Dr. Heidi Grant

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Many Heads Can Be Better Than One – Especially If They Belong to Women

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From my Fast Company Blog:

In the modern workplace, almost all work of real consequence is carried about by small teams.   But even when very smart, very talented people are assigned to work together on a project, it’s clear that the resulting team can be a complete disaster.   Sometimes it seems like teamwork can turn otherwise competent people into childish morons.  Would we be better off relying less on teams, and more on individuals going at it alone?

Not necessarily.  Teams can be smarter and more effective than the individuals who make up the team – the whole can indeed be bigger and better than just the sum of its parts, but only under the right circumstances.

A new study conducted by researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Union College shows that the collective intelligence of a small group working together uniquely predicts their performance across a wide variety of tasks.  In the study, nearly 700 people were placed in groups of 2 to 5, and their ability to solve problems as a team was found to strongly predict their subsequent success on tasks as diverse as visual puzzles, games, negotiations, and logical analysis.

The average intelligence of members (measured individually, rather than as a group) did not predict team performance at all, and that’s really important. In other words, simply having a couple of really smart people in the group didn’t necessarily make the group itself any smarter.

It turns out that the collective intelligence of the team will only meet or exceed its individual potential if the right kind of internal dynamics are in place.  The researchers found that what is needed for a group to be “smart” is effective coordination and communication, and that this is most likely to be the present in groups with members who were more socially sensitive.

When groups contained people who were particularly skilled when it comes to perceiving and responding to others’ emotions, they demonstrated greater collective intelligence, and superior performance again and again.  Not surprisingly, groups where one person dominated in conversation and decision-making were collectively less intelligent, and less effective.

So, how can you ensure that your team will be socially sensitive?  The answer is simple: Add more women.  Teams in the study that contained more women were significantly more socially sensitive, and consequently more intelligent, than the male-dominated teams.

If you don’t have the power to change the gender makeup of your teams, fear not.  Their collective intelligence can still develop and improve – through better, more sensitive means of working together, or better collaboration tools.  Create opportunities for team members to express their feelings, and for others to respond to them.   Encourage face-time whenever possible (emotions are difficult to read on the phone, and nearly impossible over email).  Cultivating a work environment  where team members experiences are acknowledged and understood will create teams that are smarter, happier, and far more successful.

Follow me on Twitter @hghalvorson

The Cure for Loneliness

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The world grows ever smaller, more connected, more crowded, and ironically, increasingly lonely for many of us.  This is a problem with a whole host of unhappy consequences, not just for the individuals who experience it, but for society as a whole.

It’s important to point out before I go any further that loneliness is not the same thing as being a private person, or a “loner,” because some of us actually both need and enjoy a lot of time to ourselves.  Loneliness, instead, refers to the difference between the amount of social contact and intimacy you have and the amount you want.  It’s about feeling isolated, like an outcast.

(That said, the opposite of loneliness isn’t popularity either – you can have dozens of “friends” and still feel lonely.  True intimacy and feelings of relatedness are much more about the quality of your relationships than the quantity.)

Persistent loneliness is not only emotionally painful, but can be more damaging to our physical and mental health than many psychiatric illnesses.  For instance, lonely people sleep poorly, experience severe depression and anxiety, have reduced immune and cardiovascular functioning, and exhibit sings of early cognitive decline that grow more severe over time.

Not surprisingly, psychologists have created dozens of interventions designed to try to tackle this epidemic of loneliness.  The approaches taken are varied, but can be broken up, roughly speaking, into four different categories.

There are interventions aimed at:

Improving social skills. Some researchers argue that loneliness is primarily the result of lacking of the interpersonal skills required to create and maintain relationships.  Typically, these interventions involve teaching people how to be less socially awkward – to engage in conversation, speak on the phone, give and take compliments, grow comfortable with periods of silence, and communicate in positive ways non-verbally.

