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Teams Who Share Personal Stories Are More Effective

Francesca Gino

April 25, 2016

No matter what industry you are in or what job you do, you probably have

experienced the frustration of working within a dysfunctional team one marked

by drawn-out discussions that led nowhere or heated conflicts that made

communication difficult. To function properly, teams need to communicate

effectively. How can you improve the odds of that happening?

Consider that when joining a team, people have a strong desire to feel accepted

by the other members. This desire can lead individual members to prioritize

fitting in over contributing unique information and adding maximum value to

the team. For example, research has shown that teams are biased toward

repeating information rather than adding new information to the discussion.

Why? Because repetition helps members appear competent in the eyes of others.

In addition, members are more likely to talk about information that they share

with other team members than information that only they have. Thus, individual

team members need for social acceptance may hinder the team s ability to share

and integrate information they need to accomplish their tasks.

One remedy is for team members to devote some time to highlighting their

different ideas, backgrounds, and perspectives. Robin Ely of Harvard Business

School and David Thomas, the current dean of Georgetown University s McDonough

School of Business, found in a qualitative study of diverse teams that openly

discussing the unique qualities of different team members and integrating

diverse perspectives allowed individuals to feel valued and respected. The team

members were able to apply their unique knowledge, perspectives, and identities

to the task at hand, which enhanced their cross-cultural learning and

performance.

One psychological process that can heighten individual team members

contributions and the team s outcomes is relational self-affirmation, I

recently found in my research with Julia Lee of the University of Michigan, Dan

Cable of the London Business School, and Brad Staats of the University of

Carolina in Chapel Hill. Relational self-affirmation involves asking

individuals from a team member s preexisting personal network (friends, family,

and coworkers) to write narratives about times the individual made a distinct

contribution.

In our studies, we asked participants to provide a list of names of people in

their professional and personal network. We then reached out to these people to

ask them to share a story of an experience when they had seen the participant

at his or her best. Here are two such narratives about participants in our

research (their names have been changed to protect their privacy):

Laura has good forethought for business and does anything and everything she

can to help keep us employed. In 2012, when Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast,

here in Florida we did not really think much of it. But Laura was obviously

worried that it would impact her business, because a lot of our accounts

receivables are in the NYC/New Jersey areas. She ended up borrowing from her

retirement savings to keep the business going. I even suggested that maybe she

could let the couple of part-timers go, but she responded that the people there

always gave their best, so she wouldn t want to do anything less for them. It

took about six months to get things back on track, but we all managed to keep

our jobs thanks to Laura.

I first met Mike in the early 80s. He was in a wheelchair and smiling, I

remember. When he could come to school, he was in pain but was full of grit. As

teenagers, we did not see Mike as special [i.e., different]; he wanted to be

one of our classmates, and he was the one with a smile that could light up the

room. Today, I realize just how much determination was transmitted in his

smile.

We gave each narrative to the person discussed in it and asked them to identify

the strengths highlighted in the stories about themselves. By making

individuals more self-aware of their unique strengths, this exercise made it

more likely that they would contribute their unique information and qualities

to the team, we found. In fact, this approach reduced individuals concerns

about social acceptance, resulting in better information exchange within the

team.

Thanks to the various strengths they bring to the table, teams have the

potential to outperform individuals yet often fail to capitalize on this

potential. Finding ways to let team members know about how their behavior

positively affected others in the past can offset concerns about social

acceptance that come with exposing one s unique perspectives and identity to

others. Making people aware of their own strengths results in better

communication among team members and thus higher levels of performance.

Francesca Gino is a professor at Harvard Business School, a faculty affiliate

of the Behavioral Insights Group at Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of

Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan

(Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). She cochairs an HBS executive education

program on applying behavioral economics to organizational problems. Twitter:

@francescagino.