by Mark de Rond
The Old: There is no I in team.
The New: There is an I in team. And it matters.
The Challenge: To exploit individual qualities while mitigating the risks these same qualities entail.
GOOD SPELLING DOES NOT EQUAL deep thinking. Take that old devil, “there is no I in team.” When basketball star Michael Jordan, after a run of twenty straight points, snubbed Coach Tex Winter with, “there may not be an I in team, but there is in win,” he may have been onto something. A basketball team without superstars rarely makes it to the playoffs, let alone the finals. Such star players as Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon, and LeBron James have consistently featured in all but one NBA finals series for the last thirty years. In fact, a team with no starting all-star player has less than a 1/100th chance of winning the championship. By comparison, a team with an all-star player raises the odds of winning to 7.1 percent and of making it to the finals to 16 percent.
These odds increase dramatically as the number of star players per team increases. Those teams with pockets deep enough to field two first-team all-star players have a one-in-four chance of winning a championship and better than a one-in-three chance of making the finals. With three all-stars, these odds increase to 39 percent and 77 percent, respectively. And the argument holds even when controlling for a team’s winning percentage during the regular season. When it comes to the playoffs, a star player improves his or her team’s chances of winning a championship by 12 percent. A superstar with a relatively weak supporting cast fares better than a team with five good players.1 Love them or loathe them, individuals matter.
So much then for that old devil. While grammatically correct, as a guiding principle, it is flawed and impractical. It downplays the extent to which high-performance teams benefit from variations in talent, in personality, and even in pay. And it diminishes the value of competition between team members. Even those blissful moments of team flow, when mind and matter fuse effortlessly as all are absorbed in the task at hand are more often than not the consequence of individual differences cleverly brought into play by good leadership. The choice of who is in and who is not will have been decided based on the relevance of particularized attributes to an available set of competencies. In sports as in business, it is the combination that matters. Even in teams that are greatly interdependent and prize uniformity—think of synchronized swimming or team sprints in cycling—individuality can be a positive differentiator. Besides, no matter how resolute the belief that individuality be completely eradicated, to collaborate effectively remains a matter of personal choice.
Team decisions require individuals to commit to those around them and to be accountable for their own performance to the team. Should they choose to commit, they will only ever do so for their own reasons. As one of Britain’s most distinguished coaches, David Whitaker, put it: “If you want an exceptional team, keep your eye on the individual … Teams thrive on individual choice and commitment … the most powerful teams are made up of individuals who have chosen to work as a team.”2 Having coached hockey teams to Olympic gold and bronze, World and European silver, he deserves to be taken seriously.
Thus, teams begin and end with individuals. This is not an ideological statement. Nor is it a normative one. This book has no intention of lionizing individuals at the expense of teams or of, God forbid, sanctioning egotism. It does not prioritize individual over collective effort (even if some tasks—particularly those that require logical problem solving—are often better done by individuals than teams). It doesn’t even go as far as Jordan’s gibe. Its perspective is far subtler. To focus on the I in teams is to pursue a very specific level of granularity. It is to see the trees for the forest by granting individuals that degree of choice missing in much popular writing on teams. To keep in mind the individual is to emphasize precisely the sorts of issues that are easily lost when considering teams as the primary unit of analysis.
Thus, the chapters in this book [from which this chapter is excerpted] explore each of the following assertions: The qualities that make individuals attractive can make them difficult. The best individuals put together do not necessarily make for the most effective team. Conflict often arises even as people agree on what needs to be done and why, and actively try to coordinate their efforts with those around them. Their productivity depends on who else is involved, and how many of them there are. It can make sense to trade off competence for likability within a team in even technically demanding environments. Competition within teams can be as valuable as collaboration.
The I in team also suggests that the key to managing teams lies not just in advanced statistical techniques, skill complementarities, or team bonding but in an appreciation of their humanity. When teams work well, it is because, and not in spite, of individual differences. These differences are at once a source of brilliance and tension, leaving teams poised between entropy and synergy, tension and collective genius.
What may appear like picture-perfect teams are then in reality often quite intricate tapestries of distinct characters united by a common goal but forced into a sanctum where trade-off choices must be made between likability and competence; where powerful but conflicting pressures coexist; where one’s success hinges on being able to reconcile camaraderie and rivalry, trust and vigilance, the sacred and the profane; and where they end up getting it wrong as often as right.
These teams can feel fragile to those on the inside, even if perfectly functional on the outside. In contrast to popular belief, teams of high performers are not easy places to be. At times, they are anything but harmonious, but then harmony may well be the result, not cause, of superior performance. Workplace teams are even more complex. Businesses rarely have the luxury of focusing on a single team with one clear objective. The composition of the I’s in charge of production will invariably be different to the composition of the I’s in charge of sales or R&D. Adding to this complexity, sitting on top of these various teams is typically a small team (the executives) charged with understanding, leading, and managing the multiplicity of teams in their business. And the I’s inside them.
