Brain Rules for Work

The Science of Thinking Smarter in the Office and at Home

John Medina

• Publisher: Pear Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781737072874
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

How can I keep people engaged during my presentations? What can I do to my office so that I look forward to coming to it on Monday? How can I improve the productivity of our team, our department, our company? Scientists know.Brain Rules for Work by developmental molecular biologist and author Dr. John Medina, explores the various aspects of work through the lens of peer-reviewed science.Having written New York Times bestselling works Brain Rules, Brain Rules for Baby and Brain Rules for Aging Well, Dr. Medina turns his expertise towards the professional world, guiding us through what brain science and evolutionary biology have to say about topics from office space and work/life balance to power dynamics and work interactions in the time of COVID-19. Medina's charming descriptions and hilarious anecdotes break the science down to practical applications that you can put into use next Monday to improve your work life and the work lives of those around you.You'll learn: Why taking breaks in nature during the workday improves productivityHow planning a meeting beforehand makes it more effectiveWhy an open office plan isn't a good office planHow a more diverse team is a more potent team What exactly about talking to co-workers online is so exhaustingWhy allowing for failure is vital to a company's successWhat power can do to an executive who has just been promotedProcrastination is not due to laziness, rather an avoidance of negative feelingsWhich personality tests will help you find the right fit for the job-hint: it's not the Myers-BriggsThe surprising source of a leader's charismaAnd what our work lives will look like in a post-pandemic worldWhether you are an employee at a company looking to become successful or an executive who wants to ensure the success of your employees, Brain Rules For Work is both a useful tool and a compelling guide for you and your co-workers.

teams

Brain Rule:

Teams are more productive, but only if you have the right people.

I ORIGINALLY MEANT to open this chapter with a line from Scott Adams. He’s the creator of Dilbert, that hapless, cartoon business-denizen of the newspaper comics page. In one of Adams’ comic strips, Dilbert’s boss meets with Dilbert and his team to discuss some of their accomplishments and failures. After announcing the team’s less-than-stellar performance, Dilbert’s boss says, “I only brought one teamwork award mug, so you’ll have to take turns drinking from it.”

Now I think a different opening is required. I’m going to start with a description of the animated short film Bambi Meets Godzilla.

Bambi Meets Godzilla starts with a lengthy opening-credits crawl. Bambi is contentedly munching on grass, pastoral music softly playing in the background. A minute into this idyllic scene, Godzilla’s giant, scaly foot suddenly appears and squashes Bambi flat. This violence is followed by the words The End. The credit crawl quickly reappears, thanking Tokyo for its help in “obtaining Godzilla for this film.” Everything fades to black.

Why start with Godzilla and not Dilbert? Because for those jobs still requiring in-person interactivity, an equally powerful and unexpected foot seemingly squashed flat that concept of work in 2020. That foot belonged to COVID-19.

Given this turbulence, can anyone say with authority what it now takes to make teams work effectively? Is anything in the cognitive neurosciences relevant to our discussion?

The happy answer is yes, at least regarding the behavioral sciences, and for a very specific reason: Darwin is stronger than COVID-19. The teamwork dynamics and social cooperativity that fueled our pre- and post-viral business offices were also observable forty thousand years ago. Back then, interactive cooperativity allowed humans to scratch two important Darwinian itches: the need for food and the need for protection. We could not survive without teamwork on the difficult plains of the Serengeti. And we still can’t, virus be damned, even in the difficult boardrooms of any company greater than the size of, I don’t know, more than two people.

In-person collaborative efforts were already becoming the norm in pre-pandemic commerce, from small mom-and-pop shops to behemoth multinationals. A 2016 study from the Harvard Business Review examined company behavioral habits and found that the hours “spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more.” The study also discovered that, for many jobs, 75% of daily activities involved interacting with other people.

Even science was affected. When I first started my research career, I occasionally encountered single-author papers. Now, they’re practically an extinct species. In 1955, only about 18% of papers in social science were written by teams. By the year 2000, it was 52%. An ecology journal circa 1960 had about 60% of its papers written by single authors. In this past decade, the number has dropped to 4%.

The contemporary practice of this ancient teamwork idea didn’t guarantee that every group effort would be better than every individual effort, however. We’ve all been involved in team projects where it would have been better if we could just do the darn thing ourselves—no buddies allowed. Statistically, however, teams are more productive, which is why their use was growing pre-pandemic and will be growing again as we crawl out from under the viral shadow.

What separates a good team from a bad one? Though no surefire recipe exists for every company, research is clear about what separates highly productive teams from less productive ones. We’ll explain this research, ranging from behavior to biochemistry. We’ll discover that creating effective teams is a fairly simple task as we slowly recover from our enforced isolation. Note, however, that I did not use the word easy.

