The Exercise A1

OUR PRODUCT

Nowadays “Eating Healthy” is popular in Hong Kong.  Our new product “Calories Rice Cooker” can provide a convenient and innovative cooking experience to busy Hong Kong people.  Calories Rice Cooker will indicate the calories of the food you put into it.  This is surely an innovative product that can attract busy Hong Kong working mothers.  With our cooker, user can know how much calories intake they have for each meal.    

OUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

 

“As a leader, I think my team is non-productive.  They didn’t contribute ideas and it made MYpresentation not rich enough.”

“It is Amy’s Kingdom!  It is Amy’s presentation, who cares?”

“Whatever you said, you will be challenged and the comments are negative.  Who cares to throw out ideas?”

“I am so frustrated and got no interest to get involved in the discussion.”

OUR TEAM IS LACK OF CREATIVITY

Stressful and Restricted Atmosphere

Amy set up lots of rules and restrictions.  We must check in with Amy and seek for her approval before offering any new idea or suggestion.  The atmosphere was stressful and lack of freedom.  The most unacceptable treatment was that all group members were not allowed to talk or speak without Amy’s permission.  Amy would reject our ideas directly or keep challenging the feasibility and marketability with harsh criticism.  Actually, challenges might help people to generate more creativity.  However, she never gave opportunity to members for further explanation.  It was a very unpleasant and stressful experience to everyone.  Meanwhile, we observed that she tended to ignore some ideas in a biased and selective manner.  We do not possess any power in the discussion, not even the freedom to talk and laugh.  This is surely a factor to kill our creativity.  Also, lack of freedom to communicate with each other made us difficult to offer creative ideas.  We felt unsafe to offer ideas since Amy kept on giving negative comments.

We encountered Emotional Blocks as we preferred to keep silence as the “harsh criticism” and “murder” ideas make everyone fear to fail or to be challenged.  

Moreover, there was Environmental Blocks.  Motivation is mostly influenced by the work environment.  However, we were discouraged to offer innovative and new ideas due to the lack of cooperation, interaction and trust among the group. 

Lack of Peer Culture

Most of creative ideas were killed by the supervisor without gathering further information.  Even though she agreed with a good idea, she would still keep challenging and give negative feedback/comments on it.  There were no trusting and respectful relationships built in the group.  Amy, as a supervisor, was not showing her concern to seek advice suggestions from us and she was not going to consider our every suggestions.  In our mind, Amy was just putting herself as the core.  Obviously the culture was not a peer culture.  Though Amy is the supervisor, we were not showing support to her due to the fact that we, as team members, were not being respected.

Ladder of Inference

By following the ladder of inference, Amy did select available data based on her preference, interpret the selected data subjectively and draw the conclusion on her own decision.  She failed to obtain more information to further explore the idea and asked members to share their views before making a decision.  Our involvement in the decision making process was minimal.  She just jumped up the conclusion based on her own perception and assumption.  There was lack of collaboration due to her micromanagement.  

OUR TEAM IS LACK OF TRUST

Supervisor’s Confirmation Bias of Similarities 

Amy kept challenging Cherry's suggestions. Amy showed a sarcastic smile. She questioned her idea with her voice raised such as the production cost, feasibility and marketability. There is no doubt that Cherry was upset, de-motivated and dissatisfied.

When another team member, Fion, supported Cherry's idea, Amy showed a totally different response.  Amy showed concentration to Fion's comments and started to show appreciation.  It seems that Amy has no problem to accept Fion's suggestions.

We think that Amy got a confirmation bias. Confirmation bias refers to social stereotypes that most of us carry around in our heads such as facial characteristics, age, gender and race, etc.)  Amy always has a positive expectation to Fion.  As Amy thinks Fion and she got similarities. Such as their single eye-lid, personality (upfront, sensible and cheerful), gender and education background. Psychologists call these beliefs implicit theories.  Because of the similarities, Amy categorizes Fion as her same type. Amy foundFion trust-worthy. The bias skew Amy's judgment if Fion's comments are inaccurate.  Confirmation bias is phenomenons wherein decisions makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweight evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis.

