Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (13 page)

Configural tasks
, last but not least, are a mix of the above. Needless to say, it would be impossible to do all five task types at the same time—indeed, many are contradictory. However, some teams may institute these different tasks sequentially, say, working together at one point, then each in turn at another.

That brings you up-to-date with the latest discoveries and insights regarding teams, their members, and their operation. In the pages to come, we’ll look into the world of different team types—a taxonomy of teams, if you will. As you read about the many different forms that pairs, trios, and larger teams take, please keep in mind that behind these labels and narrative descriptions lie all the psychological and sociological forces about which you’ve just learned.

We’ve just looked at the
inside
of teams. Now, in the next chapter, you’ll begin looking at teams from the
outside
—from the perspective of a manager assigned to build them and ensure their success.

I
n the early 1990s, one of the most driven entrepreneurs of his generation hit a rough patch. Howard Schultz was trying to expand his business, Starbucks Coffee, around the United States, but after opening a few hundred stores, he found that his rapid expansion model had begun to break down. Reports came back that customer service—an ingredient perhaps even more important to his success than the coffee itself—was dropping. Maybe the critics were right. It’s damn near impossible to scale up a cult brand like Starbucks nationally, let alone worldwide, because the intangibles, which include great customer service, don’t always respond to size and scale.

Schultz soon realized that what Starbucks needed most was someone with a deep empathy for employees and an appreciation for the art of customer service. Someone quite unlike Schultz, who was one of those type A, hypercompetitive, poor-kid-who-went-to-college-on-a-sports-scholarship, successful-at-everything-he-touches kind of guys.

So in 1994, Schultz did something unusual. He promoted his exact opposite in temperament, to strengthen employee morale and customer service at Starbucks. By the oddest of coincidences, the outsider also happened to be named Howard, Howard Behar.

“We were so unalike that it was funny,” recalls Behar. “We look different. He’s tall, athletic, hawkish. I’m short and round. We see the world differently, too. Hell, we argued and fought for three years about how important employee culture was to Starbucks’ ability to scale nationally and then worldwide. For Schultz, culture was maybe important, but not primary. For me, it was the whole game.”

The Howard-Howard relationship had a rocky start. But the two protagonists stuck to it. Indeed, Howard Behar became the president of Starbucks and served in that position for eight years under Howard Schultz.

In today’s tough and competitive economy, the demands of daily life at work and play are almost impossible to manage by oneself. What’s needed instead are people with complementary skills. And we find such pairs almost everywhere: the engineer who teams with the technical writer, the trial lawyer with the researcher, the executive with the operations expert, the inventor with the entrepreneur, the tale of the two Howards . . . the list is almost endless.

In fact, the more you study pairs, the less you find that the stereotypical combination of two nearly identical individuals—call them “Castor and Pollux pairs”—appears to exist in real life. Instead, as we will now see, pairs most often take on a wide and colorful array of forms, some of them quite unlikely at first glance. Not only is the success of these teams
not
correlated with compatibility but some of the most successful pairs consist of two people who have
nothing
in common and may actually despise each other. Stranger still are the pairs in which one member may be long dead—or have never even existed.

Needless to say, this is not the way we normally think of pairs,
nor how we typically assemble them in business, government, or academia. Rather, we tend either to team up people who we think will work well together, or simply stick together the two best individuals for the job we can find. That this selection process remains so crude even into the twenty-first century is shocking. After all, companies today spend billions, using everything from headhunters to trade shows to Big Data analytics, to winnow out those few individuals determined to be the best possible recruits from the mass of potential employees in the workforce (or from those just graduating from college). And yet, when those talented individuals are finally hired and put to work, they are paired with others, or put into larger teams, through a process that hasn’t changed in millennia: perceived compatibility, common interests, similar personalities, intuition, and more often than not, proximity and expediency.

Is it any wonder that, for all the empirical tools that are now brought to bear on corporate HR functions, we still have almost no ability to predict whether a given pair will actually get the job done? And if we can’t do it with pairs, the basic building block of all larger teams, how can we ever expect to make such predictions about teams of 50 or 1,500?

