Chapter 9
Seeking Soul in Teams
Teams often fall short because they come together rationally but not spiritually. Uncommon spirit—or soul—is often the key ingredient of wildly successful teams or “hot groups.”1 Lockheed’s Skunk Works is one famous example of an autonomous team unhampered by bureaucracy; it built America’s first jet fighter as well as the legendary U-2 surveillance aircraft. Another is Steve Jobs’s band of “Pirates,” swashbucklers and rebels who seceded from the main Apple campus to work on special projects: “It’s better to be a pirate than join the Navy.”2 But there are many others. Breakthroughs in medical research rarely happen without a team of scientists deeply committed to finding a cure for a deadly disease. The sports world is riddled with stories of athletic teams playing above their heads to snatch victory against overwhelming odds.
Leadership is often viewed as the work of extraordinary individuals, but in great groups, leadership is almost always shared and fluid. Leadership initially focuses on assembling individuals with the right stuff and building powerful cultural bonds that inspire and sustain team members through the ups and downs of challenging work. As a widely reported recent example, one of these tightly knit teams, Red Squadron of Seal Team Six, shot and killed Osama bin Laden to end an exhaustive ten-year effort to avenge the death and devastation of 9/11.
This was not the team’s first covert mission, and it would not be their last. They are a permanent operational unit bonded by a cultural fabric woven over time. “They are bound together by sworn oaths and the obligations of their brotherhood.”3 Red Squadron has learned from the history of previous missions, both successes and failures. Stories carry its lore. Members have their own language. Ritual and ceremony reaffirm the team’s sacred and secret covenant. The team acknowledges heroic actions within the tight circle, but secrets stay inside. For example, no one but the members of Red Squadron will ever know who fired the two rounds that killed bin Laden.4
Prescriptions for building such extraordinary teamwork often emphasize the intensive training and structural precision of groups like the Seals, and they only hint at the deeper symbolic secret of how groups and teams reach a state of grace and peak performance. Former Visa CEO Dee Hock captured the heart of the issue: “In the field of group endeavor, you will see incredible events in which the group performs far beyond the sum of its individual talents. It happens in the symphony, in the ballet, in the theater, in sports, and equally in business. It is easy to recognize and impossible to define. It is a mystique. It cannot be achieved without immense effort, training, and cooperation, but effort, training, and cooperation alone rarely create it.”5
Accounts of team success often lack the fine-grained nuance needed to portray the rich symbolic tapestry at the heart of such extraordinary performance. In the provocative case of Red Squadron, most details of the team’s culture are shrouded in secrecy. In other examples, observers miss the subtle cultural clues that might help leaders get better at creating cohesive, high-performing teams in their place of work. But occasionally someone tells a story of teamwork with sufficient detail and time span to provide tangible hints and guidelines for achieving magic.
THE EAGLE GROUP: REASONS FOR SUCCESS
The Soul of a New Machine is Tracy Kidder’s dazzling yearlong account of a small group of engineers at Data General who, in the 1970s, created a new computer in record time.6 Despite scant resources and limited support, the Eagle Group outperformed all other Data General divisions to produce a new state-of-the-art machine. After accomplishing the mission, the group disbanded, and the members left to pursue other interests. The technology is now antiquated, but lessons from how the team pulled it off are as current and useful as ever.
Why did the Eagle Group succeed? Were the project members extraordinarily talented? Not really. Each was highly skilled, but there were equally talented engineers working on other Data General projects. Were team members treated with dignity and respect? Quite the contrary. As one engineer noted, “No one ever pats anyone on the back.”7 Instead, the group experienced what they called “mushroom management”: “Put ’em in the dark, feed ’em shit, and watch ’em grow.”8 For over a year, group members jeopardized their health, their families, and their careers. Another engineer exclaimed paradoxically, “I’m flat out by definition. I’m a mess. It’s terrible. It’s a lot of fun.”9
Were financial rewards a motivating factor? Group members agreed collectively that they did not work for money. Nor were they motivated by fame. Heroic efforts were rewarded neither by formal appreciation nor by official applause.
