling, you fit the norm of your spectacular coworkers. But that’s rare. I’m pretty sure that in most work environments, as soon as you excel, you stop conforming. If you choose a high-performance path, you separate yourself from your coworkers. You’re not quite one of the bunch anymore. No matter how proud you are of your achievements, tell me it doesn’t hurt when you see your old group of friends coming back from a lunch that you somehow hadn’t known about.

I was thinking about this while reading research on the psychological and social effects not of being a high performer but of experiencing an extraordinary event, because the two situations share a few things in common. When something exciting and unusual happens to us, even if it’s random, we’ve excelled, in a way. We’re special. We no longer conform.

The research, by Gus Cooney and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia, shows that after we go through an extraordinary experience, we assume that we’ll really enjoy telling the tale. But when we try, we often don’t feel so good about it. We feel separate. We sense that the group resents our excellent adventure. The study focused on experiences that are really only slightly extraordinary, such as watching an interesting video, but the results are pretty clear: A special experience distances us from other people, and the responses we see in our peers makes us feel excluded.

Jaclyn M. Jensen, an assistant professor in the Richard H. Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University, has put a different lens on what divides us from our coworkers and why. Along with Pankaj C. Patel of Ball State University and Jana L. Raver of Queen’s University in Canada, Jensen studied a large Midwestern field office of a U.S. financial services firm, using surveys to find out what was going on among coworkers — in the workrooms, during team meetings, in the lunchroom, and on email.

The researchers found that even in a collegial, well-behaved workplace, not only are you perceived as different if you’re a high performer; you’re also sometimes victimized. High-performing employees in this environment scored 3.37 on a 1-to-5 scale of victimization frequency, with 1 representing “never” and 5 representing “once a week or more.” They scored significantly higher on this measure of being victimized than average and poorly performing workers.

Mostly, the victimization was subtle, which is understandable, given the risks of being called out as a bully. So instead of being overtly nasty, people avoid you or withhold resources. Or they schedule important meetings when you happen to be out of town.

It probably goes without saying that there’s no rational logic to the victimization of high performers. After all, if you’re a high performer, by definition you have an outsized impact on the organization, and you help make the workgroup shine. Your victimizers’ incentive pay is probably even based (at least in part) on your achievements.

Still, what’s rational about human behavior? As Jensen pointed out to me, human beings have a pronounced tendency to punish those who violate unspoken norms. Average performers worry that you’re making them look bad. If they can bring you down a notch, they can alleviate (or at least they think they can alleviate) their negative feelings by reminding you what an “acceptable” level of performance looks like.

But one of the more interesting aspects of Jensen’s research is that the covert victimization is spotty — it doesn’t apply to all high performers. Certain achievers are spared the worst of the victimization. These are what Jensen and her colleagues call “benevolent” high performers.

Benevolent high performers are sensitive to what’s fair for other people; they put others’ needs ahead of their own. They’re cooperative, even altruistic at times.

OK, no great news there. But the reality is that high performers too often slip into what Jensen would call “non-benevolence” without even realizing it. They start to feel entitled to their hard-won authority. Sometimes they step on or manipulate others, telling themselves that all’s fair in pursuit of the greater good. Pretty soon they’re consistently putting their own needs first. To measure this, the researchers used the surveys to place employees along a continuum of behavior, with “entitled” at one end and “benevolent” at the other. Here “entitled” means having “low equity sensitivity” — a poor sense of what’s fair to others. (As you can see from the chart, low achievers are victimized too, but the researchers found that there’s a different rationale: Weak performers are punished for jeopardizing their coworkers’ success. Benevolence doesn’t help them much.)

So if you’re a high performer who’s being excluded or cold-shouldered, maybe it’s not so much your excellence that your coworkers are reacting to but your creeping non-benevolence. If they’re not looping you into lunch invites, maybe it’s because they’re starting to sense that you’re putting your own needs ahead of theirs.

If that’s the case, you know what to do. Jensen’s research shows that practicing thoughtfulness and cooperativeness really does work to defuse your colleagues’ impulse to take you down.

Cooney et al frame the issue as black and white. They write that there’s a basic conflict between our desires to “do what other people have not yet done and to be just like everyone else,” so that if we satisfy our impulse to stand out, we can’t conform any longer, and failure to conform leads to feelings of exclusion.

Jensen’s view suggests a different way of looking at it: Even if your high performance puts you on another plane, separating you from your old bunch, that nonconformity doesn’t have to come with the punishments of rejection or sniping. If you make an effort to be altruistic, the group will reward you. If not with lunch invitations, then at least with acceptance —  a kind of benevolence of its own.

via Why Superstars Struggle to Bond with Their Teams – Andrew O’Connell – Harvard Business Review.

