Idea Management

The New York Times just released a very interesting article about the correlation between physical contact and success. (Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much). I heard Jim Rome mention it on his radio program over lunch today. In it they talk about studies that are being conducted linking momentary touches with professional success.

Scientists at Berkeley are currently focusing a study of this relationship within the basketball arena.

“In a paper due out this year in the journal Emotion, Mr. Kraus and his co-authors, Cassy Huang and Dr. Keltner, report that with a few exceptions, good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams; at the bottom were the mediocre Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats.

“The same was true, more or less, for players. The touchiest player was Kevin Garnett, the Celtics’ star big man, followed by star forwards Chris Bosh of the Toronto Raptors and Carlos Boozer of the Utah Jazz. “Within 600 milliseconds of shooting a free throw, Garnett has reached out and touched four guys,” Dr. Keltner said.

“To correct for the possibility that the better teams touch more often simply because they are winning, the researchers rated performance based not on points or victories but on a sophisticated measure of how efficiently players and teams managed the ball — their ratio of assists to giveaways, for example. And even after the high expectations surrounding the more talented teams were taken into account, the correlation persisted. Players who made contact with teammates most consistently and longest tended to rate highest on measures of performance, and the teams with those players seemed to get the most out of their talent.”

I  find this interesting for a lot of reasons, but for now, I’m thinking about this in the context of the corporate work environment. I think that one place this study could fall short is in the context of the touching. Knuckle bumps, high fives and chest bumps translate appropriately in the culture of sports. It’s become and accepted way of providing encouragement, respect and admiration for the work. In a corporate environment, this type of contact might still have some negative associations.

However, I think there are some lessons here that are very applicable. We’ve all worked in hostile work situations where people either didn’t care about the work they were doing (and you were doing) or they felt that an over acknowledgment of appreciation would be misconstrued and lead to unproductive work flow. Whatever the excuse, a lot of business people don’t seem to have in them the innate ability to praise and encourage.

Even if they do, praise typically only happens when success is achieved. But, as the study points out, the positive physical contact in basketball does not only happen when the team is winning or when a free throw is made. On a healthy, successful team it happens when the team is losing and when free throws are missed just as often.

As rarely as we give props for a job well done, how much less do we do it when the job isn’t so stellar. We tend to forget to provide respect when the ball is dropped. Maybe some admiration should be recognized for the failure as much as the success.