Perhaps the group’s structure accounted for its success. Did the group have clear and well-coordinated roles and relationships? According to Kidder, it kept no meaningful charts, graphs, or organization tables. One of the group’s engineers put it bluntly: “The whole management structure—anyone in Harvard Business School would have barfed.”10
Can tenets of the political frame unravel the secret of the group’s phenomenal performance? Perhaps group members were motivated more by power than by money: “There’s a big high in here somewhere for me that I don’t fully understand. Some of it’s a raw power trip. The reason I work is because I win.”11 They were encouraged to circumvent formal channels to advance mission-related interests: “If you can’t get what you need from some manager at your level in another department, go to his boss—that’s the way to get things done.”12
Although the structural, human resource, and political frames shed some light on the Eagle Group’s success, the invisible force that gave the team its spirit and drive was a shared and cohesive culture expressed through symbols and symbolic activities that embodied the deeper aspects of the team’s inner workings.
Signing Up
Joining a team involves more than a rational decision. It is a mutual choice marked by some form of ritual. In the Eagle Group, the process of becoming a member was called “signing up.” New recruits were told that they were volunteering to climb Mount Everest without a rope despite lacking the “right stuff” to keep up with other climbers. When they protested that they wanted to climb Mount Everest anyway, they were advised that they would have to prove they were good enough. After the rigorous selections, one of their leaders summed up the process: “It was kind of like recruiting for a suicide mission. You’re gonna die, but you’re gonna die in glory.”13
Through the signing-up ritual, an engineer became a full-fledged member of a group with a special calling and agreed to forsake family, friends, and health to accomplish the impossible. It was a sacred declaration: “I want to do this job and I’ll give it my heart and soul.”14
Leadership Diversity as a Competitive Advantage
Though nearly all the group’s members were engineers, each had unique skills and made distinctive leadership contributions. Tom West, the group’s official leader, was known as a talented technical debugger. He was also aloof and unapproachable, the “Prince of Darkness.” Steve Wallach, the group’s computer architect, was a creative maverick. Before accepting West’s invitation to join the group, he went to Edson de Castro, the president of Data General, to find out precisely what he’d be working on:
“Okay,” Wallach said, “what the fuck do you want?”
“I want a thirty-two-bit Eclipse,” de Castro told him.
“If we can do this, you won’t cancel it on us?” Wallach asked.
“You’ll leave us alone?”15
Wallach signed up.
Leadership diversity among the group’s top engineers was channeled into specialized functions. Wallach was a wunderkind who liked coming up with an esoteric idea and then trying to make it work. He created the original design. Rasala, one of his lieutenants, was a craftsman who enjoyed fixing things, working tirelessly until the last bug had been tracked down and eliminated. West, their boss, buffered the team from upper management interference and served as a group “devil.” Alsing, the code writer, and his group named “Microkids” created “a synaptic language that would fuse the physical machine with the programs that would tell it what to do.”16 Rasala, Alsing’s counterpart, and his group, the “Hardy Boys,” built the physical circuitry.
Understandably, there was tension among these leadership roles and subgroups. Harnessing the resulting energy pulled the parts into a cohesive team.
Example, Not Command
Wallach’s design generated modest coordination for Eagle’s autonomous subunits. The group itself had some rules, but paid little attention to them. De Castro, the CEO, was a distant god. He was never there physically, but his presence was always felt. West, the group’s official leader, rarely interfered, nor was he visible in the laboratory. He contributed by creating an almost endless series of “brushfires” so that he could inspire his staff to put them out. He had a mischievous knack for finding drama and romance in everyday routine.
Alsing and Rasala followed de Castro and West in creating ambiguity, encouraging inventiveness, and leading by example. Heroes of the moment gave inspiration and direction. Subtle and implicit signals rather than concrete and explicit guidelines or decisions held the group together and directed it toward a common purpose.
Specialized Language
Every unified group develops words, phrases, and metaphors unique to its circumstances. A specialized language both reflects and shapes a group’s culture. Shared language allows team members to communicate easily, with minimal misunderstanding. To the members of the Eagle Group, for example, a kludge was a poor, inelegant solution—such as a machine with loose wires held together with duct tape. A canard was anything false. Fundamentals were the source of enlightened thinking. The word realistically typically prefaced flights of fantasy. “Give me a core dump” meant tell me your thoughts. A stack overflow meant that an engineer’s memory compartments were too full, and a one-stack-deep mind indicated shallow thinking. Eagle was a label for the project; Hardy Boys and Microkids gave identity to the subgroups. Two prototype computers were named Woodstock and Trixie.
