Dream Teams

What is a team? The usual response runs along the lines of a group of people who work together for a common goal, but teams are often far more nebulous and subtle than this simple definition would suggest.

Think about your own experience at work.  You probably belong to several teams that are explicitly described in the company’s structural plan: ‘the finance team’, ‘the senior management team’ and the like.  But do you feel you share a common goal with all of the other members?  How many ‘sub-teams’ are operating within the group, often with quite different agendas?  Irreconcilable divisions within teams will undermine their unity and may compromise their ability to function at all.

Contrast that scenario with coherent teams, where differences are exploited or assimilated in the interests of the common purpose, and where there is mutual trust, respect and openness.  Strong teams like this will both enable and amplify the talents and expertise of the individual members, and can be a potent force for development and change in the company.  This is why team development is so important, and nowhere more so than with virtual teams where the members aren’t really aware that they belong to one.  I recently had the privilege of working with just such a team: when the question of whether or not they were a team was put to them, only half the members felt that they were.  This was a group of intelligent and highly competent managers, with an enormous potential that was being hampered by feeling isolated and unsupported.

The help available from people who you feel you trust and can rely on comes in many different forms.  It may be a direct contribution, actually taking over some of your workload.  Since everyone is under much the same degree of pressure direct help like this may not be possible, but unless your team-mates know what you do and how you’re doing it, they won’t know whether there is anything they could do.  Support might also be less direct, simply knowing you’re part of a team of people you can talk to when you’re feeling pressured.  This may not directly reduce your in-tray, but will certainly help you to not turn pressure into stress.

However, the power of a team can also be its Achilles heel, when it leads to the feeling that with this team we can rule the world.  The challenges of surviving in a global economy remain, and unrealistic expectations can lead to a fall at the first subsequent hurdle.  Paradoxically, another downside is the empowering feeling of ‘us’.  If there’s ‘us’ there must be ‘them’, and just as a team needs to be coherent, so too does the wider organisation within which the team operates.  When ‘us’ and ‘them’ becomes ‘we’, the world’s there for the taking.   

Lies, damn lies, and statistics?

In a quote variously attributed to Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli, lies are described as lies, damn lies and statistics.  In fact, statistics are just numerical ways of expressing things and have no particular valence, but they can certainly be used to mislead people, and when they’re presented without clarification they can easily be misunderstood.

A good example is the report on the recent Happiness of New Zealand Survey.  Taken at face value, the findings suggest that going to live in Nelson will make you happy, since over 40% of the people in the survey who live there gave ratings of 9 or 10 (out of 10) on the scale.  Retired people and those aged over 65 or preferably over 75 were also happiest.   However, Nelson is renowned as a favoured retirement destination, so are people in Nelson happier because they live there, or because they’ve retired and/or are over 75?

These questions can be disentangled by using more sophisticated statistics, but there’s really a more important question: who wants to wait until they’re 75 to be happy?  Average life expectancy in New Zealand is around 76 years for men and 81 years for women, so if you’re a man you’ll have about a year’s happiness to enjoy.  A bit better if you’re a woman: 6 years.

In my previous blog I questioned the nonsensical phrase ‘work-life balance’, since it means that at work you don’t have a life.  Unfortunately, what the Survey does suggest is that people are happier when they’ve retired, which is a very sad state of affairs.  Why do people have so little job satisfaction?  In my experience as a business psychologist it isn’t really to do with the job itself - there are relatively few jobs that are so intrinsically unpleasant.  A much more likely cause is bad management.

Interviewed by Radio Live about the Survey, I pointed out that much of what passes for management training is about procedures, and trained monkeys can learn procedures.  What trainee managers seldom learn is the complex – but learnable – skill of managing people.  Take a look at the structural diagrams that companies produce: pretty pictures with job titles, usually arranged in a hierarchical tree.  Job titles are easy to specify, but they’re actually people, and that means having the skills of a counsellor to manage them.  If you’re not prepared to learn these skills you don’t deserve to be a manager, and the members of your team are very unlikely to be happy.

If you’re a manger reading this, perhaps you’re of the view that the only way to get people to do anything is wave sticks or pay more.  There’s plenty of evidence that neither of these strategies really works.  So if you’re wondering what happiness has to do with it, the answer’s ‘everything’: happy people work better, happy people stay.

