Build Yourself a Smarter Meeting


Teamwork is at the very heart of our idea of modern life. From sports to business, it's thought to be the bedrock of success. (Look at any motivational poster.)

While we may pay homage to the legend of the lone genius, the concept of the sum being greater than its parts still holds a special sway. This assumption is pretty obvious: just count the number of meeting requests on your calendar.

If it's all about collaboration, why do so many meetings seem to curse you to a Sisyphean struggle, perpetually weighed down by brain-deadening hours trapped at conference tables, cursing your very existence?

Or, put more constructively, if you were going to break out of the mold and build your "dream team" business meeting, what types of people should you look for? Would you be on the hunt for introverts or extroverts, analytical folks or people of exceptional IQ? Does gender matter?

In a New York Times piece called "Why Some Teams are Smarter Than Others", the authors cite the work of Alex Pentland and Nada Hashmi of M.I.T. In 2010, the researchers conducted numerous experiments on a total of 697 people. What they discovered may surprise you.

When it comes to effectiveness in groups, the number of introverts or extroverts had little sway on results.

What made the difference? Theory of mind.

Theory of mind is the ability to intuit what another person might be thinking or feeling. For instance, better communicators, and according to Pentland and Hashmi, better team members, tend to be pros at interpreting body language.

What about conducting business online? Surprisingly, theory of mind made a difference here, too. It's more than being able to tell a fake smile from a real one; it's the ability to pick up on a host of subtle cues (word choice, response time, applied understanding of human nature) to simulate for yourself the experience of being another person.

You might think brainpower would be the X factor. But the smartest teams were not necessarily the ones with the highest combined IQs. Instead, the best work was done by groups that stressed equal participation, and didn't let one or two people dominate the discussion.

As far as gender went, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Generally speaking, the greater the number of women, the better the output.

Why? Evidence suggests women may tend to be more versed in theory of mind. In some studies, women score better on reading facial cues, possibly conditioned by years of encouragement to be "nice", i.e. prioritizing the feelings of others over personal needs or glories.

So the next time you're putting your dream team together, remember to load up with women who are willing to share the limelight, and consider that being exceptionally smart doesn't make you a superstar in the board room.

When it comes to an effective meeting, the alpha dog might just find himself running in the back of the pack.

Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more