I recently watched General Stanley McChrystal’s Talk on Leadership in the 21st Century (via the Stanford GSB Top Videos of 2014 List). I was struck by his description of the DNA of High Performing Teams, a discussion starting around minute 20:00. Particularly powerful was this concept of “Shared Consciousness” and how to create an environment to achieve this. Here are my notes
It’s Not About the Best Athletes — 2004 Dream Team
The mantra is always to build a team of the “best athletes,” but McChrystal warns against this. He cites the “Dream Team Fallacy,” specifically calling out the 2004 team. This team had young stars like Wade, James, and Carmelo paired with veteran MVPs such as Tim Duncan and Iverson. However, they lost to a lesser teams that played “more like teams” and settled for the disappointing Bronze after losing to Argentina.
“Talent alone doesn’t make a great team. You need faith in your colleagues and alignment behind a common goal.”
He goes further by commenting on SEAL training, BUDs in particular. Yes, these servicemen are feats of physical strength, but they are not “genetically superior.” McChrystal uses the example of swimming — the minimum standard for swimming is 2 miles in open water in under 75 minutes. For context, Diana Nyad (aged 65), swam that distance, in that time requirement, 75 times. (I don’t want to take away from her feat — I use this just to explain context.)
Build Emotional and Intellectual Connections…
To build high performing teams, McChrystal believes that they need to be small and built around Emotional and Intellectual Connections. These connections are built through face to face interactions, building trust and reinforcing purpose. To do this, McChrystal created physical interactions by moving everyone to a base location. He adds:
“I wanted the pilot who’s going to fly that very sensitive reconnaissance mission during the attack to run into the operators who had been on the mission,” he says. “If one of them had screwed it up, I wanted them to see each other eyeball to eyeball.”
More extremely, he created combined teams of SEALS and Delta Force, once treated as sacrilege.
… Leading to Shared Consciousness
Once those connections are built the teams then reach Shared Consciousness. This is similar to a state of “flow” where you become immersed in a task or project and the ability to read, anticipate, and non-verbally communicate with your team members. This state of shared consciousness results in emergent intelligence and awareness — an example being how the SEALS responded in the Bin Laden raid after losing their first helicopter before even making eye to eye combat with the enemy, effectively losing 50% of their force.
As future leaders, we should all think deeply about how to find shared consciousness. There will be some variability amongst industry and constituents, but we should focus on empathy, purpose, and community to help us get there. Thank you for reading.
