text:
The Truth about Teambuilding>
Diversity Difficulties
The Complexity of Diversity
Do Team Factions Hurt Performance? It Depends
Cultural Communication Gaps Widen in Meetings
Study Finds Good, Bad News for the Gender Wars
Teams can Learn to Overcome Cultural Differences
Across Cultures, We Look Down on Ourselves
The 2010 holidays slowed things down enough for me to get back into the library, and I came across a set of studies on workplace diversity in the Academy of Management Journal. It's a depressing topic for me. The most obvious reason is what it says about human beings, the mere fact that we are still having to discuss the issue in the 21st Century. Our inability to look past differences that genetically amount to a fraction of a percent of our genome and are literally skin deep is ridiculous. Whether biological, cultural, or learned, the average behavior and aptitude differences between men and women or blacks and whites are swamped by the differences caused by education. The behavioral differences between a Ph.D. and a high school graduate are far larger than those between the average white guy and black woman with similar education.
That said, diversity advocates have a problem in both over-reaching and, often, over-simplifying the effects. I consistently hear that diversity improves creativity, team performance, problem-solving, and so forth. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a myth, as there is no clear scientific evidence supporting this position. A "meta-analysis" of diversity studies in which researchers reviewed the results from studies over five years found that overall, personal diversity neither helped nor harmed team performance
From 1997-2002, 63 studies of business teams were published on the tangible effects of diversity on team performance. Three researchers reviewed these studies to see what we've learned, and found some patterns I found disappointing:
The only type of diversity that clearly improved team performance (as measured through financial indicators or manager/member ratings) was "functional/occupational diversity."
Racial or ethnic diversity was more often found to hurt performance then help it.
Diversity did not appear to directly hurt group processes such as conflict or cooperation, however.
The results regarding gender, age, national, and personality diversity were too mixed to draw any firm conclusions.
The affect of diversity on team members' liking for each other is not yet clear, but doesn't seem as bad as some theorists expected (psychologists say people generally prefer those who are similar to themselves).
There has been very little research into the effects:
of status/level and skill diversity on team performance.
of team diversity on team members' pay, individual performance, etc.
that leaders can have on performance of diverse teams.
that diversity has on other measures, such as knowledge flow.
So only functional diversity—having a range of educational specialties, skills, and tenure within a company or industry—usually helped team performance.
But those were averages. Other diversity studies show the answers are not that simple. And the two I came across on my holiday visit provided more context. One found that teams of people who like mentally challenging tasks did better when diverse, but age diversity hurt performance and educational diversity had no effect with people who didn't. In another, diverse teams in industries that weren't diverse tended to struggle. That's not because the minority members aren't as capable as the majority members. It's because majority members don't know how to work with the minority members.
This is not entirely, or mostly, their fault. In an industry dominated by one gender and race, one or two minorities on a team generally learn the unwritten codes of the majority and follow those to fit in. (I'm not saying they should do this, or that it's fair, but merely that this is what usually happens.) The majority members never have to learn about the cultural norms of somebody else. When placed on a team where they are not the majority, not only do they not know how to act, they don't know how to learn how to act, because they've never had to.
The authors suggested some applications of their research for managers:
Because of the power of peer pressure on attitudes toward people of other groups, "Training teams to manage and leverage their own diversity may prove more effective than training individuals."
"…(M)anaging diversity effectively often requires pervasive changes in organizational policies, practices, and cultures."
Key focal points of effective diversity training include:
"Learning about the other group(s)" to eliminate inaccurate stereotypes.
"Behavioral changes"—training on skills needed to interact with diverse others.
"Creating positive emotions associated with the outgroup" through, for example, informal mentoring programs pairing individuals from different backgrounds.
Gaining "new insight about their own ingroup," showing that one culture's approach is only one of many possibilities.
Social sanctions: "Diversity programs were… more successful in organizations that required managers to attend training programs and tied compensation and other rewards for success in meeting goals for recruiting, hiring, developing, and promoting people from diverse backgrounds."
However, I don't think diversity education is the first step. As with personality tests, there is little support in the independent scientific literature to suggest these are cost-effective practices. Put in place the proven best practices of high-performing teams first, because they place the focus on the similarities between humans rather than the differences. Every group in every culture works better if it has clearly articulated goals, rules, and procedures, for example. A Harvard study at a U.S. bank found that training to develop good procedures was more effective at improving team performance than was diversity training. In fact, diversity training had no effect at all on performance (good or bad), contrary to what the Harvard researcher thought would be true.
In short, contrary to what some managers and those who sell to them want to believe, both teamwork and effective diversity require fundamental changes in the way people interact on a daily basis. And that takes more than a seminar or two.
Ely, R. (2004), "A Field Study of Group Diversity, Participation in Diversity Education Programs, and Performance," Journal of Organizational Behavior 25:755.
Jackson, S., A. Joshi, and N. Erhardt (2003), "Recent Research on Team and Organizational Diversity: SWOT Analysis and Implications," Journal of Management 29(6):801.
Joshi, A., and H. Roh (2009), "The Role of Context in Work Team Diversity Research: A Meta-Analytic Review." Academy of Management Journal 22(3):599
Depending on your corporate environment, having factions in your team based on work skills and background may make team members more productive—or less so. Science again brings us a warning that issues like diversity are far more complex than consultants want us to think. It also provides a way around the problem, however.
As reported above, diversity based on factors like race, age, or gender can help or hurt team performance. Which impact it has on a given team depends on such a wide range of circumstances, a team leader cannot predict the result. For example, diversity by itself may not be as important as how that diversity clusters within your team. A generally diverse team faces fewer potential problems than a team that has a "faultline" between obvious subgroups of demographically similar people. I walk into a team meeting and see a rainbow, and no changes are required in how I coach the team. If instead I see a group of Native American women, another of Asian-appearing men, and a third of Martian unisexuals, I get worried (especially if ray guns are visible).
There is another kind of diversity that might help teams, though the scientific evidence is not yet conclusive. Teams made up of people with different skills, from different industries, and with different lengths of time in their company or industry seem to make better group decisions. They are able to leverage a larger range of information than can teams of more-similar people. Better-informed decisions are better decisions (up to the point of information overload, of course).
Another trend in the research suggests strongly that diverse companies with a laser focus on results outperform their competitors. You may think all organizations have that. But do you personally have measurable tasks that everyone knows you have, aligned with the team goals, division goals, and organization-wide goals? If not, I'd argue your company has a "weak emphasis on results," to quote a recent journal article.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of "ifs" related to each of these research trends. Psychology researcher Katerina Bezrukova and three business school colleagues decided to nail down some of those issues in a real-world setting. Their article in the Journal of Applied Psychology describes a study using various methods "at a Fortune 500 company in the information-processing industry. The organization is well established in North American and Western European markets and is a leading outsourcing provider for corporate and governmental e-mail services involved in the creation, development, and marketing of technology products for information processing and mail outsourcing." Now I'll mention that Bezrukova was at Santa Clara Univ., in Silicon Valley. Let the identity guessing begin.
This company had a lot of good internal data allowing measurements on these variables:
Whether a group had faultlines based "on employees' level of education, functional background (i.e., administrative, marketing, finance, and engineering), and tenure with the company."
How strong the subgroups were—that is, did everyone fall into two or three subgroups, or were there a bunch of smaller subgroups or unique individuals?
How results-oriented the group was.
How results-oriented the group's department was, and thus, whether there was a difference between the group and department orientations.
Bonuses and stock options given to team members based on team performance, which the researchers used as the measure of productivity.
Personal diversity measures such as age and race.
Bezrukova's team looked at the results for a sample of 757 employees in 138 groups in 47 departments. It found that "groups with strong informational faultlines had performance problems (i.e., lower group stock options and bonuses)." However, if both the department and the groups had a strong emphasis on measurable results, faultlines actually helped performance. Bezrukova and her colleagues suggest that having people on your team you easily identify with—the clear subgroups, in this case—might help you withstand the pressures likely in results-oriented organizations.
If both the group and department had a weak emphasis on results, faultlines neither hurt nor helped performance. When one level had a strong emphasis and the other a weak one, however, faultlines hurt performance. "In fact, the highest performing groups were those with weak faultlines in misaligned cultures…" the article says. "One explanation is that weak faultline groups may have cross-cutting ties that enable effective information sharing and are unlikely to have strong subgroups that can potentially cause process losses."
By the way, including personal diversity measures in the analysis did not change the results one way or the other, supporting the contention that on average this diversity can help or hurt depending on other factors.
Despite all the factors this study looked at, there were several critical ones I wish they had included. Team identity, how important the team is to the individual, and team potency, how capable the members feel the team is to accomplish its tasks, could very well eliminate the impact of faultlines in either direction. The study also did not separate structured teams that are highly self-organized from typical teams with little organization. Teams structured in a way that encourages healthy group psychologies would almost certainly overcome the difficulties highlighted by these results.
That's good, because you as a team member or leader have little control over the departmental environment. Besides, emphasizing measurable results is a best practice for team and corporate performance, so you don't want to abandon them just because you don't have the "right kind" of faultlines. In the U.S. and other countries you can't hire based on factors like race, and the requirements of your team may demand clusters of skill sets or backgrounds, so you have little control over faultlines. This means you have to find a way to overcome the dangers this study points out. Fortunately, team structures are a likely fix; solve many other teamwork challenges; and are entirely within your team's control. You should start building one right this second.
