Chapter 3
Organizing Groups and Teams
Organizations depend on groups and teams to do much of their work, but teams often founder on structural flaws. A team’s structure may come from the top initially, but often needs to evolve locally to meet the challenges of the game, the work at hand. That’s where leadership comes in. Whether you’re formally in charge or just one of the members, if you’re on a team that is going off the rails, there’s a leadership opportunity you can seize.
Social architecture is often taken for granted and almost invisible to the members of veteran teams. It is easier for leaders to perceive structural patterns by observing carefully as they emerge in a new team or as changes evolve in an existing one. This chapter begins with two cases of teams in crisis. Together, they illustrate many of the things that can go wrong, including weak leadership, conflict, resistance to authority, lack of accountability, and ball hogging. In one case, the challenges overwhelmed the team’s capacities and led to tragedy. In the other, the team, pushed to its limits in a life-and-death test, managed to survive by adapting an idiosyncratic leadership pact. These case stories lead to a discussion of team leadership and the relationship between task and structure. Following this, we explore the task-structure relationship in team sports.
LORD OF THE FLIES
Fiction often illuminates issues that reality obscures. Lord of the Flies is a classic novel about a group of boys marooned on a remote island after a plane crash. In the wake of the disaster, the boys were scattered over unknown territory. Two of them came upon a conch shell lying on the beach and found that they were able to summon the others by blowing into the shell.
The boys gathered and decided to elect a leader. Jack, already the official leader of a group of choir boys, proposed himself for the role and was annoyed when the whole group chose Ralph instead. To avoid a divisive struggle, Ralph appointed Jack as the leader of a subgroup charged with killing the plentiful native pigs for food. In a subsequent meeting, Ralph gave everyone a chance to participate in group decisions, declaring that whoever held the conch shell had the floor at communal meetings. With a fragile authority system in place, the group assigned responsibilities for the basic tasks of building shelter, gathering water, and tending the signal fire.
The frail structure soon began to fall apart. Roles and rules were ignored. Duties were neglected. Boys pursued individual interests and took advantage of the freedom to frolic. The neglected signal fire went out, allowing a large ship to pass by without noticing the marooned group. The group split in two. Jack solidified his command of the pig hunters and ruled with an iron hand. His group’s hunting activities quickly became a pagan rite, with a pig’s head rather than the conch shell as a unifying symbol. Ralph maintained control of his orderly subgroup. He tried to exercise his authority to bring the two groups together, but lacked the clout and command skill to pull it off.
From there, Jack’s group spiraled into anarchy, becoming a barbaric band of savages with paint on their faces and pagan ceremonial rites to bond them together, especially after a pig kill. Finally, group members turned on each other in senseless killing. Brute force, mainly wielded by Jack, was the only source of control. When help finally arrived, both the boys and their rescuers were stunned at the striking descent from reason to bedlam.
In the story, we see a structural death spiral. Ralph and Jack were wrapped in a struggle for leadership and unable to establish viable authority. Splintered roles and unheeded rules undermined accountability and reliable performance of essential tasks. In the absence of effective guardrails, the group veered off course. Chaos, divided leadership, and conflict led to tragedy.
Lord of the Flies tells a story of group dynamics that mirrors the reality of many real-life tragedies in which leadership fails, structure fractures, and a group falls apart. Yet failure is not inevitable. In a real-world life-and-death situation that became a major media event, inventive leadership turned potential tragedy into a remarkable story of courage, fortitude, and success.
SAGA OF THE TRAPPED CHILEAN MINERS
A copper mine near Copiapó, Chile, collapsed in August 2010, trapping thirty-three miners 2,300 feet underground in a 549-foot safety shelter. In high humidity and a temperature near ninety degrees, individual miners braced themselves against the hurricane-force winds and eye-clogging dust that often accompany disastrous cave-ins.1
As the brutal blasts of air, falling rock, and dust began to subside, Luis Urzúa, the shift foreman, sought to control the panicky men. In a Chilean mine, the foreman is normally the absolute authority, but in the confusion and chaos, he was in danger of losing control. Mario Sepúlveda, the unofficial jester in the group, began to take leadership. Known to the men as el Perry (Chilean slang for Good Dude) or el Loco (the Crazy One), he began to usurp Urzúa’s authority by organizing the men into three separate missions. Each subgroup explored an area of the cave, except for Urzúa, a trained topographer, who began to construct a map of the new surroundings. The only men who did not participate in the explorations were Juan Illanes and four other workers who were outside Urzúa’s chain of command and did not acknowledge his or Sepúlveda’s leadership.