To team or not to team

We should begin by asking a few questions: Just how effective are teams? Do they really make us more productive? Let’s see what happens when we sidle up next to our coworkers at, of all places, the cafeteria table.

A study from Arizona State University showed that employees who ate their lunches at tables built for twelve rather than at tables built for four were individually more productive. Ben Waber from MIT’s famed Media Lab speculated that this outcome was “thanks to more chance conversations and larger social networks.” It seems that spontaneous interactions with coworkers encourage productivity. Waber found that companies that make it easy to bump into each other and interact, “with things like companywide lunch hours and the cafés Google is so fond of, can boost individual productivity by as much as 25%.”

That’s a pretty staggering number, but spontaneous interaction isn’t exactly the same thing as team productivity. Luckily, there is a surprisingly large body of research that supports the idea that groups are better problem-solvers than individuals. They’re more creative. They’re better at spotting errors. They’re more intelligent. Profitability rises when employees are encouraged to collaborate in groups. Employees seem to concur, according to one study. When asked what had the greatest impact on their company’s ability to make money, 56% of respondents said it was collaboration. One reason COVID-19 presented such a business hazard is that the social isolation required to beat it put these numbers at risk.

Not everybody is as enthusiastic as MIT or Google about teams, however quantifiable those findings. One famous dissenter is J. Richard Markham, a research psychologist at Harvard, who’s studied group interactions for a long time. He finds that most groups actually don’t work well together. Infighting (competition for credit), asymmetric job distribution (some teammates do all the work), and confusion about aims (little agreement about what goals are to be accomplished) sandpaper away most of the benefits groups might otherwise provide. In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Markham said, “I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic … But don’t count on it. Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have.”

Markham doesn’t entirely dismiss working in teams. In that same interview—perhaps inadvertently—Markham points to a way out. He says the main reason teams fail is a lack of trust between the members.

Luckily for us, we can measure the amount of trust there is in a team, and we have the ability both to detect the presence of bad teams and to measure the success of good ones. The types of metrics available to us are broad, ranging from the behavioral to the biochemical. We’ll describe a tiny molecule, for example, that won a Nobel Prize for the guy who discovered it, something he accomplished mostly through a team effort.

The wisdom of Aristotle

When researchers looked into why we cooperate so well, relative to asocial species, they ran into what might be the friendliest molecule ever to percolate through the human brain. It’s called oxytocin.

Oxytocin does many things for us, but one powerful behavioral feature is its ability to induce trust in people. In an experiment, subjects were given nasal spray filled with oxytocin. After they sniffed it, they were much more likely to trust strangers with their money. Researchers call this tendency “enhanced social learning.” The pull of our social needs exerts a force over even our biochemistry!

The researcher who has championed much of the work exploring the relationship between feelings of trust and oxytocin also happened to garner a “sexiest man of the year” award. We scientists don’t win many of these awards, which is why, when it happened, we perked up our ears. The Geek God, named “One of the 10 Sexiest Geeks of 2005” was Paul Zak of Southern California (of course). When Zak isn’t winning awards for his looks, he is also the world’s authority on oxytocin and behavior.

Zak’s work does much to reconcile MIT enthusiasts who think groups are problem-solving machines with grumpy Markham, who says things like, “No, they’re not.” Both would do well to examine one of Zak’s most interesting oxy-related findings. He’s discovered this relationship between oxytocin and interpersonal stress: stress hurts oxytocin production. Without oxytocin, engendering feelings of mutual trust becomes harder, which is why stress often hurts relationships. That finding is directly related to what makes some teams work well while others founder.

Cue Project Aristotle from Google, a research effort that put Zak’s biochemistry findings to the test—and inadvertently also confirmed the reason for Markham’s grumpy negativity.

Run out of Google’s famed People Analytics division, Project Aristotle asked the company to do some navel-gazing. They looked internally to see what separated Google’s malfunctioning groups from its most productive superstar teams. They found that the biggest difference was psychological safety, which turned out to be right in Zak’s wheelhouse. Why? It involved trust.

An emotional climate that made “interpersonal risk-taking” feel safe for every member was the single greatest factor in Google’s superstar teams. Other factors certainly mattered—ranging from being punctual to having shared beliefs about goals—but none of these came close to the importance of the trust each team member felt for one another.

Other researchers had been finding the same thing. Perhaps the most granular of these studies came from Anita Woolley, then at MIT. Just like the Project Aristotle team, Woolley was interested in what made smart and productive teams so smart and so productive. Was there a group intelligence that could be quantified, separate from the intelligences of individual members? Was there an emergent secret sauce that was present only when everybody got together? Was the whole greater than the sum of its parts? As you may know, Aristotle was famous for asking just this question.

