On sustainable team performance

In the last post, we looked at several aspects of team dynamics like coordination, conflict management etc. In this post, we will look at creating sustainable team performance.

Evaluating team performance

	Low subjective performance	High subjective performance
High objective performance	20.3%	32.6%
Low objective performance	27.2%	19.9%

• High objective + low subjective is dangerous; sustaining performance is going to be hard. 
• The team is somehow unhappy working together; they probably do not want to work together. 
• Next offer comes, they might not stay.
• Low objective + high subjective: Needs a reality check
• Low objective + low subjective: Team is struggling, needs help, and they know it 
• How do we evaluate team performance?
• Did the team achieve objective goals?
• Are teammates satisfied with the interactions in team?
• Effective teams contribute to personal satisfaction, and overall well being 
• Is the team learning?
• Teammates are challenged, and get development opportunities, improve their knowledge and skill sets.

Creativity

• The same number of individuals are better than a team at generating ideas: both in quantity and quality (research here and here). 
• Why do teams perform worse?
• Production blocking: If you take turns, you need to wait to speak, might get distracted, lose train of thought. 
• Evaluation apprehension: Not discuss ideas because you are afraid of being judged (even if no evaluation actually happens)
• Anchoring: Subconsciously influenced by teammates' ideas, and incremental thinking to a few ideas that were already proposed. "Yes and" might reduce evaluation, but also reduces diversity of ideas. 
• Social loafing: Don't work as hard in groups. Also, there is a feeling of high performance in teams (Dunning-Kruger effect). 
• Strategy to do better
• Nominal group technique
• Each teammate writes his/her ideas independently (reduces social proof, anchoring, production blocking) 
• Each teammate presents their ideas (reduces social loafing, because of the recognition), and writes them on a board
• Open discussion on the ideas. Only clarifications, no evaluation (reduces evaluation apprehension) 
• Secret vote to rank-order ideas (reduces social proof) 
• There is an illusion of high performance in teams during brainstorming. One reason is the lack of a benchmark performance. 
• One technique is to brainstorm for 10 minutes, and ask that the output be doubled in the next 10 minutes (research here). 

Psychological safety

• A shared belief that the team is safe (without negative consequences for status, careers, self-image) for interpersonal risk taking (research here). 
• More likely to raise errors
• More likely to ask questions 
• Strategies for promoting psychological safety
• Team leader behaviors set a standard for what's acceptable
• Being accessible and approachable
• Explicitly inviting feedback and input from others
• Modeling openness and fallibility; accepting responsibility instills the same in teammates. 
• Trusting relationships 
• Invest in relationships within the team, so people feel comfortable opening up in team settings. Connect with people outside of work, to be able to draw them out. 
• Practice fields
• Simulated environments/prototypes, where the cost of failure is low
• Communicates the importance of learning, it's ok to not succeed on the first try
• Organizational support 
• Access to resources and information: promotes more sharing, and lower insecurity in sharing

Transactive memory

• The institutional memory of the team, combined with the info of who knows what. 
• Benefits 
• Better search and acquisition of info (you know who to talk to for a given topic)
• Reduction of coordination effort (you instinctively know the division of labor)
• Lower common information effect (because you believe there are experts in team)
• Perform better on tasks involving memory and info retrieval
• Strategies to improve transactive memory
• Teams are better at recalling better, with fewer errors, and are seen as having more coordination (research here). This is, in part, due to transactive memory built up as a team. 
• Teams tend to build transactive memory naturally (research here). Better than individuals randomly put together, or new teams formed from preexisting teams.  
• Training with your work team helps a lot. A note for training classes, which pool employees from different teams (not going to be very effective). 
• Training on the particular task at hand; simulated experiences help, especially for execution-focused tasks like surgery, flight etc. 
• Continuity of teams helps (because of institutional memory and the loss that occurs when people leave teams). 