For one night, anarchy prevailed and the men behaved like a pack of hungry animals, defecating and urinating anywhere and bedding down at random places in the shelter. The next morning, Henriquez, a preacher as well as a miner, called on a higher moral authority to summon the men to a ritual and calm them with prayer. Then Urzúa and Sepúlveda organized a mission to use any available means (dynamite, for example) to communicate to rescuers on the surface that they were still alive. A second group of miners was charged with scouting a possible escape route up one of the ventilator shafts. At the end of the day, a leadership crisis was brewing: Sepúlveda was beginning to take charge.
The next morning, a glimmer of routine and unity was beginning to emerge, and the miners asked to repeat the prayer meeting. Later that afternoon, a conflicted hierarchy began to morph into a democracy. Each man had one vote; ideas were debated and decided on merit instead of the authority of the sponsor. Later that night, struggles over resources again began to divide the men. Humidity and sweat inside the main shelter were so miserable that the men broke into three sleeping groups based on kinship and friendship ties. The two leaders, Urzúa and Sepúlveda, were in a group called “the 105”; another group known as Refugio moved into the safety shelter; a third group, left to fend for itself, moved into a dangerous sleeping spot on the mine’s main road or ramp. It was called Rampa.
After prayers on Day 3, Sepúlveda called a group meeting and rallied the men with his usual enthusiasm. He lectured the group to respect Urzúa but also indicated that he would be willing to take the lead if no one else was ready. As the meeting ended, the men went about their business, settling into roles consistent with their skills. Bustos, a hydraulics engineer, drafted a machinery operator to work on building a series of canals running through the camp to divert water. Pena hooked up a light system rigged to some vehicles trapped in the cave outside the shelter. Illanes, now drawn into the group, used the vehicle batteries to charge headlamps. Zamora, a vehicle mechanic, put his literary talents to work as the group scribe. Urzúa and Sepúlveda, by group vote, controlled access to the meager rations: one-half teaspoon of canned tuna, half the size of a bottle cap, once a day. Mario Gomez, at sixty-three the oldest of the men, became a wise source of optimism. Henriquez, an evangelical preacher, took on the role of el Pastor. Barrios, who had learned first aid as a child to help his diabetic mother, became “Dr. House.”
As Day 4 arrived, the group’s governance and division of labor had solidified except for the tension between Urzúa and Sepúlveda. They had cut the food allotment, but, hungry as they were, waited until all the others had been served before eating. That sense of legitimate order also smoothed what could have become a leadership crisis. Sepúlveda continued to issue orders, allocate tasks, and inspire the men. But he, along with the other men, accorded Urzúa great respect as a shift leader who, in miner’s lore, is “sacred and holy” and could not be replaced.2
Unity solidified, and the dual leadership of Urzúa and Sepúlveda stabilized. As Day 15 dawned, the men were down to the last of their meager rations. But the sound of drills from the rescue effort on the ground kept hope alive, until the closest drill missed. As faith began to wane, Henriquez again assumed his pastoral role. He summoned the men and asked them to put their hands on the food box and pray to God to duplicate the last two cans of tuna. That resurrected hope for a while, but the miners were falling into a death spiral as their health deteriorated rapidly. Men who could no longer walk to the primitive toilet spent time writing good-bye letters to family and friends. These final steps toward death continued into Day 16, while rescuers above accelerated their drilling efforts. A drill finally broke through on Day 17. The miners somehow found energy for a jubilant celebration. They painted the drill head with orange spray paint and attached a note: “Estamos Bien En El Refugio los 33” (We’re OK in the refuge—the 33). When the drill made its way to the surface, it received a thunderous welcome from rescuers, family, and friends.
