Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (7 page)

Just think of corporate leaders like Howard Schultz, Indra Nooyi, Alan Mulally, Richard Branson, and Ursula Burns, or “field leaders” like Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski and Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter—they all seem capable of
willing
their “teams” to victory. Those superior leaders understand either naturally, or by learned
experience, how to leverage this system of brain interconnectedness. How they do so is its own kind of magic. Some appear to have learned this skill from extensive experience as leaders on the way up. But others appear to be born with the specific neural circuits that empower them with either a kind of “social intelligence” or a set of interpersonal competencies that inspire others to do great things.
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This offers something of an answer to the age-old question of whether leaders are made or born. They are both, but great leaders are almost always born that way. (By the way, research on hundreds of top executives by Margaret Hopkins of the University of Toledo has shown no significant gender differences in social intelligence among top leaders, contrary to the myth that women have superior social intelligence.)

Look at mothers and their newborn babies, and you will see another phenomenon of mirror neurons: some of them are exclusively tasked with detecting and mirroring the smiles and laughter of others. It is a process that begins with moms soon after birth and quickly extends to include all humankind. Not surprisingly, this innate detector also works between leaders and followers.

For example, a leader who smiles and laughs will trigger similar laughter in his or her team—a process that also helps in team bonding. And bonded groups almost always perform better than their less-well-bonded counterparts. Not surprisingly, top-performing leaders have been shown, on average, to elicit laughter from their subordinates at least twice as often as their less successful counterparts.
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One reason for this is that laughter appears to increase both creativity and trust within teams.
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Perhaps more surprisingly, humor also makes audiences listen and retain more of a presentation or conversation.
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Once again, you can credit our mirror neurons, which predispose us to react to humor, laughter, and general happiness.

This discovery is reinforced by field experiments with actual leaders. When leaders display happiness, it improves their followers’
creative
performance—and interestingly, when they are sad, it enhances those same followers’
analytical
performance. In other words, when the team members think the boss is happy, they feel liberated to try out new ideas; and when they think the boss is unhappy, they hunker down into survival mode.
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This is probably why positive emotions result in more cooperative and conciliatory behavior.
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But it isn’t all good news: positive and negative emotions differ in longevity, something you can probably validate by thinking of your own career. Employees invariably remember negative (burdensome) events more often, with more intensity, and in more detail than positive, uplifting events.
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Although memories of good times are brief, memories of bad times seem to stay with us forever.

Happily, thanks again to our mirror neurons, positive and prosocial behavior can be contagious.
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People who witness prosocial and cooperative behaviors tend to experience a greater sense of morality.
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And, in findings that can only be considered comforting for the future of humankind, researchers have also found that people observing helping behaviors engaged in more helping behavior in their own subsequent tasks.
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Perhaps even more compelling is that subjects participating in experimental economic “dictator games” (in which only one player determines the distribution of rewards to all other players) become more generous after observing other players exhibiting prosocial behavior.
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It seems that the better we behave, the better people around us behave as well.

“WE” VERSUS “ME”

It should come as no surprise that mirror neurons play a crucial role in human teamwork. When a team is working, members must not only engage with each other but also understand and anticipate the actions of their teammates. Although a number of specific
systems in the brain help humans represent and anticipate the behaviors of others during joint action, mirror neurons seem to play a key role in enabling observational learning and imitation among team members.
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But the relationship between members of a team and their mirror neurons goes both ways. That is, socializing behavior doesn’t just arise from the wiring of our brains. Rather, the nature of our socializing with others affects the activity of our mirror neurons—to the point that it can change the way those neurons represent the actions of others.
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In the best scenario, the result is a virtuous cycle: the more we socialize with others, the better and happier we are at doing that socializing—an experience most of us know from our own lives.

If all this seems literally delusional, the real source of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, it is a valuable delusion. Why? Because delusions are
shared
among the group members. It turns out that in collaborative settings, team members who work well together will come to a common representation of their project—one that reduces any emphasis on personal authorship and competition. In other words, it becomes
our
project, not mine. And, as we will see, anything that can remove ego and claims of ownership among team members is a very good thing—not just for team productivity and durability but also in the long aftermath.
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This “learned synergy” influences not only our appreciation of success, but also our understanding of failure. Indeed, the neural representation of others’
errors
is also influenced by being in a team.
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We are much more forgiving of mistakes made by our teammates than those made by “outsiders”—especially when those outsiders are in competitive interpersonal settings.
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At their best, teams, powered by our mirror neurons, can create a sense of “we,” in which another’s actions are perceived as one’s own. Self-other merging seems to light up our mirror neuron systems. It also makes us both more vigilant and more understanding of errors made by our teammates.
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WHERE DOES INTUITION COME FROM?

Mirror neurons aren’t the only cells in the brain that help regulate how we interact with others in team settings.

For example, take intuition, the irrational sense—gut feeling, hunch, sixth sense, based on no real evidence—that you know the answer to a problem. Intuition is often revered by great executives—that moment when they sense a weakness in a competitor and act decisively; or hire or put their faith in a near stranger; or have an intimation that the market is about to shift directions.