The fact is that happiness isn’t tomorrow or yesterday, happiness is now.  What makes us unhappy is dwelling on what we lack in order to make us happy, but happiness isn’t about having things, its about letting go of the negative emotion we endlessly dwell on, the ‘worst things in my life that never happened’.  The Radio Live interview was shared with Sarah Trotman, a small-to-medium enterprise support specialist, and when asked for our one key factor for staying happy, she said remaining passionate about what you do.  I said ‘letting go’.  These might sound incompatible, but not so: the passion and excitement about what you do is the greatest motivating factor there is, but if you don’t also remember to let go of the rough that comes with the smooth, your success will be at the cost of happiness.

Work-life balance?

To me, the phrase ‘work-life balance’ means that at work you don’t have a life.  Unfortunately this is a widely-held view – work is something you have to do to earn money, but while you’re there you have to give up ‘your’ time.  An inevitable consequence of believing in work-life balance is the feeling that work is cheating you out of your life.

Hardly be surprising that so many people have little real job satisfaction, when what’s at the back of your mind is next weekend, last holiday, somewhere in the past or future you’d rather be.  This is what really cheats you out of life, because there’s no life in the past or the future - past and future are mere thoughts, a second-hand dream about life. 

What drives us into these dreams is emotion.  Everything we do has an emotional tone, somewhere along a continuum from ‘I hate doing this’ to ‘I love doing this’.  Things that we’re passionate about we can hardly be dragged away from, but life – whether at work or at home - is a mixture of things we like doing and things we don’t.

Here’s an analogy: you’re white-water rafting, and you’ve just come through some horrendous rapids.  You’re now in calm water, but there’s definitely rapids to come!  Life’s like that, whether you’re at work or at home: rapids and calm, and to negotiate the rapids you need presence of mind.  What that means, literally, is that your mind is in the present, and being resilient means letting go of all the negative emotions that come with the rapids.  Latch on to them and you’ll soon find yourself wishing you were somewhere else.

The inevitable cost of this wishful thinking is resentment and unhappiness when your attention returns to the work on your desk, and you put off until tomorrow whatever you can.  Unfortunately it doesn’t just sit there quietly, but continues to gnaw away at you from the bottom of your in-tray: ‘I really must get that done’.  Paradoxically, when you do just decide to do it, you often end up wondering what all the fuss was about! 

Happy people work best, but happiness is not about making a distinction between work and life.  To get the balance in everything we do we need to acquire the art of being here now.

Stress as Rumination

How often do we hear someone say they’re stressed because they’re moving house?  They say they must be stressed, because moving house is ‘way up there on the list’.  The list is one of the life-event scales – lists of things that might happen in your life, and you’re asked to tick all of the ones that have actually happened to you in the past 6 months.  The more ticks there are the more ‘stress’ you’re supposed to be under.

If all these things were stressful there’d be no such thing as stress management - after all, how many issues you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis can just be ignored?  You have to deal with them, and if they’re inherently stressful then stress becomes unavoidable.  And isn’t it also true that for every person who says that moving house stresses them, there’ll be another who is excited by it and looking forward to it?

We equally unthinkingly say that a bit of stress is good for you.  Pressure may be useful, but it should be called what it is: pressure, not stress.  There isn’t ‘useful stress’.  Pressure is demand, and can be hugely motivating, but all that stress offers is misery.  Of course, this depends how you define stress.  The old-fashioned flat-earth idea saw stress as lots of events, but we all know resilient people who can cope with much more than others can.  In our own experience, we’ve had days when work has gone like a dream, but the next day feels like wading through treacle.  The job hasn’t changed, what’s changed is our minds.  Stress is all in the mind, which is just as well – you can’t change everything in the world, but you can certainly change you perception of it.

The Challenge of Change defines stress as rumination – the tendency to go on dwelling on things after they’ve happened.  This is not reflecting on what went wrong in an emotionally objective way, it is just endlessly thinking ‘what if’ and ‘if only’.  As Mark Twain said, ‘some of the worst things in my life never happened’.  All that events do is to offer you something to ruminate about, but whether you do so or not is a choice.  Giving people the knowledge to make that choice is what real empowerment is about.