This chapter and those that follow will try to untangle the tapestry of high-performance teams to identify the true nature of collective performance. They do so by using insights from elite sports, occasionally supplemented by evidence from experiments in social psychology, organizational behavior, and the sociology and economics of sports. The first of these insights is in some ways also the most exasperating: it seems one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too when it comes to turning teams of high performers into high performance teams. With few exceptions, the qualities that make individuals as gifted as they are can make them wearisome as team members. They are often extraordinarily focused, with higher-than-usual thresholds for personal discomfort. This is true in sports as much as in business.
Consider, for example, 1940s baseball star Pete Reiser. Known colloquially as “Pistol Pete,” he had to be carried off the diamond eleven times in two and a half years of playing in the minors, three in the army, and ten in the majors (with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cleveland Indians, and Boston Braves). According to W. C. Heinz’s 1958 biopic, “nine times Pete regained consciousness either in the clubhouse or in hospital. He broke a bone in his right elbow, throwing. He broke both ankles, tore a cartilage in his left knee, ripped the muscles in his left leg, sliding. Seven times he crashed into outfield walls, dislocating his left shoulder, breaking his right collarbone and, five times, ending up an unconscious heap on the ground.”3 Yet, according to the New York Herald Tribune’s Bob Crooke, “Pete Reiser was the best ballplayer I ever saw.” 4 Reiser would have it no other way. Nor would we.
In the workplace, personal discomfort is rarely of the same muscular variety, limited instead to sleep deprivation, a poor work-life balance, and excess consumption of food or alcohol or both. But occasionally we find extremes here, too. The managing partner of one of the world’s largest and most profitable professional services firms who, realizing that his highly successful team of partners experienced a disproportionally high incidence of divorce, decided to retain the services of one of London’s top divorce lawyers. Doing so helped mitigate the anxiety and additional workload generated by this real, even if unintentional, consequence of a ruthless focus at work. The example is brutal but too often true: what seemed good for business proved detrimental to the families implicated by it, usually by no choice of their own.
Insofar as their focus is invariably bound up with a proclivity for perfectionism, here is how Italian soccer manager Carlo Ancelotti describes one of the game’s most successful coaches: “He [Fabio Capello] was very serious, meticulous and I don’t think there is anybody better than him at reading a game. On a human level, well, that’s a different story. He didn’t have a dialogue with us, he just told us what to do. And, unsurprisingly, he fell out with many players. For example, I remember Ruud Gullit [voted World Soccer Player of the Year in 1987 and 1989] pinning him up against the wall. The rest of us intervened to break it up, even though, secretly, I think many players were cheering for Ruud.”5
Within the world of commerce, few better examples exist than the late Steve Jobs. Adored around the world for the elegance and user-friendliness of his designs, Jobs was many things, including selfish, rude, aggressive, paranoid, lachrymose, and unpredictable, at least to those who worked with him.6 But it is his relentless perfectionism (such as making sure the magnetic laptop charger made just the right sort of click) that we adore him for. As Wired.com’s news editor, Leander Kahney, wrote before Jobs’s premature death:
Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed … Jobs is a notorious micromanager. No product escapes Cupertino without meeting Jobs’ exacting standards, which are said to cover such esoteric details as the number of screws on the bottom of a laptop and the curve of a monitor’s corners … At most companies, the red-faced, tyrannical boss is an outdated archetype, a caricature from the life of Dagwood. Not at Apple. Whereas the rest of the tech industry may motivate employees with carrots, Jobs is known as an inveterate stick man. Even the most favored employee could find themselves on the receiving end of a tirade. Insiders have a term for it: the “hero-shithead roller coaster.” Jeffrey Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, found him unvarnished and prone to using colorful language.7 Says Edward Eigerman, a former Apple engineer, “More than anywhere else I’ve worked before or since, there’s a lot of concern about being fired.” … A Silicon Valley insider once [said] he had seen Jobs demean many people and make some of them cry. But, the insider added, “He was almost always right.”8
Couldn’t work with him. Wouldn’t want a world without him. But do perfectionism, paranoia, tenacity, and self-confidence really make individuals great as well as difficult to manage in a team? Let’s explore each of these in turn.
While it may help raise team performance, the desire to identify scope for improvement can also contribute to a joyless, soul-destroying environment. This is particularly true when perfectionism is triggered by worries about getting it wrong, instead of the desire to make sure every next thing is better than the one before it. The difference is subtle but important. Recent research in psychology suggests that the latter is generally associated with positive experience, whereas the mistake-avoidance variety is associated with anxiety and, paradoxically but importantly, suboptimal performance. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the two are highly correlated, meaning that most of those people who aim for perfection also tend to worry a great deal about making mistakes, even if the latter tends to hamper performance and renders the overall experience much less enjoyable.9 It creates fatigue and resistance. For that reason, sports psychologists will often spend considerable time helping athletes reframe their ambitions in terms of realizing success as opposed to avoiding failure.
Perfectionism risks creating not just an excessively critical environment but one that, perversely, places a premium on cynicism. Cynicism is often perceived as indicative of smarts and cunning, even if it is rarely helpful. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile makes that point forcefully, having studied cynicism’s perceived relation to intelligence. In a clever experiment, she asked people to evaluate a set of carefully crafted book reviews. When her subjects were asked to gauge the reviews, they consistently thought the writers of nasty, acerbic book reviews were more intelligent and also more competent than those who conveyed essentially the same message but in kinder ways.10 It is one of the curiosities of team life in some societies that we find the contemptuous also the more capable, even if useless for all practical purposes.
