Freedom, brilliance, caring, and laughter.

Recently I was leading a session on business purpose and values, and the group I was working with wanted to really focus on dissecting how they could work better as a team. 

And suddenly the question came – what were the best teams you’ve worked in...and what made them great?

The way I felt about this question is described very well in High Fidelity, when Nick Hornby’s main character in High Fidelity suddenly has to define his favourite 5 songs of all time, and every bad song he’s ever heard comes flooding into his mind. I suddenly realised how much I wanted to answer that question, and how ill-prepared I was to answer it. I’ve spent most of my career either in great teams or hunting for them. Once found, each had been a quite profound experience. But I couldn't quite get the words out. 

Well here is something closely approximating a true answer to the question.

What are the key ingredients of a great team?

There is a lot of great academic work on this subject, and also a lot of wise and experienced voices on the topic. There are meaningful answers to be found around psychological safety, diversity of perspective, and life-changing missions. I certainly don’t find any of those things to be untrue, but what I am covering here are my lived experiences. Given the nature of my CV, I guess these are true of agency teams and marketing teams. But given the access I now have to very different kinds of teams, they seem to have a broader truth.

1.     Great teams have freedom

Let’s assume you have focus and clarity already – beyond that you want your team to feel as much freedom to express themselves as possible.

Part of this is about the act of organisation. There are two kinds of teams that definitely don’t work well – those that inhabit an environment of total chaos and have no idea of who is doing what, and those whose contribution and process is so meticulously drilled that the individual is reduced to the state of a mechanical part. In between there is a well-balanced state that is freedom. The goal is clear, the things that have to be done are well known, but the journey to get there is one of individual and collective exploration.

But organisation isn’t the only thing that gives people freedom. To do their best in a synchronised way requires freedom from fear; freedom in how they use their time (which means they need some spare); freedom to manage their energy levels and their emotional state; freedom to seek inspiration.

2.     Great teams have brilliant people

There is a lot of recent literature that describes the important of prioritising the integrity of the collective over the talented but destructive individual. Whilst there is some wisdom in this, it’s important also to recognised that every great team has within it some truly brilliant individuals.

Brilliance is a term chosen advisedly. It’s not the same as intelligence, experience, rank arrogance. It is a property that happens when a person of unique skills is inspired by a task or a situation, and is compelled to find an amazing solution that acts as a gravitational pull for everyone around them. Very often this brilliance is creative, but that doesn’t mean it’s the ‘creative’ who offers it – brilliance comes in any and every flavour – technical, emotional, analytical.

Crucially, embracing brilliance means embracing a degree of friction. The thinking is likely to cut across the grain, to transgress roles and responsibilities, and to require some nurturing and protection. It’s often the seed of the destruction of a team. But it is also the lightning in the bottle. The team should never be sacrificed to the demands of a brilliant but painful individual, but it could be just as dangerous to sacrifice all brilliance for a quiet life.

3.     Great teams care about each other

A sense of purpose and mission is of course incredibly valuable to a team. If that purpose is truly inspiring it can elevate a team to achieve incredible things. But it’s very notable that many great teams – like sports teams, or bands, or great businesses – are sometimes in search of relatively trivial goals. But in all cases, these teams deeply care about achieving them – and achieving them together.

It feels like there is some magic in ‘caring’ itself, and that this creates the greatest pleasure and the greatest momentum when caring about the goal and caring about each other fuse and intermingle. Lots of things can help this to come together – a common enemy, a shared objective, a tough situation – but the essence of it seems to be people wanting to help each other and to inspire each other.

This is an easy thing to write down, or to include in a set of company values. Enabling a team to ‘drop a level’ and to care about each other and what they are doing on a human level is a much deeper and more important attribute. It’s a defining attribute of brilliant leaders, and an extremely difficult one to maintain under fire.

4.     Great teams laugh together

When I think of any one of the best teams I’ve been a part of I feel three feelings: a rush of energy, a warmth of memories, and a tension just below my ribs. And it is the last of these that is most precious to me – the memory of moments of intense, almost hysterical laughter.

This looks at first sight like the most trivial on this list, but to me it has always been the most important.

For me, laughter is a signifier of multiple fundamental attributes. If you are doing anything really worthwhile, it is going to be hard, and there are going to be moments where the deck seems ludicrously, impossible stacked against you. The ability to laugh through these moments and continue is essential. Laughter also tends to be an indication of balance – between a shared world view and a set of values, and diversity of perspectives that makes your world view genuinely intriguing and entertaining to each other.

How do you make these things happen?

These attributes of teams are magical. There isn’t a framework or a process that you can use to make them happen, and nor should there be. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do – as a leader, everything you do to create clarity, provide freedom, to hire and retain wonderful people makes it more likely to happen. But the most important thing is to treasure it when you find it, and to defend it to the death.

