Causation
Symptoms and Causes
This newsletter is slightly adapted and expanded from a LinkedIn post I put up a few years ago.
Backward
A lot of leadership advice is completely backward. Not backward in the sense that it is the opposite of correct, but backward in the sense that it reverses cause and effect.
Googele and Microsoft both launched projects to discover the most important traits of strong teams.
Google's Project was called Aristotle and Microsoft called their’s The Art of Teamwork Project. Google studied their own teams, while Microsoft studied teams across different industries. Unsurprisingly, none of these results conflict, though they are slightly different.
Google found that its best teams share these traits:
Structure and Clarity
Meaning
Impact
Psychological Safety
Dependability
Microsoft found these traits in common:
Clear Purpose
Collective identity
Awareness and Inclusion
Trust and Vulnerability
Constructive tension
I am not exactly sure why this information is helpful because these traits are natural products of a good team, they are descriptive, not prescriptive. It would be like saying, "we studied the best football teams in the history of the NFL and found that they shared these traits.
Strong offense
Strong defense
Excellent special teams
Game preparation
Team members do their job
If you are a coach and you want to improve your football team, it doesn't help you to know the obvious things about good football teams. What matters are the things you do.
What comes first, a strong team or the traits of a strong team? Does a new team become good by focusing on the acquisition of these traits, or are these traits simply by-products of strong teams? You can see immediately that there is a causality problem. The articles written about these projects suggest the former, and that if you want to have a strong team then you should focus on acquiring these traits. These types of studies can be very pernicious because they can cause leaders and teams to focus on the wrong things. As we saw in the last essay, focus, often sequencing can be more important than prioritization. Focusing on these traits at the wrong times can have disastrous consequences.
Rather than focusing on acquiring traits, leaders must focus their organizations on tasks that are going to have the highest payoff.
Compliance again
In a previous newsletter, I briefly mentioned David Hackworth and his experience as a battalion commander in Vietnam.
When young military leaders ask me for book recommendations, "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts" by David "Hack" Hackworth, is almost always on my list. The book is about how one of the worst US battalions in the Vietnam war became one of the most effective battalions in the Vietnam War. If Hack wanted to turn around the failing battalion he inherited, both the Google and Microsoft studies may have pushed him completely in the wrong direction. Hack's battalion had nothing going for it. It was undisciplined, unstructured, had low morale, and took enormously high casualties. The soldiers were completely defeated, both physically and psychologically. Not one leader from the battalion could remember a time when they had emerged victorious from a fight with the enemy. They had been conducting useless patrols, taking casualties to booby traps, and then returning to the base. Hack knew things had to change.
When Hack took command of the battalion, he didn't have a leaders' retreat where everyone was encouraged to be open and vulnerable. He didn't lead them through exercises where they built trust and designed a collective vision. He didn't do any of the things that remotely resembled an effort to acquire the traits from the Microsoft and Google studies. Hack got his officers together and said,
"Starting now, we're going to follow the two-rule plan. I'll tell you what the two new rules are and you'll make them happen. Once your troops have mastered the first two rules, we'll add two more and we'll keep doing that until we're squared away. These are the changes for today: we're always going to carry our weapons and they will be spotless. We will wear our helmets at all times.”
Notice that Hack focused on doing stuff that was going to make his team win. His specific context called for immediate action, not trying to hard-wire certain organizational traits into his battalion.
All good teams are basically the same, they have all the traits found by Google and Microsoft. All dysfunctional teams are dysfunctional in their own special way.1 Hack saw that his team was dysfunctional because it lacked basic military discipline, and instilling that discipline with urgency was the only way to turn the battalion around; a sort of team-building shock therapy. As Hack continued to build his team he instilled in the Soldiers a collective identity and built trust among them. By the time Hack handed his battalion over to a new commander, the battalion had acquired most of the traits found in the study. But Hack's focus was rarely if ever on any one of those particular traits; the traits were simply by-products of the actions that he took to help his battalion win.