Source: Bezrukova, K., S. Thatcher, K. Jehn, and C. Spell (2012), "The Effects of Alignments: Examining Group Faultlines, Organizational Cultures, and Performance," Journal of Applied Psychology 97(1):77.
Cultural differences in communication are hard to deal with as a team leader, especially when everyone is sitting around a table together (literally or virtually). It turns out there's a bigger reason than you might expect. A study showed that American-born and East-Asian MBA students moved further apart in communication style when meeting together.
On average, folks from China, Japan, and Korea test out as being more oriented toward maintaining harmony than do Westerners. Americans in particular generally report being more "individualistic," more focused on what is important for "me" than what is important for "us." One of the most obvious ways in which these differences play out is how people talk to each other. Yet there hasn't been a lot of research into intercultural communication in live group settings, because the process is time-consuming. The study by Univ. of Southern California communications scientists Jolanta Aritz and Robyn Walker shows why. They put together teams in various cultural arrangements and gave them a problem to solve. In some teams there were more Americans, and in others more East Asians. After videotaping each team's meeting, transcripts were prepared, and the researchers "coded" the transcripts looking at each person's:
Contribution:
"number of turns taken"
"number of words spoken"
"average turn length"
Participation:
"number of conversational overlaps"
"number of interruptions"
"number of backchannels" (brief statements to show the person was listening)
"frequency of latching" (starting to talk the instant another person seemed to finish)
As you might predict, Americans did more of everything except interrupting, which neither side did much of. Aritz and Walker call this an "involvement" style of communication. By keeping their inputs shorter and waiting until they were sure the previous speaker had finished, the East Asians gave more priority to being considerate than to getting their points across. I don't say this with any judgment against either group. Both niceness and involvement are important to effective teamwork.
These cross-cultural differences are troubling enough to the international facilitator, but it gets worse: Each group shifted away from the other's style when they were in the minority. East Asians did even less of everything, as if they were trying to be model East Asians in the face of the other group, the researchers say.
Americans mostly did nothing different when in the minority, which says something in itself. This made me think of the "Ugly American" type of traveler who expects people in other countries to act like Americans, or at least abide our culture-based behaviors, rather than conform to the norms of their hosts. The Americans did, however, "latch" more when in the minority. The researchers speculate this is because they were trying to force the East Asians to adopt a more American style, presumably by trying to pick up the pace of the conversation.
Curiously, even though the East Asians reported in surveys after the meetings "that they did not feel as included, valued, or supported as their American counterparts," they were no less satisfied with the process than were the Americans. I'm not sure what to make of that. Was it a matter of them having studied in the U.S. long enough to know how Americans are, and thus to have accepted it? Or did they recognize they had stuck to their cultural values and that was enough for them? Your speculation is as good as mine.
The great advantage of this study design is it points out specific behaviors both sides should look for. I find myself thinking about a story my brother-in-law Brodie Brown told me during his days at Xerox. (He spent thirty years, his entire career, with the same company—hard to fathom these days.) The company formed a joint venture with Fujitsu, and Brodie participated in some meetings in Tokyo. When his boss asked the Japanese whether they understood what the boss thought was an agreement between the two sides, the Japanese all nodded their heads yes. The boss thought that meant they were saying, "Yes, we agree." Brodie knew, and could not convince the boss, that they were only saying, "Yes, we understand your position." This may have been a simple "lost in translation" moment, but I think the higher-on-average level of politeness in Japanese society may have contributed. Sure enough, weeks later it became clear the two sides did not, in fact, have an agreement.
The more important question for a team leader is what to do about these differences. The authors say simply that the behaviors should be pointed out. I'll go with that. If you're facilitating these two groups, point out the specific ways the groups behaved in the study. Ask the Americans if they will agree to slow down and allow you to remind them. Ask the East Asians to be more outspoken than they might normally be, and facilitate that behavior the way you would with a introverted American. Getting the fullest possible participation and contribution from all individuals is the point to having a team.
That said, I will issue my usual warnings about stereotypes. Even when there is some basis in fact for them, they are only averages. There are millions of East Asian individuals as aggressive as the most aggressive Americans. There are also millions of Americans far more reticent to speak in meetings than the average East Asian. Recognizing that an individual might match a group norm is prudent, but assuming they do is prejudice. Early in the remake of "The Karate Kid," the American kid turns to a guy on an airplane to China and haltingly tries out his Chinese. The guy looks at him and says, "Dude, I'm from Detroit."
You can't go wrong by meeting people where they are instead of where you expect them to be.
Source: Aritz, J., and R. Walker (2010), "Cognitive Organization and Identity Maintenance in Multicultural Teams: A Discourse Analysis of Decision-Making Meetings," Journal of Business Communication 47(1):20.
Here's a little good news from the gender wars: In a study from Quinnipiac Univ., gender had no impact on the ratings students gave each other on group projects.
However, the study also adds fuel to the gender wars. Females earned higher teamwork ratings overall than males regardless of the gender of the rater.
That first finding was reassuring. It discounts one of the concerns raised about schemes in which team members have a say on each others' performance ratings. I believe 360-degree assessments are a far fairer way of evaluating performance than relying on one person. If nothing else, other sets of biases can balance out the supervisor's set (we all have them, after all). At least one source I'm aware of found zero correlation between supervisor ratings and 360s of the same individuals. The phenomenon of "crowd-sourcing" suggests the value of multiple perspectives, and plenty of studies show that over time, decisions made by a group are better than those by a single person. Or a married person. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Reassuring, too, to read that in this context people were able to overlook whatever issues they have with people of the opposite sex and rate folks based on their behaviors. The researchers, Accounting Professor Janice Ammons and Marketing & Advertising Department Chair Charles Brooks, suggest that their study's method might have had something to do with that:
"The composition of the teams did not change over the semester… and the data was drawn from the third set of evaluations. By this point, students were more familiar with group expectations, characteristics of team members and their contributions, as well as the evaluation process itself… Some have suggested that reliability in scoring increases when evaluations take place at multiple stages."
A lesson here is that having only one peer-assessment per year, and constantly fiddling with the content or format year-to-year, are poor practices. I've long advocated for multiple evaluations within the year in companies that insist on having formal appraisals, for reasons that ought to be obvious but apparently are not given how many companies ignore them. If you only evaluate once a year:
You get behaviors you don't want for months more than necessary.
You treat employees unfairly by punishing them without giving them a chance to correct their behaviors first.
Some of you won't like that word "punishing." Like it or not, most employees who get lower ratings will consider it punishment, especially if performance ratings are tied to salary. Or maybe you don't care whether people who aren't "stars" feel punished. But the reality is that every company relies on a significant number of non-stars (see "Are You Supporting Your B Players?" under "Sources" at the end of this topic). Ammons and Brooks suggest another reason, that having multiple evaluations may reduce the impact stereotypes will play in people's ratings.
I'm scared to wade into the other finding, but I guess I have to. Females received higher ratings from both genders in two ways. Every team member was given 100 points per person to divide among all the members, including themselves. That is, if the student had four teammates, she was given 500 points to distribute. "If everyone contributed equally and did his/her fair share of the work, then each member of the team should receive 100 points," the evaluation cover sheet explained. Someone who did less should have been given fewer than 100.
The average score for females was 100.44, and for males 98.83, which was a "statistically significant" difference (greater than mere chance would suggest). As you would probably guess, the average person rated themselves above average. The mean for all self-ratings was 103.52. Males and females did not differ in those self-ratings, defying popular concerns about the self-esteem of female students.
The professors also requested ratings for a set of individual behaviors, and females came out on top in each of the six behaviors:
"Prompt in attendance at team meetings"
"Delivered agreed-upon parts of project in a complete fashion"
"Met deadlines"
"Volunteered appropriately during team meetings when tasks need to be accomplished"
"Pulled fair share with regard to overall workload"
"Showed enthusiastic and positive attitude about team activities and fellow team members"
The students had the option to add comments. Females were both more likely to comment and more likely to give positive comments, which I consider two more signs of good teamwork. Again, these figures were not affected by gender differences between the commenter and the commented-upon.
I am too cowardly to comment on why the females were better team players. I will point out that these numbers were averages, meaning there would have been some excellent male team players and some terrible female team players.
Focus instead on the list of behaviors. Ammons and Brooks drew them from interviews with students in previous classes, and the list certainly fits both the research literature and my team-coaching experience. Because they are behaviors, you can ignore the gender issue and use them to improve your personal teamwork. Discipline yourself to get to team meetings on time. Give worst-case estimates for deadlines, and then come up with a system to make sure you beat them. Make yourself take at least one team task per month that you do not really want to do. Keep a list of team action items and use simple math to see if you are doing your part: eight items divided by four team members means two items for you. Try to keep your comments mostly positive.
Behaviors, not gender, make the difference. Anyone can do those things, be they male, female, or some combination thereof.
Ammons, J., and C. Brooks (2011), "An Empirical Study of Gender Issues in Assessments Using Peer and Self Evaluations," Academy of Educational Leadership Journal 15:49.
Lagace, M. (2003), "Are You Supporting Your B Players?" Working Knowledge: The Thinking that Leads, Harvard Business School: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/3558.html.