A shared language binds a group together and is a visible sign of membership. It also sets a group apart and reinforces unique values and beliefs. Asked about the Eagle Group’s headquarters, West observed, “It’s basically a cattle yard. What goes on here is not part of the real world.” Asked for an explanation, West remarked, “Mmm-hmm. The language is different.”17
Stories
In high-performing groups, stories keep traditions alive and provide examples to guide everyday behavior. Group lore extended and reinforced the subtle yet powerful influence of Eagle’s leaders—some of them distant and remote. West’s reputation as a “troublemaker” and an “excitement junkie” was conveyed through stories about the computer wars of the mid-1970s. Stories had it that when he had a particular objective in mind, he would first go upstairs to sign up senior executives. Then he went to people one at a time, telling them their bosses liked the idea and asking them to come on board: “They say, ‘Ah, it sounds like you’re just gonna put a bag on the side of the Eclipse,’ and Tom’ll give ’em his little grin and say, ‘It’s more than that, we’re really gonna build this fucker and it’s gonna be fast as greased lightning.’ He tells them, ‘we’re gonna do it by April.’”18
Stories of persistence, irreverence, and creativity encouraged others to go beyond themselves, adding new exploits and tales to the Eagle Group’s lore.
Humor and Play
Groups often focus single-mindedly on the task, shunning anything not directly work related. Seriousness replaces playfulness as a cardinal virtue. However, effective teams balance seriousness with play and humor. Surgical teams, cockpit crews, and many other groups have learned that joking and playful banter are essential sources of invention, attentiveness, and team spirit. Humor releases tension and helps resolve issues arising from day-to-day routines as well as from sudden emergencies.
Play among the members of the Eagle project was an innate part of the group process. When Alsing wanted the Microkids to learn how to manipulate the computer known as Trixie, he made up a game. As the Microkids came on board, he told each of them to figure out how to write a program in Trixie’s assembly language. The program had to fetch and print contents of a file stored inside the computer. The Microkids went to work, learned their way around the machine, and felt great satisfaction—until Alsing’s perverse sense of humor tripped them up. When they finally found the elusive file, they were greeted with the message “Access Denied.” Through such play, the Microkids learned to use the computer, coalesced into a team, and practiced negotiating their new technical environment. They also learned that their playful leader valued creativity. Humor was a continuous thread as the team struggled with its formidable task. Humor often stretched the boundaries of good taste, but that too was part of the group’s identity.
Ritual and Ceremony
Rituals and ceremonies are expressive occasions. As parentheses in an ordinary workday, they enclose and define special forms of behavior. What occurs on the surface is not nearly as important as the meaning communicated behind and beneath. Despite the stereotype of narrowly task-focused engineers with little time for anything nonrational, the Eagle Group understood the importance of symbolic goings-on. From the beginning, the leaders encouraged ritual and ceremony.
For example, Rasala, head of the Hardy Boys, established a rule requiring that changes in the boards of the prototype be updated each morning. This allowed efforts to be coordinated formally. More important, the daily update was a ritualistic occasion for informal communication, bantering, and gaining a sense of the whole. The engineers disliked the daily procedure, so Rasala changed it to once a week—on Saturday. He made it a point always to be there himself.
Eagle’s leaders met regularly, but their meetings focused more on symbolic issues than on substance. “‘We could be in a lot of trouble here,’ West might say, referring to some current problem. And Wallach, Rasala or Alsing would reply, ‘You mean you could be in a lot of trouble, right, Tom?’ It was Friday, they were going home soon, and relaxing. They could half forget that they would be coming back to work tomorrow.”19 Friday afternoon is a customary time to wind down and relax. Honoring such a tradition was all the more important for a group whose members often worked all week and then all weekend. West made himself available to anyone who wanted to chat. Near the end of the day, before hurrying home, he would lean back in his chair with his office door open.