Team learning

• Learning is critical to maintaining high performance over time (all the earlier notes on the importance of reflection etc. support this).
• Strategies to promote learning 
• Emphasize the strategic importance of learning (make them part of SMART goals)
• Continuity in team membership 
• Important for transactive memory, psychological safety
• Post-action debriefs 
• Reflection enhances learning, even in low performing teams (research here)
• Sharing workload with all teammates 
• Con: Increases coordination costs; so make an appropriate trade-off

On team dynamics

In the last post, we looked at team structures, both formal and informal, as well as the importance of establishing norms and team charters. In this post, we will look at managing team dynamics once the team is formed: coordination, drawing out team members and unique inputs, addressing causes of underperformance like social loafing and language barriers, and managing conflict.

Coordination

• We tend to specialize to leverage different people's competencies, and then integrate to develop a product. How do we integrate these different specialities together? 
• Diagnose the interdependence the team is facing (research here)
• Pooled: Work is divided into multiple independent components; so no interdependence costs. Example: organizing an event divided into food, stage etc.
• Low interdependence: standardizing requirements for process and outputs. 
• Sequential: One team's output becomes the input for another. Example: standard assembly line.
• Medium interdependence: Careful planning and scheduling required. Centralized decision making is quite effective here. 
• Reciprocal: One team's output becomes another team's input, and vice versa (iterative, cyclical chains of tasks). 
• High interdependence: Continuous information flows, coordination meetings, multiple integration points etc. 
• Natural response is to coordinate everything in an attempt to bring order. However, this does not typically work:
• Such reciprocal tasks are not easily predictable, because feedback comes from different sources. 
• Team leader is not necessarily close to the tasks at hand, and does not have the info. required to make decisions. 
• Make sure there are incentives and relationships between specialists/integrators/customers; team leader should not be a single point of failure (SPOF). 
• Best practices for dividing work and coordination
• Have single digit teams: coordination work increases significantly for double digit teams. 
• Have clear goals and performance standards
• Minimize links in communication. Team leaders should make sure they are not SPOF. 
• Divide labor with the ultimate goal in mind. Initial division might make later integration hard. 
• Don't give important tasks to uncommitted members. Example: having private goals different from the team's, or having too much workload. 
• Preserve equity across projects, not within projects. It won't be efficient to involve all team members for everything. 

Common information effect

• The phenomenon of discussing mostly common information in team meetings. 
• Why?
• Higher probability that common info is discussed (multiple members can start it)
• Instantly reinforced once it comes up, as others have it as well 
• Higher probability of being recalled after meetings (research here on medical teams)
• Perceived as more credible because of its well-known nature. 
• Why is this bad?
• The whole point of teams is to leverage unique insights, expertise, and avoid group think. 
• Strategies to mitigate this effect
• Encourage norms of debate vs consensus (research here)
• Framing as a "problem to be solved" rather than "decision to be made". Draws out unique info. as ways to address the problem. 
• Rank-ordering all alternatives, instead of choosing best option. This could bring out unique info to support some alternatives lower down the order (research here). 
• Alert team to different expertise possessed by teammates. We tend to be attentive, if we believe our teammates are experts. 
• Minimize status differences amongst teammates. It's hard to draw out people who perceive their status to be low. 
• Pay attention to unique info, alert teammates on it. 
• Give a chance for everyone to speak! 3 people do 77% of talking in 8-person groups (research here). Go sequentially around table, share insights ahead of meeting etc. 

Social Loafing

• We do not work as hard in groups as individuals (Ringlemann effect here)
• Why?
• Diffusion of responsibility: we believe someone else will pick up the slack.
• Strategies to mitigate
• Have smaller teams; less possibility of social loafing 
• Address the issue early, before social loafing sets in. Hard to reverse. 
• Assign meaningful tasks, so there is intrinsic motivation (Adam Grant's research on fundraisers; earlier social loafers raised 4x more money).
• Assign unique roles, so people do not see their work as redundant 
• Make individual contributions identifiable; recognition boosts productivity
• Use hybrid reward structures (team and individual); pure socialism or pure capitalism hurt.
• Invest in relationships within the team; instills a sense of obligation to team. Offsites, social activities all help. 