Enhancing social support.  Many lonely people are victims of changing circumstances. These approaches offer professional help and counseling for the bereaved, elderly people who have been relocated, and children of divorce.

Increasing opportunities for social interaction. With this approach, the logic is simple:  If people are lonely, give them opportunities to meet other people.  This type of intervention, therefore, focuses on creating such opportunities through organized group activities.

Changing maladaptive thinking.  This approach might seem surprising, and its rationale less obvious than the other approaches.  But recent research reveals that over time, chronic loneliness makes us increasingly sensitive to, and on the lookout for, rejection and hostility.  In ambiguous social situations, lonely people immediately think the worst.  For instance, if coworker Bob seems more quiet and distant than usual lately, a lonely person is likely to assume that he’s done something to offend Bob, or that Bob is intentionally giving him the cold shoulder.

Lonely people pay more attention to negative social information (like disagreement or criticism). They remember more of the negative things that happened during an encounter with another person, and fewer positive things.

All this leads, as you might imagine, to more negative expectations about future interactions with others – lonely people don’t expect things to go well for them, and consequently, they often don’t.

Interventions aimed at changing this self-fulfilling pattern of thinking begin by teaching people to identify negative thoughts when they occur.  Whenever they feel anxious about a social encounter, find themselves focusing on everything that went wrong, or wondering if they’ve made a bad impression, a red flag is raised.

Next, they learn to treat these negative thoughts as testable hypotheses rather than fact.  They consider other possibilities – maybe everything will go smoothly, maybe it wasn’t all bad, perhaps everyone liked me after all.  They practice trying to see things from the perspective of others, and interpret their actions more benignly.

Take the case of Bob the Distant Coworker.  With thought retraining, lonely people learn to ask themselves questions like “Am I sure Bob doesn’t like me?  Could there be other, more likely reasons for his quiet, reserved behavior at work?  Could he simply be preoccupied with some problem?  I know sometimes I get quiet and distracted when something is bothering me.  Maybe Bob’s behavior has nothing to do with me!”

Once the negative thoughts are banished, lonely people can approach new relationships with a positive, optimistic outlook, see the best in others, and learn to feel more confident about themselves.

With four approaches to curing loneliness, the obvious question is:  What works?  Thanks to a recent meta-analysis of 50 different loneliness interventions, the answer is clear.  Interventions aimed at changing maladaptive thinking patterns were, on average, four times more effective than other interventions in reducing loneliness.  (In fact, the other three approaches weren’t particularly effective at all.)

It turns out that fundamentally, long-term loneliness isn’t about being awkward, or the victim of circumstance, or lacking opportunities to meet people.  Each can be the reason for relatively short-term loneliness – anyone who has ever moved to a new town or a new school and had to start building a network of friends from scratch certainly knows what it’s like to be lonely.   But this kind of loneliness needn’t last long, and new relationships usually are formed… unless you’ve fallen into a way of thinking that keeps relationships from forming.

More than anything else, the cure for persistent loneliness lies in breaking the negative cycle of thinking that created it in the first place.

Follow me on Twitter @hghalvorson

Longer May Not Be Better, But It Seems That Way

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From my Fast Company Blog:

Thinking about trying to shake things up at work?  Brimming with new ideas and strategies?  Hoping to move your company boldly into the future?  Good for you.  But if you are going to innovate, it might help you to start by understanding what you are up against, psychologically speaking.

It’s not just that people fear change, though they undoubtedly do.  It’s also that they genuinely believe (often on an unconscious level) that when you’ve been doing something a particular way for some time, it must be a good way to do things.  And the longer you’ve been doing it that way, the better it is.

So change isn’t simply about embracing something unknown – it’s about giving up something old (and therefore good) for something new (and therefore not good).

Recent research shows that people have a very reliable and tangible preference for things that have been around longer. In one study, students preferred the course requirement described as the status quo over a new version (regardless of whether the new version meant more or less coursework), and liked it even more when it had been around for 100 years rather than only 10 years.   In another, people who were told that acupuncture had been in existence for 2000 years expressed more favorable attitudes toward it than those who were told it existed for 250 years.