In addition to recurring rituals, the Eagle Group convened intermittent ceremonies to raise their spirits and reinforce their sense of shared mission. Toward the end of the project, Alsing instigated a ceremony to trigger a burst of renewed energy for the final push. The festivities called attention to the values of creativity, hard work, and teamwork. A favorite pretext for parties was presentation of the Honorary Microcoder Awards that Alsing and the Microkids instituted. Not to be outdone, the Hardy Boys cooked up the PAL Awards (named for the programmable array logic chips used in the machines). The first was presented after work at a local establishment called the Cain Ridge Saloon.
The same values and spirit were reinforced again and again in a continued cycle of celebratory events:
Chuck Holland [Alsing’s main submanager] handed out his own special awards to each member of the Microteam, the Under Extraordinary Pressure Awards. They looked like diplomas. There was one for Neal Firth, “who gave us a computer before the hardware guys did,” and one to Betty Shanahan, “for putting up with a bunch of creepy guys.” After dispensing the Honorary Microcoder Awards to almost every possible candidate, the Microteam instituted the All-Nighter Award. The first of these went to Jim Guyer, the citation ingeniously inserted under the clear plastic coating of an insulated coffee cup.20
The Contribution of Informal Cultural Players
Alsing was the main organizer and instigator of parties. He was also the Eagle Group’s conscience and nearly everyone’s confidant. For a time when he was in college, Alsing had wanted to become a psychologist. He adopted that sort of role now. He kept track of his team’s technical progress, but was more visible as the spiritual director of the Microteam, and often of the entire Eclipse Group. Fairly early in the project, Chuck Holland had complained, “Alsing’s hard to be a manager for, because he goes around you a lot and tells your people to do something else.” But Holland also conceded, “The good thing about him is that you can go and talk to him. He’s more of a regular guy than most managers.”21
Every group or organization has a “priest” or “priestess” who ministers to spiritual needs. Informally, these people hear confessions, give blessings, maintain traditions, encourage ceremonies, and intercede in matters of gravest importance. Alsing did all these things and, like the tribal priest, acted as a counterpart to and interpreter of the intentions of the chief:
West warned him several times, “If you get too close to the people who work for you, Alsing, you’re gonna get burned.” But West didn’t interfere, and he soon stopped issuing warnings.
One evening, while alone with West in West’s office, Alsing said: “Tom, the kids think you’re an ogre. You don’t even say hello to them.”
West smiled and replied, “You’re doing fine, Alsing.”22
The duties of Rosemarie Seale, the group’s secretary, also went well beyond formal boundaries. If Alsing was the priest, she was the mother superior. She did all the usual secretarial chores—answering the phones, preparing documents, and constructing budgets—but she found particular joy in serving as a kind of blessed den mother who solved minor crises that arose almost daily. When new members came on, it was Seale who worried about finding them a desk and some pencils. She liked the job, she said, because she felt that she was contributing something of real significance to the project.
BUILDING A SOULFUL TEAM
The experiences of the Eagle Group, Skunk Works, and Red Squadron are unique. But the leadership principles behind their success can be applied to teams anywhere. After extensive research on high-performing groups, Peter Vaill concluded that spirit was at the core of every group he studied. Members of such groups consistently “felt the spirit,” a feeling essential to the meaning and value of their work.23 Warren Bennis could have been writing about the Eagle Group, Skunk Works, or Red Squadron when he concluded, “All Great Groups believe that they are on a mission from God, that they could change the world, make a dent in the universe. They are obsessed with their work. It becomes not a job but a fervent quest. That belief is what brings the necessary cohesion and energy to their work.”24
CONCLUSION
From the Eagle Group’s experience and from what we know about Lockheed’s Skunk Works and Team Six’s Red Squadron, we have distilled tenets that can guide leaders in building great teams.
- How someone becomes a group member is important.
- Diverse leadership supports a team’s competitive advantage.
- Example, not command, holds a team together.
- A specialized language fosters cohesion and commitment.
- Stories carry history and values and reinforce group identity.
- Humor and play reduce tension and encourage creativity.
- Ritual and ceremony lift spirits and reinforce values.
- Informal cultural players make contributions disproportionate to their formal role.
- Soul is the secret of success.
Team building at its heart is a spiritual undertaking. The leader’s work is both a search for the spirit within and the creation of a community of believers united by shared faith and culture. Peak performance emerges as a team discovers its soul.