The smartest of team members can be surprisingly intuitive when making choices, presumably as a result of having been right so often in the past. As with perfectionism, this is a generalization and, as with any generalization, there are plenty of exceptions. In the workplace, high performers are often keenly aware of their worth to the team but also to the market for talent and might expect instant access to resources and the executive suite.11 To combine intelligence with the sort of deep-seated insecurities that fuel high performance, particularly within a highly competitive milieu, can breed paranoia.
In his Playboy essay on the American chess player Bobby Fischer, for example, Brad Darrach describes his prodigy’s media profile as “a sort of paranoid monomaniac who was terrified of girls and Russian spies but worshipped money and Spiro Agnew … a high school dropout with a genetic kink who combined the general culture of a hard-rock deejay with a genius for spatial thinking that had made him quite possibly the greatest chess player of all time,” even if he drove his support team insane.12 Darrach’s own sketch of Fischer is refreshingly forthright: “He considered himself a superstar, the strongest chess player in the world, and when it came to money, he wanted what superstars like Joe Frazer and Muhammad Ali are offered.”13
Intel’s Andy Grove’s autobiography likewise leaves little to the imagination. Success, he thought, breeds complacency, and complacency failure. As the title of his book suggests, only the paranoid survive.
However inspiring the tenacity of baseball’s Pete Reiser, his behavior risked jeopardizing the team. Having been told by his physician that he would have to sit out the remainder of the season (having once again hit the wall in attempting a catch), Reiser ripped off his bandages, snuck out of the hospital, took a train to Pittsburgh, and went to the ballpark. Upon arrival, he was told to suit up, not to play but because “it’ll give ’em that little spark they need.” In the fourteenth inning, however, the team had run out of pinch hitters. Reiser walked up to the bat rack, pulled out his bat, walked up to the plate, and hit a line drive over the second baseman’s head—a hit that was good for three bases. With two runs scored, Reiser rounded first base and collapsed. He woke up in the hospital. He continued to play throughout the season, even if dizzy most of the time and unable to see fly balls, which might well have cost them the pennant that year.14 Less dramatically perhaps, college basketball players, oarsmen, or gymnasts can put the health of their team members at risk by hiding illnesses for fear of deselection—something coaches are well aware of and eager to avoid.
High performers’ ambition and intensity occasionally mean they can be explosive in how they deal with those around them. Having won an impressive four Premier League titles in five years with Manchester United, soccer player Eric Cantona’s outbursts were as legendary as his contributions, and targeted not just at fellow teammates but at fans, too. Very few managers were willing to deal with his headstrong character.15 Thus, in a match against London-based soccer club Crystal Palace in early 1995, Cantona was given a red card (a penalty card ejecting him) and sent off after a punishing kick on Palace defender Richard Shaw in response to Shaw pulling his shirt. As he walked toward the tunnel, he launched a kung-fu–style kick at one of Crystal Palace’s taunting fans, followed by several punches. He was duly tried and found guilty of bringing “the beautiful game” in disrepute, fined, and banned for eight months. Cantona had snapped, unable to explain his own behavior: “When the hooligan called me ‘a French son of a bitch’ … I had heard it 50 billion times before. However, on that day I did not react as I used to. Why? I never found any answer to that.”16
Despite often deep-seated insecurities, high performers are prone to overestimate the extent to which they are unique and contribute to team performance. These well-documented human traits are exacerbated in many of them. So, for example, most high school students see themselves as above average in intelligence; most business managers see themselves as more competent than average; 90 percent of motorists think themselves safer than average drivers, whereas 94 percent of university professors think themselves better than average teachers. And paradoxically, the bias of seeing ourselves as better than average causes us to see ourselves as less biased than average, too. As psychologist Daniel Gilbert points out, the tendency is not merely for us to see ourselves as more competent but as different from others, too.17 For example, while people may see themselves as more generous than average, they also tend to see themselves as more selfish than average.
In What Sport Tells Us About Life, English cricketer Ed Smith credits this unusually high level of self-assurance for one of sport’s more curious incidents: Zinédine Zidane’s head-butting of Italy’s Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final. It was, in many ways, Europe’s equivalent of Mike Tyson sinking his teeth deep into Evander Holyfield’s right ear. Materazzi fell to the ground. French soccer prodigy Zidane was given the red card and dismissed from the field in what should have been the swan song of a brilliant career. Everything about the event was bizarre. Zidane had already announced he would retire after the tournament, and whatever happened, he would be remembered as one of soccer’s greatest players. As Smith writes: “It was almost as if a great Shakespearean actor, playing King Lear at the National Theatre for the last time, interrupted his final soliloquy by punching the dead Cordelia and then announcing his life-long hatred for producers, directors and—especially—the paying public. We all like a gracious exit. However, Zidane left us scratching our heads.”18 Unlike Tyson, Zidane never once apologized for his act of madness. Nor did he say much about what triggered his reaction except that it was an “insult to his family” made by Materazzi in the heat of the game.