"Us" versus "them." Most of us like to think we're better than people who think that way. Of course, in doing so, we categorize ourselves as part of one group superior to another group: The "us" who don't engage in "us versus them."
It is okay to have these thoughts, because our brains are hard-wired to create them. Thousands of years ago, when a group different from yours appeared on the horizon, trouble was likely brewing. The issue is not how to stop these thoughts, but what you do with them when you work in a diverse group. As Japanese Zen Master Muso wrote in the 14th Century, "Rather than try to refrain from discussing judgments of others… turn around and reflect, 'Who is it that speaks of others' right and wrong?'"
Unfortunately, lots of people don't manage those thoughts well. "Team diversity offers a complex challenge because it has the potential to both benefit and disrupt team performance," say three organizational behavior professors at Erasmus Univ. in the Netherlands. Along with all the potential benefits diversity can bring, "cultural diversity may also engender intergroup biases that invite a closing of minds to the contributions of culturally different others," write Anne Pieterse, Daan Van Knippenberg, and Dirk Van Dierendonck in Academy of Management Journal.
This is well documented, and scientists have been trying to work out when diversity helps and when it doesn't. For instance, "diversity is more likely to yield performance benefits the more a task is complex and has strong requirements for creativity, problem solving, and decision making," the Dutch team writes. Scientists are also looking for factors managers can use to fix the downsides of diversity. This team decided to look into "goal orientation," which is known to impact how we go about learning.
Studies have found we all fall somewhere along two continuums, which I'll illustrate with two questions:
Do you learn just for the sake of learning, or primarily to master a specific task or skill?
Are you motivated to learn because you like to learn or be skillful, or more because you are afraid—either of losing skills, or of looking bad compared to other people?
Most of us are a mix of these that may change given the situation. But some people fall into distinct sets, like people who learn a range of stuff because they don't want to look stupid, or people who develop specific skills just because it gives them joy. The Dutch team figured based on earlier research that teams of people interested in general learning for reasons other than fear or competition, or not afraid of losing specific skills, would leverage diversity to perform well.
They used the easy sample population of university students—who might have provided different results than a more age-diverse group, mind you. The professors conducted a survey to identify learning orientation and other factors at the start of a business simulation done in teams of three or four. Though 75% of students were of Dutch descent, "5 percent had a Surinamese background; 5 percent, Chinese; 3 percent, Indonesian; 3 percent, Antillean; and the remaining 8 percent, various other cultural backgrounds (e.g., Moroccan, Serbian, Vietnamese)."
The simulation results were graded by teachers not familiar with the study. When these were compared to results from the questionnaire, only the familiarity of the members with each other predicted better performance. On average, diverse teams did no better or worse than non-diverse teams. But if members liked to learn in general for internal reasons, diversity helped performance. If they focused on retaining skills so they wouldn't fall behind others, it hurt the team's grades. But how did this happen? What behaviors resulting from learning orientation impacted grades?
In a second study with the same set-up, the researchers added another survey at the end of the simulation with team communication questions like, "Team members discussed the rationales underlying their ideas and viewpoints." Consistent with lots of other studies, this study found that better discussions led to better performance. And sure enough, if people learned for their own reasons or did not care about protecting their skills compared to others, their teams had better communication and performance. These studies do not prove learning orientation caused better performance. But the facts that orientation was measured at the start of the studies and "predicted" both the grade results and the communication behaviors suggest causality.
Happily for us managers, while people have natural tendencies toward certain traits, relevant behaviors can be changed by changing the work environment. The Dutch team has a number of suggestions along those lines. They write, "leaders may instigate higher learning approach or lower performance avoidance orientations through goal setting or creating learning… oriented work group climates or preventing performance avoidance climates," especially if these are tied to rewards like bonuses. Other ideas include, "emphasizing the importance of team and personal development, de-emphasizing competition, and creating an environment where employees feel secure and mistakes are seen as learning opportunities and are not punished. This can be highlighted by training and appropriate compensation and feedback systems," the scientists write.
Zen masters might also suggest addressing the illusion of difference our hard-wired brains foist upon us. One of the meeting rules I enforce is, "Everyone is equal," stressing that job function or title are irrelevant during group decision-making. All we care about is who has the best evidence and logic. This rule is directed primarily at job title differences and the subcultures of, for example, software testers versus hardware designers. But it also subtly addresses other differences like ethnic background, age, or gender.
There is at least one way you are no different from those you see as different and—admit it—slightly inferior to you. Most of them see you the same way: slightly inferior. Force yourself to listen to others' perspective without regard to where their parents' parents came from, and you might just learn something.
Source: Pieterse, A., D. Van Knippenberg, and D. Van Dierendonck (2013), "Cultural Diversity and Team Performance: The Role of Team Member Goal Orientation," Academy of Management Journal 56(3):782, http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.0992.
In an earlier topic I asserted that people are more alike than different. Imagine the grin on my face when I came across a study less than a week after first writing that article that piled on more evidence. It turns out there are patterns to how people view themselves versus how others view them, and those patterns hold true across 20 countries from around the globe. Knowing that pattern could be very useful to you whether leading or on a team, and should be downright reassuring if that team has cross-cultural issues.
Researchers in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, and Germany used the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (a "Big Five" test) to compare a person's ratings of their own personalities to ratings by people who knew the person well. Consistently across those four countries, people saw themselves as more neurotic than their friends or family members saw them. They believed themselves less competent, self-disciplined, and giving, and more open to fantasy. "Even this short list of disparities suggests that in general, people do not view themselves more favorably than how they are viewed by others," the study team says in a Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article. Contrary to the idea that we build ourselves up in our minds, these studies show that deep down more of us think worse of ourselves than others do.
You might think the difference would be bigger for traits that are easy to observe in action, like altruism (selflessness), versus something like fantasizing that occurs mostly in someone's head. You can see whether someone is acting selfish, but have to rely on their words or make assumptions about their thoughts. However, the article says a recent review of 170 studies found there is little evidence this is true, "counter to what textbook descriptions and commonly held beliefs suggest." This study found the same thing. As I have warned before, question your sources.
In a second study, the research team compared its results to studies using the same test everywhere from Burkina Faso to Hong Kong, Malaysia to Peru, Turkey to the United States. With one exception so glaring it almost has to be a mistake in that study, the findings lined up with the European data. Even when two countries were very different on various economic measures such as the average life expectancy, levels of corruption, or amount of bureaucracy, the overall pattern of self-view versus other-view held consistent.
The differences weren't all self-critical. "It seems that in all places, people tend to think that they are more curious and their lives are experientially richer" than an outsider perceives, and that they are more open-minded and not as assertive as others rate them. (It is possible not to be assertive enough, so maybe that is self-critical for some people.) A couple of patterns that held across cultures differed by demographic traits:
Women across cultures see themselves as more neurotic, agreeable, warm, and open to feelings than do men, and men self-rate as being more assertive and open to ideas.
"In every human society explored thus far, individuals become less extraverted and open to new experiences and more agreeable and conscientious with age…" the article says.
For me, these studies bring into sharp focus an incident years ago when I was managing a work group (as opposed to a "team"[1]) of about 20 people. One person clearly had some self-esteem issues and felt beaten down by previous managers. I thus made the conscious decision to find something to genuinely compliment her on, no matter how trivial, every time I saw her. She worked in another building, but I used "management by walking around," so this averaged a couple of compliments a week. If you've read Covey's Seven Habits, you recognize that I was trying to build up her "emotional bank account," too.
It didn't work. After at least a year of nothing but positives, I had to gently question how she had handled a customer request. The next thing I knew, she had even gone over my boss's head to file a complaint with the Ombuds Office. Fortunately my boss knew how my employee was and reacted appropriately, but I was deeply hurt. After calming down, I approached the woman, apologized for having upset her, and learned something stunning: She said I never gave her any compliments. Her self-image was so low, she had zero recall of my having said a positive thing to her.
Granting this is an extreme case, this incident points out that if you are a fair-minded person, most of your employees and teammates think less of themselves than you think of them—or than you think they think of themselves. This explains, in part, the need to show appreciation regularly, even if it doesn't seem like people need it, or in that employee's case, notice it. If you can specifically call out when they have been competent, conscientious, or giving, that should add impact. The self-image finding also says it isn't necessary to berate people when they make mistakes. Most are already beating themselves up more than you could.
On the other hand, most of your colleagues probably think they are more open to new ideas than you do. This helps explain why so many leadership experts emphasize the importance of persuasion inside a company. You have to be ready to convince internal folks in the same way you would try to sell your product or service to a customer.
But mostly for me, these studies reinforce the idea that cultural differences can be overcome by focusing not on those differences but on personality similarities. Almost everybody on your team feels vulnerable in some way. Empower them, have them talk in a safe setting about how they want to interact with each other, and facilitate agreements on how they will do their work and measure their performance. Based on my teambuilding experiences, I predict you will see personality and cultural differences become irrelevant without even mentioning diversity.
Source: Allik, J. et al. (2010), "How People See Others is Different from How People See Themselves: A Replicable Pattern Across Cultures," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99(5):870.
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[1] See "What is a 'Team?' The Answer Matters to You."


