Preschool Basics for the Future of Work
In my last post, we learned from Dr. Michele Borba that empathy is dropping precipitously in young people. She also shared some ways that children are learning how to practice empathy and turn it into a verb.
The concept of practicing human skills is becoming an obsession of mine. We know that human skills are critical to remaining competitive in the labor market. The harder the skill is to describe, the more resistant it may be to automation or machine learning.
At the same time, however, while human skills may be less susceptible to automation, we don’t necessarily have easy access to or a sophisticated grasp of our uniquely human skills.
Think about some of the worst people you’ve ever worked with. You know acutely what it’s like to work with people who lack a moral compass, empathy, judgment, a sense of ethics, or strong communication or team-ing skills.
I have a little notebook that says in big bold-faced letters on the cover, “Employees I’m thinking of firing.”
It always makes me laugh. Don’t pretend you don’t know exactly who would go on your list; we know because it’s painful when those human skills are lacking.
One of the more interesting pieces of research in this area comes from Alex “Sandy” Pentland at MIT. Pentland has hooked up thousands of workers to special badges they wear that produce “sociometrics”: up to 100 data points per minute logging how people engage and interact with one another. The whole point of this is to enable him and his team to delve more deeply into how to cultivate strong and productive teams.
The badges measure the “tone of voice [people] use; whether they face one another; how much they gesture; how much they talk, listen, and interrupt; and even their levels of extroversion and empathy.” All these factors then roll up into the performance data of a team.
What I love about Pentland’s work is that for all the fancy technological bells and whistles that he uses to analyze people at work, there’s a very simple dynamic at play. It’s ultimately the same thing we all learned as toddlers and kindergarteners.
To be a skilled worker, it all boils down to taking turns.
Yes, I’m serious: Taking turns. Pentland’s research consistently shows that our patterns of communication are the most important predictor of a team’s success—when “everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.” These patterns matter more than IQ, skills, or personality.
These patterns inform the way the most productive and cohesive groups cultivate their energy and engagement outside of formal meetings. And together, “those two factors explained one-third of the variations in dollar productivity among groups.”
Pentland and his research team map teamwork across companies, and their research illuminates how talking and listening in equal measure, facing one another, gesturing energetically, connecting across the team—not just with the leader—lie behind the science of building great teams:
Badge data show that these people circulate actively, engaging people in short, high-energy conversations. They are democratic with their time—communicating with everyone equally and making sure all team members get a chance to contribute. They’re not necessarily extroverts, although they feel comfortable approaching other people. They listen as much as or more than they talk and are usually very engaged with whomever they’re listening to. We call it ‘energized but focused listening.’ The best team players also connect their teammates with one another and spread ideas around.
Taking turns, listening actively and attentively, looking at one another: each of these are critical to idea flow within a team.
In addition, it’s also important for some of the team members to venture outside of their groups to gather information from other external sources. This exploration and retrieval of information and ultimate sharing of information with the original team is critical for keeping up the energy of the team and cultivating a social intelligence.
Pentland’s research team has been able to codify all of these insights through the big data they have collected. The real magic comes when they visualize that data and what those interactions look like for an organization.
The interactions make clear whether one or a few people are the social influencers within a group—who is left out and what patterns emerge. What do the interactions literally look like and how do the lines oscillate?
Pentland’s sociometrics underscore how critical social ties, connections, engagement, and differences are in stimulating and sustaining the flow of ideas and the expansion of social networks and creation of social intelligence.
So, the next meeting you’re in, think about what the interaction patterns might look like within your organization. What would the face-to-face interactions look like vs. web-conference-based ones vs. email interactions? Where are the silos of information? Who’s the person or which function serves as a gatekeeper of information—holding data or ideas ransom?
Great teams are built on taking turns, focused engagement, active listening, as well as the sharing of and building on information and new ideas. It’s as simple as that. Pentland offers up a way forward for each of us to practice being a “charismatic connector”: “The trick is to do what creative people do: they pay attention to any new idea that comes along, and when something is interesting, they bounce it off other people and see what their thoughts are; they also try to expand their social networks to include many different types of people, so they get as many different types of ideas as possible.”
Baby steps for the future of work: Let’s begin talking and listening in equal measure.
Dr. Michelle R. Weise is the author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet and leads Rise and Design, which offers research, strategy, and consulting services to businesses and higher education institutions.