Can one bad apple ruin your team?

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ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com MIT Sloan Executive Education offering two to three day courses and executive certificates for professionals seeking cutting-edge business insights on innovation, cybersecurity, AI, and more. Info at executive.mit.edu This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat, a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Daisley. Interesting episode for you today. It's an interesting disclosure to kick off with. There's a lot of things I really enjoyed about Kate Murphy's book, Why We Click. It's a sort of exploration about communication, about how we fall into synchrony with each other. What I liked, Kate's a journalist who's written on a wide range of topics for news publications around the world. And she brings an appetite for discovery to her books. She sort of does her research, tries to get inside different topics. This book, like I say, is about how to get in sync with other people. And we've probably never needed that more, the idea that we need to try and sort of reform our understanding of how to get connected with other people has never been more important. She says some things in there that a few of us might flinch at. She says, for example, that we can only get in sync with people face to face. Now, obviously, that's got huge implications for the way that we do work and where we do work. Effectively, she says any other communication is sort of impoverished. It doesn't really work the same. We've witnessed it, but it's just interesting for her to articulate it. And I can handle her perspective on that. I've seen other things that make me think I don't wholly agree. If you've ever watched online gamers playing and chatting to people through headsets, you can see they're totally attuned with each other and that they're in total synchrony. There's a total connection. There's a humor. There's a warmth. These are a full connection. Now you might say that that's audio connection and that she says that that isn't as bad as video connection. I don't know, but it suggests to me that technology isn't necessarily this impervious barrier that we can't form connections with. So, you know, I've got some questions there. Eventually, though, the book goes a little bit woo-woo. And I think that might be the barrier in my head. She talks about cosmic entanglement of people, that somehow they're spiritually entwined in a way that we don't yet understand. And look, let me tell you this. I promise you with every bit of conviction in my body, I will be willing to come back and publicly apologize if it turns out that the woo-woo is actually true, that there was some magical thread pulling people together. Until then, I do want to earn that apology by saying that I believe that these things are total cobblers. So with that caveat, look, and that the book only really peaks into that at the very end or sort of towards the end. It's mainly about how we forge connections. And on the basis of that, it's quite a cracking read. It's a really good read. So look, you know, there's my little health warning. I want to tell you, I didn't ask about the woo-woo. I didn't venture into it. It's just not of interest to me. So you're going to enter it. You're going to have a woo-woo free zone here. There's no cosmic entanglement. We're not going to delve into those areas. So if for the next 40 minutes, you just don't want to be, trigger warning, you don't want to go into cosmic entanglement, I can commit to you. You're not going to have that after me currently talking about it right now. It's a good conversation, actually. I mean, not least because any manager is going to find the research about team bad apples to be, I think, the sort of thing that gets right into our understanding of team dynamics. And it's just a fascinating excursion into the research of what we know about that. And good apples. There's a there's a positive end to the story. This is my conversation with Kate Murphy about her book, Why We Click. I wonder if you could kick off by just introducing who you are and what you do. Well, my name is Kate Murphy, and I am a journalist based in Houston, Texas. And you may have seen my work in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian. And though I've written on a wide variety of topics, I'm known for investigating and exploring why people behave the way they do and interpersonal communication and really what brings people together and what drives them apart. You've written this book, which is incredibly stimulating, that goes deep on this notion that if I was going to be reductive, this notion of human synchrony, how we form meaningful connections with other people, the neuroscience of that. Why was that a fascination for you? You know, as being a journalist, I'm always interested in how people present themselves and how I connect with them or don't connect with them. And actually, you know, how I sense whether or not someone is being honest with me, not honest with me, which is really at the heart of being a good journalist, but also at the heart of really being an engaged human being is reading one another and reading one another accurately. So I think that's probably the start of it. Because I think everybody is interested in how people relate to one another and why we're attracted to some people and not attracted to others. And what's going on that makes that happen? Because we've all had the experience of saying, you know, I'm not quite sure why I'm friends with this person because we have nothing in common, but nevertheless, you just click. And what's behind that? Why are there some people that you immediately meet and you feel a sense of connection and other people you can kind of tell pretty immediately, no, this isn't going to work. I'm not going to bury the lead. This is a podcast about work. And