It was wonderful to see a large group of parents and staff at the seminar, 'The Importance of Silence, Calmness and Stillness in Children's Lives' led by parenting educator Maggie Dent on Wednesday 28th February. All who attended found the evening enjoyable, informative and thought provoking. With so many tips and strategies to take away, everyone was so very thankful to spend an evening with Maggie Dent. Many thanks to Immanuel's Parents and Friends Committee for hosting Maggie Dent and providing parents with the opportunity to hear from a well researched and dynamic speaker.


text:
Auer, Lama, Roskelley summited Howse Peak before avalanche killed them on the descent
Auer, Lama and Roskelley killed in avalanche on Canada's Howse Peak
Remembering Tim Auger
Brandon Pullan / August 14, 2018
Off Route and Out of Time - The Sharp End, Alpinist 56
Katie Ives
This Sharp End first appeared in Alpinist 56—Winter 2016.
IN APRIL 2016, Marc-Andre Leclerc stepped off a bus onto the edge of a highway in the Canadian Rockies. Above dark woods, the stark-white snows and smoke-grey rock of Mt. Robson flashed cold against the sky. He was alone. Slowly, he walked closer. "I reminded myself that you only ever get to visit a place for the first time once," the Canadian alpinist recalled on Alpinist.com. "I immersed myself into the environment, and took in all the sounds, smells and colors that give the forest its atmosphere." Beyond the shores of Kinney Lake and the tumult of Emperor Falls, the Emperor Face, his objective, rose half-hidden by mist. Thousands of meters above his camp, gusts roared. "For the first time in a long time," he recounted, "I felt deeply intimidated by the aura of the mountain."
Marc-Andre didn't bring a watch, and he fell asleep to the sound of the wind. He woke to silence and a pale glow. At first, he wasn't sure whether it was dusk or dawn. Then he realized the light came from the east, and so he prepared to start climbing. Ahead, lay the fabled route that had taken one of its first ascensionists, Barry Blanchard, many attempts over thirteen years to complete, resulting in the name Infinite Patience. Marc-Andre soloed rapidly over a blue ice pillar and a grey flow, up a narrow passageway of steeply faceted stone and through a snow mushroom. Crossing the west face, he swung his axes again and again in identical motions until time seemed to stop. And yet, the sun continued along its westward arc, and the air deepened to gold.
He reached the summit just as dusk mirrored over a boundless frozen expanse. After a brief bivy, he descended into the predawn dark. Falling ice shards signaled the return of the sun, and he gazed back to see "a shadow of Mt. Robson extending forever into the horizon against a red sky." By the time he returned to the road, he'd spent four days by himself:
My thoughts had reached a depth and clarity that I had never before experienced. The magic was real.... I was deeply content that I had not carried a watch with me to keep time, as the obsession with time and speed is in fact one of the greatest detractors from the alpine experience.... Climbing routes with an established track simply in order to attain the summit, or keeping time in order to set records reduces the adventure of alpinism to that of a sport climb....
Already I have been asked how fast I was, but I honestly cannot tell you how many hours the Emperor Face took me to climb. I began when I felt ready, and I reached the top at sundown. I also don't know how long the hike back to the road took me, but I do know that while descending...back into the world of green lushness and deep blue lakes that I felt more at peace than I would have had I been counting my rate of kilometers per hour.
The Emperor Face of Mt. Robson (3959m), where Barry Blanchard, Eric Dumerac and Philippe Pellet made the first ascent of Infinite Patience (VI 5.9 M5 WI5, 2200m) in 2002. Fourteen years later, Marc-Andre Leclerc soloed it. In Alpinist 29, Blanchard wrote: "To march onto this mountain is to wade into the mists that rise from Berg Lake." [Photo] Jeffrey Pang
EVER SINCE I READ Marc-Andre's account of his Robson solo, I've been intrigued by the idea that leaving behind a watch could seem like a rebellious act. From speed records, to alarms set for alpine starts, to notions of "turn-around times" and the logged data of fitness apps, climbers are often conditioned to think of keeping track of precise rates and minutes as part of the routines of alpinism.
Modern Western exploratory mountaineering developed alongside technological advancements that created new perceptions—and ambivalences—about chronology. In The Culture of Space and Time, American historian Stephen Kern recounts a simultaneous sense of the loss of undeveloped places and unrestricted time. During the late nineteenth century, steamships and trains enabled passengers to circumnavigate the globe even faster than the French novelist Jules Verne's imagined "eighty days." Railroad companies pushed for a standardization of time zones, completed in 1913, and maintained by wireless signals that pulsed around the world. Factories and armies alike relied on pocket watches to synchronize movements of large numbers of people. Even minutes seemed like valuable commodities, and pundits urged readers to be sure that each one was well spent. Much of daily life appeared to accelerate, while distances shrunk.
By the early twentieth century, as James Gleick recounts in Faster, scientists' merging of space and time into a single, relative continuum reflected what many laypeople already felt. For mountaineers, venturing to distant ranges seemed a way to escape the insistent metronome of urban existence. In 1938 the British explorer Eric Shipton wrote in Blank on the Map: "Every time I start an expedition, I feel that I am getting back to a way of living which is now lost...before life was so mad a rush...and beauty itself exploited as a commercial proposition." And yet, in some ways, the pace of their societies followed them into the hills: through the maps they made and the information they spread.
"Real adventure is...not the result of some marketing budget.... It burns brightest on the map's edges." —Kyle Dempster, The Road From Karakol
In recent years as watches give way to smart phones, frenetic networks of instant communication increasingly fill the inner spaces of drifting and dreaming. Industry swallows up moments of once-disconnected "leisure" and "free time." In a 2014 High Country News article Christopher Ketcham noted that much of mainstream adventure media now resembles a form of "corporate accountancy," with new athletic feats promoted like products on a factory line, always "faster, more." But there are other ways to interact with the mountains, beyond measurements. And there are other concepts of "ascents" that remind us of all the wild places we might go—off route, and seemingly, out of time.
LEIGH ORTENBURGER and Renny Jackson's classic guidebook, A Climber's Guide to the Teton Range contains the tantalizing words: "Overlooked for decades because it is usually not easily seen, Moxie Tower is readily visible from the valley given the correct lighting conditions. Even the map neglects this tower, as no closed contour is depicted on the Grand Teton quadrangle sheet." Some years ago, my climbing partner, Dylan, and I set out for Andy Carson and Paul Horton's rarely visited route up the southeast corner. I remember little of the climb itself: apart from the constant clatter of loose rock that made me wonder if we were lost. It's the approach that stands out in my mind: the way the spire emerged from what seemed like a solid canyon wall, how it felt to clamber across meadows toward something that—only shortly before—had been invisible to us. It was as if we'd entered a hidden world.
"A mountain has an inside," Scottish writer Nan Shepherd explained in her 1977 memoir The Living Mountain, an underground cult classic for climbers, its story an inversion of mountaineering formulas. During the final years of World War II, she set out to explore not the summits of the Cairngorms, but the plateau and the depths. "To know [the mountain's] essential nature," she recounted, "to know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living.... It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age." In place of athletic training, she honed her senses to try to glimpse the real mountain in its totality—snow and meadow, rock and ice, sound and silence—to lose herself in those moments when the boundaries between her perception and the landscape seemed to fade. To find one's "way in," as she defined it, is a form of ascent that takes not hours but years and is never fully complete.
