Chapter 10
Clarify Roles

History is littered with disasters that came about because the wrong person was in charge at the wrong time, or because who should be in charge was unclear. Sometimes these disasters occurred through miscommunication, and sometimes because leaders neglected their roles.

The key to a beautifully crafted machine is that every part works, and is in the right place—in the role it fits. The same is true of teams in the workplace.

Team rituals can help clarify and reinforce team roles, and we can tell by just looking at the interactions among team members how well they will work together. As leaders, our role is not only to lead but to be the glue that holds the team together. When leaders put their teams first, and have their back, team members feel freer to challenge the status quo and innovate.

Aligning Roles with Information

On the morning of July 3, 1988, the crew of the USS Vincennes was particularly edgy. Early in the morning hours, one of the Vincennes helicopters had been deployed to investigate some boats trafficking in their area of the Persian Gulf.

The helicopter pilot reported receiving small-arms fire from the boats. The Vincennes was stationed in Iranian waters and captained by Captain William Rogers. Rogers retaliated by firing upon the small vessels, which heightened the tension in the darkened Combat Information Center, a small war room inside the Vincennes that was lit up with control panels and computer screens. Much of modern warfare is staring at computer screens.

The Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser had been hastily deployed from San Diego, California, only a month earlier and rushed to the Persian Gulf to increase security. It had also been outfitted with the new, state-of-the-art Aegis surveillance system. (More on that later.)

Meanwhile, at 10:17 a.m., Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian Airbus carrying 290 passengers and crew, took off from Bandar Abbas Airport for a twenty-five-minute flight across the Strait of Hormuz to land in Dubai. Many of the civilians on board were making a sacred journey to Mecca.

Shortly thereafter, tacticians on board the Vincennes started tracking Flight 655 as it approached their location. At that moment, the sophisticated Aegis surveillance system provided a critical piece of misinformation. Even though the airliner was accurately broadcasting an identifier as Mode III, or civilian, the system falsely identified the Airbus as instead Mode II, a military combat F-14, a plane more than two-thirds smaller.

The second error was human. A tactician monitoring the plane’s approach toward them incorrectly stated that the plane was descending toward the Vincennes, possibly as an act of aggression, when in fact the plane was ascending to a cruising altitude of fourteen thousand feet. Strangely, the fancy system was not designed to provide information on changes in altitude, so, to compute altitude changes of aircraft being monitored, operators had to compare altitude data taken at different times and make the calculation on their own, manually, on scratch pads, or on a calculator—and all this potentially during live combat.

Rogers radioed the captain of the nearby friendly frigate USS Sides, Robert Hattan, and asked him to confirm what they identified as an approaching F-14. Captain Hattan disagreed with the Aegis’s assessment. All operators and monitoring systems on board the Sides correctly identified the airplane as a commercial jet ascending, not descending, in a standard commercial flight path.

Rogers listened to the conflicting identification coming from the Sides and decided that the superior technology and monitoring system of the Aegis outclassed the information from the frigate. The fancy Aegis technology gave Rogers a superior sense of confidence and the willingness to disregard Hattan’s warning.

At 10:24 a.m., Rogers ordered two missiles to be deployed. One hit the airliner, which killed all 290 passengers on board. The Sides and crew were later awarded a Meritorious Commendation for “outstanding service, heroic deeds, or valorous actions,” in part for their efforts to dissuade Rogers from launching the attack.

This tragic incident involved many mitigating factors—human, technological, and situational. Following the incident, lengthy congressional hearings and investigations were held.

From this recounting of the story, it’s clear that a primary cause of the disaster was a lack of clear team member roles.¹ Team performance and team decision making can often be flawed, particularly under pressure situations, if roles are not clear. Had the two crews built redundancies or decision-making processes to question or confirm the information from different angles, the disaster might have been avoided.

It’s trendy and cool to talk about flattening companies, destroying hierarchies, and that large-scale “holacracy” experiment going on over at Zappos. The definition of holacracy, according to the website holacracy.org, is “a new way of running an organization that removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across clear roles, which can then be executed autonomously, without a micromanaging boss.”² But here’s the thing: whatever the team or project situation we’re trying to solve, role clarity is critical. Not every situation requires a “boss,” but we do need a decision-making process, and we need a balance of expert roles on each team.

This is true on soccer teams and on high-performing expert teams, such as media crews or emergency-response teams. And it’s certainly true of those ad hoc innovation teams that come together in a company to be the “voice of the customer” or whatever the company calls it.

When I interviewed Tammy Erickson, author and adjunct professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, in September 2012, she said role clarity in team environments was often the most overlooked characteristic in building high-performing teams. Often the team, or the boss, makes the assumption that, if they put super-talented people together, they will change the world.

