Think Pairs, Not Teams

Most of your life you’ve heard of the virtues of teamwork or the ‘power of teams.’ But I think a common misconception is that there is automatically ‘power in numbers.’ We all somehow inherently know that the strongest teams are small. But how small?

The power of pairs is underestimated. There are so many examples of magical pairs. You see them often in sports where pairs are obvious: in beach volleyball, Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor are the most decorated female beach volleyball Olympians ever. In basketball, the ‘official team size’ on the court is five but if you are a fan you know Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, the Oakland Warriors’ “Splash Brothers,” are a remarkable ‘sub team,’ and own the single-season record of 483 three pointers. Or Donald and Nancy? Okay, let’s forget that one for now. 

But great pairs are everywhere. Remember the Wright Brothers? They would argue with each other so vigorously that others around them wanted to crawl under the table. Then they’d go to lunch together, and come back to swap sides of the argument and finish it! 

And it’s clear that great pairs can occur many times in your life (even at the same time). Steve Jobs and Woz, as well as Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, and Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, and I bet Steve Jobs and Laurene.

The other half of a “power pair’ is sometimes not widely known, so we think it’s a ‘team of one’ in a way. Rarely is it. Ever heard of Oprah Winfrey’s best friend and often business partner Gayle King?  

Daniel Kahneman is famous for his remarkable work on biases, captured in Thinking Fast and Slow; but Amos Tversky was his remarkable other half for much of his career (and he died before their work was recognized with a Nobel Prize). 

And actually ALL teams are completely dependent on the power of pairs? Picture yourself shaking hands with someone and looking them in the eye. Now try to imagine that with three of you. Or five. Even when you’re on a larger team, you are actually operating as a pair or multiple pairs within your larger team. In fact I’d venture to say all teams are really just a multiple of the smallest team possible: teams of any size are actually multiples of pairs. Like molecules are made of atoms, teams are made up of individual one-to-one relationships, or pairs.

The larger the team, the less likely you’ll have an amazing team. The reason is simple math. With two people, you have one relationship. Only one relationship. But you don’t have one relationship for every two people per team (unless it is only a two person team); let me show you. Add a third person and the number of relationships triples. Adding two more people (a total of five) and you more than triple the number of relationships, or pairs, again to a total of 10! Now imagine shaking hands and looking in the eye your four other teammates. It’s muddled. As teams grow, they become harder and harder to make amazing.

So what’s the point? Actually, I have two points for now. First, make teams as small as you can without compromising the input you need. Smaller is better. Second, focus your life and even your own performance on YOUR pairs, your partners. Those pairs in your life might be in the context of a larger team sometimes, of course, but remind yourself that a team is a collection of pairs, a collection of one to one relationships. Who are your key pairs in your work, your life?

So ‘what makes a great pair?’ I’ll save that for another blog, but in the meantime I’d love to hear your thoughts on two things below. First, what is an example of an amazing pair (I’m always looking for these)? This could include pairs who really ‘challenge’ each other like the Wright Brothers or one that seems totally complimentary in other ways or both. My second question is what do you think are the one, two or three things that make the relationship of an amazing pair amazing?