In a twist to this popular explanation for his fury, Smith claims instead that Zidane acted in sheer frustration because the game had not played out as destined. Any brilliant athlete, thinks Smith, is convinced of greatness; the greater the athlete, the stronger the conviction. It can turn locker rooms into vipers’ nests of egos, cliques, and fragile psyches.19 Zidane understood that it was he who was to turn around France’s fortunes in the final few minutes of the tournament, as indeed he had done before on several occasions. And so, in the 104th minute of the match, Zidane met a perfectly placed cross on his forehead, his header aiming for the top of the goal. Things were going as scripted: Zidane had already played and won a World Cup final and European Championship, having scored twice in each one, and this final, his third, was to be a replica of those two. His second goal would be France’s salvation. What better moment to retire from the game he loved? Alas, Italy’s goalkeeper made a superb save. Zidane’s facial expression was one of unbelief: he had been denied what was rightfully his. As Smith reckons, the greater an athlete’s self-belief, the greater the fall when this is punctured. So, insulted and disillusioned, Zidane blew it all.
That too much self-confidence risks reducing a team to less than the sum of its individual parts is also evident in American football. As former San Francisco 49ers Head Coach Bill Walsh explains:
There is another side [to ego] that can wreck a team or an organization. That is being distracted by your own importance. It can come from your insecurity in working with others. It can be the need to draw attention to yourself in the public arena. It can be a feeling that others are a threat to your own territory. These are all negative manifestations of ego, and if you are not alert to them, you get diverted and your work becomes diffused. Ego in these cases makes people insensitive to how they work with others and ends up interfering with the real goal of any group efforts.20
What can amount to self-delusion is hardly confined to sports. British men, for example are, on the whole, overly optimistic as to their waist sizes. A recent study points out that the average man thinks he measures 35.8 inches around the waist even if the average waist size is closer to 38 inches. This would be amusing were it not for the fact that any waist larger than 37 inches in circumference correlates with heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.21
Cheerier (though no less alarming) is a study reported in a March 1997 issue of U.S. News & World Report. One thousand Americans were given a list of names of well-known individuals, including Bill and Hilary Clinton, O.J. Simpson, Princess Diana, Oprah Winfrey, Mother Teresa, Michael Jordan, Al Gore, Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, Dennis Rodman, and Colin Powell. They were subsequently asked, for each of these, whether those on the list could be certain of a place in heaven. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Mother Teresa topped the list at 79 percent, followed closely by Oprah Winfrey in second place. Mr. Simpson came last at 19 percent.22 The follow-up question was no less intriguing. What did these one thousand respondents think would happen to them after death? No less than 87 percent of them were absolutely confident of a place in heaven, effectively beating Mother Teresa to the front of the line.
Closer to our field are responses to two questions asked of 1,800 senior managers.23 Here’s the first: “On a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being ‘very confident,’ 1 being ‘not at all confident’), how confident are you in your own ability to make good choices?” Reassuringly, 83 percent of respondents said they were either “confident” or “very confident” of their ability to make good choices when it came to their professional lives. The second question, as usual, proved the more insightful: “How confident are you in the ability of those you work with most closely to also make good choices?” Most people anticipate that the 83 percent of self-reported self-confidence will take a beating. Few are, however, prepared for the extent of the nosedive: of the 1,800 managers surveyed, only 27 percent were either “confident” or “very confident” of the ability of their colleagues to also make good choices.
Now, of course, there is something quite ironic about this: if you happen to have been involved in hiring these colleagues, there is clearly something amiss with your ability to make good choices. That said, these survey results illustrate not just our tendency to overestimate our own abilities but, worryingly, our underestimating the abilities of others. What few seem to realize is that those we work with are often far more perceptive of being underestimated than we think they are. And, as a general rule, people resent being underestimated, particularly by those they work with every day.
It is this inferior, and often poorly grounded, assessment of the skills of others compared to one’s own that can be the scourge of professional service firms. Steve Hollis, a senior partner with KPMG, has worked with a multiplicity of teams in Europe and globally. His assessment is refreshingly candid: “All too often our clients question why, with our unparalleled knowledge of their business, we can’t do more to help them. All too often I find the root cause is the natural instinct to protect what we have and not risk introducing a colleague who may put all of our achievements at risk.”24
Our relative lack of ability in many areas of life also makes us less likely to recognize when we are incompetent.25 A nice, even if rather unusual, example of this is the story of McArthur Wheeler who, in 1995, robbed two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight. He had made no visible attempt at disguise. Aided by surveillance tapes, the police were able to arrest him later that night. When, as part of the procedure, they showed Wheeler the video footage of him carrying out the crime, he acted in disbelief, claiming he “wore the juice.” Apparently, Wheeler had been under the impression that rubbing lemon juice on one’s face made one undetectable to security cameras. As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette put it at the time, Wheeler might have had larceny in his heart but little in his head.26
Of course, not all this is bad news. If individuals didn’t share at least some of these characteristics, it is unlikely that any of them (with the exception of Mr. Wheeler) would have achieved quite as much as they did. As professional service firms know particularly well, sometimes those most difficult to get along with can also be the greatest rainmakers.