Thirty-nine years later, in A Place in Which to Search (2016), Wyoming climber Joe Kelsey wrote of his own decades-long quest to learn to experience, truly, a single place: the Wind River Range. After years of editing alpine journal trip reports, he explained, "I became increasingly detached, disinterested in deeds of derring-do, in bolting ethics and the legalistic definition of free climbing, while at the same time becoming more interested in simply being in the mountains." Wandering to obscure, uncharted and erroneously mapped heights, he kept track of minute images: an arrowhead on a summit ridge, a flower in a stone crevice. "Simply seeing—seeing clearly, seeing detail—could be the ultimate gesture of reverence," he concludes. At night, he had recurring dreams of an invisible, unattainable peak, concealed behind a dense maze of contour lines. "I, who consider intimacy with the landscape to be the goal of our wanderings, believe that the ultimate intimacy is being so lost that I have not the slightest idea where I am," he writes. "I am not somewhere on a map; I am simply there."
IN 1939, AFTER GETTING off route in the Italian Alps and erring his way up a summit that didn't exist on his map, the poet Michael Roberts imagined compiling a humorous compendium of disoriented climbers' accidental ascents, The Climber's Guide to the Wrong Mountains. By losing our path, however, we sometimes find something more valuable: regained memories of how to navigate beyond predetermined locations, experiences akin to explorations of earlier times.
Last summer, when Anna Pfaff, Lisa Van Sciver and Rachel Spitzer arrived in the Zanskar region of India, the only map they could obtain was inaccurate. Carrying just a photo of a mountain, they traveled by bus and horseback only to discover they'd entered the wrong valley. Giving up their original objective, they kept wandering until they noticed a silver-granite peak, bright with patches of snow, which they referred to as Tare Parvat ("Star Peak" in Hindi).
Under a starlit sky, they set out over flows of thick ice and stacks of loose rock, placing knifeblades for protection in small seams. Fifteen hours later, they completed the first ascent of the 5577-meter summit. On Alpinist.com Pfaff explained the name for their route: "Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines unattached as 'not assigned or committed (as to a particular task, organization, or person). Since we traveled halfway around the world to climb a peak that we didn't find, then made the best with what we had, we found the name suitable."
DURING THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY, a group of French writers began exploring the connections between landscapes and human minds, assisted by practices they called derive, "drifting" and detournement, "rerouting." Through various walking games—such as using the map of one city to navigate another—they sought to break free of predictable patterns of travel and perception, to ignore demarcated routes and boundaries, and to find a more intimate, personal and inward sense of place.
"The detailed exploration of the world is very far from complete," wrote Shipton in 1939. Even small mountains have infinite fastnesses. This summer, seeking my own form of derive, I scrambled a few hundred feet from a crowded trail, until aretes and ravines enveloped me, and all sight and noise of other people vanished. Already, I was invisible, lost within the mountain's folds, the tangles of krummholz trees and jagged boulders. Somewhere, traversing diagonally across a buttress that didn't exist in my topo, I became committed. Below me, forests sunk into the blue of distant valleys. A distant lake shrunk to an eye. Above, the way was clean and sharp: lines of white quartz and dark cracks, ramparts of stone and air. I made imaginary maps in my mind—this rock horn for one hand, the side of this wall for a foot, this crevice so sharp it tore my fingers and would not let me fall. Beyond the top of the buttress, I regained the trail, the sense of a secret folded inside my mind: a fragile, perhaps forbidden, realm encountered by accident, never to be visited again.
Choosing longer, slower or otherwise unaccustomed approaches also restores a keener awareness of the nuances of a land. In the winter of 2002, French climber Lionel Daudet attempted a solo enchainment of three hard routes on the great north faces of the Alps. Instead of relying on a helicopter or a car to ease the kilometers from peak to peak, Daudet traveled by foot, ski and bike. He climbed without bringing any means of technological communication. "Then, I am in a world that's off the scale," he recounted in Alpinist 1. Days of storms and cold unfolded "like a slow-motion film." He turned back, frostbitten, below the summit of the Matterhorn. Eventually, he lost eight of his toes. As he recovered, fragments of remembered experiences coalesced into the image of a shadowy mountain—this was the true goal, Daudet realized, the dream peak he'd unconsciously sought on each climb, without ever getting closer. "The interior mountain is the mountain that doesn't let itself be climbed," he wrote in La Montagne Interieure. Instead, it vanishes "into the mists, the same mists that will seize me in my turn."
Leclerc atop Mt. Robson. On Alpinist.com he wrote, "Away from the crowds, away from the stopwatch, and the grades, and all the lists of records, I've been slowly able to pick apart what is important to me and discard things that are not." [Photo] Marc-Andre Leclerc
LOOKING BACK, MONTHS LATER, at his Robson solo, Marc-Andre Leclerc now says:
It's hard to put my finger on what the magic ingredient is.... Kind of like it is hard to recall the exact feeling of being a child discovering something wonderful and new because it is a feeling too removed from our "adult" state of mind to actually grasp in a tangible way.
Beyond the steady beat of a watch hand or the sharp ping of digital apps, we move by mysterious and archaic rhythms: the gradual unfolding of the day's colors; the sidereal sweep of the night; the recollection that we may encounter immeasurable things in the span between living and dying, between the inexorable approach of darkness and dawn. And in those moments of climbing when all existence seems to compress back to single points of light—a flash of crystal on a granite ridge, a star flickering to life above a couloir, a sudden memory of places and people long vanished—recall dreams of how everything, in the end, might be both lost and found in time.
This Sharp End first appeared in Alpinist 56—Winter 2016. Issue 56 is available on newsstands, by subscription or direct through our online store.
edkeller
This is a beautifully written and deep piece. Thank you!
I'm reminded of many texts, and climbs, but the melancholy of 'The Soloist's Diary' comes most strongly to mind.
'Today: performed a most elegant movement. It was yesterday, I think, that I threw away all but twenty feet of rope.
Sound is the most tenuous of things: untouchable, deceiving, hiding in shadows, covering its damp tracks with echo, cacophony, history hanging on its subtle dark pallor or harmonies, a night which ridicules vision. So too I have trouble these days in hearing beauty. It is years now. All the rock is as it appears: a barrenness ending in human things with warped and mangled flesh, pale veins and tendons utterly void of strength. My nostalgia is infinite. My heritage of vacuum in the rich somber architecture of nature. My desire an impossible return.
Long ago I spoke with other wretched ones. One swore he remembered starting from waves, another from the desert. Still others mentioned primeval forests, rice terraces, lagoons; and another, a remarkable figure, yelled to me ages ago from across a crack that he had been born on the wall and was trying to find his mother somewhere high above him. I arrived by crude error and, forever, here... '
The Soloist's Diary, Jeff Long

