Week 2 Post 1: Nut Island Effect

For this class each student has been assigned a mentor, who has many years of experience in the healthcare industry as well as a great knowledge of organizational behavior. My mentor is Matthew Fandre, he is a Liuetenant Colonel in the United States Army and is currently the Chief Medical Officer at Munson Army Health Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I talked to him on the phone last night for the first time and he gave me a lot of good suggestions for this class. One of the things he suggested was for me to read and article from the Harvard Business Review called, Nut Island Effect: When Good Teams Go Wrong. So I took his advice and read the article today.

To sum up the article, there was a team that operated the Nut Island sewage treatment plant in Quincy, Massachusetts. This team was every manager's dream team of employee's, they performed difficult and dangerous work without complaint and needed little supervision. The team also improvised their way around operational problems as well as budgetary constraints, and were very dedicated to the organizations mission. However, their hard-work eventually led to extreme failure. This is due to what has been come to known as the Nut Island Effect, which has been defined as, "a destructive organizational dynamic that pits a homogeneous, deeply committed team against its disengaged senior managers. Their conflict can be mapped as a negative feedback spiral that passes through five predictable stages. 

The five stages are as follows:

1. Management, its attention riveted on high-visibility problems, assigns a vital, behind-the-scenes task to a team and gives that team a great deal of autonomy. Team members self-select for a strong work ethic and an aversion to the spotlight. They become adept at organizing and managing themselves, and the unit develops a proud and distinct identity.

2. Senior management takes the team’s self-sufficiency for granted and ignores team members when they ask for help or try to warn of impending trouble. When trouble strikes, the team feels betrayed by management and reacts with resentment.

3. An us-against-the-world mentality takes hold in the team, as isolation heightens its sense of itself as a band of heroic outcasts. Driven by the desire to stay off management’s radar screen, the team grows skillful at disguising its problems. Team members never acknowledge problems to outsiders or ask them for help. Management is all too willing to take the team’s silence as a sign that all is well.

4. Management fails in its responsibility to expose the team to external perspectives and practices. As a result, the team begins to make up its own rules. The team tells itself that the rules enable it to fulfill its mission. In fact, these rules mask grave deficiencies in the team’s performance.

5. Both management and the team form distorted pictures of reality that are very difficult to correct. Team members refuse to listen when well-meaning outsiders offer help or attempt to point out problems and deficiencies. Management, for its part, tells itself that no news is good news and continues to ignore team members and their task. Management and the team continue to shun each other until some external event breaks the stalemate.

After reading the article I learned a lot about the importance of the relationships between upper management and its employee's. As the article shows, as a manager you could have a great team of employee's that are doing their job and even going beyond expectations. However, as the manager if you do not show an interest in their work and develop personal relationships with your employee's it could lead to negative outcomes. Therefore I believe that it is very important develop relationships with your employee's early on to show that you actually care about them as a person rather than just somebody who is their to do work for you. 

- David