A telling counterpart to soccer’s Cantona and Zidane is Morgan Stanley capital markets division’s Rob Parson, the protagonist of a popular Harvard Business School case study. Performance appraisals for Parson suggested his colleagues found him to be sharp-tongued, impatient, and generally just difficult to work with. Although he was an unlikely candidate, Morgan Stanley had snapped him up after a successful stint with three major investment houses. As Parson himself had already suspected, the fit was far from perfect. While generating vast revenues for the firm, he had never quite fit the consensus-building, team-based culture of Morgan Stanley. As Paul Nasr, who recruited him, despairingly summarized: “He has created a hostile environment around him. The syndicate guys are not happy with him basically questioning their prices. The traders are not happy with him questioning their knowledge of the markets. And he always thinks he has the right answer, and the majority of the times he does have the right answer, but every time he comes up with the right answer on his own, a lot of people feel undermined.”27 Despite his rough edges, Parson was valued for his ability to cross-sell and to make introductions and share information, and for the energy he brought to bear on his work.28
Why is it that Cantona, Zidane, and Parson are so good and yet so bad? The answer may lie in some specific traits that, while desirable, risk derailing teams. By implication, team leadership is as much about mitigating the risks of these traits as it is about exploiting their potential. So, for example, self-belief can lead people to be more decisive, yet they risk being seen as domineering. An added dose of intelligence is useful in allowing someone to quickly grasp the complexity of the issue at hand, yet risks dismissing the contributions of others. High performers are unusually restless. As a recent survey of one hundred high achievers suggests, their single most common trait was discontent.29 Restlessness fuels productivity. But it can cause people to be impatient with those around them as well. That they have high expectations leads them to set and achieve ambitious goals, yet can make those around them feel unable to fully satisfy expectations.
People who are disciplined are useful insofar as they foster efficiency and productivity, yet they risk being accused of entertaining unrealistic expectations. Their charisma can help bring out the best in others, yet they risk being manipulative in luring others into particular ways of doing things. They are determined to win and hate getting the short end of the stick, meaning they often end up getting what they want. And yet because everything becomes a competition of sorts, their behavior can be threatening to their peers. They are often tenacious but can drive others to exhaustion. Unafraid of change, and lured by the promise of newness, they risk taking action before the requisite buy-in of colleagues. Their farsightedness is valuable in discovering whatever gaps there are between today and tomorrow but often at the expense of focusing on what needs to be done now. The strength of their convictions makes them believable but can cause them to become defensive when challenged.30
Talent Q Group has compiled assessment data from over fourteen thousand individuals adding further traits that risk derailing teams when under pressure: hypersensitivity, as a result of being overly anxious and often surprisingly fragile emotionally; isolation, particularly when also being poor communicators; iconoclasm, or being willing to break with convention but, in doing so, being insensitive to those around them; attention-seeking behavior, making them prone to exaggerating; and, as in Steve Jobs’s case, a tendency to micromanage the affairs of others.31
Thus, high performers oscillate between healthy and irritating behaviors. As Work Ethic’s Kate Ludeman and Eddie Erlandson write, “their magnetic leadership commands respect, but their aggressive tactics create resistance, resentment and revenge. They are celebrated for their achievements but loathed for the carnage they leave in their wake. People stand in awe of their competence and can-do energy, but they often hate reporting to them or teaming with them.”32
Many employees nowadays spend ten or more hours a month complaining about their bosses (or listening to similar complaints by others), while around one-third spent twenty hours doing so, and occasionally far more.33 Internet blogs are a rich source of such complaints. Take this one for example:
[My boss] pays me $20 hr to basically take messages on little scraps of paper (I’m not allowed to have a message book) and write up invoices, etc that he dictates word for word and totals in Excel, so he can verify how Quickbook calculates! But I am called the office manager and referred to as “her.” He insults the crew and customers all day, every day. He’s taken a successful company and has ruined it by changing everything that worked to “his way” … he’s totally inconsistent … messes up everything, wastes everyone’s time … This is the worse case of a clueless, control freak narcissist I have ever encountered and I’m 58 years old. He plays on the computer all day, crunches Fritos (loudly) burps, sneezes, sighs constantly … spits tobacco in the garbage cans & bathroom sink. I have never heard him say excuse me. Rather, the bigger the burp, the prouder he is.34
Robert Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule pulls no punches either. His arsenal includes studies of U.S. nurses as recipients of verbal abuse from physicians. One of these, conducted in 1997 and written up in the Journal of Professional Nursing, found that 90 percent of the 130 nurses surveyed reported being victims of verbal abuse over the previous twelve months. A similar study published in Orthopaedic Nursing surveyed 461 nurses of whom 91 percent reported similar complaints, but within a single month.35
So it seems we cannot have our cake and eat it too. Or can we? A first step is surely to acknowledge the risks entailed in our own behavior, and to set clear limits as to what behavior is and isn’t acceptable on the team. The risk of an individual derailing a team can be mitigated by helping him to realize that his behavior may ultimately thwart his own potential.
