What the Superchickens experiment teaches us about building high-performing teams

In the society we live in, individual productivity is rewarded more than group productivity. Why? It’s easier to measure. It’s easy to tell when an individual has been productive, they have met their goals. When the group performs well because the collective intelligence of the group is higher and they make better decisions, it’s hard to attribute that to specific individuals and recognize them for it. But surely if we identify and reward individual productivity and create a group of the top performers then the group performs well, right?

In a TEDTalk, Margaret Heffernan refers to a study by William Muir at Purdue University that debunked this myth. In Muir’s experiment he selected the most productive hens from each cage to breed the next generation of hens, and created a flock of Superchickens. In a parallel experiment he created a flock of chickens by breeding all of the chickens in the best performing cage.

What he found was that in the group of Superchickens, productivity plummeted. Only 3 rickety looking Superchickens in the cage survived because these hyper-aggressive hens had pecked the others to death. It turned out that the most productive hen in each cage achieved productivity by suppressing the other chickens’ performance. On the other hand, in the second group where all the hens from the best cages were bred, productivity increased over generations and they were laying 160% more eggs.

In Heffernan’s talk she also refers to an MIT study on the characteristics of high-performing teams that were best able to solve complex problems. The study shows that teams that performed the best had the following characteristics:

• Their members contributed more equally rather than letting one of two people dominate the group
• The team had a higher average social perceptiveness, i.e. reading emotions from other people’s eyes and the ability to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe
• The team had more women (which can partly be explained by the fact that women on average scored higher on social perceptiveness)

Bottomline: There were no Superchickens on high-performing teams.

With this background on Superchickens and the composition of high-performing teams, it’s time to ask ourselves the hard question. When we describe our goal as wanting to hire “Rockstars” are we really setting ourselves up for hiring Superchickens? The term, Rockstars, in itself glamorizes individual performance. So in trying to hire Rockstars unless we specifically interview to find candidates who will increase the collective intelligence of the group, we are by default adding Superchickens and detracting from our goal of building a high-performing team.

To keep this blog relatively short, I’ll cover building diversity in the team in a separate post. In this section I’ll talk about how you can identify and weed out the Superchickens and discourage the behavior of achieving performance at the expense of others.

Identifying Superchickens:

Here are 3 things you can do to weed out Superchickens among the candidates you interview:

• Ask them to tell you about the team in their previous job. What were the roles on the team when they had to solve a problem? Did you get the sense that he/ she took the time to help others? Did they build personal relationships? If they did, they have the ability to use their understanding of people and their motivations to improve the collective team’s performance.
• When the candidate tells you about a past project, ask them how they got the idea to do something, how ideas from the team were captured, participation from all the voices on the team. Superchickens will talk mostly about their ideas that resulted in solving problems. You don’t need an idea generator - there’s never a dearth of ideas. What you need is a candidate who will listen to the team to hear their ideas and encourage equal participation in the group.
• Lastly and most importantly, get references from multiple direct reports that the candidate has had. If there are no direct reports then peers that the candidate has worked with closely on projects. Superchickens cannot be good managers - their underlings or peers will be frustrated and will feel like their productivity was suppressed.

Mentoring and encouraging the right behavior

Once you’ve weeded out the Superchickens you still need to encourage the right behavior in the team and course correct when you see the need. Here are some tips to keep the team high-performing:

• Share what is important to you in team culture - create guidelines upfront that discourages Superchicken behavior and lays out the collaborative work environment you’re looking to create.
• Periodically check in with each of the member of the team - pay special attention to the quiet voices and sometimes you have to read between the lines. Ask if they feel like we are being true to the team culture that we had set out to create. Is there good collaboration across the board? If you value the team culture, every member will too and guard it fiercely.
• Coach members where you see the need - the worst thing you could do is ignore bad behavior but the second worst is to wait to have this discussion at a performance review. Direct feedback as and when needed is more effective in course correcting team dynamics. 
• Reward group performance - Live the team culture by making sure that the reward structure and how rewards are determined aligns with the culture guidelines that you set. 360 reviews should be an integral part of performance reviews.

Have you found good techniques to differentiate between Superchickens and team-players when you interview candidates? How do you keep your team high-performing?