Language barriers

• Language fluency is perceived as a proxy for expertise and competence (research here)
• Why is this bad?
• Wrongly dismiss valid points made by less fluent speakers 
• Dismiss less fluent speakers as incompetent (status hierarchies based on language)
• Strategies to mitigate
• For fluent speakers
• Solicit inputs from teammates before meeting, so less fluent speakers don't feel uncomfortable speaking off the cuff, and also gives them a chance to write/email their thoughts. 
• Prepare written handouts in advance and align spoken language, so less fluent speakers can follow. 
• Adjust vocabulary: to reduce idiomatic usage etc. 
• Actively engage others in the conversation. Refrain from dominating the meeting. 
• For less fluent speakers 
• Resist avoidance behaviors, like not attending meetings 
• Prepare in advance for the meeting: lay out thoughts, be prepared for off-script questions etc. 
• Ask if people understood your point 
• Ask people to repeat if you did not understand something 
• Refrain from switching to the native language; you deepen the language faultline that exists. Don't sit next to someone who speaks your language! 

Conflict management

• Two types of conflict
• Task (cognitive) conflicts 
• Disagreement about the task at hand 
• If managed well, can be beneficial
• Encourages critical thinking
• Provides for multiple viewpoints, and associated learning 
• Helps break groupthink (ineffectual consensus)
• High task conflict has negative consequences
• Implementation becomes difficult, as consensus becomes hard
• Lower satisfaction in team
• Relationship (affective) conflicts 
• Arise from interpersonal incompatibilities
• Is typically destructive, drains energy, threatens team viability
• Moderate task conflict + Low relationship conflict is ideal; all others lead to low performance
• High task conflict that escalates, can lead to relationship conflict
• Effective teams typically have low relationship conflict, and increased task conflict during the middle (when most decisions are made), while low performance teams have increasing relationship conflict over time with dangerously low levels of task conflict (team is essentially not engaged); research here. 
• Strategies to mitigate relationship conflict 
• Establish and reinforce norms for debate (discussion less likely to be personally, and makes you a better debater)
• Address conflict early: turn into a task conflict and resolve, if possible. Having a shared goal and vision is key, as divergence in goals/values lead to relationship conflict. 
• Have processes so team members can safely share their private goals/values 
• Invest in relationships within the team
• Avoid ad hominem attacks, and ask to focus on issues at hand and provide examples of bad behaviors 
• Manage task conflict, so it does not escalate into relationship conflict. Reach consensus every so often, so complete divergence does not occur. 
• Negotiate to preserve your interests, as well as the other's
• In most situations, add other issues to a negotiation, and resolve across them (interest-based negotiation)
• Be mindful of:
• Using power to resolve conflict: can jeopardize the relationships. Use sparingly. 
• Using "standards" that are not equitable 
• Compromising your way to an agreement. Might leave the parties dissatisfied. 

On team structures

In the last post, we looked at setting goals for teams. In this post, we will look at how to structure the team: both in terms of formal structures, as well as through informal roles and norms. We will also discuss the importance of team charters to delivering high performance.

Formal structure in teams

• Departmentation
• A grouping of jobs and activities within the team
• Typically, a team has a leader and team members
• Team members might be subdivided into teams, each with a leader
• Questions: How to subdivide into teams? Generalist team or specialist team?
• Specialist team: works better when tasks are predictable. Efficiency becomes the key here (research here). 
• Generalist team: works better when tasks are dynamic in nature, not readily understood. Enables cross-functional collaboration, as well as quick adaptation to changing situations. 
• Not easy to go from one structure to another (research here)
• Easy to go from specialist to generalist, not the other way around
• Specialists develop norms for communication and collaboration to work across their functional silos, which come in handy when they are put into a generalist structure. 
• Generalists probably have not developed such norms, because they do not need them (as all functions are already present in this structure), and jumping to a specialist structure becomes difficult. 
• Centralization
• Distribution of decision making power: team leader or spread within the team?
• Where tasks are relatively known and efficiency is key, centralized decision making works well. Where tasks require creativity, decentralized decision making is more effective (because of flexibility, multiple inputs etc. Research here). 
• Decentralized leadership typically is typically perceived as being more effective. Likely because there are many faces recognized as leaders, and that reflects positively on the strength of the team (research here). 

