The Corner Office: How Top CEOs Made It and How You Can Too. Adam Bryant
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backwards into a colleague’s arms. The notion of being a team player has been reduced to a truism—I work on a team, therefore I am a team player. It’s a point captured in a cartoon, by Mike Baldwin, in which an interviewer says to a job candidate, “We need a dedicated team player. How are you at toiling in obscurity?”
The most effective executives are more than team players. They understand how teams work, the different roles of individual players, and how to get the most out of the group. They know how to create a sense of mission and how to make people feel like every-one’s getting credit. They know how to build a sense of commitment in the group. Just as some people have street smarts—they are savvy and know their way around a neighborhood, and they understand the unwritten rules for getting things done—others have team smarts.
In a world in which work is increasingly done through collaboration, team smarts is an essential skill.
“With most of the important things I learned about leadership, it was usually because we weren’t hitting our numbers,” said Teresa A. Taylor, the chief operating officer of Qwest Communications. “When things are going well, you think, ‘Oh good, everything we’re doing is right.’ When things aren’t going so great, that’s when you reflect and you say, ‘What am I doing that isn’t working, or what do I need to change?’ It’s very much on instinct and experience. Even the instinct is driven by watching people’s body language, watching how they’re presenting. I mean you can just ask an open-ended question, and if three people wiggle and one person doesn’t, you can figure, okay, they’re not working together. So I do spend a lot of time reading the room.”
It starts with an understanding that teamwork is built on a foundation of one-to-one interactions between people, an unwritten contract that has nothing to do with business cards, organization charts, or titles. A big part of being team smart is appreciating that teamwork is developed by conveying a sense that you are looking out for a colleague, that you’ve got her back. It’s these small exchanges—a favor here, an extra mile of effort there—that become the connective tissue between two people. And that’s where team-work starts: with two people.
Greg Brenneman, the chairman of the private equity firm CCMP Capital, said that one of the most memorable lessons he learned about leadership was from the future Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney, with whom Brenneman worked at Bain, the consulting firm, long before Romney went into politics.
“He said, ‘Greg, in any interaction, you either gain share or lose share. So treat every interaction as kind of a precious moment in time,’ ” Brenneman recalled. “And I’ve always remembered that, because I think it’s really true. So what I’ve tried to do is have more conversations where I’m gaining share than losing share, to try to add value to everything.”
Gary E. McCullough, the CEO of Career Education Corporation, shared a story that helps bring Brenneman’s rule to life. It involved a woman named Rosemary, whom he came to know when he was working at Procter & Gamble. She operated the coffee cart that came around each morning, but McCullough came to appreciate her keen sense of people, and her insights about whether they understood the basics of teamwork.
“Rosemary had an uncanny ability to discern who was going to make it and who wasn’t going to make it,” McCullough said. “And I remember, when I was probably almost a year into the organization, she told me I was going to be okay. But she also told me some of my classmates who were with the company weren’t going to make it. And she was more accurate than the HR organization was. When I talked to her, I said, ‘How’d you know?’ She could tell just by the way they treated people. In her mind, everybody was going to drop the ball at some point. And then she said, ‘You know you’re going to drop the ball, and I see that you’re good with people and people like you and you treat them right. They’re going to pick up the ball for you, and they’re going to run and they’re going to score a touchdown for you. But if they don’t like you, they’re going to let that ball lie there and you’re going to get in trouble.’ Again, I think it’s those intangible things.”
Being team smart begins with the foundation of learning to work with another person. The next step is to understand team dynamics, and the role that individuals play on each team. Many CEOs have learned these lessons through sports.
Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, the online gaming company, said his experience playing soccer on his school team was a formative leadership lesson.
“We were on the same team together, most of us, for eight or nine years, and we were at a really little school in Chicago that had no chance of really fielding any great athletes,” he said. “But we ended up doing really well as a team, and we made it to the state quarterfinals, and it was all because of teamwork. And the one thing I learned from that was that I actually could tell what someone would be like in business, based on how they played on the soccer field. So even today when I play in Sunday-morning soccer games, I can literally spot the people who’d probably be good managers and good people to hire.”
He explained the qualities he looked for on the soccer field:
“One is reliability, the sense that they’re not going to let the team down, that they’re going to hold up their end of the bargain. And in soccer, especially if you play seven on seven, it’s more about whether you have seven guys or women who can pull their own weight rather than whether you have any stars. So I’d rather be on a team that has no bad people than a team with stars. There are certain people you just know are not going to make a mistake, even if the other guy’s faster than they are, or what ever. They’re just reliable.
“And are you a playmaker? There are people who don’t want to screw up, and so they just pass the ball right away. Then there are the ones who have this kind of intelligence, and they can make these great plays. These people seem to have high emotional intelligence. It’s not that they’re star players, but they have decent skills, and they will get you the ball and then be where you’d expect to put it back to them. It’s like their heads are really in the game.”
Andrew Cosslett of InterContinental Hotels Group also learned about team dynamics from sports—in his case, rugby.
“Everyone’s different, so you have to know people,” Cosslett said. “I think having a sense of self-awareness is very important, like how you impact each of the people you’re with differently. The whole thing about staying alive on a rugby field is about reliance on the guys around you. Each one of those people on a rugby team responds differently because it’s physically dangerous as a game. It has a tension in the changing room before you go out to play that’s not like any other sport, and I’ve played lots, because it is almost like going into battle. There’s a chance you’re going to break your neck or have a very bad injury.
“You need to jell with them as a team, but each one responds individually. So it’s about seeing the world on their terms and then dealing with them on their terms, not yours. I think you’re born with some of this as well. I’m very sensitive to how people are thinking and feeling at any given moment. That’s really helpful in business, because you pick things up very fast.”
Part of team building is understanding the roles that different personalities play in a group. For example, Will Wright, the video-game developer behind best-sellers like Spore and The Sims, sees people either as potential “glue” or “solvent” in a team setting when he is considering hiring someone.
“There is the matter of how good is this person, times their teamwork factor,” Wright said. “You can have a great person who doesn’t really work well on the team, and they’re a net loss. You can have somebody who is not that great, but they are really very good glue, so that could be a net gain. A lot of team members I consider glue within the team in that they disseminate things effectively, they motivate and improve the morale of people around them. They basically bring the team tighter and tighter. Others are solvents, and it’s their kind of personal nature that they might be disagreeable. They rub people the wrong way. They’re always caught in conflicts. For the most part, that is at least as important as their competence in their roles.”
Team smarts is about having good peripheral vision for sensing how people