Adrian Gostick

It’s long been a tactic used by sports coaches, business leaders, and sales managers to position your team as the underdogs about to bring down the championship team/leader in your industry/top performer.
You explain that your team is David and you are taking on Goliath. That gets people pumped, right?

Not so fast.

According to research published this month in T+D magazine, groups work about 30 percent harder when competing again lower-status competition. In other words, we put in more effort when we are competing against those we know we should beat.

One of the researchers, Nathan Pettit from Cornell University, explains the psychology. He says members of a team understand the embarrassing implications of being outperformed by a lower-ranking team, thus they work harder. Also team members believe it is possible to not only beat, but dominate the lower-ranking team, and that self-fulfilling prophecy tends to lead to better outcomes. However, when competing against a higher-ranking team, team members studied perform only at expected levels. The researchers surmised that members subconsciously realized that losing would not result in a loss of standing for them.

What are the implications for us as managers? Pettit says, “managers may want to carefully consider creating performance comparisons between groups of different statuses as a potential way of eliciting increases in effort.”

For your team, let your people know they are the best. Let them know that they can beat any competition, and chances are they will.

I had an interesting question from a client this week: Can you define the ideal employee?

While my first instinct was to respond with a wisecrack (me/Steve Jobs/Mother Theresa), instead I pointed to our survey of 200,000 people for The Carrot Principle that showed engaged employees:

•Consistently put in extra effort
•Are motivated to contribute to the success of their team and organization (they care about the team and not just themselves)
•Are always looking for better ways to get the job done
•Get a strong sense of personal accomplishment from their work
•Have a positive attitude about work
•Receive a lot of recognition for their great work

While it’s a good list, it’s admittedly not all-inclusive. For instance, you could argue an ideal employee is ethical, capable, intelligent, dependable, etc. But for a short list of characteristics, these six provide a pretty good analysis of a person’s ability to excel in your organization.

In fact, right now, why don’t you think about each of the members of your team and ask if they live these six; and then ask the same question about yourself.

Early one morning this week, two guys were talking loudly in the next aisle of lockers at the gym, and I couldn’t help overhearing. Here’s part of the conversation:

Matt: You still working at Mountain Lumber? (I changed the name, but it’s a large retailer.)

Jim: Oh yeah, and listen to this. I’ve been telling them I want a certain day off for two months. I go in yesterday and sure enough, when I look at the schedule, Cathy has got me working that day. I tell them I’ve been asking for that day off forever, and she says it’s too late. She says I should have told her when the schedule went up on the weekend, but I have my days off on Saturday and Sunday so how could I have known? She said that was my fault. It was my responsibility to check the schedule the day it goes up.

Matt: Huh. So what do you do?

Jim: I told them (he coughs) I might come down with the green flu that day. They can fire me if they want. That way I get 18 months of unemployment.

Matt: Or they could just make your life miserable.

Jim: (Grunts in agreement) They put me on the counter yesterday. That’s the worst. I have to be the highest paid guy ever to work the register.

Unfortunately this kind of dialogue happens thousands of times a day around the world. In our 200,000-person research study for The Carrot Principle, we found a vast majority of employees view their managers as little more than “time keepers” and “task masters.” Very few employees saw their supervisors as motivators. And very few believed their managers were understanding or sympathetic to their personal issues, and yet that issue alone has been reported as the third most important in employee work satisfaction (after recognition and communication).

In the best work places, employees call their managers “relevant” to their positive work experience. They say their managers are considerate of their goals inside and outside of work, and because of that understanding they give more discretionary effort and stay more committed.

I knew Tacita Lewars would be interesting from the moment we first spoke on our cell phones. We were in the same building but looking for each other amid a thousand attendees at the HR Institute of Alberta annual conference.

“How will I know you?” I asked. “I’m wearing all black,” she said, “and I’m all black.”

We met in the lobby a few minutes before I was to give the keynote address. Tacita carried a dog-eared copy of The Carrot Principle and a tape recorder. She introduced herself as president of the Institute’s book club and she asked some questions about our work. In turn, I asked a few of her.

It turns out in addition to reading at least one business book a month, this bright young woman is a global HR consultant and an expert in cultural diversity. When I asked her to sum up her work she told this story:

Tacita was riding the bus one day into downtown Calgary. A man was seated nearby, and by his appearance and speech he seemed to be from Africa. “Are you a girl?” he asked.

Tacita let out a startled breath and said, “Yes, I’m a girl.” She had no idea it was that hard to tell. Soon the man asked again. “So you are a girl?” By this point, Tacita was getting worried: Was her dress androgynous; was her hair style not feminine?

“Yes I’m a girl. Why do you keep asking that?”

The man apologized, and said he was simply wondering if she was a girl or if she was a married woman.

With the influx of foreign-born workers into our organizations, that lesson and many others have helped Tacita make a living teaching managers how to better understand cultural divides. A few examples: North American managers expect potential hires to make strong eye contact, though in some cultures such directness is considered rude; in some Muslim countries a man pays respect to a woman by not shaking her hand, though a hiring manager may take this as a slight; and so on.

The moral is: If our goal is to choose the best possible employees, we’d do well to better understand the cultural backgrounds of the people who are applying.

I know, there are so many bigger issues going on in the world. But now and then we just need to talk about simpler things. For instance: is it communication or communications?

Now and then I’ll visit a Corporate Communication department that calls itself Communications. It’s a simple thing, but the word communication is already plural when used to explain that you are in the business of writing, marketing, PR, etc.
So is communications always wrong? Tim Larson, associate professor of communication at the University of Utah, defines the two terms as such:

• Communication — The exchange of information between individuals, for example, by means of speaking, writing, or using a common system of signs or behavior.
• Communications — The technology and systems used for sending and receiving messages, for example postal, telephone, radio, TV and the Internet.

In other words, according to Professor Larson, a lineman working on a telephone pole works in the communications field, but a writer, editor, public relations practitioner works in a communication department.
Okay, that’s my rant. Off this week to speak at the HR Institute of Alberta and then on to the University of Arkansas. More stories from those venues I’m sure.