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
The Power of the Pelosi Moment
The absolute power oozing from Nancy Pelosi, clad in Armani sunglasses, a MaxMara coat, and Stuart Weitzman pumps was heady to watch this week. Many of us couldn't get enough of the exchange in the Oval Office, the press conference outside the White House, and maybe most stunningly, the walk from one to the other in the aforementioned outfit.
It's still rippling over me, in memes where Pelosi leaves a White House in flames behind her or in gifs that set her strut to the Peter Gunn Theme as she dons her shades.
Sure, part of it is that someone of the female persuasion who knows how to wield power and shares my name held the President accountable in a historic space that should have been a home court advantage of sorts for him. I find that all kinds of inspiring. But I just realized this is the rousing kernel in it:
That moment, that meeting, signaled change is afoot.
Blessed be on all that is holy. Let me say it again:
Change is afoot.
After two years of feeling like Donald Trump has his foot on my neck, Nancy Pelosi has freed my windpipe just a little. Just enough to let more air in. Ahhhhh … breath. Sheer breath. May we revel in the return of breathing.
As we bring a close to one year and usher in another, how heartening is this?
This is not about politics. Not really. Sure, I'd like the Democratic House of Representatives to bring back the fantastic health insurance I had this year. And I have other wishes that would fall in the political category. But this energized feeling is not about political matters, but moral ones.
I began this day seeing the faces of the children who were slaughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School six years ago. And a photo of a Jewish cemetery in France desecrated with 37 swastikas. And the story of a 7-year-old girl who died from dehydration while trying to flee an oppressive regime and gain some measure of safety in this country. This, as scandals continued to rain down on the President of the United States, who can't stop lying because it's all he knows. That's been proven, tracked, confirmed.
He's about to stop getting away with things, though. What (eventually) comes with that is this — we get to go back to shaming white supremacy, quelling the fears of our Jewish citizens and people of color. Maybe in a twisted way Trump has done us a favor by showing us how many are among us that suddenly felt free to express and not be hampered by "political correctness" upon his election and the subsequent rollout of rallies.
Which brings us back to Pelosi. Because among the red meat the President tossed out at those rallies was a series of names and issues designed to rile up the crowd. No need to say anything but "Maxine Waters" or "Nancy Pelosi" to hear the boos and jeers. Just tell them the liberals want wide open borders. What a great applause line. It detracts from the fact that Mexico isn't paying for the wall.
While I was in a local eatery this week, a Trump supporter I know was watching closely on his phone to see what Michael Cohen's prison sentence would be. "Three years," he crowed. "What does that have to do with Trump?" Then with a smirk he asked his phone to bring up the Dow.
In mid-November The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on Pelosi. Another bad-ass photo of her in orange, this time a pantsuit with matching pumps. Old school feminism used to tell us we shouldn't focus on what a woman is wearing because it takes away from her skills and it's sexist. Well, I'm tossing that rule out the window. The clothes confer power. They send a message.
Maybe it's only a subtle message to some men and women who don't have an interest in fashion. But for many of us, it's a form of communication. I've long agreed with the sentiment that for the most part women dress for other women. This isn't about labels or name dropping, more a declaration of knowing who we are. Cultivating a style takes confidence. You know how many women couldn't pull off wearing that orange suit? Many.
Nancy Pelosi knows who she is.
In the aforementioned magazine piece by Robert Draper, this was my favorite paragraph:
When I asked Pelosi whether Democratic leaders had ever encouraged her to rise in the ranks, she scoffed. "They didn't ever invite me to a meeting," she said. "The only time I was ever in the Democratic speaker's office was when I became speaker. When I decided to run, the first thing I heard was: 'Who said she could run?' Oh, light my fire, why don't you! Then they said, 'Why don't women just make a list of things they want done, and we'll do them?' We're not talking about the 1800s — we're talking about 19 years ago!"
Light my fire, indeed.
Having just finished Michelle Obama's memoir, Becoming, this reminded me of where she talked about the school counselor who told her she wasn't Princeton material. We know how that turned out.
Meanwhile, who else showed up on my social media feeds this week? Christine Blasey Ford. In a video from afar, she presented Sports Illustrated's Inspiration of the Year Award to Rachael Denhollander, a lawyer and former gymnast who was the first woman to publicly accuse Larry Nassar, the former Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics doctor, of sexual assault.
"Rachael Denhollander, I am in awe of you, and I will always be inspired by you," Ford said. "In stepping forward, you took a huge risk and you galvanized future generations to come forward, even when the odds are seemingly stacked against them. The lasting lesson is that we all have the power to create real change, and we cannot allow ourselves to be defined by the acts of others."
Yes. It is time to reclaim our world. I think the President has unwittingly empowered us to do this.
Bring on 2019.
Columnist, Blogger, Author, Coach in the Greater NYC area. Six-word bio: Zen chick with a Jersey edge. Favorite topics: gender, politics, race, meaning of life.
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text:
I Kastelruther Spatzen (letteralmente, "Passerotti di Castelrotto") sono un gruppo musicale Sud tirolese di schlager e folk music, e prendono il nome dalla loro città di origine, Castelrotto (ted.: Kastelruth), in provincia di Bolzano.

