The Chemistry of Teams

Michael Anton Dila
Sep 4, 2018 · 9 min read

I have been thinking about why there seems to be a dearth of literature about teams. In particular, I wonder why, despite the received wisdom that the success of startups is often determined by the strength of the team, and considering the great energy and attention that has been focused on startups over the last 10–15 years, there isn’t more thinking on this subject.

“No! Do not try. Do or do not. There is no try.”

What is a team? And why are teams important? The answers may seem so obvious that they don’t merit explicit discussion. But I think that’s mistaken. We used to believe that entrepreneurship was not teachable, that being an entrepreneur was something you were or not. There was nothing about being entrepreneurial to make explicit, nothing to share, nothing to learn. Not much more than Yoda’s direct but inscrutable advice to Luke Skywalker about being a Jedi, “Do or do not. There is no try.”

This leads me to my first hypothesis about teams: a team is a school. On the one hand, teams are formed through training, but, at a certain point the team becomes not just the subject of learning, but also part of the context. I had two seminal experiences in my young life that have shaped my thinking about teams. One was working on a feature film and the other being part of the first staff of a new French restaurant.

Before I had either of these experiences, however, I was part of two different kinds of teams that both structured my consciousness of team work and got me hooked on the “power of the possible” that working on teams gives us access to. In one case, I became a member of a men and boy’s choir, and in the other, I became part of a production team through my high school drama program.

Fame (1980) was a love story about what teams can do.

Being part of a church choir, it was singing at the Sunday service that seemed to be “the point” of our activity as a team, but the work, and the fun of being part of a choir, was all about choir practice. Our twice weekly practices were not only occasions to rehearse singing our parts, but also how we became a group, more than a collection of singers. We followed our leader and teacher, the choirmaster, and learned from and taught each other. We became a team over those weeks, months and years of practice. If you have ever heard the choir of King’s College Cambridge then you have heard the sound that working as team makes. This sound and its power is a major clue to why we should care about teams.

Drama exposed me to the concept of “cross functional” teams. Unlike the different parts of a choir, the team in a drama production all do different things, from acting, to lighting, set building, and costumes. In putting on a play, all these different kinds of contributions have to be directed, coordinated and brought together to work in concert. The play is this concerted activity, the team all working together to make a coherent performance, while each doing his/her part.

My second hypothesis about teams is that teams exist to make possible what we cannot do individually or alone. As I have thought more about this, I have wondered about the impact of production line manufacturing on teamwork. Taylorism decomposed the work of manufacturing so as to make any part of the production process interchangeable and replaceable. The benefit of this way of organizing work is that it makes output predictable and reliable. The limitation of this kind of work is that it will never produce anything new, but only what the process is designed to produce. And without the intervention of some kind of teamwork, the work so organized will never improve beyond a certain point.

Restaurants and film sets are two other places that we can see how the power of team work makes possible what it is difficult if not impossible to do alone. At first it might seem that this is merely a solution to a coordination problem, that there are so many tasks to be performed and executed at the same time, that you need a team in order to distribute the labor. However, in both restaurants and on film crews, we find a diversity of skilled labor, people whose long and deep training and prior experience make them valuable and hard to replace. The design of the work of such teams is the anti-thesis to that of factory work, where the goal in the design of each piece of work is to make it possible for virtually anyone to do it. In factories it is the design of the production line that it meant to stand in for or replace the role of the team.

In the late summer of 1982, I got a job as a waiter at a new restaurant. I was hired onto the first team, about 6 weeks before the restaurant opened. I had worked in a couple of restaurants before, but this was the first time I had been part of an opening. The work we did in training ranged from learning and tasting the food on the menu, talking with and watching the chef and kitchen staff, to practicing table setting and service. We practiced so that we not only sharpened our individual skills and roles, but so that we learned to function as a single harmonious choir of service.

Sweetbitter, based on Stepahanie Danler’s novel, captures the ethos of team work in restaurants.

Restaurants and film sets have an ethos. This is because they are not merely workplaces, but in a very real sense, they are also communities. This aspect of community is not incidental or a product of the work, after the fact. The community of restaurants and film crews create work environments with a sense of mission and purpose. People in such environments often feel very strongly committed, both to the goal of what they are producing together and to their teammates. Interestingly, particularly in the context of restaurants, the strength of these bonds is inversely proportional to the degree to which the business model of the restaurant is industrialized. There is less community and culture that binds the crew at a McDonald’s than there is at, say, Grammercy Tavern.

