Great Teams

Jaideep Ganguly ◼︎ Extracts from: "Organizing Genius by Warren Benis" ◼︎ Jan 16, 2005

1. Members of a Great Team need a worthy challenge, a hard task that allows them to explore the whole gamut of their intellect and talent. They need colleagues who stimulate and challenge them and whom they can admire. People in a Great Team fall in love with the project. They are so taken with the beauty and difficulty of the job that they don’t want to talk about anything else, be anywhere else, or do anything else. Problem solving douses the human brain with Dopamine and Seratonin that make us feel good, and people ache to do good work. In the course of joining the group, these people never ask, “How much does it pay?". Instead they ask “How soon can I start?” and “When can I do it again?” Great Teams reflect the leader’s profound, not necessarily conscious, understanding of what brilliant people want.

2. Members of a Great Team say they would have done the work for nothing. The reward is the creative process itself. A Great Team believes that they are doing something vital, even holy. They are filled with believers, not doubters. They know that they will be expected to make sacrifices, but they also know that they are doing something monumental, something worthy of themselves. The clear collective purpose makes everything they do seem meaningful and valuable. Given a task they believe in and a chance to do it well, they will work tirelessly for no more reward than the one they give themselves.

3. People in Great Teams have lots of fun. The intensity may bring giddiness at the thought of a feisty David, hurling fresh ideas at a big, backward-looking Goliath. The work is all they see. Great Teams are made of indefatigable people who are struggling to turn a vision into offerings. Such people don’t stay up nights wondering if they have enough work life balance.

4. Successful collaborations are dreams with deadlines, they are places of action. They are not think tanks or retreat centers devoted solely to the generation of ideas. Great Teams don’t just talk about things, they are hands-on, they make amazing and original artifacts. Great Teams are not the places where memos are the primary form of communication. Time that can go into thinking and making is never wasted on some bureaucratic function. One of the simple pleasures of Great Teams is that they are almost never bureaucratic. People in them feel liberated from the trivial and arbitrary. Often, everyone deals directly with the leader, who can make most decisions on the spot.

5. Recruiting the most talented people possible is the first task of anyone who hopes to create a great team. Typically, the leader is the one who recruits others, by making the vision so palpable and seductive that they see it too. Within the group, the leader is often a good steward, keeping the others focused, eliminating distractions, keeping hope alive in the face of setbacks and stress. These people have more than enormous talent and intelligence — they have original minds. They see things differently, and therefore can achieve something truly unprecedented. These are people who can spot and discover interesting, important problems as well as skill in solving them. Often, they have specialized skill, combined with broad interests and multiple frames of reference. They are problem solvers before they are computer scientists and engineers. They look for new and better ways of doing things and they have the tenacity to accomplish things of value.

6. Great Teams are not just created by Great Leaders, they make it possible for a leader to be great. Great Teams don’t exist without great leaders, but they are much more than lengthened shadows of them. In fact, what makes a leader really great sometimes is because he/she can draw on the collaboration and internal resources of the group he/she works with. This means that leaders of Great Teams are not great leaders alone; they are great leaders who exist in a fertile relationship with Great Teams. Great Teams are made up of people with rare gifts working together as equals. Yet, there is one person who acts as maestro, organizing the genius of the others. He/She is a pragmatic dreamer, a person with an original but attainable vision. Ironically, the leader is able to realize his/her dream only if the others are free to do their exceptional work.

7. Leaders of Great Teams have exquisite taste. They are curators, whose job is not to make, but to choose. The ability to recognize excellence in others and their work may be the defining talent of leaders of Great Teams. Oppenheimer couldn’t do the individual tasks required to make the atom bomb, but he knew who could and he was able to sort through alternative solutions and implement the optimal one. Such leaders are like great conductors. They may not be able to play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, but they can assemble a symphony that can do that. Great Teams are headed by people confident enough to recruit people better than themselves. They revel in the talent, sometimes they find you. The talented smell out places that are full of promise and energy, the places where the future is being made. The gifted often catch the zeitgeist and ride it to a common shore.

8. Certain tasks can only be performed collaboratively, and it is madness to recruit people, however gifted, who are incapable of working side by side toward a common goal. Although the ability to work together is a prerequisite for membership in a Great Team, being an amiable person or even a pleasant one, isn’t. Great Teams are probably more tolerant of personal idiosyncrasies than ordinary ones, if only because the members are so intensely focused on the work itself. The all-important task acts as a social lubricant, minimizing frictions. Sharing information and advancing the work are the only real social obligations.

9. Great Teams become their own worlds. They also tend to be physically removed from the world around them. People who are trying to change the world need to be isolated from it, free from its distractions, but still able to tap its resources. Great Teams aren’t Cloisters. As people so often do in isolated communities, participants in Great Teams create a culture of their own — with distinctive customs, dress, jokes, even a private language.