Why Superstars Struggle to Bond with Their Teams

Top 5 Reasons Why People Quit Their Jobs [INFOGRAPHIC]

If you’re an employer, you need to know what will make your employees quit.

What could be the deal breaker? What could cause them to leave suddenly?

BambooHR have the top 5 reasons why people quit their jobs in their infographic below.

Takeaways:

1. Your boss doesn’t trust you – and you want more trust, but you aren’t getting it.


2. The work you are doing is not flexible and you want more space to move.


3. Do you have difficult co-workers? They could make you quit!


4. Has your boss blamed for things that aren’t your fault?


5. Does your job have expectations of you during your time off?

via Top 5 Reasons Why People Quit Their Jobs [INFOGRAPHIC].

Top 5 Reasons Why People Quit Their Jobs [INFOGRAPHIC]

3 Ways to Encourage Employees to Give You More Feedback

Want an honest appraisal of how things are really going from your team? Try these tricks to get the unvarnished truth.

When you’re the boss, bad news, unpleasant as it is, can be incredibly valuable… and incredibly hard to come by.

Without knowing what’s going wrong in your business, you can’t fix things, but employees are generally hesitant to be the bearers of bad news. And as Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Company, pointed out on Signal v. Noise recently, they’re often even more reluctant when they suspect that you might not exactly welcome this sort of negative feedback with open ears.

“The biggest reason I didn’t give my boss feedback is I believed that even if I did speak up, nothing would change. I believed my boss wouldn’t do anything with my feedback. No action would be taken. And if nothing was going to change, what was the point of me saying anything?” she recalls of her days as a frontline employee. Apparently, she isn’t alone.

“Futility has been found to be 1.8 times more common than fear as a reason for employees not speaking up to their managers. According to a 2009 Cornell National Social Survey, more employees reported withholding their ideas due to a sense of futility (26%) than a fear of personal consequences (20%),” she reports.

So what’s the remedy for this fear that negative feedback will simply be ignored? Don’t wait around for your employees to magically become bolder, Lew advises. Instead, try these three simple techniques for encouraging the sort of open environment that will convince your team you’ll actually take their suggestions seriously.

1. Don’t shoot the messenger. Celebrate her.

Even if you don’t agree with or act on the next piece of negative feedback you receive from a member of staff, take a moment to publically thank that employee for bringing her concerns to you. Lew offers Amanda Lannert, the CEO of Jellyvision, as a positive example of this principle: “during an all-hands meeting, she publicly thanked an employee who spoke up and gave feedback.”

2. Explain WHY nothing was done.

Among the most discouraging things that can happen for employees is to screw up the courage to present negative news to the boss and then see absolutely no action taken. So if you get a piece of feedback that isn’t practical to act on for whatever reason, be sure to take the time to explain to your employees why you were unable or unwilling to make changes.

“Expose your decision-making process,” advises Lew. “If you don’t, employees will wonder, ‘What ever happened to that idea I suggested?’ They’ll assume that you’re not open to receiving new ideas, and they’ll hesitate to bring up feedback the next time around.”

3. Start small.

If you haven’t been encouraging your employees to give you negative feedback previously, it’s probably too much to expect them to approach you with really substantive complaints straight off the bat. So begin by acting on small suggestions to prove your openness to hearing the bad along with the good.

Lew gives another example from a fellow CEO, in this case Dave Bellous, the co-CEO of Yellow Pencil. He learned that “his company needed a new phone service. So he promptly changed their phone service, and saw an immediate shift in his team’s morale. This one unassuming change yielded huge results. All because he acted on something small quickly,” Lew writes.

via 3 Ways to Encourage Employees to Give You More Feedback | Inc.com.

3 Ways to Encourage Employees to Give You More Feedback

Three Things that Actually Motivate Employees

The most motivated and productive people I’ve seen recently work in an older company on the American East Coast deploying innovative technology products to transform a traditional industry. To a person, they look astonished when I ask whether their dedication comes from anticipation of the money they could make in the event of an IPO.

Newcomers and veterans alike say they are working harder than ever before. Their products are early stage, which means daily frustrations as they run through successive iterations. Getting them to market demands more than corporate systems can handle, so they must beg for IT upgrades, recruit and budget themselves, and even take on sales responsibilities to explain innovations to customers — which adds to the workload. So much pressure, yet they don’t seem to care about the money?

One person says that he can’t let himself think about an IPO. It’s too remote; it distracts from doing the work, and the work is the important thing. Another says she is most excited about the opportunity to change how the industry operates and have a big impact on improving lives. The chorus of voices is consistent: “We take the work in directions we choose.” “We’re working on the most advanced technology.” “Our products change lives.” Moreover, they have the joy of self-expression. One sales manager, a former actor, recited Shakespeare at a customer meeting and won over skeptical executives.