This sets up my third hypothesis, that teams must have a mission. I have recently been re-reading a chronicle of the early years of the commercial computer industry. The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder, is a kind of journalistic ethnography of a team. It follows the story of a group of people at Data General, who are trying to build a machine that both meets the criteria of a sales driven business and that will push the state of the art in engineering. One of the most interesting and memorable things about the book is the names of the two core teams on the project, the Hardy Boys and the Microkids. These give a sense of how, even in those days when the “tech” industry was still almost entirely located in and around Boston, there was a new ethos emerging.

What drives the action in Soul of a New Machine is the kind of propulsive near mythic struggle that Joseph Campbell describes as The Hero’s Journey. We often describe this as a “mission” and mean by that term to capture something akin to going into battle, on the one hand, and the near-religious connotation of the colonial missions of the Catholic church. The people working on an assembly line, whether at Ford Motor Company or McDonald’s or even the more contemporary example Chipotle, are driven, for the most part, by the process of production. Something very different is at work in teams with a mission.

The most mythical car in America was produced by a team with an ethos.

In David Gelb’s 2015 documentary film, A Faster Horse, we follow the story of the team charged with the mission of designing the 50th Anniversary edition of the Ford Mustang. Among the many fascinating things this films provides access to is the sense of both the scale and coherence of the Mustang team. It is clear that part of the ethos of this team is shaped by a design legacy of a 50 year old product. What is equally clear is sense of belonging that this ethos creates.

From my drama kid experiences in high school to the year I spent working on a feature film when I was 18 years old to the nearly six years I spent working in restaurants, I learned something about working on certain kinds of teams that surprises me still. These teams generate an intensity of experience that is driven, in no small part, by the intimacy that develops among teammates. The surprise or revelation of this intimacy is that it is not merely a product of working together, it is a crucial part of the productivity of certain kinds of teams. This intimacy is also, I think, what explains restaurants with lower staff turnover and loyal clienteles.

My fourth hypothesis is that teams are chemical. We often talk about whether there is “chemistry” between two people in a relationship. This is part, but not all of what I mean in pointing to the chemical nature of teams. Much of the literature of industry and work has been grounded in metaphors of physics and mechanics. Even the “rational man” of economics is often described by analogy to a machine, with inputs and outputs, rather than in human terms.

Chemistry, on the other hand, contains both productive and dangerous energies of potential: one mixture of elements can fuel a source of heat, another can blow up in your face. I remember being taught to waft a gasifying liquid, ammonia in this case, in order to catch its scent without being overwhelmed by the interaction between the ammonium and the chemistry of one’s own body via the nasal passage. If you’ve ever done this wrong, as I did, you still have a visceral recollection of your mistake. The chemistry of teams can be equally visceral and can be both powerful and mysterious.

The chemistry of teams may be part of what explains two seemingly contradictory experiences. Recent research at Google on the conditions that create high performing teams registers something called “psychological safety” as one of the most critical elements of team chemistry. This seems to fly in the face of the success of teams under one of the most legendary leaders of our age: Steve Jobs. By all accounts, Jobs was a tyrant. He could be brutal, capricious and sometimes even cruel in his treatment of those on his team. Yet, Apple, under Steve Jobs was a nearly magical place of innovation, while under the leadership of a seasoned executive like John Scully, it not only faltered, but almost winked out of existence.

We should be on guard against reductive explanations. And explaining Apple’s success is a complicated matter. But I think that any explanation that does not attempt to account for the chemistry Steve Jobs created, and which seems to have persisted since his death, would be deficient.

My thinking on teams and what makes them work is just beginning. The evidence for my hypotheses does not have a string empirical basis or, at the least, not one I can provide. Nor is what I have proposed above anything like complete or exhaustive. Rather, I am trying to re-open the subject so that we can think more deeply and more clearly about how and why teams create such powerful designs for producing, focusing, amplifying and even changing human capacity.

I am eager for new conversations about teams…wait, here comes one now. Gotta run!

Michael is a Design Insurgent and Chief Unhappiness Officer

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