We don’t need the best people, we need the best teams – Part 2

“. . . their assumption is that an organization’s intelligence is simply a function of the intelligence of its employees. They believe in stars, because they don’t believe in systems. In a way, that’s understandable, because our lives are so obviously enriched by individual brilliance. Groups don’t write great novels, and a committee didn’t come up with the theory of relativity. But companies [organisations, clubs etc] work by different rules. They don’t just create; they execute and compete and coordinate the efforts of many different people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star” – Malcolm Gladwell

Introduction –

Make the Sum greater than the Parts
Ladies and gentlemen, we may have been wrong all along by our inordinate focus on the star individual. We may have been wrong all along by individualizing and idolizing talent above teamwork. By sharing the work of Greg Satell and commentaries from others and I, I have sought through the first part of this article to show that best teams trump best people any day.

The end of Part One of the article is a befitting beginning for this concluding part, “Leaders and Human Resource practitioners should hear and heed Dave Ulrich (leading HR thought leader), ‘Often in Human Resources we focus on the individual, who’s got talent and how do we build talent? What I like with capability is that talent has to come together in teamwork. And you have to make the whole more than the individual parts. The example we love to use is sports.

The person who scores the most points in the world cup, the winner of the golden boot, is on the winning team about 20% of the time. The team is more important than the individual. In basketball, the leading scorer is on the team that wins the MBA championship about 20% of the time. In movies, the winner of the actor/actress award in the Oscars is on the movie that wins the Oscar of the year about 20% of the time. Capability building is when you make the whole greater than the parts – when the team is better than the individual.’ ”

‘Talent mindset’ is the orthodoxy of American management
Hence, we don’t need the best people; we need the best teams. But we have since held unto the fantasy of the individual star in all areas of human endeavor that I think it would be further helpful to present additional perspectives from other commentators. For the good book said that in the mouth of two or three shall all be established. In a 2002 article, titled, The Talent Myth, Malcolm Gladwell presented what you could call the nirvana on the failings of the concept of individual stardom. Copious excerpts are presented here, “The ‘talent mindset’ is the new orthodoxy of American management. It is the intellectual justification for why such a high premium is placed on degrees from first-tier business schools, and why the compensation packages for top executives have become so lavish.

In the modern corporation, the system is considered only as strong as its stars, and in the past few years this message has been preached by consultants and management gurus all over the world. None, however, has spread the word quite so ardently as McKinsey, and, of all its clients, one firm took the talent mindset closest to heart. It was a company where McKinsey conducted 20 separate projects, where McKinsey’s billings topped $10 million a year, where a McKinsey director regularly attended board meetings, and where the CEO himself was a former McKinsey partner. The company, of course, was Enron.

The Enron-mindset still haunts us
And all this was around 2001. Here is my question: over a decade after, how much has changed since the Enron-Andersen-McKinsey saga? Maybe we got a little more sober about the disproportionate rewards and special status given to ‘talented ’individuals, with some help obviously from the 2008 financial crash. But look around you. Have we actually made landslide level changes and gone ahead to harness the power of Us’ over the power of Í? Is there a greater appreciation for teams above individuals? At the political, corporate, faith-based, not-for profit organisations? Are our hiring, deployment, reward, or promotion systems now built around the team-above-the-individual paradigm?

What if smart people are overrated?
Let’s get back to Malcolm Gladwell, “The Enron scandal is now almost a year old [in 2015, it is now over a decade old]. The reputations of Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, the company’s two top executives, have been destroyed. Arthur Andersen, Enron’s auditor, has been all but driven out of business, and now investigators have turned their attention to Enron’s investment bankers. The one Enron partner that has escaped largely unscathed is McKinsey, which is odd, given that it essentially created the blueprint for the Enron culture. Enron was the ultimate ‘talent’ company.
When Skilling started the corporate division known as Enron Capital and Trade in 1990; he ‘decided to bring in a steady stream of the very best college and MBA graduates [he] could find to stock the company with talent’ …. During the 1990s Enron was bringing in 250 newly minted MBAs a year. Or, as another senior Enron executive put it to Richard Foster, a McKinsey partner who celebrated Enron in his 2001 book (co-authored with Sarah Kaplan) Creative Destruction, ‘We hire very smart people and we pay them more than they think they are worth.’ Gladwell argues further, “The management of Enron, in other words, did exactly what the consultants at McKinsey said that companies ought to do in order to succeed in the modern economy. It hired and rewarded the very best and the very brightest – and yet Enron went into bankruptcy. The reasons for its collapse are complex, needless to say.

