Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (26 page)

BEWARE OF A NO-MAN’S-LAND

We finish our team taxonomy with the conversation we’ve put off until now. By this point you may have already asked yourself this question several times: What do you do in the gaps?

Let’s say you have a small business of about fifty-five employees, and you are preparing to grow. But you also know that the next stage, even at the smallest optimal size, is
eighty-five
employees away. That’s more than 150 percent larger than you are now.

You certainly can’t hire that many people in one or two bursts, for fear of overwhelming every company function. Yet you don’t want to be stuck in team no-man’s-land for months or even years and increase your vulnerability to your team’s shaking itself to pieces or going off the rails. So what do you do?

First, remind yourself that these optimal team sizes are just that:
optimal
. They sit at sweet spots, at the nexus of operational efficiency and human nature. But that doesn’t mean that
not
being at one of these optimal sizes is a team death sentence. It just means that you will likely have trouble maintaining your maximum efficiency—though you can still probably cover that gap with greater monitoring and even your recognition (and anticipation) that there may be a potential problem.

By the way, just because you are at one of those sweet spots, it doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed success. There is, as yet,
no real analysis of the comparative advantages of having the right team size versus other factors from diversity to management competence. And you can still be a textbook team and nevertheless fail—there are no guarantees; you can only improve your odds.

Even though researchers have reached a consensus about ideal team sizes, don’t let that always discourage you from composing teams that fall between those benchmarks. This no-man’s-land doesn’t have to be lethal, but it might diminish a team’s chances of reaching its optimal performance. We can’t say for sure how much of a risk this poses, but our sense is that if the variant in which the odds don’t change is about 20 percent (thus, 15±3, 150±30), the penumbra of acceptable suboptimal team size is possibly 50 percent. This means that the gap between sizes is completely covered for the smaller teams. And only with large and very large teams—450±225 and 1,500±750—do we begin to see any real gaps, and given the size of those operations, those gaps can be vaulted quickly.

So, the real question becomes: How much of a shortfall from your potential optimal team performance are you willing to accept in exchange for the cost and trouble it will take to get there? There is no universal answer to that—each team leader must make his or her own choice based on a calculus of many variables, including funding, time to market, and the available talent pool. With luck, tools will also soon emerge to help with that decision.

Now let’s look at teams in action.

T
he most important team in American history officially retired at noon on December 4, 1783. The location was the Long Room of Fraunces Tavern in one of the oldest parts of New York City. The location was picked not only because it was a popular saloon and gathering place, but also because much of the city, including many of its public buildings, had been burned down during the war.

Nine days before, the defeated British Army—along with a large number of Tories who, rightly, believed they were no longer welcome—had packed up, boarded Royal Navy ships, and sailed away. The parades and celebrations following the embarkation of the enemy were largely over, the city was secure, and the members of the team—many of whom had rarely been home over the previous six years—were eager to get back to their families for the holidays.

None was more so eager than the leader of the team, General
George Washington, who had visited his Virginia home, Mount Vernon, just once during all those years. Now he was going home. His possessions were packed, his horse, Nelson—who had crossed the Delaware with him at Trenton, stood like a rock on the bridge under fire at Monmouth, and carried the general to Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown—was brushed and fed, and the honor guard was pacing impatiently.

Everyone knew that this would be the team’s last time together. So they put on their best uniforms and left their homes and barracks early enough to be sure they were on time, knowing that this moment would be remembered for as long as the new nation they had helped create endured.

One man who rushed to the tavern knew the city well. Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge was the son of a New York City police commissioner, and during the war, as Washington’s chief of intelligence, he had run the Culper Espionage Ring—which had played a crucial role in the war—in Manhattan. Almost fifty years later, in his memoirs, Tallmadge recorded his memories of the day:

At 12 o’clock the officers repaired to Fraunces Tavern in Pearl Street where General Washington had appointed to meet them and to take his final leave of them. We had been assembled but a few moments when his excellency entered the room. His emotions were too strong to be concealed which seemed to be reciprocated by every officer present. After partaking of a slight refreshment in almost breathless silence the General filled his glass with wine and turning to the officers said, “With a heart full of love and gratitude I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.”