The bottom line is, unconsciously we all believe that longevity = goodness.  There are, admittedly, plenty of instances where this is perfectly rational.  When something has stood the test of time and beaten competitors, it is probably a superior product in at least some respects.

The problem is that longevity and tradition aren’t always accurate predictors of goodness – inertia, habit, marketing prowess, market monopoly, and fear of change can all be the real reasons why we haven’t tried something new.  Also, there are areas of life that really should be unaffected by this sort of bias – in domains like art or cuisine, how long something has been around should have little to do with how aesthetically pleasing or delicious you find it.

And yet, it does.   In one study, people who saw a painting described as having been painted in 1905 found it far more pleasing to look at than people who saw the same painting described as created in 2005.  In another, they admired the appearance of a tree described as being 4500 years old more than did those who thought the same tree just 500 years old.

In my favorite example, study participants were given a piece of European chocolate.  It was described to them as having first been sold in its region either 73 years ago or 3 years ago.  Guess which group rated the chocolate as better-tasting.

It’s not impossible to overcome an unconscious bias, but if you want to succeed you need to start by realizing that it’s there.  Innovation requires that we not only convince others that new can be good, but that we address their (often unconscious) assumption that what’s been around longer looks, works, and tastes better.

Follow me on Twitter:  @hghalvorson

The Dark Side of Self-Control

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From my Psychology Today Blog:

Why do people drink too much, eat too much, smoke cigarettes, take drugs, or have sex with people they’ve just met?  What’s to blame for all this bad behavior?

Most people would say that, while these self-destructive acts can have many root causes, they all have one obvious thing in common: they are all examples of failures of self-control.  Each of us has desires that we know we shouldn’t give in to, but when faced with temptation, some of us lack the willpower to resist it.

A recent paper by psychologists Catherine Rawn and Kathleen Vohs, however, argues that if you really think about it, something about that simple answer doesn’t quite make sense.  In fact, it turns out that sometimes it’s having willpower that really gets you into trouble.

Think back to the time you took your very first sip of beer.  Disgusting, wasn’t it?  When my father gave me my first taste of beer as a teenager, I distinctly remember wondering why anyone would voluntarily drink the stuff.   The experience is similar for most of us when it comes to our first sips of wine, hard liquor, and coffee as well.  And smoking?  No one enjoys their first cigarette – it tastes awful, burns your throat, makes you cough, and is often nauseating.  So even though smoking, and drinking alcohol or coffee, can become temptations you need willpower to resist, they never, ever start out that way.

Just getting past those first horrible experiences actually requires a lot of self-control.  Ironically, only those individuals who can repeatedly override their impulses, rather than give in to them, can ever come to someday develop a “taste” for Budweiser, Marlboro Lights, or dark-roasted Starbucks coffee.

We automatically think of willpower as a resource we use to help us do the things we know we should do – the things that are good for us. So why then would anyone ever exert willpower in order to do something that isn’t good for them?

The short answer is, we do it in order to achieve some goal.  And more often than not, that goal has something to do with social acceptance.   We force ourselves to consume alcoholic beverages that taste awful, inhale cigarette smoke that gags us, and try to mask the taste of coffee with generous applications of milk and sugar, in order to seem sophisticated, grown-up, and cool.  We experiment with illegal drugs, even though we are terrified of the physical and legal consequences, in order to feel accepted.  We have sex with people when we feel no sexual desire whatsoever, hoping that they will like us and that maybe it will “go somewhere.”

When we use our willpower to overcome our healthy impulses, we are choosing interpersonal gains – like forming friendships and avoiding rejection – over personal well-being. These aren’t self-control failures – far from it.  They are deliberate choices, and they are in fact self-control successes.

So if you think that your child will grow to become a clean, sober, and abstinent teenager just because he has the willpower to hold out for two marshmallows later instead of one marshmallow now, think again.