Many people consider chess to be the ultimate application of human logic, but as Garry Kasparov—arguably the greatest chess player of all time—professes, “Intuition is the defining quality of a great chess player. . . . Often, your gut will serve you better than your brains. To me the implication is clear: What made players great was not their analytic prowess but their intuition under pressure.”
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In practice, intuition can seem like ESP, coming from a place deep in the recesses of your mind. But recent research has found that intuition is partly produced by a class of neurons in the brain called
spindle cells
. The role of these spindle cells is to quickly transmit thoughts and feelings to other cells. And by “quickly” we mean jaw-droppingly fast. Within one-twentieth of a second, spindle cells trigger neural networks designed to make judgment calls with only a minimum of evidence—such as deciding whether one person is trustworthy or whether another is right for a job. In our fast-moving digital world, this ability to make accurate “gut calls” can be crucial for team leaders.

Meanwhile, another class of neurons called
oscillators
regulates physical coordination between people. When two cellists play together, they hit their notes in unison because of their respective oscillators. In a sense, human beings find harmony when their oscillators do.

For now at least, we don’t know how to strengthen or regulate the firing pattern of mirror neurons, spindle cells, and oscillators. We can’t yet manipulate how we work together at the neural level. But what we can understand is that these fundamental factors do exist and not only are happiness and stress contagious, but they can spread within seconds across a team.
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WHEN IN DOUBT, HUG IT OUT

For generations, management and leadership experts (as well as our own mothers) have been telling us to always thank people for their help or for a job well done. Well, now research has shown that
expressions of gratitude
can in fact increase closeness among group members.
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When managers express gratitude, it can increase employees’ sense of social worth and self-conception as viable members of the organization. And that, in turn, promotes prosocial behaviors that tie the team together even more.
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By the same token, nonverbal expressions of gratitude can be particularly powerful. For example, touch can activate reward regions of the frontal lobes of the brain,
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stimulate oxytocin release,
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and excite the vagus nerve, one of the body’s longest nerves, which runs from the brain stem to the abdomen, touching most of the organs in between, and is linked to prosociality and attention.
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Put all of that together and you can see how (appropriate) touch can enhance cooperation in team activities.
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Now you understand what all that hand-holding, hugging, and trust-catching was about in team training seminars.

Here’s another one you probably already know, but for which there is now empirical evidence:
reputation
matters in teamwork. Studies in organizations and social groups have found that reputations form and spread among group members at the speed of lightning.
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How fast? Within a week of a team’s formation, all its
members have likely already acquired groupwide reputations as either collaborators or free riders.
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And these good reputations can be extremely valuable to the team members who enjoy them. In experimental studies, group members with a prosocial and generous reputation tend to be rewarded more by other group members. In particular, they tend to receive greater resource allocations than those with less generous reputations. Better yet—and the reader will especially want to remember this—those same prosocial and generous team members are also more likely to be appointed to leadership positions.
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You really do get ahead by getting along.

HEALTHY FOR YOU TOO

Being part of a successful, well-functioning team is good not only for your organization but also for you.

Recent research comprising more than 300,000 patients across 148 studies has revealed that individuals who report inadequate social relationships have a 50 percent greater probability of mortality as compared with patients who report adequate social relationships.
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Loneliness, and its deleterious effects, is at the heart of this. Being on a team can make you happy, sad, angry, or frustrated, but it rarely makes you feel lonely. And loneliness is a killer—literally. As Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, revealed in a May 2013 article for the
Atlantic
, there’s a strong link between suicide and loneliness. Noting a marked rise in suicide rates, Wilcox convincingly argued that these new statistics challenge the “rugged individualist” myth and indicate that men and women seem to be significantly more likely to kill themselves if they lack support systems.

Additionally, the sleep of lonely young adults is less efficacious as assessed by almost every physiological, behavioral, and self-report
measure.
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Lonely people at all ages show weaker immune responses and a greater vulnerability to viral respiratory infections.
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For certain tasks—such as financial forecasts and sales estimates—the team can actually make you look better as an individual. Particularly in such quantitative judgment tasks, teams consistently outperform the average of their members’ individual judgments.
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When teams are also given outcome feedback,
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share task-relevant information, and are asked to identify their most accurate group member,
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they outperform their members’ average estimates by even more.

Ah, but there is a danger in this collaboration—as anyone who has sat in a meeting with one overbearing member who sucks all of the oxygen out of the room (that is, everyone) knows, teams tend to assign
more
weight to the contributions of their extroverted members. The only way to shift the weight back is through highly visible and shared data about the past accuracy of each member of the team. That usually shuts up the loudmouth.
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Individuals also seem to learn better if they are learning as part of a group.
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One reason for this is that the very process of seeking agreement with other teammates drives more concrete conclusions—and dealing with teammates’ contrasting opinions also leads to greater self-reflection. It is better to be challenged by others than to learn in an echo chamber.
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Studies with adult participants show that performance on reasoning tasks is improved when debate is a requirement for team activities.
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It works for kids too. Pairs of eight-year-olds were asked to predict whether an empty metal box or solid rubber ring would float in water. Once they agreed on a prediction they had to test it. The children were then queried right after the experiment and then some weeks later for their understanding of the phenomena. The delayed post-test results proved to be significantly better in groups that sought agreement in their predictions before testing and worked in a group in which contrasting opinions were expressed.
It didn’t even matter if agreement was actually achieved—all that was important was that agreement-seeking and contrasting opinions were features of the discussion.
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That’s why postmortems and debriefings are so valuable.