That marked the end of the first chapter in what would become the longest period anyone had ever survived underground. All the men eventually came out alive. Their structure had continued to evolve, but remained intact until the group was finally rescued. The last squabble came at the end—who would be the last man to leave the mine? Hierarchy and tradition prevailed. Urzúa got the honor and emerged last, receiving the acclaim of spectators and media and claiming the record for the person buried underground longest and surviving.
COMPARING LEADERSHIP DYNAMICS
Both groups, boys and miners, struggled with the gravity of their situations, moving from chaos to a nascent form of democracy. In the case of the stranded boys, the one person–one vote agreement yielded a leader, Ralph, who assigned people to roles. The assignments fell apart from lack of coordination and supervision. Jack challenged Ralph’s authority, and in the ensuing leadership struggle, pulled his pack from the group. The resulting anarchy and unchecked conflict between two warring subgroups led to the group’s descent into chaos and killing.
The miners’ experience began much like that of the marooned boys: chaos in the aftermath of disaster, emergence of democracy, and a struggle for leadership between Urzúa and Sepúlveda. But there were significant differences that favored the miners. Urzúa’s role as foreman gave him legitimate and traditional authority that the boys’ group lacked. But authority is not the same thing as leadership, particularly in a time of crisis. Sepúlveda had a special emotional attachment with the men, and his initiatives filled a leadership vacuum, but he was careful to respect Urzúa’s formal authority. Early on, Henriquez (el Pastor) assembled the miners for a spiritual meeting, calling on faith in a higher authority to stabilize a volatile situation. His prayers helped calm the miners, and they called on him periodically during their time underground. Urzúa and Sepúlveda managed to agree on a workable way to share leadership. Urzúa would continue as the formal leader while Sepúlveda served as a sort of sly socioemotional cheerleader. Their roles overlapped, and the other men willingly took orders from both.
The early democracy, the invocation of a higher spiritual authority, and the resolution of the contest for leadership calmed the men and readied them for work. As the miners took on responsibilities based on their individual skills, roles emerged rather than being assigned. Urzúa and Sepúlveda supervised and took control of rationing food and responding to other existence concerns. Through various vicissitudes, this basic structure survived until Urzúa ascended from the mine.
The marooned boys began with good intentions. They tried to establish a workable structure, but lacked the miners’ advantages in terms of an established authority structure and experience working together as a team. Even with those advantages, the miners struggled to evolve a social architecture that would sustain them. They muddled their way to a viable arrangement: a unique hierarchy of authority, division of labor from the ground up, and workable lateral and vertical coordination. Rationality and commitment to a shared purpose helped the miners survive.
Leadership needs to step up when a team is failing. If the designated boss doesn’t have the savvy and skill to get the group back on track, someone else needs to provide the leadership the group needs. Whether they are formal or emergent, structural leaders have a better chance of success if they recognize that the right structure depends on the group’s circumstances—what game the team is playing.
TASK AND STRUCTURE IN TEAMS
In developing a team structure, a basic consideration is the nature of the work to be accomplished. Tasks vary in clarity, predictability, and stability. Simple tasks align well with basic structures—clearly defined roles, elementary forms of interdependence, and coordination by plan or command. More complicated projects generally require more complex structure: flexible roles, mutual give-and-take, and harmonization through lateral dealings and communal feedback. But when a situation becomes exceptionally ambiguous and fast paced, particularly when time pressure is high, reverting to more centralized authority often works best. Otherwise, groups may not make decisions quickly enough. Without a structure aligned to the work, performance and morale suffer, and troubles multiply.
We have looked at two teams—boys and miners—that needed to change their structure to meet new challenges. One succeeded; the other did not. In ongoing teams, it is often the case that the team needs to vary its structure to meet the requirements of different tasks. An example is a U.S. Army commando team that compiled a distinctive record in World War II. It accomplished every mission, including extremely high-risk operations, with remarkably few soldiers wounded or killed. A research team concluded that the unit’s success was not a matter of unusually high training or talent. Instead, the group was very good at reconfiguring its structure to fit the situation. When planning in advance of missions, the group functioned much like a town meeting. Anyone could volunteer ideas and make suggestions. Decisions were reached by consensus, and the engagement strategy was approved by the group as a whole. The unit’s planning structure resembled that of an R&D team or a creative design group. Battle plans reflected the group’s best ideas.