one of the things that you say has sort of huge implications for how we do our work and explicitly where we do our work. You say, and I'll quote you, you say require one another's physical presence to feel truly connected and whole. Now in the context of work, I'd love you to give us a navigation for that, really. Does that mean, does that mean that we need to prioritize face-to-face for when we're building relationships? How do you see that intersecting with the world of hybrid work? Well, yeah, I think this is very significant when you think about remote work. But just to back up, what interpersonal synchrony is, which I found incredibly fascinating and feel fortunate that I was able to be in the really beginnings of this research and really meet some of these researchers and what they have found because of advances in technology, that when two people interact, we tend to sync with each other. And what I mean by that is not only do we begin to mirror one another's facial expressions, our gestures and our postures, we also sync up our heart rates, our respiration, our hormonal activity, and also our brainwaves during conversation. They actually sync up. You can see this. We see this happening between individuals. And so when you think about work, being in someone's presence, that type of synchrony is what happens within us when we feel connected. Our bodies are actually embodying the other person through all these different levels. And so it's sort of this multi-sensory experience that really suggests that we have more senses than the five we take for granted. And you really can't achieve it in more two-dimensional or even three-dimensional interactions like what we see online. So it really goes to show that for people to really connect on this deep level where there's a real empathy and understanding and sense of connection, it requires physical presence. So, yes, I would say that for people to develop really strong work teams, really strong cultures, to really feel connected and feel like you have friends at work, which is really important. I think people downplay that to really what makes you motivated to get up in the morning and work as a team is if you feel connected and you can't achieve that online. Now you can support it and it doesn't mean you have to be in someone's presence all the time, but you do need that to build those relationships and feel that connection moving forward. Would you draw the line somewhere? Would you give us sort of your estimation as someone who's looked into this? Is that once you've built the relationship, is one day a week enough? Do you see a metric that you can measure on this? You know, the research is not that definitive. And I think human beings are different. I don't think that you can say that this friendship will last if you do it once a week and this friendship will last if you do it once a month. I think everyone's different and the types of relationships are different and the degree of maintenance that you need is different. But I would say that it's very difficult to maintain a close relationship Have this heightened anxiety about that. And so we lose sight of other people, and we lose sight of this syncing that we are, that is occurring between us. And we can talk more about this later, but, you know, really becoming more in touch. They're finding that people that have better at what's called interoception, and that's reading their own body and being more in touch with themselves, are better able to sync up with other people. So I really think that it's something that we all feel, and you know it to be true when you do sync with somebody, and you have that moment where you're just, you're not in your head anymore, and you're not worrying if they like you anymore because you are so in sync. And part of that is getting over that anxiety and telling yourself that this person probably likes me as much as I like them. And to really go with it and to be so attentive and focus on the other person that you lose yourself in the interaction. You do become one because you are so in sync. Mullen's on this is about work, about workplace relationships. And actually, it's a great place to study synchrony because we all know a colleague we get on well with or a few colleagues who are our friends, the person we go to for gossip. And then there's two or three people in every workplace who we just don't connect with. And the thing that I was spellbound by, actually you tell this like it's, it reads like a movie, you talk about this idea of a bad apple. I think we can all relate to it, the idea that suddenly you're in a group, or you can relate to it at college or in projects. You're in a group, and suddenly someone who just doesn't want to be there ruins the buzz of everyone in the group. I wonder if you could give us an excursion into the research behind this. What is, what is the truth behind a bad apple at work or a bad apple in any environment? Well, I think, as you say, we've all experienced this. And there's been a lot of research into this phenomenon, which, as you say, is, is a contagion. And it does go back to this research I talk about that in the book of interpersonal synchrony, where we tend to sync to the people that are around us. And the management literature is pretty clear that the single greatest predictor of the success of a group or team is not who, how stellar the best performer is or even what the average performers are like, but how terrible the worst person is. That can be in ability, it can be in mood, and critically, it's in their behavior. And one of the greatest research projects that was done on the bad apple effect was out of the University of Washington, where they had a co-conspirator or a plant in various work teams, and they were charged with either being a slacker, a depressing downer, or a jerk. And not only did this person affect the performance of the team, this one person came