Il gruppo
Agli inizi degli anni ottanta il gruppo viene fondato dai musicisti Karl Schieder, Walter Mauroner e Valentin Silbernagl, che da tempo cantavano insieme. Poco tempo dopo entrarono a far parte del gruppo Oswald Sattler e Ferdinand Rier, ed infine Norbert Rier. Con questa formazione, i Kastelruther Spatzen iniziano la loro carriera ed incidono il loro primo disco, il singolo Das Mädchen mit den erloschenen Augen, che fruttò loro il primo disco d'oro.

Nel 1986, Schieder e Ferdinand Rier uscirono dal gruppo per motivi di lavoro. Al loro posto subentrarono Albin Gross e Karl Heufler. Sette anni più tardi se ne andrà anche Oswald Sattler, che sceglie di cominciare una carriera da solista; sarà sostituito da Andreas Fulterer, che però lascerà gli Spatzen per lo stesso motivo nel 1998. In quell'anno integrarono il gruppo Kurt Dasser e Rüdiger Hemmelmann.

Nel novembre 2012 esce sulla Bild che un ex-componente del gruppo accusa gli altri di non registrare i propri cd, ma di inviare negli studi di registrazione dei musicisti professionisti. La risposta di Rier esce sul quotidiano locale Dolomiten dicendo che tutto ciò è vero e di non averlo mai negato.

L'attuale composizione:
 Voce: Norbert Rier
 Voce e chitarra: Kurt Dasser
 Sassofono e clarinetto: Valentin Silbernagl
 Tromba e sintetizzatore: Walter Mauroner
 Tastiere e fisarmonica: Albin Gross
 Voce e basso: Karl Heufler
 Batteria: Rüdiger Hemmelmann

Discografia

Album

 Das Mädchen mit den erloschenen Augen, 1983
 Ich sag's Dir mit Musik, 1985
 Musikantengold, 1986
 Servus Südtirol, 1987
 Weihnachtssterne, 1987
 Wenn Berge träumen, 1988
 Doch die Sehnsucht bleibt, 1989
 Feuer im ewigen Eis, 1990
 Wahrheit ist ein schmaler Grat, 1991
 Das Beste der Kastelruther Spatzen Folge 1, 1991 - Raccolta
 Eine weiße Rose, 1992
 Die schönsten Liebeslieder der Kastelruther Spatzen, 1992
 Der rote Diamant, 1993
 Atlantis der Berge, 1994
 Kastelruther Classics Folge 1, 1994 - Raccolta
 Nino und das Geheimnis des Friedens, 1994
 Das erste Gebot ist die Liebe, 1995
 Das Beste der Kastelruther Spatzen Folge 2, 1995 - Raccolta
 Kastelruther Spatzen live in Berlin, 1996 - Live
 Sterne über'm Rosengarten, 1996
 Träume von Liebe und Zärtlichkeit, 1996 - Raccolta
 Herzschlag für Herzschlag, 1997
 Kastelruther Classics Folge 2, 1997 - Raccolta
 Die weiße Braut der Berge, 1998
 Weihnachten mit den Kastelruther Spatzen, 1998
 Die Legende von Croderes, 1999
 Und ewig wird der Himmel brennen, 2000
 Jedes Abendrot ist ein Gebet, 2001
 Ihre Ersten Erfolge, 2001
 Das Beste der Kastelruther Spatzen Folge 3, 2001 - Raccolta
 Liebe darf alles, 2002
 Das Frühlingsfest der Volksmusik - Das Gold-Jubiläum der Kastelruther Spatzen Doppel-CD, 2002
 Herzenssache, 2003
 Alles Gold dieser Erde, 2003
 16 Spatzen-Hits Instrumental, 2004
 Berg ohne Wiederkehr, 2004
 Zufall oder Schicksal, 2005
 Nino und das Geheimnis des Friedens, 2005 (Remake + 2 tracce extra)
 ...und Singen ist Gold, 2006
 Dolomitenfeuer, 2007
 Geschrieben für die Ewigkeit - Besinnliche Lieder, 2008
 Jeder Tag ist eine Rose, 2008
 Herz gewinnt - Herz verliert, 2008
 Ein Kreuz und eine Rose, 2009
 25 Jahre Kastelruther Spatzen, 2009 - Raccolta