Centralized	Decentralized
High interdependence in teams	Low interdependence in teams
Execution-focused tasks	Creativity-focused tasks
Low complexity tasks	High complexity tasks
High diversity in age/experience	Low diversity in age/experience

• Note that in this decentralized leadership, each person is responsible for a different area, and in seeking local maxima, people might not coordinate well. That could explain why decentralized leadership does not work when coordination required is high. 
• Switching from one structure to the other has costs: centralized to decentralized has lower performance drop than the other way around (research here).
• Why? Because the norms people develop in one structure carry over, and new norms require time to take root. 
• Rewards structure
• Should we reward the individual or the team? Should we focus on competition (sales) or collaboration (innovation)?
• If speed is the focus: competition works better (research here)
• If accuracy is the focus: cooperation works better 
• Switching from competitive to cooperative actually improves speed a little, while hurting accuracy (contrary to what is expected; research here). Why is this?
• Norms survived the switch from competitive to cooperative structure (for example, not feeling incentivized to contribute more, given the team as opposed to individual rewards). 
• Change thinking/norms first, and the benefits will follow. 
• Switching from cooperative to competitive reward system actually helps. For the same reason that cooperative norms get carried over. 
• Can we do a mix of individual- and team-based rewards?
• The evidence is mixed:
• Research here shows that it does not work any better
• Research here shows that it works better than group-based or individual-based reward systems, when there is high interdependence. 
• Recognize if you are committing the folly of rewarding A while expecting B. Change accordingly. 
• We want teamwork, while rewarding individual performance. 
• Virtuality
• Teams spread across geographies/nationalities; and/or communicates using technology 
• Research here
• Geographic dispersion
• Lack of contextual knowledge (of local conditions etc.); foster it to make this work!
• Added coordination/communication costs
• National dispersion
• Arrive at a common understanding that respects cultural differences/uniqueness, so the team can work together
• Electronic dependence
• Reduces ability to control/monitor for leaders; increase feedback (bidirectional)
• Reduces richness of communication; increase face-to-face communication, and establish norms for communicating effectively (use video conferencing for resolving sensitive issues etc.) 
• Three strategies to improve performance of virtual teams
• Team empowerment: Low face-to-face in combination with low empowerment is a disaster. High empowerment + low face-to-face can actually be better than high empowerment + high face-to-face (research here). 
• Support structures: Clear task structures and roles, clear reward structures, consistent info. sharing are examples of support structures. For virtual teams, these are key; they don't matter as much for co-located teams (research here).
• Building a safe environment: Where people can speak their mind freely; very important, especially for geographically dispersed teams (research here)

Informal structure in teams

• Team roles (research by Belbin here and here)
• Investigator: explores opportunities, develops contacts, stakeholder insight
• Teamworker: helps team gel and avoid friction, builds trust in team
• Coordinator: Focuses on team goals, draws out colleagues, delegates work etc. 
• Plant: Fosters creativity, solves complex problems, generates ideas 
• Implementer: Turns ideas into action; develops work plans 
• Finisher: Quality control; polishes and evaluates outcomes for quality 
• Evaluator: Objectively evaluates the team's options; logical 
• Shaper: Provides drive and motivation, so team maintains focus and motivation 
• Specialist: Brings expert knowledge of a key area to the team
• Identify critical roles, and roles that are unfulfilled (especially ones that are resulting in underperformance)
• Evidence unclear on whether team roles are distinct, probably because people play multiple roles (research here)
• Team roles have no bearing on salary, promotions, formal power etc. (research here)
• All team roles have weaknesses that need to be managed (research here)
• Team needs to have most of these roles filled for success
• Make sure you identify people who play multiple roles; lot of dependence, what if they leave?
• Either you or someone else should fill missing roles.
• Make sure to discuss team roles, especially when there is a competitive reward structure. Disaster if no such discussion happens in this scenario (research here)
• Team norms (thinking)
• Behavioral patterns that are accepted, relatively stable, and expected by team members
• Norms around accountability, responsibility, ownership, decisions, conflicts, meetings, communication etc. 
• Why care about team norms?
• Positive outcomes for individuals (satisfaction, perceived performance, compensation) when cooperative norms (vs competitive norms) are present (research here)
• Teams with cooperative norms meet early, establish guidelines for cooperation, and are more effective.
• What can leaders do about team norms?
• When team expectations are low, high leader expectations help establish effective norms like accountability, responsibility etc. (research here)
• When team members have high expectations, leader influence is low
• When team norms get set, they are difficult to change. Make sure to crisply define team norms: an opportunity when they are not clearly articulated. 
• If team members have clearly defined low expectations, going to be an uphill battle; takes time. 