in and totally turned the tables on everyone there, but also this particular person had everyone else acting, behaving exactly like that person was. Like in the jerk condition, everybody started being a jerk, being very antagonistic, treating each other badly. Same thing in the depressing downer condition. And that one was actually sort of sad. If you look at the videos, people were acting, they were moving very slowly. They were putting their heads down on the desk. They were acting like the task at hand was meaningless, but also life in general was meaningless. It was really, it was quite striking. And the same thing in the slacker condition. People started eating. They started kicking back. They started saying things like, let's get this over with, and performed really badly. But the thing that I think is so important to realize is that no one in the teams, in the work groups realized it was happening as it was happening because they had a big debrief afterwards, and no one said, oh yeah, that guy was like a weirdo. That guy was pulling everybody down. They had no realization of that. Once it was pointed out, they thought, oh yeah. And certainly when they saw the videos, it was just incredible how much they embodied this person in their work team. And that's so important for managers to pay attention to not only who the bad apple is, but also who within the group is really clicking. And if you think of people like Paul McCartney and John Lennon, who really clicked, and what if a manager had separated them and put them into different departments or different work teams? Same if, you know, the management literature like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who won the Nobel Prize in economics. They were so in sync that they sat next to each other at the typewriter. They were totally in neural synchrony when they were working. And so it's so important to think about that when you are putting people together, building work teams, and really noticing who clicks and who doesn't. The hope for me came in the fact that there was this wondrous good apple. And I loved the fact that the designated bad apple started wondering why he was failing in his sort of mischief. That someone came along. Now, this is quite an important lesson, I think, for bosses, that this, that a bad apple is not your destiny, that one bad person in your team or in a meeting is not going to therefore guarantee that the whole enterprise fails. The good apple gave me a bit of hope that actually, look, we're in control of this. You know, we might have to dial up the thermostat a little bit higher than we'd normally think about it, but there is a way around it. Can you give us the story of the good apple? That was during that same research project where there was a slacker, the depressing downer, and the jerk. And this was one of the subjects who came in, of course, oblivious to what was happening. And he was able to resist, one of the very few who was able to resist the bad apple's bad behavior. And how he did that is he sort of deflected it, number one, but he went around and made connections, synced up with all the various people in the team, and then started to draw connections between each team member and started to build these series of connections around the bad apple. And then even started to try and connect with the actual bad apple. So it was almost like his signal was stronger than the bad apple's signal and drowned it out or really sidelined the bad apple. So as you say, it is possible, but it, it can also be difficult because with very strong personalities, they can hijack a group. I don't know if you've met with Danny Meyer, who runs a bunch of Michelin star restaurants in the United States and also the fast food restaurant Shake Shack, but he calls it skunking. When you've got somebody in your employ who is like a skunk and who is spreading their bad vibes, their bad odor around and it kind of contaminates everybody. And that it's real important to try and identify that and sideline people who do that. But yeah, I think it's, you know, you think about charisma. People who have charisma are people who have a stronger signal to which people sync. And they're, they're almost like able, their magnetism is greater than that of the bad apple. So they're better able to overcome, but it's hard to find that person. And as you can tell from that research study where there were all these people and there was one, just one good apple. So I think what I've taken away from this research is to be really mindful how I'm showing up. And I think we can all learn from that, whether in our professional or personal life, is think about, am I carrying with me a negative residue from a previous interaction, whether at work or at home? How am I showing up? What am I feeling inside? What can I, so to speak, erase my emotional whiteboard before I enter into this meeting or this next interaction? I'll give you a really good example. There, there was someone that I worked with and they would always show up, whether it was a Zoom meeting, a virtual meeting, or an actual meeting, but would always show up in sort of a dramatic fashion. I think we all know people like that who would show up and like, oh my gosh, you would not believe the day I've had. Oh my gosh, you would not believe the traffic. And, and that sets the tone. It sounds sort of silly, but it really does set the tone for the meeting. And instead of showing up and saying, I am so glad to be with you all. I'm so glad to finally be here. It's totally different. The tone that it sets and what people sync to, that sense of anxiety, urgency, instead of this is great. We're all here together. Let's see what we can do. It's a very different way of showing up. Yeah. It's intriguing, isn't it? It offers something for all the people watchers, all the people who love observing human interactions and the impact of people. It sort of allows