When it came time to execute, the group’s structure transformed from a loose, creative confederation to a tightly controlled chain of command. Every individual had specific assignments. Tasks had to be done with split-second precision. The team’s leader had sole authority for making operational decisions or revising the plan. Everyone else obeyed orders without question, though they could offer suggestions if time permitted. In battle, the group relied on the traditional military structure: clear-cut responsibilities and decisions were made at the top. The group’s ability to tailor its structure captured the best of two worlds. Participation encouraged creativity, ownership, and understanding of the battle plan. Authority, accountability, and clarity enabled the group to function with speed and efficiency in combat.
STRUCTURES OF SPORTS TEAMS
The structural possibilities in teams are almost endless, but the options generally fall into one of several recognizable patterns. Team sports, among the most popular pastimes around the world, offer a helpful way to cut through the complexity and clarify how structure varies depending on the task. Because every competition calls for its own unique patterns of interaction, different sports call for different arrangements of people. Social architecture is thus remarkably different for baseball, football, and basketball. So is the nature of leadership. Defining the game is a prerequisite to building your team.
Sum of the Parts: Baseball
As baseball player Pete Rose once noted, “Baseball is a team game, but nine men who meet their individual goals make a nice team.”3 In baseball, as in cricket and other bat-and-ball games, a team is a loosely integrated confederacy. Individual efforts are mostly independent, seldom involving more than two or three players at a time. Particularly on defense, players are separated from one another by significant distance. The loose connections reduce the need for synchronization among the various positions. The pitcher and catcher must each know what the other is going to do, and, at times, infielders must anticipate how a teammate will act. But a hitter is alone in the batter’s box, and a center fielder is alone in a large expanse. Managers’ decisions are mostly tactical, normally involving individual substitutions or actions. They typically stand in the dugout, wearing the team uniform, ostensibly thinking strategically. Managers can come and go without seriously disrupting a team’s play. Players can transfer from one team to another with relative ease, because a newcomer can do the job without major disruption to a team’s style of play. John Updike summed it up well: “Of all the team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittence of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely salted with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seemed to be best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game.”4
This kind of structure works whenever it’s the case that “if we each do our own job, we’ll be fine.” An example in a very different context is the structural evolution of Al-Qaeda. It began in Afghanistan in the 1980s as a centralized, top-down organization under the leadership of Osama bin Laden. Expelled from its safe haven and seriously damaged by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, it adapted to circumstances and evolved a structure based on local cells that operate independently. Two different cells could be working toward the same mission without knowing it. When not activated for a specified mission, members of these sleeper cells blend with the general populace. As in baseball, the leader’s job is to plan tactics and ensure that each separate unit knows its job and has the skills and resources it needs for success. This hydralike team structure looms as a deadly threat that is difficult to combat with traditional command-and-control strategies, and the loss of any one cell does little damage to the whole organization.
Planning the Next Move: Football
American football and other chesslike sports, such as curling, require a structural configuration very different from baseball. These games proceed through a series of moves, or plays. Between plays, teams have time to plan strategy for the next move. In contrast to baseball, football players perform in close proximity. Linemen and offensive backs hear, see, and often touch one another. Each play involves every player on the field. Efforts are sequentially linked in a prearranged plan. The actions of linemen pave the way for the movement of backs; a defensive team’s field position becomes the starting point for the offense, and vice versa. In the transition from offense to defense, specialty platoons play a pivotal role. The efforts of individual players are tightly coordinated. George Allen, former coach of the Washington Redskins, put it this way: “A football team is a lot like a machine. It’s made up of parts. If one part doesn’t work, one player pulling against you and not doing his job, the whole machine fails.”5
Because of the tight connections among parts, a football team must be well integrated, mainly through planning and top-down control. The primary units are the offensive, defensive, and specialty platoons. Each has its own leader-coordinator. Under the overall leadership of the head coach, the team uses scouting reports and other surveillance to develop a strategy or game plan in advance. During the game, strategic decisions are typically made by the head coach. Tactical decisions are delegated to coordinators or to designated players on offense or defense. Each head coach stands on the sidelines in his unique game-day regalia, surrounded by players and other coaches.