Duke University’s legendary coach Mike Krzyzewski holds “irritant meetings,” challenging his staff and players to think of as many irritants as possible and—in the spirit of “let’s not let Duke beat Duke”—to have them out in the open for discussion. The complaints can be something as simple as bad food or accommodation, tardiness of one or more team members, inflammatory language, personal hygiene, sloppiness, lack of engagement or perceived lack of commitment, or even someone not speaking out when they should.36
Like the proverbial dead fish under the boardroom table, if you leave it there long enough, it will start to stink. Anecdotal observations suggest that conversations and meetings like Krzyzewski’s can be helped by relying on “hard facts” insofar as objective data feeds the analytical part of the brain.37 By their very nature, high performers are uncomfortable exposing their insecurities. To substantiate this, we need look no further than the proliferation of “corporate coaches” who are engaged, often confidentially, to help senior executives come to terms with their inner demons. Sports teams have long done likewise by retaining the services of sports psychologists.
Aware of the risk of derailment, those tasked with leading teams have often resorted to “away days,” retreats, or corporate team-bonding exercises. Chances are that you have already thrown considerable resources at team-building exercises: trivia nights, military-style boot camps, treasure hunts, wine tastings, traversing hot coals, building towers from bits of trash, or tracking down fugitives, their variety limited only to the human imagination and corporate budget. Their effects are often short-lived, and their consequences occasionally costly.
Athletes too seek out team-building events, even though the events can polarize as much as bond. Former Australian cricketer, Shane Warne, recommends against them, worried about the injuries they might cause. “I am from the old school,” he says. “If you want to gel everyone together, lock them up in a pub and do not let anyone come in. Sometimes after a long summer of cricket, players are better off spending time away from each other so they can recharge the batteries. Not a boot camp.”38 Steve Waugh, his former captain, disagrees: “To me, ‘bonding’ is an overrated term normally linked to reminiscing about past escapades with a truckload of grog on board. I’ve had my fair share of these nights, and while they can create a few laughs and a better understanding of each other, the experience is shallow and soon forgotten.39
To make sure they are not shallow, the events occasionally include periods of collective reflection, such as the Australian cricket team’s trip to Gallipoli and the Somme, or the England cricket team’s visit to Flanders Field and Dachau.40 England captain Andrew Strauss’s description of the bonding experience as a “tough but rewarding five days” took on more meaning when the England and Wales Cricket Board publicly confirmed that one of the team, James Anderson, had suffered a cracked rib during a boxing match against another teammate.41 Then again, the England team did go on to win the 2010 Ashes, arguably cricket’s most famous prize.
Occasionally, the exercises get bizarre. Take, for example, Alarm One Inc.’s decision to pit sales teams against each other in an exercise where the winners would poke fun at the losers, throwing pies at them, feeding them baby food, making them wear diapers, and swatting their buttocks. One “losing” employee, Janet Orlando, subsequently sued the California home security company for having spanked her with a competitor’s yard sign; the company ended up paying $1.7 million for the privilege. Or consider the example of Chad Hudgens, until recently employed by Utah-based motivational coaching firm Prosper Inc. After volunteering for a new but undisclosed team-building exercise, he was taken outside and pinned to the ground by colleagues before his enterprising boss proceeded to pour water all over his face, telling Hudgens’s team members all the while that he wanted them to work as hard on sales as Hudgens did at breathing. Needless to say, Hudgens has since sued his employer.
As a correspondent for the Times of London writes: “Nobody worries about team spirit on the factory floor. You never see teams of assembly-line workers scaling rock faces in East London … Only the pretentious and the terminally short of ideas feel that there is anything to be gained from being strapped into a canoe with some halfwit from marketing, and having an ex-commando bark instructions at you for a day.”42
More auspicious perhaps is a recent study by three University of California–Berkeley psychologists on the effect of touch on team performance. By coding the touch behavior of 294 players from all thirty National Basketball Association (NBA) teams during the 2008–2009 season, they discovered that frequent touching early on predicted greater performance for teams as well as individuals later in the season. When controlling for player status, preseason expectations, and early season performance, their hypothesis that touch predicted improved performance still held. Intuitively this makes sense. By touching—using high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles—we communicate cooperation, and help lay to rest the anxieties experienced by others in communicating affect, reassurance, and trust.43 The practicalities of generalizing these findings to the bank, law firm, or boardroom, however, are less clear-cut.
A more promising antidote is that of galvanizing teams around a credible cause. And here is where sporting teams often have it over their corporate cousins. The Cambridge University Boat Club (CUBC) has always had a single objective. Founded in 1828 by two students, one from the University of Oxford, the other from Cambridge University, the club’s goal remains that of beating Oxford in the annual Boat Race. This race is still rowed “at or near London, each in an eight-oared boat during the Easter vacation” in full view of the public. As the second-oldest varsity match in the world (cricket predates it by one year), it attracts a quarter of a million people on the banks of the River Thames and a television audience of an estimated 120 million around the world.