you a thing to take a step back from the meeting you're in and think what's going on here. What's going on? Is someone having an outsize impact here? Is there a way for me to construct this meeting, adapt this meeting, change this meeting, give a project to someone for me to recast or reshape this meeting? It's sort of an interesting people watcher challenge. It sort of has a play out as well, I think. I mean, you talked there about thinking about the, being intentional about the impact that we have on our meetings ourselves or on the impact that other people have. I love the idea of how leaders can be thinking about this, that leaders, even though they might be going through sort of a maelstrom of stress and anxiety and overwhelm, actually Netflix chats at a week and they feel that it's disrespectful to their overwhelm. So it's an interesting balance to strike and I guess, you know, it's something where you probably need to think about trying to do some sort of meeting purge before you bring the humanity back to those things. But yeah, interesting, interesting to see people sort of try and steer their way around it. I think it's interesting that, I mean, I, I don't think anyone's done a study, but I'd be really interested in those people who get really aggravated with connecting with other people on a different level. And they have to stay in that work zone and that they have become irritated. That tells me that their stress level is such that they're not really processing, focusing, they're just trying to check a box and move on to the next thing. Oh, I couldn't disagree more there. I couldn't disagree more. The lived experience for a lot of younger workers, low status workers in knowledge work is increasingly that they've, they've got back to back meetings all day that aren't in their control. You know, they, they might hear lectures from senior people about if the meetings adding no value, feel free to leave, but they don't feel empowered to be able to do that. And so, you know, from Microsoft data, we see that 90% of people multitask while they're in video calls. They, they feel overwhelmed. And so when in addition, someone turns up and says, let's talk about last night's TV, they can end up feeling, I've, I've witnessed it firsthand. They can end up feeling that it doesn't empathize with their lived experience. So it largely depends. And I guess, you know, senior people will give you a different take than junior people. But I've definitely seen where people have got a low level of autonomy, a low level of agency in their job. They find that the, the sort of the trivialization of meeting agendas, they find it added distraction. Yeah, I can see that. I can absolutely see that. And, and I can also see how people would have conversations that would just be a stall tactic. So they wouldn't get on with work. And I could see how that instead of trying to connect, like there's a big difference between talking about how something that you read or watched impacted you and how that made you feel and why you like something versus somebody who's just recounting the plot to you. I mean, that, that can get ridiculous. I mean, you, it's like, well, I, yeah. So there's a difference between the conversation where someone's really trying to connect. And, and I think that, that the book I wrote before this book was about listening. And really, I think a lot of listening and the skill in listening is being able to ask the right question. And so for those interstitials, when you are asking that right, that right question, those types of questions that really allow you to connect and get to know that person in a way that helps you work with that person because you get more connected with that person, not just, you know, somebody telling you the plot of something they watched on Netflix. Cause I agree, just, you know, shoot me. Tell me this, I want to explore this. What people won't know is that we're doing this with no cameras on. And that actually in support of one of the things that you talk about, that there's a strange thing that when we are staring into a screen, it seems to be less effective as a means of trying to synchronize with other people than just hearing their voice. It's really counterintuitive, isn't it? I mean, I can definitely relate to it. There's something strangely far more intimate to me of a phone call than a FaceTime call. But I wonder if you could explain why and then sort of give us a serving instruction. Should we be trying to take some of our meetings to our meetings to voice only or just our one-to-one calls to voice only? How would you navigate? Well, knowing this research and also just being in touch with myself, you know, Zoom fatigue is real. And the reason why we feel that way and why people do not like Zoom calls other than an ability to monitor people, because it is like watching somebody on a security camera. I mean, the production value is very bad on a Zoom call. But the way video conferencing has evolved, the way that video images are coded, decoded, patched, altered, introduces a bunch of artifacts where, and we've all experienced it, there's sort of the blurring, there's the blocking, there's the out-of-sync audio, all of these things. But there's a lot of things that we aren't even aware of where there's this smoothing of artifacts to save bandwidth. And as we've been discussing, to connect with people, we rely on a lot of these subtle cues, these micro-expressions, blood flow, things that we aren't even aware that we're picking up on. So when you're looking at a video image that has a lot of this not only erased but also altered in a way that makes it almost, it's faulty. It's really faulty information. Not to mention if we think about the pixelation of our screen, as well as the angle of the camera, which can make you look subservient or haughty depending on the camera angle. It just totally scrambles all of these things