Team charters

• It is important to have a shared understanding in the team about roles, norms, expectations, reward structures, processes etc. Team charter is a formal document that captures this. 
• Team goals
• Roles and responsibilities 
• Authority and empowerment
• Resources and support 
• Operations (team meetings, frequency etc.) 
• Protocols for giving/receiving feedback 
• Rewards and sanctions 
• Team charters improve intermediate process outcomes like communication, mutual support, cohesion etc. (research here)
• Team charters can also really boost team performance, even when the strategy is not very effective (research here). Better charter + worse strategy > worse charter + better strategy. 
• Why? Because the systematic approach will help the team discover ineffectiveness of the strategy, and adapt course. 
• Note that charter is in our control, whether a strategy is good may/may not be. 

On setting goals for teams

In the last post, we saw how to compose teams: how to think about team size, diversity in demographics, personality, values etc. In this post, we will examine how to set goals for teams to achieve excellence (you might want to refer to this earlier post on setting goals for individuals).

Does the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Reasonable, Time-bound) framework work for teams as well?

• SMART goals work for teams in general! 
• Caveats
• Specific performance goals are better than specific learning goals (research here), especially on complex tasks. Teams do better on both performance and learning when given specific performance goals. 
• Learning goals cause people to be siloed, reducing coordination, communication, and teamwork => Missed learning opportunities => Lesser innovation 
• Set general learning goals, as opposed to specific learning goals for team members. 
• Growth mindset (vs fixed mindset) is important to teams as well to accomplish difficult goals (research here). Learning orientation is better than performance orientation: making mistakes and learning is better than focusing on not making mistakes, proving themselves to others which typically results in restricting team to known tasks.
• High interdependence yields better performance coupled with high commitment (research here). Note that for teams with low commitment, interdependence undermines performance. 

On composing teams

In this post, we will look at how to compose effective teams. We will look, in particular, at optimal team sizes, diversity with respect to demographic composition, team personality, values, and abilities.

Team size

• Why care about team size?
• Team size was the number one positive predictor of creativity and innovation in teams (across 24 studies on 1359 teams; research here). Team size was a better predictor than:
• Other positive predictors
• Job-relevant diversity: team had different functional experts
• Goal interdependence
• Task interdependence
• Negative predictors
• Team longevity
• Background diversity (which school, place etc.) 

• Larger founding teams => Better startup performance (research here)
• Larger size of board of directors => Better stock market and net income performance (research here)
• Smaller companies benefit much more from a large board
• Large teams vs small teams
• Large teams
• More capabilities
• More resources
• More information, input, ideas => more innovation
• Small teams
• More cohesive
• Better satisfaction; people know each other and feel valued
• Faster consensus, move fast
• Better individual contribution; no social loafing
• Is there an optimal team size?
• For optimal team satisfaction, 4-5 team members (research here)
• Note that this is not optimal for effectiveness
• Typically, 5-10 members is optimal for effectiveness
• >10 => more conflict, process costs, social loafing etc. 

Diversity

What exactly does diversity mean?

• Surface-level diversity (Demographic diversity)
• Gender
• Age
• Nationality/race
• Background (educational, job-relevant diversity etc.)
• Deep-level diversity
• Personality
• Values
• Abilities
• Beliefs
• Motives

Why care about diversity?