Self-control is simply a tool to be put to some use, helpful or harmful.  To live happy and productive lives, we need to develop not only our self-control strength, but also the wisdom to make good decisions about when and where to apply it.

Follow me on Twitter @hghalvorson

Would You Be A Greedy CEO? Here’s How To Tell

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From my Fast Company Blog:

It’s difficult to open a paper these days (or, turn on your laptop or smartphone, if that’s how you get your news) without reading about a new and reprehensible instance of CEO greed.  Most are tales of golden parachutes received after nearly running a company into the ground, or huge bonuses paid out in a year when hundreds of employees lost their jobs.  Occasionally, there’s a real doozy – remember when John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, spent over a million dollars redecorating his office?  Or when former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski bought a gold-plated trashcan on the company’s dime?

Obviously, most CEO’s do not behave this badly.  But how can we understand the behavior of the ones who do, and anticipate when a leader might be particularly likely to go the Way of the Golden Trashcan?   In other words, when is a leader most likely to be self-serving, rather than focused on what’s best for the company (or, for more mid-level leaders, their group within the company)?  And how can each of us tell which type of leader we are, or might someday be?

The answer is an important one, since self-serving leaders are often ineffective leaders.  By allocating more resources to themselves (pay increases, bonuses, office space, credit and recognition, etc.) and less to their group, and by focusing on their own goals rather than group goals, greedy leaders undermine employee loyalty and motivation. Their self-serving ways have been known, on occasion, to bring an entire company to its knees.

You might think that power itself is to blame – that more powerful leaders are inherently more likely to hog resources than less powerful ones.  But it’s not that simple.  Recent research suggests that both low and high-powered leaders can make self-serving decisions, but that they do so for very different reasons.

High Power Leaders: Research shows that being in a position of power makes people generally less sensitive to what’s happening around them  (e.g., input from others, social norms) and more sensitive to their own internal states and feelings.

Powerful people care less about what others think of them, and become demonstrably less adept at correctly assessing other people’s feelings and perceptions.  (Interestingly, even people in very temporary positions of power show these same effects – there’s something about power that seems to immediately turn our vision inward).

In particular, research shows that very powerful leaders tend to be swayed by their personal beliefs about what an effective leader is like.

If your idea of an effective leader is someone who pursues their own goals and ambitions at the expense of the group, takes full advantage of their status and perks, and invests little of their personal time or effort into helping their employees, then being in a position of power is quite likely to turn you into self-serving leader.  If you’re fortunate enough to be made a CEO, there is probably some gilded office furniture in your future.  Good luck with that.

If, instead, your idea of an effective leader is someone who is more concerned with whether or not the group is effective, puts group goals ahead of their own, gives up perks, and invests time and effort in tasks that benefit their employees, then power won’t turn you greedy – in fact, you’ll probably be generous and attentive to others.  And the really good news is, your beliefs about effective leaders are correct – leaders who focus on their employees, rather than themselves, understand what leadership is all about and are more successful because of it.

Low Power Leaders: Mid-level leaders, on the other hand, are less likely to use their own beliefs about effective leadership as guides, and are more strongly influenced by external cues, like information about their own and their employees relative performance.  When low power leaders believe they have outperformed their employees, they feel entitled to more benefits, and make more self-serving decisions with regard to recognition, perks, and pay.  When their employees have superior performance, they spread the benefits around accordingly.

Often, it’s only when an individual is promoted from a position of relatively lower power to one of high power that we begin to see their true colors, so to speak.  Only then does their mental image of an ideal leader begin to influence their own leadership behavior in tangible ways.  Corporate Boards would be very wise to try get a sense of a CEO candidate’s beliefs about great leaders, because the behavior the candidate admires is exactly what the Board, and the employees, are going to get.

Rus, D., et al., Leader power and leader self-serving behavior: The role of effective leadership beliefs and performance information, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2010), doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.06.007