After the officers had taken a glass of wine General Washington said “I cannot come to each of you but shall feel obliged
if each of you will come and take me by the hand.” General Knox being nearest to him turned to the Commander-in-chief who, suffused in tears, was incapable of utterance but grasped his hand when they embraced each other in silence. In the same affectionate manner every officer in the room marched up and parted with his general in chief. Such a scene of sorrow and weeping I had never before witnessed and fondly hope I may never be called to witness again.
¹

Not many teams have members the likes of Knox, Greene, and Hamilton. And fewer yet are led by someone who is, in the immortal words of one team member, Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee: “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

But if you step back from the extraordinary achievement of this team in defeating the most powerful army in the world and winning independence for the United States of America, you are reminded that it was still just a team—one that feuded, exhibited near-fatal inexperience and incompetence, and lost more battles than it won. Indeed, just nine months before, in the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy, many of this team of officers (including several at Fraunces Tavern that day) had come very close to mutinying over lack of pay. It took a famous bit of theatrics by General Washington (showing his age by putting on a pair of glasses to read a letter) to end the mutiny and probably save the young nation.

THE MARCH OF LEADERSHIP

General Washington’s sense of theater and drama, combined with his astonishing bravery, integrity, and self-control, made him one of history’s greatest leaders. He didn’t, however, start out that way. The young man who first made his reputation in the French and
Indian War was less decisive and more hotheaded, if no less brave. It is interesting to speculate how much of the general’s behavior that day at Fraunces Tavern was real and how much was calculated. Some historians have even suggested that some of his tears were in frustration for having (thanks to the Continental Congress) failed to fulfill the promises he made at Newburgh.

It was probably all three and more. Washington, who willed himself to almost never show emotion, was obviously deeply moved by the moment. Understandably so; he and his team had just won a great victory. But Washington, as much as any leader, and certainly since the Enlightenment stripped away the role of religion in such events, understood the importance of the sacred in secular events. He knew that his tears would shock the room, so he let them flow. That Henry Knox, the big, emotional bookseller turned artillery commander, stood beside Washington for the toast probably wasn’t a coincidence either. Washington must have realized that his own tears would turn General Knox into an emotional wreck.

Then, in the crowning moment, the one captured in paintings over the next two centuries (and likely for many centuries to come): the stricken commander-in-chief asks that his fellow team members come to him, where he says not a word, but takes each man’s hand and, through tears, dips his head in gratitude for their service.

You could not script a better scene. It all could have turned into a chaos of rushed words and improvised speeches. Instead, the general controls the event: the weeping attendees come forth and shake the Great Man’s hand with an almost unbearable (and certainly unforgettable) intensity of emotion. Washington is spared having to improvise a comment for each officer and thus betray how he ranks each man in his memory and esteem; and the moment passes quickly without dragging on and losing its emotional punch.

Cynical? No, genius. As always with his eye on history and perception, Washington crafted an almost mythical moment that gave
every man in the room exactly what he needed and wanted—and yet rings through history. And he does so speaking just two sentences, neither particularly memorable. And the tears on both sides of those handshakes are real. Like all memorable and great leaders, Washington has both played his part and lived the character.

The event ends quickly. The officers, many of them now barely able to maintain their composure, follow the general to the nearby Whitehall wharf. There he takes his leave of them—there is no record of his words, if indeed there were any—and boards a barge to today’s Jersey City. Then he travels on to Annapolis, where, in yet another theatrical moment—maybe the most important in the history of democracy—he stands before the Continental Congress, resigns his commission, and goes home. He arrives at Mount Vernon just in time for Christmas Eve.

THE HEART OF THE TEAM

In order to gain the deepest understanding of teams and how they operate, one must appreciate the dynamic of teams. The everyday term is “team spirit.” We prefer the term “dynamic,” because until this point we have largely been speaking of teams in a static manner. But, as we mentioned earlier, teams do have a beginning, a middle, and an end; they are born, take form, accelerate from a standing start, reach peak speed and productivity, and then, for some interval, preferably short but sometimes drawn out, they decline—with luck,
after
they’ve achieved their goals.

And then they die. Sometimes this ending is happy because a team has achieved the goal set for it, its members are lauded and rewarded, and they move on to new challenges. Sometimes a team ends because it reaches a temporal deadline set for it; its results are then measured or audited, and with luck the team has achieved an acceptable result and the members are proud of their contributions.
And sometimes a team fails to reach its goals and disassembles itself. Or worse, through some internal dysfunction—the wrong skill combination, incompatible personalities, poor management, misguided or impossible goals—the team dissolves in acrimony and accusations of bad faith.