• Diversity means multiple backgrounds and hence viewpoints; the downside is increased potential for conflict. 
• Deep-level diversity becomes more important for team performance/processes over time (research here).

Demographic diversity

Why is demographic diversity important?

• Background diversity is a negative predictor for innovation (as we saw in the above picture). However, some elements of background diversity like education and functional background have a positive impact (research on the banking industry here, for example).

• Demographic faultlines are more important than mean/variance of a given indicator (research here).
• What is a demographic faultline?
• Multiple subgroups in a team that have similar demographic dimensions (age, gender, education etc.)
• A useful exercise to map out team members on these demographic dimensions, and see if faultlines exist. 
• Demographic faultlines reduce cohesion, and increase conflict. Ability and personality faultlines do not have a similar impact (values > 0.15 or 0.2 can be considered significant; research here).
• With such demographic faultlines, subgroup cohesion might actually be pretty strong!
• These subgroups likely increase conflict. 

• Demographic faultlines in top management teams reduces ability to make strategic decisions/risk-taking/innovation (research here). In particular, such teams were unwilling to expand into novel international territories (presumably, such a decision is supposed to be good). 
• Strong faultlines reduce firm profitability (research here; 42 management teams and 2100 decisions), especially when there is not a shared objective. 
• Strong faultlines actually enhance profitability when there is a shared objective. Note that developing a shared vision is a great way to offset faultlines in teams!
• Other ways to tackle strong faultlines
• Encourage belief in pro-diversity 
• Encourage open communication

Deep-level diversity

• While background diversity is important in a team (as we saw above), we want alignment in personality and values, as we will see below. 

Personality

How do we measure personality?

• Several flavors of personality tests:
• Myers-Briggs: 16 major personality types 
• Big five: OCEAN mnemonic (Openness to experiences, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism/emotional stability)
• A useful exercise is to map the team members on the big five types, and see how much diversity there is, as well as the average on each dimension. 

Why care about personality?

• Knowing the personality of the team members helps us understand how to work with each other better, how to compose effective teams etc. 
• Team performance with high conflict is better when teams are open to new experiences, and have higher emotional stability (research here). Helps you compose teams with such personalities. 
• Team performance with high confidence is better when there are more extraverted people on the team, and when there is openness to experience (research here). 
• The big-five personality types have a significant impact on team performance (research here). Conscientiousness and agreeableness are very important (you want the minimum level to be high here, not just the average). Emotional stability as well as openness to experience are also important (having a high average is good). Extraversion is useful, especially when the team is high in confidence (it might hurt if confidence in team is low). 

Values

How do we measure values?

• Here's a standard framework (Hofstede's cultural dimensions) to think about values: use CLUMP as mnemonic
• Collectivism
• Long-term
• Uncertainty
• Masculinity
• Power distance 
• A useful exercise to map out team members on these five dimensions, and see how much diversity there is, and the average for each dimension. 
• Here's another similar framework (Tradition, conformity, security, power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence).
• Each nation/group holds these values in differing proportions 

Why care about values?

• Enables us to design a team with values that encourage high performance, for example (or whatever other end needs to be met like innovation etc.)
• Collectivism in teams leads to higher performance (research here); having a high average is good. 
• A good leader can encourage collectivism by providing a shared vision, shared goals etc. 
• Person-team/company fit (a team member's perception of their fit with the team or company) is critical to determining job satisfaction, commitment to team, team cohesion, performance etc. (research here). 

On protecting yourself from undue influence

In the last post, we saw how to build a relationship network to enhance influence. In this post, we will look at ways to protect yourself from undue influence.

Why do you need to protect yourself?

• Power can be abused (as we have seen, especially when the moral identity is weak), and it becomes important to protect yourself and your team from unwanted influence. 
• Example: Milgram and Zimbardo experiments
• Thin line between influence and manipulation for personal ends. 
• Manipulation is typically for personal ends, while influence connotes being used for the greater good. 