I wonder if Google knew that.

The three elements of c-factor

To answer Aristotle’s ancient question, Woolley and her colleagues examined the group behaviors of almost 700 people. She separated them into teams, then assigned them a series of tasks. Each task required a different set of collaborative skills, ranging from conjuring creative solutions to solving a thought-problem to planning a trip to the grocery store.

Sure enough, some teams worked really well together, but others, not so much. What made the successful groups so successful? The data appeared confusing at first. Some were managed by strong alpha-type leaders, while others had the authority more evenly distributed. Some teams had intelligent people who deliberately divided the solutions into bite-sized tasks. Others divvied up the workload by considering individual team members’ superpowers before assigning jobs. Lots of variation. Not a lot of insight. There weren’t any obvious commonalities that predicted success—until the researchers started looking at relational issues.

The one superpower all the successful groups had in common was how they behaved toward each other, how they treated one another relationally (with an interesting demographic twist we’ll get to shortly). From this relational treatment sprang an Aristotelian group intelligence. And it was the degree of group intelligence that predicted how successful a team became. They named this group intelligence “c-factor,” short for collective factor. The higher the c-factor in a group, the more successful the group was at their tasks, no matter how sophisticated or mundane. The difference wasn’t trivial.

C-factor consists of three elements. You can think of it as a stool supported by three legs. In Woolley’s study, all three elements needed to be present simultaneously to support the weight of the superstar scores. I’m guessing you’d like to know the components of c-factor. Without further adieu, here they are:

1. Members of the group excel at being able to read each other’s social cues.

2. Members of the group take turns in conversation.

3. The more women in the group, the higher the c-factor.

What Borat has to do with teamwork

The first leg of the stool concerns something called Theory of Mind, a complex cognitive gadget that comes as close to mind-reading as neuroscience gets. It may be best illustrated with help from famed comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.

From Borat to Ali-G, Baron Cohen’s comedic oeuvre often includes emotionally tone-deaf characters. Baron Cohen showcased one such character in interviews while he promoted his movie The Dictator, in which he literally played a dictator. He often gave the promotions in full character. One such interview involved legendary comic and TV talk-show host Jon Stewart. Dictator Baron Cohen started the interview by pulling a gold-plated pistol out of his waistband and laying the weapon on Stewart’s desk. The audience gasped.

Things went casually downhill from there. The dictator discussed subjects ranging from jarring descriptions of his various sexual exploits to the loss of his dictator friends, Kim Jong-il and Muammar Gaddafi. Throughout the interview, Baron Cohen’s dictator was blissfully unaware that his conversation was making the audience cringe. Stewart had a really hard time suppressing his laughter, perhaps because the stereotype seemed only too true.

What was Baron Cohen’s dictator missing? Scientists would say he was missing Theory of Mind. Unlike Baron Cohen’s character, people who have a strong Theory of Mind are good at detecting the emotional information in someone else’s face. They also have the ability to take the perspective of others.

How do we know this? Though the ability to read facial information might seem different from the ability to shift perspectives, research reveals they both originate from Theory of Mind, a capacity to understand the psychological interiors of other people, their intentions, and their motivations. The core talent is discovering the rewards and punishments inside someone else’s mind, thus developing a “theory” of their mind. To develop this theory, our own minds pick up on a variety of bodily cues, the most prominent being facial expressions. Extracting information from faces is such a big deal to the brain, it devotes an entire region (the fusiform gyrus) just to processing them.

Theory of Mind can be measured quantitatively, which is how researchers detect when changes occur. The psychometric measuring instrument is termed the RME, short for Reading the Mind in the Eyes. The RME is a test that shows you a series of faces of people experiencing emotions. Your job is to guess what the emotions are. There’s a hitch, though. You can see only the person’s eyes. People who have strong Theory of Mind do very well on this test. People with low Theory of Mind don’t. The test is so robust, it’s being used in some quarters to detect the presence of autism.

The author of the RME test should know. He’s Simon Baron-Cohen, a brain scientist at Cambridge, and one of the world’s authorities on autism. If that name sounds familiar, it should. He’s the cousin of Sacha. I can’t imagine what their family reunions must be like.

So, what does Theory of Mind and the RM...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Teams
• 2. The Home Office
• 3. The Business Office
• 4. Creativity
• 5. Leadership
• 6. Power
• 7. Presentations
• 8. Conflict/Bias
• 9. Work-Life Balance
• 10. Change
• Concluding Thoughts
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index