But whatever the reason—and we hope that after you’ve read this book, your teams will have the happier conclusions—the fact is, for good or bad, teams do not experience these things all at once. In this chapter, we intend to look at how the stories of teams play out over time, and how at each step of the way—even after the team’s death—you can, with the right management, improve the outcome.

ALL TEAMS HAVE LIFE CYCLES

Every team is a narrative, a story that typically begins with a
formation phase
in which strangers (or near strangers) are thrust together under unusual circumstances and then are forced to quickly establish their relationships with each other even as they rush to understand their assignment, divide it up, and then parcel out the pieces to the right members. Soon thereafter, the team enters into an
establishment phase
, in which it needs to establish rules, metrics, milestones, and its communication apparatus. And all of this must be done even as those same members begin to work on their task itself. That shift of focus from organization to actual work on the assignment marks the transition to the
operational phase
.

As time passes, and as the initial results of its work are known, the team inevitably has to adjust—resetting milestones and deadlines, and coping with the personalities, idiosyncrasies, and the strengths and weaknesses of its members. This is the
functional phase
. External forces are in play as well: new competitors with threatening new products or services may appear unexpectedly;
deadlines may change; budgets may shift; product descriptions may be rewritten to meet the evolving needs of the parent company. All of this puts further stress and confusion on the team, whose still-immature interpersonal relationships may not yet be strong enough to handle them.

But assuming the team survives, these events ultimately have another effect: they become elements in the team’s growing story, the legends and experiences that help define its internal culture. It is from this evolving story that the team derives an even greater internal cohesion, as well as a body of best practices to draw upon while facing future challenges. This is the
cultural phase
.

There are new challenges as well. For example, the longer a team endures, the more likely it is to lose original members. Some leave voluntarily, their work done. Others go, often regretfully, because their talents are needed elsewhere and the company transfers them. A third group leaves not only the team but also the company itself—often to work for a competitor.

This third type of departure can be particularly unsettling—because of its betrayal, because it enhances the competition, and most of all, because it may transfer the team’s proprietary knowledge to its biggest threat. These departures can lead to a lot of mistrust, bad blood, and time wasted on depositions and litigation.

A fourth type of departure can have the opposite effect: when a difficult or dysfunctional member of the team is forced out. In the short term, this can raise the overall paranoia of the team (“Will I get fired next?”), but in the long term it is almost always a salutary event.

No matter the reason for a team member’s departure, the immediate concern afterward is the recruiting and training of his or her replacement. Even if the rookie is a good fit, this process is always a test of the team’s personality, solidarity, and culture. It’s also a good reason for the development of the team’s narrative, its story; it is the assimilation of that story by the newcomer that quickly
acculturates him or her to the team. The healthier a team’s culture, the less productivity it will lose to newcomers making their way up the learning curve. This is the
sustainable phase
.

Assuming the team survives these challenges, overcomes any technical obstacles, and approaches its goals, it now moves into a
maturation and consolidation phase
. The challenge now is to resist the desire to rush ahead, and instead to maintain the pace and finish the project properly. It is a task more difficult than it appears, because pressures will build from every direction—the company wants to introduce or implement the project’s results; recruiters want to steal away the team’s top talent; the team members themselves want to move on to new challenges; and, you, as the internal or external manager of the team, are exhausted and want to wrap things up. Those pressures only grow as the project approaches the finish line, and they serve as distractions and impediments to finishing the job right.

Bad teams disintegrate or implode. Good teams survive to enter the
completion phase
. Now that the invention, prototyping, and testing are completed, the task becomes one of packaging the results (which can include a demonstration or a finished product, an operations manual, preparing presentations of test results, patent filings, facility dismantlement, and team member reassignment) for senior management or, in the case of an entrepreneurial start-up, for investors. Usually, there is a handoff of the completed project to another team that specializes in commercialization or reverse engineering in preparation for large-scale manufacturing. In recent years, as products and services are increasingly released to the public while still prototypes—Google’s search engine officially remained a work in progress for more than a decade—a team’s life cycle may not end until its offering has a hundred million users and is sold to another company.

Once everything is packaged, bundled up, and either handed or sold off, the team reaches its
end phase
. Successful teams “end”
in two different ways. They are either shut down or they transform, often with many of the same members, into a new team with a new task. Either way, the best teams (as with General Washington and his staff) mark that transition with some kind of ceremony that both celebrates their success and officially demarks the team’s conclusion along with the beginning of the next phase in the members’ lives.