A football team’s tight-knit character makes it tougher to swap players from one team to another. Irv Cross, of the Philadelphia Eagles, once remarked, “An Eagles player could never make an easy transition to the Dallas Cowboys; the system and philosophies are just too different.”6 Unlike baseball, football requires intricate strategy and tightly meshed leadership and execution.
Coordination on the Fly: Basketball
Basketball (as well as similar games like soccer, hockey, and lacrosse) requires tight coordination as in football, but in a much more fluid game. In quick, rapidly moving transitions, offense becomes defense—with the same players. The efforts of individuals are highly reciprocal; each player depends on the performance of others. Anyone can handle the ball or try to score.
Basketball is much like improvisational jazz. Teams require a high level of spontaneous, mutual adjustment. Everyone is on the move, often in an emerging pattern rather than a predetermined course. A successful basketball season depends heavily on a flowing relationship among team members who read and anticipate one another’s moves. Players who play together over time develop a sense of what their teammates will do. A team of newcomers experiences difficulty in adjusting to individual predispositions or quirks. Keidel notes that coaches, who sit or roam the sidelines, serve as integrators.7 They are typically dressed in business suits or sport coats. Some are screamers and “towel-wringers”; others (like Phil Jackson) are more contained and stoic. Their periodic verbal or sign-language interventions reinforce team cohesion, helping players coordinate laterally while on the move. Unlike baseball teams, basketball teams are doomed if they play as a collection of individual stars. Unlike football, basketball has no platoons, and the action doesn’t stop between plays. It is wholly a harmonized group effort.
A study of Duke University’s successful women’s basketball team in 2000 documented the importance of group interdependence and cohesion. The team won because players could anticipate the actions of others. The individual “I” deferred to the collective “we.” Passing to a teammate was valued as highly as making the shot. Basketball is “fast, physically close, and crowded, 20 arms and legs in motion, up, down, across, in the air. The better the team, the more precise the passing into lanes that appear blocked with bodies.”8
Whenever a new team forms or an old team underperforms, examine the team’s task and structure. If you try to play baseball with a structure better adapted to basketball, members will waste time in unnecessary meetings and become frustrated as they trip over one another. Conversely, if the team uses a baseball structure to play basketball, lack of teamwork will doom its efforts, and the whole will be much less than the sum of the parts.
Leadership becomes even more critical in self-managing teams, which many see as the structure of the future. Such teams plan, assign tasks and roles, schedule, make decisions, and solve problems on their own. The model is becoming more and more common as experience and research both suggest that self-directed teams often produce better results and higher morale than groups operating under more traditional top-down control.9 But Lord of the Flies reminds us that there is an important difference between “self-managing” and “leaderless.” Self-managing teams usually need help getting started, and work best when they have a clear sense of what game they’re playing and how success is defined. More and more well-known firms—such as Microsoft, Boeing, Google, W. L. Gore, Southwest Airlines, Harley-Davidson, and Whole Foods—capitalize on the benefits of self-directed teams. A workable structure helps ensure that these positive paybacks will be realized, and structurally attuned leaders are needed to make sure a team is aligned to compete in its game.
CONCLUSION
A designated leader is no guarantee that a team will be well led. An effective team requires leadership that aligns the group’s structure with the group’s tasks and circumstances. If the official leader doesn’t bring the structural awareness or leadership skills that the team calls for, someone else must step in to ensure that the team stays on track and gets where it needs to go. Structural leaders help groups get clear about why they’re there, who is in charge, who is supposed to do what, and how team members can work with one another to achieve the group’s purpose. When authority is challenged, they find ways to share leadership so that team members can work together instead of letting conflict undermine team performance.