The question as to why this student race should hold such universal appeal is itself interesting: Is it because it involves two of the world’s grandest institutions of learning, the intellectual homes of Lewis Carroll, John Maynard Keynes, W. H. Auden, Stephen Hawking, and C. S. Lewis? Is it the secrecy surrounding crew selection and race preparation? Is it because rowing has mostly remained an amateur sport, meaning that either university crew will often field Olympians and world champions? Or is it because it has always been a thing of sharp contrasts: passionately amateur and yet holding to professional standards, a world of mutual respect yet intense rivalry, where it’s all about taking part but where the pain of losing is intolerable?
Perhaps it is the all-or-nothing character of the race, as four-time Olympic gold medalist Matthew Pinsent explains: “You must have huge courage to put yourself through all that is required to earn your seat, and row the race. There’s something very alluring about putting yourself through all that, in order to row a race where the prize is a small medal in a little box. The pain is so worthwhile, but the penalties for losing are really high too. In other walks of life there is much to achieve even if you don’t win, whereas in the Boat Race it’s all or nothing.”44
Few workplaces can compete with as compelling and simple a purpose. It allows the CUBC to strip complex, often highly emotive decisions to their bare bones. They call it the “Stephens Question,” so-named after an influential former club manager, Roger Stephens: “Will doing this make the boat faster?” The answer is ultimately a straightforward yes or no. Notwithstanding the fact that most workplaces are vastly more complex in their pursuit of multiple objectives, would it help to try and distill, at the level of the team, an equivalent of a Stephens Question? The predictable, “Will this increase shareholder value?” may be the correct test as far as senior management or corporate boards are concerned but it is unlikely to inspire. The real question is what will.
Reprinted from There Is an I in Team by Mark de Rond (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012).
Notes
1. See L. J. Wertheim and T. Moskowitz, Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won (New York: Crown Archetype, 2011). As Wertheim and Moskowitz note, it is a rarity for a basketball team without superstars to make it to the playoffs, let alone finals. When compiling a register of the top eight basketball players, using such criteria as first-team all-stars, top-five MVP vote-getters, or even salaries, they noticed at least one of these featured in all but one NBA finals series for the last three decades.
2. See D. Whitaker, The Spirit of Teams (Marlborough, UK: The Crowood Press, 1999), 12.
3. See W. C. Heinz’s essay, “The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete,” in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, ed. David Halberstam (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 289–303, quote, 236–237.
4. Ibid.
5. See Carlo Ancelotti, The Beautiful Games of an Ordinary Genius (New York: Rizzolo International Publications, 2010). This quote from a prepublication online review.
6. See Walter Isaacson, “Rages, Tears and Hugs: No One Was Immune to Steve’s Folly,” The Sunday Times, 30 October 2011, 2.
7. See John Arlidge, “A World in Thrall to the iTyrant,” The Sunday Times, October 9, 2011, 2–3.
8. See http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_apple.
9. See, for example, Joachim Stoeber, “Striving to Achieve Perfection: How Perfectionism Affects Aspirations, Emotions, and Results in Achievement Situations,” working paper, The Social Life of Achievement workshop, Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, September 30, 2010.
10. Teresa Amabile, “Brilliant But Cruel,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 19, no. 2 (March 1983): 146–156.
11. See Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, “Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?” Harvard Business Review, September 2000.
12. See Brad Darrach’s wonderful essay, “The Day Bobby Blew It,” in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, ed. David Halberstam (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 90–128, quote, 92.
13. Ibid., 99.
14. Ibid., 243.
15. For a more elaborate description, see David Bolchover and Chris Brady, The 90-Minute Manager (London: Financial Times Management), 198. As the authors explain, his manager at Leeds United, Howard Wilkinson, believed that Cantona was not a team-player, omitting him from many games, and ultimately selling him to Manchester United.
16. From Jean-Philippe Leclaire and Jérôme Cazadieu, “King Eric: Ten Years On,” The Sunday Times, May 13, 2007.
17. For a more elaborate discussion of these traits, see Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2006), 252–255.
18. Ed Smith, What Sport Tells Us About Life (London: Penguin, 2008), 29.
19. This is how Steve James described the 2010 English cricket team in The Telegraph, September 28, 2010, as it prepared to face Australia in the Ashes, in “The Ashes 2010: England’s Boot-Camp Experience Is Just Not Cricket.”
20. See Richard Rapaport’s interview with Bill Walsh, “To Build a Winning Team: An Interview with Head Coach Bill Walsh,” Harvard Business Review, January 1993. Norman Mailer’s 1971 feature on Muhammad Ali is telling in this respect, too. As he wrote in Life: “Muhammad Ali begins with the most unsettling ego of all. Having commanded the stage, he never pretends to step back and relinquish his place to other actors—like a six-foot parrot, he keeps screaming at you that he is the center of the stage. ‘Come here and get me, fool,’ he says. ‘You can’t, ’cause you don’t know who I am. You don’t know where I am. I’m human intelligence and you don’t even know if I’m good or evil.’ This has been his essential message to America all these years. It is intolerable to our American mentality that the figure who is probably most prominent to us after the president is simply not comprehensible, for he could be a demon or a saint.” See Norman Mailer, “Ego,” in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, ed. David Halberstam (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 713–737, quote, 713.