But what if Enron failed not in spite of its talent mindset but because of it? What if smart people are overrated?

IQ Measures are limited – re-definition of Smart and Success required
“What I.Q. doesn’t pick up is effectiveness at common-sense sorts of things, especially working with people,” – Richard Wagner, a psychologist at Florida State University. In another article, Marcia Kaye said, “You don’t need exceptional talent. Forget luck. To reach the pinnacle of success in any endeavour, what you need is grit, writes Angela Duckworth in her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, the respected U.S. psychologist makes a persuasive case that highly successful people have a fierce determination that trumps IQ, talent, emotional intelligence and every other measure.

Quite simply, life’s winners are the plodders who keep on keeping on, the ones who don’t let a letter of rejection, failed experiment or lost race sideline them for long. . . . Stick-to-itiveness is hardly a new idea (especially to those over 50 familiar with “If at first you don’t succeed . . .”). But Duckworth argues that millennials raised on American Idol focus far too much on innate talent or instant results and far too little on hard work and follow-through. Back to Richard Wagner, and he says. “In terms of how we evaluate schooling, everything is about working by yourself. If you work with someone else, it’s called cheating. Once you get out in the real world, everything you do involves working with other people.”

How would you answer this question from Wagner and Robert Sternberg?
Wagner and Robert Sternberg, a psychologist at Yale University, have developed tests of this practical component, which they call “tacit knowledge.” Tacit knowledge involves things like knowing how to manage yourself and others, and how to navigate complicated social situations. Here is a question from one of their tests: You have just been promoted to head of an important department in your organization. The previous head has been transferred to an equivalent position in a less important department. Your understanding of the reason for the move is that the performance of the department as a whole has been mediocre. There have not been any glaring deficiencies, just a perception of the department as so-so rather than very good. Your charge is to shape up the department. Results are expected quickly. Rate the quality of the following strategies for succeeding at your new position.

a) Always delegate to the most junior person who can be trusted with the task.
b) Give your superiors frequent progress reports.
c) Announce a major reorganization of the department that includes getting rid of whomever you believe to be “dead wood.”
d) Concentrate more on your people than on the tasks to be done.
e) Make people feel completely responsible for their work.

Wagner finds that how well people do on a test like this predicts how well they will do in the workplace: good managers pick (b) and (e); bad managers tend to pick (c). Yet there’s no clear connection between such tacit knowledge and other forms of knowledge and experience. The process of assessing ability in the workplace is a lot messier than it appears.

What can we do to harness the power in teams?
How do we learn to harness the synergy in groups? The aim of this two-part article is to awaken our consciousness so that we can avoid the danger of the single story dashboard on talent and organizational success. The difference between a great idea and a not-so great one is the people that execute the idea. So many should-have been great ideas never made it to greatness because the group that tried to execute it didn’t leverage enough the ‘power of Us’.

How do we grow the skill for making the sum of a group greater than the sum of their individual parts? A few ideas come to mind:

• Redefine talent— we need to redefine what we call talent to include behavioural competencies such as ability to work in a team, ability to excavate value from a team, emotional intelligence, grit or stick-to-itiveness, etc.

• Building teamwork and partnership into the curriculum—why do we wait for people to finish school before we train them on teamwork or before we highlight the need to grow team cohesiveness skills? If team membership and leadership are so important to delivering premium results why delay teaching it or why is it excluded from our curriculum? When then would young people learn that success in life would depend more on your ability to work with others than in your knowledge of Biology or Algebra? When?

• Hire for ability to work in teams

• Promote into leadership roles based on ability to make a team more than the sum of its parts as against basing these decisions largely on success at functional goals/skills. A person does great at sales and marketing, then she should be the Marketing manager, now supervising a team of Sales & Marketing officers. No attempt even to provide the person with the people skills required to make success of the new role or to even let the person know that the new role requires a new set of skills different from the ones she used as a Sales officer.

• Develop team based goals and measures – one of the tensions that exists within Performance Management is that of individual versus team. How much of goals and measures should be individual and how much should be team based?

• Give team based gifts and awards – we should be mindful that even ‘employee of the month’ doesn’t work alone sometimes. What about ‘team of the month’?
• Develop teams and integrated systems that transcend one individual