Team Building
Find Me a Good Cat Herd
Jim, the head of a major mutual fund company, was speaking to a group of executives about the qualities that had most helped him in the business world. He was a big, burly, outspoken, plainspoken fellow, with an outstanding track record of success—highly respected throughout his own organization as well as the industry. He was summing up what he believed were his own key attributes.
“Truth is, I’m not really an investment expert,” he said.
That got the crowd’s attention, as he was after all heading an investment company.
“I’m not really a product expert,” he continued.
“I’m not really a customer service expert.”
“I’m not really a systems or operations guy.”
He paused. The room was completely quiet.
“But I’ll tell you what I am,” he said softly. “More than anything, I’m a team builder.”
He shifted his considerable weight, looking a little like an aging NFL defensive lineman. “Oh sure, I know something about investing and product design and service and operations and all that. I’ve been in this business awhile now. But many of you in this room know more about those things than I do. No doubt about it. But one thing I can do, I can get all kinds of people to work together—that’s one thing I do understand.”
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Of the many skills useful for success as a manager, one of the oddest may also be one of the most valuable. It’s not hard to find managers who are outstanding numbers crunchers, customer service experts, or even individuals with creativity and vision. But if I need to get a complex, costly, critical project done, let me first find a manager who can herd cats.
Cats, of course, unlike “herd animals” such as horses, sheep, or buffalo, prefer to go their own way. Much like humans in a corporation. Though organizations want and need, as the name implies, to organize people toward common goals, the reality is that most human beings have their own ideas, agendas, and preferences. Which is why, when you have a really big important project—like building a jet engine or a computer, say, or producing an annual report or a Super Bowl commercial, or changing a company’s culture—with many team members who have diverse skill sets and personalities . . . well, finding a manager talented enough to herd cats is a great place to start.
Fact is, very little of value is accomplished in an organization without collaboration, without large numbers of people working together toward a common goal. Thus, companies have an inexhaustible need for managers who can get people to put aside differences and work together effectively (easier said than done). These extremely valuable individuals exhibit a high degree of what could be called—my own term—“teamplayerism.” In essence, it’s the ability to work effectively with all kinds of people, to not be sidetracked by the inevitable disputes that arise, and to keep everyone on a positive, constructive course. The basic inclination to “reach out, connect, and include” makes Type B managers good natural team builders.
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In many ways our mutual fund company friend Jim was a classic Type B personality. Open, friendly, conversational, he could talk in his easygoing manner to anyone about anything. He was always on the lookout for potential and finding ways to bring out the best in others. I remember spending a few hours with him at the end of the day at the bar in a hospitality tent on the eighteenth hole of a golf tournament one of our companies was sponsoring. We’d been there awhile, all had a few beers, and had been chatting amiably with, among others, the bartender, a very bright, pleasant young woman in her early twenties named Ramona. We were all impressed by her. She was professional and perceptive—just a nice, attractive personality who could more than hold her own with a group of slightly inebriated financial services executives in their forties and fifties. As evening fell and we finally got up to leave, Jim took a long look back at her as she started to clean things up behind the bar.
I could see he was thinking about something.
“Hey, Ramona,” he said at last with a bit of a beer-tinged laugh but also a touch of seriousness, “you wanna sell any mutual funds?”
Jim was always building his team, even in the unlikeliest of circumstances.
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The most famous team builder, the most high-profile cat herder of our time, is arguably Phil Jackson. Jackson, who’s won eleven NBA championships as coach of the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers, is known for using a unique blend of basketball wisdom, Zen Buddhism, and Lakota Sioux philosophy to help his teams reach peak performance. But his greatest accomplishment, the foundation on which all of his success is built, is getting supremely gifted individual performers to think of team first and individual achievements second. Here’s how he explains it in his 1995 bestseller, Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior (with Hugh Delehanty). The “Michael” he refers to is of course Michael Jordan.
I flashed back to 1989 when I took over as head coach and had talked to Michael about how I wanted him to share the spotlight with his teammates so the team could grow and flourish. In those days he was a gifted young athlete with enormous confidence in his own abilities who had to be cajoled into making sacrifices for the team. Now he was an older, wiser player who understood that it wasn’t brilliant individual performances that made great teams, but the energy that’s unleashed when players put their egos aside and work toward a common goal.
Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the “me” for the “we.” This is the lesson Michael and his teammates learned en route to winning three consecutive NBA championships. As Bill Cartwright [who played center on three of Jackson’s Chicago Bulls’ championship teams] puts it: “A great basketball team will have trust. I’ve seen teams where the players won’t pass to a guy because they don’t think he’s going to catch the ball. But a great basketball team will throw the ball to everyone. If a guy drops it or bobbles it out of bounds, the next time they’ll throw it to him again. And because of their confidence in him, he will have confidence. That’s how you grow.”
Back when he was younger and cockier, Jackson admits, he would have quickly laughed at anyone suggesting that “selflessness and compassion were the secrets to success.” But as he grew older and wiser, he began to view the world differently and forged his own collaborative, spiritual Type B vision of team building. Actually, it’s so unique and idiosyncratic, you might call it Type J—for Jackson—but it’s certainly at the other end of the spectrum from Type A. However you label it, no one’s done it better.
Though Jackson’s laboratory is basketball, he might as well be describing managing in a corporation. The qualities he focuses on—trust, confidence, selflessness, compassion, plus most importantly, getting rock stars with outsized egos and challenging personalities to work together for the common good—are exactly what you have to achieve when building teams in business. The basic dynamics are the same, whether you’re herding cats for Apple, Alibaba, Walmart, or the Los Angeles Lakers.
When building teams for important projects, Type B managers need to be closely attuned to the strengths and weaknesses of the “players” they’re assembling, and vigilant about the work’s progress and how team members are getting along. Countless major projects are derailed not by lack of talent but by preventable interpersonal conflict. Will the team’s participants mesh well together? Or will they clash and cause discord and disruption—and drive the productivity train off the desired track?
If you’re someone who can assess talent astutely, keep those independent feline personalities in line, and help them look outside themselves to find value in something greater, chances are you’ll always have organizations vying for your management skills.
Management Insight
Much like cats, humans in a corporation, if left to their own devices, prefer to go their own way. An intuitive, inclusive Type B approach is helpful in understanding interpersonal dynamics and guiding team members to work together for the common good.