They will, but only if they know who is supposed to do what.

Putting the Right Person in the Right Role

Next time you’re standing at the gate waiting to get on a flight, watch when the crew shows up. Watch how they interact with one another. Do they laugh? Do they ask questions they don’t know the answer to? Does it sound like they are listening well to one another? Or do they ask questions out loud—to no one in particular—and answer themselves?

They are all pros, and they work at the same airline, but there’s a very good chance they have never met one another. Yet, it turns out that how these professionals interact in the first few minutes will tell you a lot about how effective they are going to be shortly as a team up in the sky.

Mary Waller, a researcher at York University in Toronto, has been studying something she and her colleagues call “ swift-starting expert teams.”³ These teams are everywhere—TV news crews, emergency-response teams, event organizers. They are composed of highly specialized professionals who assemble for a specific job or task and often have little or no previous interaction with one another, but do share the following characteristics:

• Are competent and familiar with complex work environments
• Work quickly under situations of time pressure
• Have a stable role on the team but ad hoc team membership
• Have complex, interdependent tasks that rely on interactions with teammates

It turns out that how members interact with one another during just the first fifteen to twenty minutes is highly predictive of how they will perform as a team for the entire duration of the job. The reason is that interaction patterns established early in these relationships usually persist throughout them, on any operation in which they serve together.

Waller and her colleagues tracked each piece of dialogue team members uttered and identified the patterns in which they develop. For example, “Input the coordinates” is a command. “We have good weather today” is an observation. “Maybe we should ask tower control” is a suggestion, and “What should our heading be?” is an inquiry. The researchers categorized each segment of their communication as disagreement, humor, anger, small talk, observation, agreement, question, and more. They found the communications within well-performing teams to have the following characteristics:

• They are simple and consistent. The researchers discovered that patterns of interaction often emerged quickly and persisted throughout the relationship. And the highest-performing teams established patterns that were simple, consistent, reciprocal, and balanced with one another. The lowest-performing teams had a greater variety of conversational patterns, more unique communication patterns, and members who showed a lack of reliance on other team members.

• They are short and targeted. While big locker-room pep talks or command-center speeches look good on television, they aren’t terribly effective in driving team excellence. The most effective teams kept their communication short, precise, and targeted to a specific task or job sequence.

• They are balanced. In the study, the researchers measured what they called “reciprocity,” that is, to what extent the team members relied on one another and balanced participation in communication. For example, if a team member showed “ mono-actor” behavior of asking and answering her own questions, it demonstrated that she showed less reliance, and less reciprocity on other team members.

Here’s an interesting twist in the study: the researchers hypothesized that any mono-acting behavior would be on the part of the pilot currently in control. They thought that the person with command of the airplane would be the one offering the least reciprocity.

But that was not the case. It was the PNF (pilot not flying), who lacked control of the plane, who exhibited the greatest amount of mono-acting behavior—in other words, was least likely to act as a team player.

The truth is that most of us are professionals with expertise in our own areas. Most of us have jobs that are specialized and specific to our own unique talents. And that trend is continuing. Increasingly, organizations are hiring specialists, and job tenure is shortening— meaning we are all working more and more in swift-starting expert teams.

If we keep our team communications consistent, targeted, and balanced, our teams will soar. Team rituals—however small or humble—will help us better define who is doing what on our teams.

Defining Roles Through Small Team Rituals

In our house, if the coffee isn’t ready by the time my wife leaves to teach, her mojo is off for the whole morning. I’m sure lack of caffeine is part of the problem, but it’s only half of the story. Another meaningful part of the process is the brewing of the coffee, the pouring of the coffee, the stirring half-and-half into her favorite mug, in just the right quantity, and sipping the coffee on the drive to school. The ritual of the coffee is as valuable as the taste and the caffeine.

Rituals performed in groups can be even more powerful. When we take time as a team to savor moments or engage in rituals before events, we can greatly affect the outcomes. For example, simply taking time to share a toast before a sip of wine will make the wine taste better to everyone. The principal reason is that the ritual forces everyone to be present in the moment. Another form of savoring is when we close our eyes while listening to music we enjoy. By intentionally closing one sense, we are opening and accentuating another.

These are small examples of savoring experiences, which involve taking time to appreciate and amplify the small moments of life such that they become more powerful and meaningful. Families are the most basic and essential teams in our lives. And building positive rituals in our families can have immense impact.