21. See The Week (UK ed.), October 15, 2011, 23.
22. As published in U.S. News & World Report, March 23, 1997, based on a poll of 1,000 Americans conducted by Market Facts. The full results are as follows: Mother Teresa (79%), Oprah Winfrey (66%), Michael Jordan (65%), Colin Powell (61%), Princess Diana (60%), Al Gore (55%), Hilary Clinton (55%), Bill Clinton (52%), Pat Robertson (47%), Newt Gingrich (40%), Dennis Rodman (28%), O.J. Simpson (19%). Survey instruments like this are blunt instruments and may need to be taken with a pinch of salt. For example, much depends on the religious views of the respondent, and the criteria he or she thinks apply when making judgments on who is, and isn’t, heaven-bound. Also, the list is a predominantly Christian one. One can be forgiven for concluding that it reads much like a popularity contest.
23. The survey results are described in D. Marcum and S. Smith, Egonomics: What Makes Our Ego Our Greatest Asset (Or Most Expensive Liability) (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).
24. Steve Hollis, interview with author, May 9, 2011.
25. See, for example, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 6 (1999): 1121–1134.
26. M. A. Fuocco, “Trial and Error: They Had Larceny in Their Hearts, but Little in Their Heads,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, D1, as quoted in ibid. My favorite example of stupidity in crime is Kasey G. Kazee’s attempt to rob a liquor store in Ashland, Kentucky, in August 2007. In an attempt to disguise himself, he had wrapped his head in duct tape. Luckily for Kasey, it was a hot day and his sweat prevented the tape from ripping off his eyebrows when the police tore off the duct tape in an attempt to identify him.
27. From M. Diane Burton, “Rob Parson at Morgan Stanley (A),” Case 498-054 (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1998), Nasr is quoted on p. 5 of the case.
28. On matters of promotion, one of the 2010 Ig Nobel Prizes was awarded to a piece of research that, controversially, shows, by means of agent-based simulations, that not only is the Peter Principle (implying that people are promoted until they reach their maximum level of incompetence) unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization. Within a game-theory-like approach, the three authors (Alessandro Pluchino and his team at the Universitá di Catania) explored different promotion strategies and found that in order to avoid such an effect, the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote an agent each time at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence. So in mathematical terms, at least, it makes the most sense to promote incompetence. Sometimes.
29. Maulana wahlduddln Khan, “Depression as Blessing,” The Times of India, May 24, 2011.
30. For more details on these traits (their benefits and risks), see Kate Ludeman and Eddie Erlandson, Alpha Male Syndrome (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006), 12, 78.
31. Dr. Alan Bourne and Richard A. Mackinnon, “Personality and Leadership Derailment,” white paper, Talent Q, info@talentq.co.uk.
32. See Ludeman and Erlandson, Alpha Male Syndrome, 8–9. While good estimates are hard to come by, the authors suspect 75% of top executives to be “alphas.” One could argue, of course, that this high estimate reflects a typically “Western” perspective, with alpha traits being expressed differently (if at all) in societies that place a premium on collaborative problem solving, modesty, humility, and equality. And while Ludeman and Erlandson focus on alpha males, they make it clear that many of the traits attributed to these males are true of alpha females too (even if females tend to express them differently).
33. See badbossology.com for some interesting data on “bad” bosses. The survey was sponsored by Development Dimensions International.
34. The entry can be found at http://www.badbossology.com/i128879.
35. See Robert Sutton, The No Asshole Rule (London: Sphere, 2007), 19.
36. See S. B. Sitkin and J. R. Hackman, “Developing Team Leadership: An Interview with Coach Mike Krzyzewski,” Academy of Management Learning & Education 10, no. 3 (2011): 494–501.
37. Alpha traits are not confined to men, of course. As Ludeman and Erlandson write, there are few differences between genders when it comes to competitiveness and drive. There do seem to be differences in the way these traits are expressed. For example, men scored higher than women on impatience and the difficulty of controlling their anger, whereas women are usually less overt. Women are emotionally more intelligent and will often prefer to seek consensus. Their ability to empathize and be sensitive to the feelings of others can pay dividends but could be ineffective when dealing with those who need a more direct approach. And conflict avoidance can suppress internal competition, or drive it underground, and clear the air by exchanging strongly held points of view. So it seems one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too.
38. Steve James, “The Ashes 2010: England’s Boot Camp Experience Is Just Not Cricket,” The Telegraph, October 28, 2010.
39. Ibid.
40. Nick Hoult, “The Ashes 2010: England’s Secret Bonding Trip Was Beneficial, Says Andrew Strauss,” The Telegraph, October 28, 2010.
41. Andy Wilson, “England’s ‘Boot Camp’ Called into Question After James Anderson Injury,” Guardian, October 15, 2010.
42. Martin Samuels in The Times as reprinted in The Week, November 10, 2007, 10.
43. See Michael W. Kraus, Cassy Huang, and Dacher Keltner, “Tactile Communication, Cooperation, and Performance: An Ethological Study of the NBA,” working paper, University of California–Berkeley, 2010.
44. Julian Andrews, What It Takes to Earn Your Place (London: Third Millennium Publishing, Ltd., 2004), 12.