Low Level of Communication / Openness

As Amy set up rules of check in and cannot laugh, the level of communication in the team was low.  Amy’s openness was low.  She could not accept members’ ideas easily.  It shows that Amy was lack of trust towards individual team members. She just selectively trusted specific member with bias.  

Low level of Risk Tolerance

Amy had a low level of risk tolerance as she would be the presenter of the pitch.  To her, it is her responsibility to give out a good idea.  She demonstrated a low trust level to the team.  She challenged members’ ideas negatively in a strong manner before accepting the idea.  She also possessed the final decision-making right. 

Lack of Benevolent Concern

The pitch was presented by Amy alone to the top management.  To us, as team members, it is Amy’s presentation and seems that it is not our business.  Whatever good ideas we provided, the rewards won’t come to us.  We could not trust what Amy was doing was for the sake of the team.  Thus, we do not necessary to offer good ideas.    

OUR TEAM IS NOT COLLABORATIVE

No sense of community

Apparently, the meeting was held in a poor atmosphere under the influence of the supervisor. She kicked off the meeting by setting unwelcome instructions with a view to preventing team members from offering ideas and suggestions. Whatever member offered, Amy just kept challenging their justification instead of asking them to elaborate their ideas further. 

Amy used her position power to dominate the meeting.  She showed no collaborative behavior.  There was no communication among the members and the way of communication was top down instead of two-way.  There was no sense of community.  The comments or feedbacks given by Amy were always in a negative manner which led to the lack of trust, commitment and eventually inattention to results among the members. 

No Empowerment

No empowerment was given by Amy throughout the meeting as there were only challenges, dissatisfaction and stress.  Amy failed to build the team ego as she adopted the traditional team approach which operates under the tyranny of the “We”.  She put group consensus and constraint above individual freedom.

Solely Task-Oriented Leadership

Leadership is critical to teamwork.  However, Amy failed to lead with example by communicating openly and honestly to the members thereby unable to win the respect and trust of others. Her unsupportive attitude also lowers the trust and mutual respect in the team.  Therefore, members were unwilling to excel for achieving their ultimate goal.

Under Amy’s leadership, team members’ self-esteem was extremely low and they were hesitated to express their views in order to avoid being challenged.  They preferred lay-low and unwilling to share their ideas due to poor team spirit. It was observed that Amy just pooled people together but failed to motivate them to function effectively as a team.  Obviously, Amy was task-oriented with low relationship-oriented intention.  A highly collaborated team should have a leader with both task- and relationship-oriented.

GOOD POINT TO HAVE AMY

Amy appeared to be a devil in the whole product development process.  However, to some extent, she was serving as the engine of the team.  Only with a strong and strict team leader, we were able to have a clear direction on what we should do next.  Since Amy was demanding and always gave negative feedbacks, we could then re-think the feasibility of our ideas though this greatly hindered our creativity.  With this demanding leader, we operated at a fast pace. Thus, Amy also served as an important part in making the team collaborates.  

 

 

 

 

 

References:

• Bill F. and Andy B. (July – August 2005) Virtuoso Teams. The High-Performance Organization. Harvard Business Review, pp117-123
• Charles E. Taylor, (21 December 2012). Human Factor Industry News. Aviation Human Factors Industry News. Vol VIII

• Deepak, M. (February 2004) Risky Business: Trust in Negotiations. Negotiation Decision-Making and Communication Strategies That Deliver Results, Newsletter from Harvard Business School Publishing and the program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School
• Dr. Sandra Lindsay, (23 October 2007). The importance of trust. SEDL Advancing Research, Improving Education.
• Ed Catmull. (September 2008) How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity. Harvard Business Review, pp.65-72
• Lynda G. and Tamara J. E. (November 2007) Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams. Harvard Business Review
• Roderick M. Kramer, (June 2009). Rethinking Trust. Spotlight on TRUST. Harvard Business Review, pp.69-77
• Robert F. Hurley, (September 2006). The Decision to Trust. Managing Yourself. Harvard Business Review, pp.55-62
• Teresa, MA. (September - October 1998) How to Kill Creativity. Harvard Business Review, pp.77-87
• Science Daily (NA) Confirmation Bias [WWW] Available at:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/c/confirmation_bias.htm. [Last Accessed Feb 16 2015]