that we've developed as human beings to connect with other people. And so your brain is like scrambling to kind of sync with this faulty information. And that's where you get Zoom fatigue because it's not there or it's weird. It's just not what we're used to. And it's also just like that blocking and blurring. It's just not there. And we can't find it. And this is all again subconscious, but that's why you get off a Zoom call and I don't think I've ever been, ever seen somebody get off a Zoom call. They rip the headset off and like, you know, when it's over. And that's because you have been working so hard to connect, sync with something that isn't there. And like you say, there is, and I've actually, you know, it's not just my word for it here. I mean, and if anybody reads my book, they can go back to the back of the book and see every single research study. And I never based it on one study. There's several studies. You can see five or six on anything that I discuss in the book. And you can go and you can see that there have been studies where they have compared just phone conversations versus video or Zoom, that type of thing, types of video conferencing and seen how work teams are, how productive, how efficient they are. And they have shown clearly that telephone people are, they are more in sync in terms of their conversations, that there's less interaction, there's better flow and how they perform on the tasks that they are set to is vastly improved if it's just a telephone conversation. And I'm not saying that video conferencing doesn't, Zoom doesn't have its place. Like if you need to see PowerPoints, if you need to show off product development or if you just want to say hi, like, you know, Bruce and I, we said hi in the beginning and waved at each other. I mean, everybody wants to hi, you know, maybe you want to say hello. But also let's be honest, if we get to like brass tacks, nobody's looking at the other person anyway. They're looking at themselves during Zoom calls and in their mind they're thinking, oh my God, I don't look like that, do I? Or, you know, boy, I need to, you know, I need a haircut. And you're also looking in the background. You're so distracted by all these other things. It's just not an efficient and effective way. And we started it during COVID and I think it's time to rethink it. I know I'm pushing against a tide here. But the research clearly shows that it's not a really good way to connect. In fact, it inhibits connecting. The interesting thing, I guess, is that, you know, if you've got a strong sense of disconnection, then to some extent being entirely reliant on these things might be sort of a big issue overall. I remember chatting to one guy who worked at an organization and all his company's calls were all audio only. And he said, he said, you know, so like, so he's got this huge volume of calls, 20 hours a week of audio calls. And they were all audio only in a big firm. And he said that he felt that he'd ended up in a state of managed depression. And so maybe that goes back to your main point, that if you're seeking to get on the same wavelength as anyone, then, you know, these impoverished alternatives for face-to-face aren't going to be the answer. But yeah, just it's the interesting one. My personal instinct would be that one-on-one audio only can be really effective. As soon as you start getting into a big call, a sort of conference call, I think you do lose something from subjective experience. But it's just interesting to get your evidence take on it. It's an interesting debate, isn't it? Yeah. And I'm not saying that it's the final word, but I agree with you. You know, if somebody is only communicating by phone or only by video and they're not in people's presence, I mean, that's the gold standard is to be in people's physical presence. And then next, you want something that has the highest fidelity that you can get that doesn't introduce artifacts. And video conferencing at this point introduces too many artifacts. But I can see how if it's a huge call with lots of people interacting, it's kind of hard to tell who's talking now. Whereas on a video call, you, you know, it lights up their little, you know, Hollywood squares and their little, this square lights up. And so, you know who's talking. So I agree with you. It does depend on context, but I just think we should all be aware of what we Books, but my book's more a self-understanding book. And there's a great consolation, but also there's a great power in understanding yourself and your feelings and behavior and that of other people and where that comes from and being able with that knowledge, being able to mitigate the effects. So, yeah, I think you're right. It's kind of hard to wrap your head around. Who knew that we synced up with other people like that? In fact, it's a little bit disgusting. But you know, that's what, that's what we do. And there's something beautiful about it because if you think about it, there's something really satisfying. Synchronistic effects are shown in all of the life sciences and also the physical and life sciences. So for everything from the tiniest quantum particle to supermassive quasars, manifest synchronistic quality. So it's not surprising that we as human beings do the same thing, too. So it really links us to the universe as a whole that we do this. And it's really interesting and powerful and fascinating. It really is. Kate, thank you so much. Lovely to talk to you. Thanks, Bruce. Thank you, thank you, thank you to Kate. I really enjoyed that book, actually. And I audio booked it. Very good audiobook. I've been Bruce Aysley. If you enjoyed this, you'll definitely enjoy the newsletter where I discuss things like this and much more on a weekly basis. Thank you for your company today. I'll see you next time. Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. 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