In the world of business, traditionally it is the company that has created this. It remains the great weakness of the independent, agile working style, that thus far it is less reliably able to create that dynamic than the traditional co-located team. But I think that’s temporary, that it can be achieved, and I look forward to exploring this further!

Those top 5 teams, in full, with a rough estimate of their ‘peak vintage’:

5. BBJ All-Stars (2004)

This is the first proper professional team that I worked in. And whilst it’s fair it took me a little while to adapt successfully to the world of work (aka survive probation) it’s clear that I was ludicrously lucky to land where I did. This team had a ludicrously high level of brilliance, and all the positive freedom you could ask for. I’d say more that half the people who sat within 10 metres of me at this point are now CEOs, CSOs, bestselling authors or other equivalent luminaries (within one bank of desks: Paul Hutchison, Geoff de Burca, Mike Florence, Clare Peters, Richard Shotton, Geoff Seeley, Mike McCoy and many others); but the other half were just as brilliant. We were catching the tail end of the ‘golden days of media’ so the laughter was appropriately hedonistic. I don’t know what our brand purpose was.

4. Carat Players (2015)

Named for the theatre company in the agency, this team was my first as a business general manager and has a unique place in my heart. I was beyond fortunate to succeed the wonderful Tracy de Groose who had given a strong but quite traditional agency a great sense of freedom. Whilst the more complex and challenging modern era of networks and holding companies was beginning to kick into gear, we managed to create a strong sense of identity from a pretty diverse set of perspectives, we did a ton of great work and won a lot of great clients. I reckon I still speak to someone from this team every week. The pitches in particular need a special mention, culminating in the P&G Northern Europe pitch team of 2017 – a truly exceptional gang, but perhaps also the end of an era.

3. Coca-Cola X-Agency (2006)

I don’t know quite what to call this team, because in reality it included the whole marketing team, a bunch of brilliant agencies (Mother, VCCP, Vizeum, BD Network to name a few), and that’s what made it so good. It was a fluid and flexible network of brilliant teams galvanised around doing good work and huge launches for some great brands. There was an inherent excellence and decency to everything we were doing, and it felt like there was an absolutely commitment to excellence and imagination in how we worked together, which I have realised since is an incredibly difficult dynamic to create. This is 15 years ago and the members of this team are scattered all over the world and across many different disciplines, but it’s still extraordinarily connected. Many of its members are still my clients, partners and friends. Happy days.

2. Vizeum – Start From a Different Place (2009)

I’ve heard people describe businesses as ‘family’ before, but this one really felt like one. We had a ten year reunion last year for this team and it was like only a few days had passed. It was an agency full of eccentric and warm-hearted characters, and we cared about what we were doing, and we cared about each other. Again some absolutely brilliant people, and my first experience of a multi-disciplinary strategy team (a recurring theme and a passion for me) – this one including Patrick Affleck, Chris Stephenson, Eva Powell, Dan Plant, and later on Stewart Gurney and Amy Watt. Our trips to Paris and Brussels were amongst the most fun I ever had at work. We knew that lots of what media agencies were doing was going in the wrong direction and we felt we had the right answers. I think we were probably right. When I left this agency to go to the US, I was pretty certain I’d made a terrible mistake, and I’m not afraid to say that I cried.

1. Jumptank (2011)

If I ever match the Jumptank experience again in my life, it will be a miracle. We were a team of only four people, stretched across thousands of miles. We were dropped into a big complex organisation that had spent some time in the doldrums. We had, in retrospect, a not brilliant name (a portmanteau of jump-start and think-tank.) It should never, ever have worked. But it just did.

We were all decent at our craft, but because we were so different in our interests, and aligned in our values, the collective alchemy was really quite magical. We cared deeply about each other, but an intrinsic part of that caring was a deep commitment to doing brilliant work and setting our own standards, mainly just out of reach. We were in a context that gave us both ‘freedom to’ through the power of the resurgent Aegis Media North American network, but also ‘freedom from', both from a fundamentally supportive organisational leader and from the unquestioning, non-hierarchical support we gave each other.

We innovated, we invented, we connected and more often than not we won. We were surrounded by grounded, sceptical but ultimately open-minded colleagues, and we helped each other to succeed. We argued like cats and dogs, but most of the time we laughed, and laughed and laughed. Francesca Ronfini, Sam Huston, Michael Bernardoni and me. I’ve rarely worked so hard, and I have rarely had so much fun.

The next great team will be probably one you build yourself.

The underlying emotional needs expressed here seem to me to be things that we want, need and expect more than ever. But a great team can't be assumed, and it doesn't come to you on a plate. The ability of large, established businesses to create them is under pressure from multiple directions, but on the upside at the same time more and more people are grabbing hold of their own contexts and ways of working.

Maybe the next generation of great working experiences will come from recognising that the great teams are those that we build for ourselves.