If we want to gain insights into how to build high-performing teams, we need a better approach than simply identifying their common traits. If you are leading an underperforming team, it doesn't help you to know the traits of a good team. What should matter to you is how to take an underperforming team and turn it into a high-performing team. John Kotter's book "Leading Change" is a decent resource for this. But always remember that each dysfunctional team is dysfunctional in its own way. If you want to turn around an underperforming team, the first thing you have to do is identify the root cause of the underperformance. For Hack's battalion, the key problem was a lack of discipline. But for another team, it might be toxicity, fear, and too much discipline.
The traits of good teams identified by Google and Microsoft are generally by-products, not benchmarks or goals. If you treat them like benchmarks achieving them may be elusive.
Additionally, Google and Microsoft are now large and profitable companies that haven’t really gone through enormous hardship in recent years, although Microsoft has recently announced some layoffs. When you are raking in oodles of cash and you don’t have serious competition leadership gets really easy because there’s no real pressure. How many of the teams that demonstrated these traits would be able to demonstrate them through an enormous amount of stress and tumult? How much psychological safety will teams have when rounds of layoffs begin? How cooperative will people be when they are afraid of being fired and start putting themselves before their teammates? Maybe some teams will be able to withstand hardship, but certainly, not all of them will.
I cannot stress enough here that context is everything. Every situation is unique and there are no easy answers. What won’t change is the importance of correctly framing your environment, understanding your unique set of problems, and mobilizing the right people to solve them.
This is, of course, a reference to the famous opening lines of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
When I was a Cav Squadron Support Platoon Leader, the Infantry Battalion next to us was well known for their soldiers being in full battle rattle: Weapon, Kpot, Kevlar and LBE every time any of them broke the gate of the kaserne. Every single cook, ammo hauler, fueler or truck driver looked as squared away as the line troops. This was the standard, even if running across town. Every other unit's truck drivers were often in t-shirts and soft caps, including my guys.
The Infantry Battalion shared a mess hall with our squadron and the BN CO and his officers (down to LTs) ate multiple meals every day in the mess hall. I was the DFAC OIC so I was there a lot too, since I didn't want my boss to hear news from the grunts before he heard it from me.
One morning, early in my command, the Inf BN CO said "Parmly, you need to remind your men that they are soldiers first then specialists in their trade. If they don't look like soldiers they won't act like soldiers." That meshed exactly with what SSG Hill, my transportation section sergeant, had said to me the day prior.
I sat down with the platoon NCOs and gave them room to raise the standards for performance. SSG Hill advocated for a policy like the grunts. I backed it and we made it the new SOP. Some griping at first, esp the bit about drawing weapons from the Arms room every day. HHT CO wasn't a fan of that but I changed his mind. CSM was a big fan and made it a point to stop our guys and do a spot check of vehicle readiness and individual weapons cleanliness. Now you not only needed to draw your M16, but it had to be clean! What a concept!
Pretty soon, we started to see differences, in the way the guys took care of all their gear, vehicles, etc. OR rate jumped up, and support improved across the board. Platoon morale was high as our guys felt like they were role modeling high standards and expectations for the first time in many of their young careers. Like, whoever expects a 55B to role model soldierly conduct? Soon, line troops were doing the same with their vehicles and drivers.
A simple act of reminding soldiers of their core purpose can generate multiple positive returns. This is why Lt Col (later Maj Gen) John LeMoyne was such a powerful influence upon me as a leader of soldiers. I have many examples where John pointed out to me the inadequacy of my expectations of my men. He often noted it was easy to make an 11B feel like a soldier; Hard to make a cook feel like one.
Love “Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts”!
Really like your point that definite ACTION must be taken to build a culture.
Leaders can’t just snap your fingers and “be these things, team”. What about the leader of that team? Would modeling those characteristics personally help create them in the team?
Also, I think purpose/meaning/a vision can, and should, be provided and there could be some causation there. But of course that in and of itself is not enough. Still need to build the rest. And to your point, I can imagine contexts where the purpose/meaning would need to come later.
Great newsletter and food for thought as always!