• The team called the “brain trust” at Pixar, the computer animation film studio known for producing smash hits like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., and many others. Pixar founder Ed Catmull says, “Early on, all of our movies suck.”15 Yet, the brain trust and other teams within the company have the remarkable ability to produce and deliver feature films to the market that regularly win Academy Awards and almost always make the list of top 50 worldwide highest grossing animated movies.
For more than two decades, we've been obsessed with answering one question: How do you equip a team to deliver big things? We've studied teams like those just mentioned and observed and worked with thousands more – with a singular lens: What is the how? Specifically, the human how? In other words, how did they create the behavioral dynamics that make the team seemingly superhuman?
When teams are enthralled with an idea, they are relentless in their learning, experimentation, and practice. We certainly are, which is why we've insisted on going far beyond team basics in our work. For example, nearly everyone knows that for a team to succeed they need a purpose, agreed-upon goals and objectives, a strategy, customer, charter, resources, role clarity, clear responsibilities, processes, and all the other fundamentals.
Here is the key question, though: If each of us knows these basics, and many teams fulfill those requirements, why do so many teams still fail to do anything significant at all? The truth is that a lot of organizations are in peril for one striking reason: Dynamics exist that stop employees from being who they really want to be: great people, particularly in relationship to the other members of their team.
Good teams can repeat back a strategy they've read on paper. They can watch the slides and listen to leaders at the town hall gatherings. But if the team's plan isn't reflected in their hearts, they're likely doomed to be overwhelmed by an avalanche of priorities and mixed messages about how they should do their work. In addition, the seemingly ever-changing direction of the company creates a dizzying swirl of confusion. A pressure to reinvent oneself while still delivering what the team was told to do yesterday overwhelms capacity and crushes confidence.
Under such circumstances, even though executives can see the strategy clearly on the whiteboard, without the ability to be better together, employees with glazed eyes ask with increasing frequency: Where are we going? Who are we becoming?
It's painfully clear that it's far more than revising the team charter or redesigning the reporting structure that's going to get any of us through this. As well, the solution requires going further than platitudes about needing to model organizational values.
The answer to what's necessary for teams to do big things today lies in going deeper than the behavior basics. A first step is examining how the members of extraordinary teams behave together. For example, let's go back to the quiz of legendary teams. What did you see as the common thread in the success stories cited earlier? Most people come up with a list that includes these behaviors:
• Trust
• Collaboration
• Respect
• Vision
• Strategy
• Accountability
• Empowerment
• Communication
These characteristics or behaviors indeed are demonstrated in nearly every story of team success. (Come on, though, admit it: Did you have a sense of déjà vu when you read the list? We did because it's a list distributed nearly word for word in countless books and within organizations around the world.) There's no surprise here: These qualities are necessary for a team to succeed.
But there's more. (And once you see and apply it, everything changes.) These values and behaviors are inherently intangible. What's necessary are reliable methods to create tangible behaviors. In nearly every success story, there's a pattern – a way the team approaches their objectives and team members interact with each other – that serves as a mechanism by which the behaviors on the list above become a reality. Those who can see this pattern and these dynamics and replicate them dramatically improve the arc of the team's destiny.
The key to seeing the pattern requires understanding that the values and behaviors we've all been conditioned to believe are the Holy Grail (in other words, if you have them, the world is yours) aren't the end-all resolution. The values and behaviors successful teams demonstrate, while important, are in reality just one of two steps toward the solution. To illustrate, consider pi.
• The values and behaviors we listed for successful teams are not wrong; they're merely incomplete. For example, if you ask someone, “What's pi?” and she answers, “3.14,” you wouldn't jump up and down and claim she lied or was incorrect. Likely, you'd explain that there's more to the numerical value: It's 3.14159…and so on from there.
• Recall that we asked what exactly enabled these exemplary teams to succeed? At that moment, most of our brains did the same thing. It defaulted to describing what the teams did to succeed (3.14 = trust, courage, collaboration, and so on). To complete the answer, however, we must dig into how the teams functioned to create the what, the trust, courage, collaboration, and more (3.14159 = the how).
What's important is rarely achieved until a team knows how to do it.
None of us have been told a lie. The talented people in HR and organizational development know what they're doing. Values and behaviors and characteristics and capabilities – identifying them is critical to success in any endeavor. And if you are as passionate about developing and being a part of teams that do big things as we are, you've likely reflected on the list of values and behaviors and asked yourself these critical questions:
• Why does it seem everyone keeps talking about the same behaviors but little changes in people's actions?
• Why is it that many professionals could look at their bookshelves and see pages upon pages promising the characteristics identified on this list, yet these same people are challenged to demonstrate these qualities when under pressure?
• Why is it that nearly every person in today's workforce can define and describe the virtuous behaviors they believe their team needs to demonstrate to win – yet are unable to consistently model the behaviors?
We know why. (And so must every team with big aspirations.) And here's why we know why. Together with our team of specialists, we reverse engineered what successful teams, including those highlighted earlier, were doing as they achieved big things. Specifically, we looked at the outcomes–actions–thinking (in that order) demonstrated by the members of those teams. Thus, we cracked a code: how to shape thinking that creates the actions necessary for any outcomes you desire.
The knowledge of incredible thinkers has powered our work. This list includes Aristotle (thinker who needs no introduction), Viktor Frankl (Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist who helped humans find meaning in even the cruelest form of existence), Daniel Goleman (the psychologist who looked beyond IQ and explained the skill set called EQ or emotional intelligence), Daniel Kahneman (another psychologist whose life's work has focused on judgment and decision-making), and David Cooperrider (professor and innovator of appreciative inquiry into leadership).
By pulling the research and wisdom together of those who study how we behave