Bowling and Football

An Idea for Consideration

Last week, I had dinner with a friend, who is a senior leader at a big company. He started talking about interpersonal conflicts within the team he just joined as leader.?

From the sound of it, things came to a head recently with a pretty vicious? verbal scrap. But even beyond that incident, the team operated more as a “council”—individuals behaved as if their primary roles were to represent and advocate for their teams’ work. They didn’t see themselves as jointly responsible for the team-wide results.?

We talked through what might be driving the team toward conflict instead of toward cohesion. (This was over margaritas, so I’m not sure we did our best thinking.)?

But one potential explanation of the challenge was that the environment itself provided incentives for the executives to compete with each other.?

This was a staff group, so they lacked a clear business metric that would provide an ego-less way of judging the quality of initiatives (e.g., the ROI of a project). So the path to success, and securing resources, required arguing for one’s ideas—and undermining those of others—without the benefit of a clear framework for solving those debates.?

And those debates were ego-filled because they tended to be about “my idea versus your idea” rather than a more neutral, “What's the best idea?”

Of course, the path to high performance ratings, big bonuses, recognition, and promotion—again, without an objective measure of success—was through securing more resources and launching more projects than others via these same competitive behaviors. So even if the individual executives got along just fine, the company’s performance management approach would turn them into conflict monsters.?

During our dinner discussion, our other line of investigation into my friend’s team challenge was to dissect the extent to which the team is interdependent. One consequence of my friend being so senior—he reports to the CEO—is that each of his team members is also a senior executive, each with their own big objectives.??

Coincidentally, the previous day, I had a conversation with a leader who also wanted her new team to be more cohesive. Along this same line of investigation, I asked her, “I understand why you want them to get along and work better, but for the average person on the team, does succeeding really require working well with others? If they’re thinking through their weekly agenda on Monday, is that even a top 5 item?”

The basic answer was No.?

In the moment, I told her that it reminded me of the difference between a baseball team and a football team, where the need for coordination is vastly different.?

As I shared that story with my friend, I could see the mindmeld in his eyes (though it could have been the margaritas). He responded with an even better analogy: “I always say, ‘Are we a bowling team or a football team?’”

He explained that in a bowling team, the people might like each other and may give each other advice, but they operate separately. Each person just has to worry about getting their score as high as possible.?

Critically, if someone hates another player on the bowling team or ignores a team directive, it doesn’t really matter. Just get out of my way and let me bowl is a reasonable perspective for a team member to have.?

In contrast, a football team can’t win unless everyone is on the same page. A team member can’t do their own thing because for each play to work, they need to be where they are expected to be, at the moment everyone on the team expects them to be there.

And while, yes, some players make more money than others, may score the ball more, and may have higher visibility, every single person is critical to success. As a result, everyone on the team has to maintain a reasonable working relationship.??

So what are the implications of those stories and analogies?

First, it’s probably hard to create a cohesive team if people don’t have a real reason to be cohesive. That requires viewing the challenge from the perspective of people on the team. As the team leader, we often have a clear view of why greater coordination would be valuable. But if that’s not obvious to everyone else, it’s worth making it so.

That said, it’s probably not enough to explain that leaders should coordinate. I suspect it takes giving them real work that requires them to do so.?

Second, it may be helpful to identify and directly talk about the ways the context may provide the wrong incentives for coordination. This came up when I talked to a team about implementing the Objectives & Key Results framework. The aspiration was to have a robust discussion about what projects were highest priority and to have the team rally around them. Unfortunately, that behavior would also disadvantage people whose projects were picked, since the performance management process is based on individual contributions, not team contributions.?

The proposed solution to that conundrum was to say to team members explicitly: “We know what this means for you, and we’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”??

Finally, creating a clear strategic logic with objective target outcomes can remove some of the ego from the team debates. (See my previous article on this .) Once team members can have a debate that’s about the problem to be solved rather than about scoring points on each other, there may be more room for them to operate as a cohesive unit.

Leadership Wisdom

“We associate stillness with steadiness, seriousness, and industriousness; we believe there’s something virtuous about controlling the impulse to move. At times and places where there’s work to be done, physical movement is regarded with disapproval, even suspicion. [...] What this attitude overlooks is that the capacity to regulate our attention and our behavior is a limited resource, and some of it is used up by suppressing the very natural urge to move.”

— Annie Murphy Paul, in The Extended Mind

Something Fun

Trevor Noah’s performance at this weekend’s White House Correspondents Dinner was funny. And the last 3 minutes is a pretty profound challenge to the media.

https://youtu.be/_fpxCuorKjA

Thanks for reading!

Charles

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