FORTUNE
June 12, 2006
How to build a great team
Harmony. Cooperation. Synchronized effort. It's difficult, but it can be learned. Watch the great
teams very closely - and then join one of your own.
By
Jerry Useem,
In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a
crime they didn't commit. These four men promptly escaped from a
maximum-security stockade to the
If you have a
problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire
the A-Team.
The A-Team went off the air in 1987 - still
wanted by the government - but television has never produced a better blueprint
for team building. The
key elements of its effectiveness: a cigar-chomping master of disguise, an ace
pilot, a devilishly handsome con man, a mechanic with a mohawk and an amazingly sweet
van.
Those particulars
might not translate to all business settings. But clear definition of roles is a hallmark of
effective collaboration. So is small team size - though four is
slightly below the optimal number, 4.6. And the presence of an outside threat -
like imminent recapture by government forces - likewise correlates with high
team cohesion. To
wit:
Another universal
characteristic of teams is that they're, well, universal. If you work for a living, we're
guessing you interact with other humans. (Lighthouse keepers, we'll see you next
time.)
If you think this is
mushy stuff, marginal to the daily battle of business, consider what is
happening at Sony. CEO Howard Stringer
and President Ryoji Chubachi are trying to restore
the fighting spirit (and higher profits) at a company built on decentralized
teams. Their theme: Sony
United.
This issue also
takes you deep inside a six-man team of Marines operating in Iraq; the team
that built Motorola's RAZR phone; the cutthroat yet symbiotic pack
of cyclists in the Tour de France; and the world of an open-source software
company.
Each of these
stories challenges a piece of conventional wisdom. If "hire great people" seems
like unassailable advice, for example, then read Geoffrey Colvin's "Why
Dream Teams Fail."
The fact is, most of what you've read about teamwork is bunk. So here's a place
to start: Tear down those treacly
motivational posters of rowers rowing and pipers piping. Gather every recorded instance of John
Madden calling someone a "team player." Cram it all into a dumpster and light
the thing on fire. Then
settle in to really think about what it means to be a team.
We're certainly not
against the concept of teamwork. But that's the point: All the
happy-sounding twaddle obscures the actual practice of it. And teamwork is a practice. Great teamwork is
an outcome; you can only create the conditions for it to flourish. Like getting rich
or falling in love, you cannot simply will it to happen.
We will go further
and say: Teamwork is an individual skill. That happens to be the title of a book. Christopher Avery writes,
"Becoming skilled at doing more with others may be the single most
important thing you can do" to increase your value - regardless of your
level of authority.
As work is
increasingly broken down into team-sized increments, Avery's argument goes,
blaming a "bad team" for one's difficulties is, by definition, a
personal failure, since the very notion of teamwork implies a shared
responsibility. You
can't control other people's behavior, but you can control your own. Which means that
there is an "I" in team after all.
(Especially in
Yet this is not the
selfish "I" that got so much attention during the "me"
decade; it's the affiliatory
"I" that built
Here's both the
problem and the promise of cooperation. Humans aren't hard-wired to succeed or
fail at it. We
can go either way. In
her study of groupwork in
school classrooms, the late Stanford sociologist Elizabeth Cohen found that if
kids are simply put into teams and told to solve a problem, the typical result
is one kid dominating and others looking totally disengaged.
But if teachers take
the time to establish norms - roles, goals, etc. - "not only will [the
children] behave according to the new norms, but they will enforce rules on
other group members." Perhaps to a fault. "Even very young students,"
Cohen wrote, "can be heard lecturing to other members of the group on how
they ought to be behaving."
Economists have long
assumed that success boils down to personal incentives. We'll cooperate if it's in our
self-interest, and we won't if it's not (sort of like lions).
Then a team of researchers led by
Linnda Caporael thought to ask: Would people cooperate
without any incentives? The answer was--gasp!--yes, under the
right conditions. Participants
often cited "group welfare" as motivation.
To
economists, shocking. To anyone who's been part of a
successful team, not shocking at all. Life's
richest experiences often happen in concert with others - your garage band, your wedding, tobogganing. The boss who assumes that workers'
interests are purely mercenary will end up with a group of mercenaries.
No battery of team
exercises can fix that situation - especially if they involve spanking your
colleagues with yard signs. When a sales office of a home-security
company, Alarm One, adopted that practice, a 53-year-old employee later sued
for emotional distress. (A jury awarded her $1.2 million in
April.)
Again, let the greats show the way. During a public appearance in 2000, an A-Team cast member was asked by a fan to name his favorite co-star. "Listen," Mr. T responded. "That's wrong for me to pick a favorite, because I'm a team player and we were a team. Remember, they say"--here it comes again--"there's no 'I' in team." No, but there is a "T." And pity the fool who forgets it.
Why dream teams fail.
It may be tempting to recruit all-stars and let 'em
rip. Don't do it. Dream teams often become nightmares of
dysfunction.
By Geoffrey Colvin,
FORTUNE senior editor-at-large
June 12, 2006
In what universe is it even conceivable that the
How could a movie starring Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones,
and Julia Roberts, directed by Steven Soderbergh, get
tepid reviews and gross less worldwide than the star-free My Big Fat Greek
Wedding? That movie was "Ocean's
Twelve."
And how could a FORTUNE 500 company run by a brilliant former McKinsey
consultant, paying fat salaries to graduates of
If someone tells you you're being recruited onto a dream team, maybe you
should run. In our team-obsessed age, the concept of
the dream team has become irresistible. But
it's brutally clear that they often blow up. Why? Because
they're not teams. They're just bunches
of people.
A look at why so many dream teams fail, and why so many of the most
successful teams consist of individuals you've never heard of, yields insight
into the essential nature of winning organizations. As always when the subject is the real-world
behavior of human beings, the takeaway includes things we always knew - even
though we rarely behave as if we do.
The most important lesson about team performance is that the basic theory of
the dream team is wrong. You cannot
assemble a group of stars and then sit back to watch them conquer the world. You can't even count on them to avoid
embarrassment. The 2004
By contrast, the 1980 hockey team that beat the Soviets at the Lake Placid
Olympics was built explicitly on anti-dream-team principles. Coach Herb Brooks, who died in 2003, based his
picks on personal chemistry. In the
story's movie version, "Miracle," Brooks' assistant looks at the
roster and objects that many of the country's greatest college players were
left out (professionals were not eligible to play then). To which Brooks responds with this essential
anti-dream-team philosophy: "I'm not lookin' for
the best players, Craig. I'm lookin' for the right players."
To see why dream teams so often disappoint, let's consider the most common
paths to failure.