This cannot continue—nor will it for long. Just as the sciences of management information, supply chain management, and new-employee profiling have emerged in turn in response to past challenges to organizational efficiency, so too is it inevitable that a new discipline will soon emerge to bring computational power and empirical techniques to enterprise team-building. For those of us who have found ourselves in failed or dysfunctional teams—that is, most of us—that day can’t come soon enough.

And when it does, as has been the case with one technology-driven revolution in corporate operations after another, the first adopter in each industry will find itself with a powerful competitive advantage that will enable it to accelerate away from its
competitors. Imagine a company or an institution in which every one of its operating units, large and small, works with an efficiency that today is found only among its “superstar” teams.

When that revolution in team construction and management finally arrives, it will no doubt start with the very foundation of all teams: pairs. After all, pairs are not only the most common of human (and animal) teams, but they are also the basic bricks from which the edifices of larger teams are built.

POWERHOUSE PAIR ON THE PRAIRIE

On a warm Southern California evening in 2012, in the eastern Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia, thirty-one skinny high school–age boys lined up on the Arcadia High School track to run the eight laps of the 3,200 meters—the metric version of the classic two-mile run. The boys’ 3,200 is the showcase race each year at April’s Arcadia Invitational. The race is held under the lights, in prime time.

In high school track, nine minutes for the 3,200 is considered to be national class for a boy. Most of the thirty-one boys toeing the start line of the 2012 Arcadia 3,200 had a chance at breaking nine minutes.

Halfway through the race, at the 1,600-meter mark, a tight bunch of twenty runners came through in 4:31. This pack of boys elbowed and jostled for two more laps. Then four runners, led by a senior from Houston, Texas, suddenly broke out and set a terrific pace. The top four had a different look from the rest, flying like seasoned Olympians. They would run faster for the last two minutes, covering the final 800 meters at a sub-four-minute-mile pace to finish a race that ESPN called the greatest high school boys’ 3,200-meter race in history.

Finishing fourth, with a time of 8:51, was a small kid with sandy hair and black socks halfway up to his knees. The first three runners
were seniors, but the little fellow in fourth was a junior: Jake Leingang from Bismarck High School in North Dakota. Though sixteen years old, at a wispy five foot eight and 120 pounds, Jake looked like a seventh-grader.

That such an unlikely kid from the sparse plains of North Dakota had found his way to the glitzy Arcadia Invitational track meet near Los Angeles, and then finished fourth in the greatest boys’ 3,200 meters ever run, was astonishing. Good distance runners must train year-round, a near impossibility in North Dakota. Most days in December, January, and February are below freezing; many are below zero. March is melting snow that freezes overnight and turns roads into skating rinks. Needless to say, Jake Leingang, coming straight off a North Dakota winter, was at a huge disadvantage competing in April against the tanned runners from Texas, California, and Arizona.

But Jake had an advantage the other runners didn’t: he had been trained by the foremost pair of high school distance running coaches in the United States.

Mighty Mouse

Back in August 1970, when a high school sophomore named Darrell Anderson showed up for his first week of cross-country practice at Bismarck High, he stood five feet three inches tall and weighed 105 pounds. Cross-country races are three miles long and take place on hilly trails in public parks or on golf courses. A football player’s weight is a burden. So it is typical for distance runners, then and now, to be on the slight side. But Darrell A. was puny even in this crowd.

The most famous American runners of the early 1970s were sinewy men like Frank Shorter, the Yale graduate who in 1972 would become the second American to win the Olympic marathon race, and Steve Prefontaine (“Pre”), the mythical Oregon phenom who
would die in a car accident in 1975 and become the presiding spirit of the Nike running shoe brand. The aristocratic-looking Shorter was five feet ten inches and 135 pounds, a self-described ectomorph. Working-class kid Prefontaine from the logging town of Coos Bay, Oregon, was five feet nine inches and 140 pounds. Pre was considered to be on the muscular side.

But little Darrell A. was a runt even for a fifteen-year-old cross-country runner. A Bismarck High cross-country team photo shows Darrell A. with his bowl haircut standing at attention, chest out and hands behind his waist. “I was holding up my running shorts in the back,” he says. “They were too big.” He was often needled and teased by teammates and coaches alike for his short stature and his unfashionable haircut—and labeled with unfortunate nicknames.

So how did little Darrell A. do when competition started?