DVD

 Das Beste Folge 1
 Das Beste Folge 2
 Herzschlag für Herzschlag
 Das große Kastelruther Spatzenfest
 Ich würd es wieder tun
 Berg ohne Wiederkehr
 Dolomitenfeuer
 Noch größer als der Everest

I premi
Tra i numerosi premi nella lunga carriera dei Kastelruther Spatzen, si possono ricordare:
 la vittoria al Grand Prix der Volksmusik del 1990 con Tränen passen nicht zu dir (i Kastelruther Spatzen concorrevano per la Germania: solo dal 2000, infatti, alla manifestazione partecipa anche l'Alto Adige);
 il premio Edelweiß, gli oscar della musica popolare tedesca, nel 1991 e nel 1993;
 il premio Echo nella categoria Schlager/Volksmusik, negli anni 1993, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2008 e 2009;
 sei nomination agli Amadeus Austrian Music Award.

Non si contano i dischi d'oro e di platino raccolti in Germania, Svizzera e Austria, dove nel 1990 sono stati anche premiati per il loro primo milione di dischi venduti, e nel 1999 per i 10 milioni di copie.

Note

Altri progetti

Collegamenti esterni

Gruppi musicali tedeschi
Gruppi e musicisti del Trentino-Alto Adige
Castelrotto

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Security agencies applauded for professionalism during elections
BY: Shirley Asiedu-Addo,
Mr James Oppong-Boanuh — Inspector General of Police
A Senior Research Fellow in Peace and Development at the University of Cape Coast, Dr Patrick Osei-Kufuor, has commended the security agencies for the laudable role they played in promoting peace in the country before, during and after the elections.
"Their approach has been commendable. We could have had a very high incidence of violence but I think the policing approach worked to ensure this did not happen," he said.
In an interview with the Daily Graphic on the recent elections and the aftermath, Dr Osei-Kufuor said even with places noted to be hotspots and with deviant acts, the police effectively adopted democratic policing principles and respect for human rights to ensure peace.
"They did well to avoid tear gas and water cannons and worked to control crowds with barricades, which was good," he said.
In the just-ended December 7, 2020 elections, the Ghana Police Service reported that six persons died from 61 electoral and post-electoral incidents nationwide.
It said 21 of the incidents were true cases of electoral violence, six of which involved gunshots, resulting in the death of the six persons.
Humaneness
Dr Osei-Kufuor said but for the humane approach by the security agencies, the situation could have degenerated into violence in many parts of the country.
He, therefore, urged the security agencies to continue to use democratic principles of policing to help keep the nation's peace intact.


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Shirley and I have been going to India now for eight years. In the beginning we concentrated on learning the needs of the people there. In the last few years the focus has changed to not just meeting some of the physical needs of the people (construction of churches) but in trying to have the messages of William Branham printed on a limited basis for distribution to those that read the Telugu language. We presently have two people that are retyping some of the messages that have already been translated so they will be in the proper format for the HUB. It is from the HUB that we download the messages and print for distribution. There are 58 messages in Telugu on the HUB and still over 118 that were in print before and out of print and still need to be retyped. We also are trying to get new messages translated so that more will be available. Freddie last year printed over 1000 message books and this year plans to print over 1500 as new messages are made available on the HUB. We send free of charge a limited number to a minister but if the request is large then we ask them for assistance in printing charges.
This past year we focused on many things. In one area we had a class on water baptism and then baptized five people which will be the beginning of a new church in an area that we have been working. It was a blessing to be able to minister in this way. In the following year we plan on visiting the area again and strengthen those that have accepted Christ as their Savior.
Much of the work that we are doing presently is preaching to various churches that we have been working with over the years. In some cases we have never been in the church before. Some of the churches are well established and we can go deeper into the messages. In other churches most of the people are illiterate so the messages must remain simple. Last year we did a series that we managed to video and will make them available to ministers that have computers that can view them. There is also a collection of videos that we have been able to put together over the years showing Sabino Canyon, Sunset Mountain and personal testimonies by various ministers. These will also be made available to various ministers as they show an interest.
This year we took with us a model of the Tabernacle of the Wilderness and used it as a teaching aid to help the people (especially the youth) understand the approach to God through Jesus Christ. It was a blessing to see the young people grow. We always speak through a translator and sometimes the messages are not as clear as they could be. By having the model with us we were able to have a more relaxed atmosphere where the people could ask questions and we could explain to them more fully what we were trying to teach them.
This year we spent 11 weeks in India. I preached 72 services while we were there and ministered in over 35 churches. During our time in India we baptized 7 people in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ as well as helped to establish a new church. We were able to spend time in a few of the villages, teaching on the Tabernacle of Moses. We were able to hold meetings with ministers in different areas and tried to answer their questions. We also distributed Bibles and message books in Telugu.
One of the highlights of this year was when we had the opportunity of baptizing the last member of the family of a church pastor that we had been working with over the past 5 years. It was his grandmother. She was over 80 years old. In the past we had baptized most of his family and his father. The only one left was the grandmother. It was a blessing to see her complete the family coming forward for Christian baptism.
Next year we plan on returning and strengthening the brothers that we have worked with over the years. There is much work to be done in India. There are not many missionaries from the states that travel anymore to India. I am grateful for the ones that do go.


Present Weather Conditions Will Not Postpone Contest With Phillies Saturday.
The American League game between Philadelphia F. C. and Bethlehem Steel, scheduled for tomorrow at the Steel field, will go on despite the present weather conditions. So many games have been postponed recently that no further delays can be permitted if the schedule is to be completed in the regular season allowed by this league. Bethlehem has played fifteen league games to date and thirteen more remain to be played. Seven at Bethlehem and six away. Phillies vs. Bethlehem game has been postponed several times, but only a blizzard at the time, set for the start, will prevent play tomorrow.
Malcolm Goldie, the clever outside left on the Bethlehem list, has completely recovered from the injury he received in the game against New York, and he will be seen in his regular place against the Phillies. The visitors will be out to show that the defeat administered to Bethlehem in the opening league game of the season was no fluke, and they will be sure to make it interesting for the locals, despite the big difference in the relative positions of both teams in the league standings.
Fall River leads the league by one point with Pawtucket and Bethlehem right behind. Should Bethlehem and Pawtucket both win tomorrow, they will be tied for first place with 24 points.
The following is the Bethlehem lineup: Highfield, Young, Ferguson, McFarlane, Carnihan, Terris, Campbell, Rattray, McNiven, Maxwell, and Goldie.