“Additional research found that children who enjoy family meals have larger vocabularies, better manners, healthier diets, and higher self-esteem,” author Bruce Feiler writes. “The amount of time children spent eating meals at home was the single biggest predictor of better academic achievement and fewer behavioral problems.”⁴

Sports teams innately understand the power of rituals. Consider the awesome and fear-inducing haka performed by the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team before every game. This powerful expression of native dance not only reinforces their heritage and cohesiveness as a team, but also channels any pregame anxiety into unified energy and focus. In this instance, the haka ritual also acts as a social glue to bind the team together.

We can easily build rituals into the culture of our business teams as well— for example, around the way weekly and monthly team meetings are handled. These meetings often involve the same people, and the more junior participants usually speak less while the boss speaks more, which is exactly opposite to what a healthy culture looks like. Healthy, participative teams want ideas and insight from everyone at the table.

Paolo Guenzi, in his book Leading Teams, offered an idea for how to change this team ritual for the better: tell everyone in advance of the meeting that, if they don’t participate and share their best ideas, they could get a yellow card as a warning.⁵ Two warnings will win them a red card, which means they aren’t permitted to attend the meeting next week. We don’t need to be too worried that people will intentionally get a red card to leave the meeting. It’s not likely people will actively seek negative reinforcement to get themselves kicked out.

We need to remember that we engage in these small acts of leadership to build better, more functional teams because our teams allow us to accomplish things that we cannot do alone.

Putting the Support Team First

Rona Cant, of Oxford, England, should change her name to Rona Can. In an interview in late 2014, Rona said that, after being an English housewife and raising two children in the 1990s, she decided something was missing from her life. She wasn’t the type to host afternoon tea, so she started a business in fabrics and upholstery. That wasn’t quite satisfying enough, so she decided she needed another degree and enrolled at a university. Something was still not quite right. She felt a bit unfulfilled, so she started taking sailing lessons.

Finally realizing she was confusing busyness with fulfillment, she signed on to a yacht crew to race around the world. But before she could feel competent to race, she completed the arduous Yacht-master ocean certificate to ensure her capability and contribution on the boat. She also completed a course in diesel-engine mastery, just in case the ship’s engines needed repair while far from harbor.

Then she participated in another around-the-world yacht race, then a third race around Great Britain and Ireland—and this time she won. Now you know the kind of flinty, tenacious, can-do person that Rona is. But what does this have to do with clarifying roles and how we interact with our teams? Her early adventures gave her the experience and knowledge to apply small acts of leadership in her next audacious adventure.

After winning the sailing race around Great Britain and Ireland, Rona signed on to be part of a three-person expedition to drive dogsleds five hundred kilometers (three hundred miles) through the remote wilderness and mountains of Norway. They drove the dogsleds to the very tip of the Norwegian landmass, where it touches the Arctic Ocean, to a remote outpost of snow and ice on the edge of the world called Nordkapp. It wasn’t even a trail. In fact, the goal was to create the trail, to pioneer it, so that the trip could be done again.⁶

During my interview with Rona in 2014, she described something I found fascinating about dogsledding in the northern wilderness and that stressed how important clear roles and teamwork count in such a potentially dangerous situation. Each evening the dogsledders would camp near a frozen lake or river. While her traveling partner, Cathy, erected the tents and Rona built a fire and untethered the twenty-eight sled dogs and inspected them for cuts and injuries, their guide, Per Thore, would take an immense auger and drill a hole through as much as a meter of ice to create a well from which to retrieve fresh water. Rona would then hike to the well, post-holing her way through the waist-deep snow, to ladle forty liters of water into a plastic container and haul it to the campsite.

Several trips were required to deliver all of the water to the spot where Thore was busy sawing chunks of frozen reindeer meat to mix with dry food and the water, which he’d then set over a campfire to make a stew for the dogs. The dogs required more than sixty kilos of food per day.

And then Rona would return to the hole in the ice to retrieve ten liters of water for the humans. You see, only after the dogs were fed and cared for would the humans take their first sip of water. When you hear her tell the story, the reason is obvious: without the dogs in the wilderness, you die. Without the dogs, you are going nowhere. They are the engine that makes the expedition possible, and without their health and well-being, and rest and focus, all is lost.

The people on our teams, in our organizations, are the reason our companies exist at all. And when bosses spend all their time working, refining, and advancing their own agendas—their own missions and aspirations for promotion, money, or recognition—it’s the beginning of the end. Things start to break down, and not just the processes and the integrity and quality of what the company delivers. The very people within the organization begin to suffer emotionally and even physiologically.⁷

Remember, we need to nourish our people first. The only difference between ordinary and extraordinary is the decisions we make—when we put our teams first, our expeditions, and our work, will go great places.