Not bad, considering. He discovered that he could do something essential in cross-country running: he could bear the pain of effort just as his idol Steve Prefontaine could. Indeed, during training sessions, Darrell A. would sometimes run so hard that he’d suffer chronic diarrhea for the rest of the day.

By the time Darrell A. was a senior, he had grown to five feet eight inches and 125 pounds and was among the top five high school runners in the state. But then he contracted mononucleosis, and his high school running career was over. Once he recovered, he enrolled in a local junior college and soon captained its cross-country team. After two years, Darrell A. transferred to North Dakota State University, an NCAA Division II powerhouse at the time in cross-country and track. Darrell A., now at his full height of five feet ten inches, became a solid member of that team, able to run ten thousand meters in less than thirty minutes.

But he never forgot high school and his treatment there. Darrell A.’s resentment about those years gnawed at him well into middle age. He asked himself: Did I ever really reach my full potential as a runner? What if I had been more physically mature in high school?
What if I’d had more confidence? What if the coaches had seen my potential instead of calling me stupid names?

What Could Have Been

Across the Missouri River from Bismarck lies its smaller sister city, Mandan. The town of Mandan is best known for an event that happened nearly 140 years ago, in the spring of 1876. That’s when George Armstrong Custer mustered his Seventh Cavalry at nearby Fort Abraham Lincoln—and rode westward toward the Montana Territory and his fatal encounter at the Little Bighorn a month later.

That’s pretty much the whole story for Mandan. Today it is the poor twin sister of Bismarck. The athletic teams at Mandan High School are spotty. As in many hardscrabble towns, the teenage athletes with the most potential often never show up. They have long since been diverted by after-school jobs, parental neglect, drugs, or dropping out.

The coaches and sports facilities at Mandan High School were, and still are, in a shabby state compared with those of richer Bismarck across the river. Whereas Bismarck High’s football teams play in a multimillion-dollar bowl on fancy artificial turf, Mandan football teams play on a soggy and chewed-up grass field in the floodplain of a nearby river. Around that sodden field and its old spectator stands is a 400-meter running track. It is a far cry from the $300,000 tangerine-colored tartan job at the Bismarck Community Bowl. Rather, Mandan’s running track is a black asphalt road with a bit of rubber mixed in for only a touch of softening.

With these low-rent attractions, it is hardly a surprise that Mandan High has always had trouble attracting good-quality high school coaches. That rule applied in the 1980s, when Dave Zittleman ran the half mile for Mandan High.

In the boys’ half mile (now 800 meters), two minutes is a standard that separates a decent high school runner from the rest.
The better half-milers are five seconds faster, at 1:55, and nationally ranked boys can dip under 1:50. Dave Zittleman looked like a kid capable of breaking 1:55, which is a good time and is often good enough to win the North Dakota state championship meet. Dave Z. stood five feet eleven and weighed a lean and muscular 155 pounds—the perfect build for a half-miler.

Dave Z. may have had the physical goods to break 1:55, but he always seemed stuck on the slow side of two minutes. His coaches were of little help. They didn’t motivate Dave, and they possessed no special knowledge about training or tactics. To Dave Z., they seemed lazy.

Like Darrell Anderson, Dave Zittleman began to realize his potential as a runner only after finishing high school. At eighteen, he crossed the Missouri River and enrolled at the University of Mary in Bismarck. A Catholic liberal arts university of 3,000 undergrads, U. of Mary had a decent small college track team. The coaches were several cuts above his coaches in Mandan. Dave Z. took advantage of his new circumstances and completed his University of Mary track career with a personal best of 1:54 for the half mile. Considering North Dakota’s lousy spring weather, 1:54 is quite good. Dave Z. had clearly improved as a runner during his college career.

But had he improved enough? Dave Z. would question that for years. It gnawed at him. Like Darrell A., Dave Z. finished his high school and college track careers with a sense of dissatisfaction and unfulfilled promise. Moreover, Dave Z. had a smoldering resentment for his misinformed coaches.

Champions from A to Z

Today Darrell Anderson and Dave Zittleman are the co-coaches of Bismarck High’s powerful cross-country and track and field dynasty. The Bismarck High boys have won eleven straight cross-country team championships at the state level, and another eight
straight in track and field. One team member was the aforementioned Jake Leingang, the nationally ranked 3,200-meter runner.