For these professionals, a future IPO is outweighed by today’s OPI — the opportunity for positive impact.

OPIs exert a strong appeal wherever I find them. In a different company in a middle American city, I talked with a couple meeting with a caterer to finalize details of their wedding — which was going to take place in the office lobby. Imagine that — people who feel so connected to their workplace that they want to get married there.

Both companies embrace a digital future still being invented. Yet leaders have turned change from exhausting to exhilarating by asking employees to open their imaginations. Although some professionals see transformation as a threat, most find chances for creative expression, especially as the companies evolve from siloed departments to flexible collaboration. Employees are encouraged to work on the best and latest concepts. Emphasis has shifted from output to impact – from how many products are sold to how much the products enrich people’s lives in the broader society.

There are no promises that these jobs will last forever. Loyalty comes from the daily work itself, a sense of community accepting of individuality, and constant reminders that what employees do matters.

I summarize these keys to strong work motivation in three Ms — mastery, membership, and meaning. Money is a distant fourth. Money can even be an irritant if compensation is not adequate or fair, and compensation runs out of steam quickly as a source of sustained performance. Instead, people happy in their work are often found in mission-driven organizations where people feel they have positive impact on social needs. As my HBS colleague Michael Norton shows in his book Happy Money, giving to others boosts happiness.

Unfortunately, happiness at work is rare. Numerous polls show low levels of work engagement in U.S. companies, with perhaps half of employees disengaged and disaffected. That’s an appalling finding. I think the problem is that human resource policy too often centers around compensation and benefits and not around the nature of the work itself. In contrast, the high-performance teams in sports and business I studied for my book Confidence focus on the work and its impact. They work harder, longer, and yet with more energy than low-performance teams. They make a difference day by day, making progress through small wins — a key to motivation that another HBS colleague, Teresa Amabile, studies in The Progress Principle.

To tap the three Ms, leaders at all levels can rethink how they define their strategy, jobs, and culture. They can:

Mastery: Help people develop deep skills. Stretch goals show faith that people can shape the future rather than being victimized by it, and find pride in constant learning. Even in the most seemingly routine areas, when people are given difficult problems to tackle, with appropriate and tools and support, they can do things faster, smarter, and better.

Membership: Create community by honoring individuality. Community solidarity comes from allowing the whole person to surface, which means going beyond superficial conformity to know what else people care about. Encourage employees to bring outside interests to work. Given them frequent opportunities to meet people across the organization to help them get to know one another more deeply.

Meaning: Repeat and reinforce a larger purpose. Emphasize the positive impact of the work they do. Clarity about how your products or services can improve the world provides guideposts for employees’ priorities and decisions. As part of the daily conversation, mission and purpose can make even mundane tasks a means to a larger end.

Highly-engaged people who contribute more of themselves can produce Shakespeare recitations that win customers, weddings in office lobbies that build community, or the ultimate prize: innovations that change the world.

via Three Things that Actually Motivate Employees – Rosabeth Moss Kanter – Harvard Business Review.

Three Things that Actually Motivate Employees

When Leaders Fail

I read a fascinating article in Wired recently about how Google has failed to respond appropriately to rise of Facebook and other social networking sites. Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt is taking full responsibility. Schmidt is quoted as saying, “I clearly knew I had to do something and I failed to do it.”

For me, this was the most intriguing line in the article. Sam Gustin, the writer of the article, explained Schmidt “was so focused on running Google’s day-to-day operations that he didn’t give the issue the necessary attention.”

That’s when leadership fails. It’s easy to fall into the trap. We get focused on doing what we do. We try to get better at. We do all we can to get the team focused on what we do. We want improvement. We want quality. We want to do what we do well.

The problem is that when we get so focused on doing what we do well, we run the risk of missing what’s happening in the bigger picture.

What we do well and had success doing in the past, may not work now and in the future.

Other opportunities may surface, but we’re so focused on what we have to do today that we miss them.

New threats to our strategy continue to pop up. If we only work on the day-to-day, they go unnoticed.

We may falsely assume that the people we’re trying to reach stay the same — we assume their needs never change.

Here’s what’s most challenging about all this — leading the day-to-day is the easy part of leadership. We know it. We’re comfortable with it. We feel good doing things we know how to do.

The challenge, of course, is that an organization concerned about impacting multiple generations will experience a brief existence and then die if it’s focused solely on the day-to-day…even if the quality of the execution is flawless.

It’s probably time we pause to notice and then act on what requires our necessary attention.

via When Leaders Fail – TonyMorganLive.com.

When Leaders Fail