How do you protect yourself and your team?

• Minimize biases
• Social Proof
• Encourage a private vote, where each person writes their opinion independently. This alleviates the peer pressure. 
• For brainstorming: it's useful to get all the ideas first before discussion
• Build a coalition before entering meetings; do not be a single minority. 
• In Solomon Asch's experiments, 95% gave the correct answer when there were at least two people to support them. 
• Availability
• Keep a continuous record of events, info, that you can refer to
• Hold meetings sometime after events occur, so people have a better perspective
• Ask questions that invite counterfactuals (what-if questions), alternative explanations, counter-examples. 
• Liking
• Minimize face-to-face conversation to reduce dialogue, so you don't develop a liking bias
• Flip the influence tactic on the user 
• Social Proof
• Offer counter-examples
• Show how similar others are not doing what you are being asked to do
• Show how others have taken this approach, and failed
• Show how others have taken a different approach, and succeeded
• Liking
• Affirm the similarities, and then refocus the conversation on differences. This will help reduce the liking bias you might develop. 
• Anchoring
• Ignore the anchor, and focus on the business at hand. It might be hard to realize you are being anchored though!
• Flip the anchor from high to low, or vice-versa.
• Framing
• Ignore the framing. Might be hard to realize!
• Flip the framing from gain to loss (to encourage risk-taking), or vice-versa.
• Scarcity
• Offer counter-examples
• Show the item is not unique
• Show the item is not in limited quantity
• Show time is not limited, from prior experience
• Reframe the power relationship
• Reduce the control the other person has on you, or your dependence on them
• Identify that there are multiple bases of power: personal, cognitive, legitimate
• Use a different base of power to gain the upper hand
• For example, if your manager uses a legitimate base of power, you can try using personal base of power (for example, you are an expert in that context)

On building a relationship network to enhance influence

In the last post, we saw how to influence people without formal authority. In this post, we will see how to build high-quality relationships, that help enhance your influence.

Why are relationships important?

• Org charts only explain part of the organizational network, and the interactions that happen. 
• Controlling for performance ratings, rank, tenure, IQ, grades, school etc., the position in the organizational network predicts promotion, salary, important areas of responsibility, informal influence and power. 

What exactly is a relationship?

• Social exchange of resources/support etc. define a relationship
• Offer something to people to "earn" a network
• What are some categories of resources/support? 
• Task-related currencies
• Resources: Budget, space, personnel, information
• Cooperation: Expediting requests, approvals etc. 
• Relationship-related currencies
• Being a friend, and giving a sense of belonging
• Listening to concerns and issues 
• Providing political/emotional support 
• Position-related currencies
• Advancement and visibility: Opportunity to present to senior management
• Reputation: endorsements
• Social capital: introducing to network
• Person-related currencies
• Providing opportunities for learning: recommending a course, book etc.
• Providing self-esteem or self-actualization: gratitude, appreciation, compliments etc. 
• Use verbal framing to call out the favor you have done (there is no dollar value here!)
• Invest in a relationship before calling favors: reciprocity vs quid-pro-quo

How good is your current network?

• Power audit: Identify the 10 most valuable contacts in your current network
• Rate your dependence on them from 0-10, and their dependence on you as well
• The most fruitful relationships are those where the mutual dependence is high
• When your dependence is high, you could be taken advantage of 
• When someone's dependence on you is high, you could leverage that advantage
• Clear moral reasons not to do so 
• Socio-economically as well, when abuse of a relationship happens, people disengage (find alternatives to replace you etc.) until no more value can be extracted. 
• Look to collaborate, co-create value

What position in the relationship network is beneficial?

• "Hit by the bus" test. If you are removed from the network, would the network be able to sustain itself?
• The network depends on you for information, advice, expertise, gossip etc. 

How to cultivate a high-quality network?

• Engage with people outside the regular circle; broaden your network (typically, people only interact within the same team, physical space, building etc.)
• Have lunch once a week with someone you do not know
• Join a professional association, sports club etc. to build out your network
• Volunteer for a non-profit, for organizing a conference etc.