Why You Shouldn’t Build Your Team Like a Heist Movie
To get the job done, you need cross-training and redundancy
Who doesn’t love a good heist movie? They’re so fun and ubiquitous. You’ve got the smooth-talking team in Ocean’s 11. Then there’s Marky Mark, bumbling his way through Italy in The Italian Job. But wait, what about the mind-bending Inception?
I think you get it — we don’t need to turn this article into a listicle. There are a lot of heist movies, all with one common element: the team. In each movie, a team of experts is crafted by some suit-wearing, debonair pair of sunglasses — a series of experts who learned their skills on the mean streets because they don’t teach lock-picking at Vassar. These experts come together for one final job that will have two sequels and a prequel. (But who’s counting?)
For the heist to succeed, you’ll need people with specific skills: the disguise artist to honey pot the antagonist, the lock pick to crack the safe, and the mastermind to orchestrate it all. Without the team, the mission fails. Except, it’s slightly more fragile than that. What if the mastermind is killed, or the locksmith is captured, or the disguise artist is Bernie Mac and everyone is like, “Holy sh**, is that Bernie Mac?”
Heist movies in real life
With heist movies, the stakes are clear: get in, get out, and don’t get caught. However, in our daily work lives, the stakes are rarely so transparent. There’s not a guard that needs to be knocked out before a camera is shut off. Instead, there’s usually a miasma of stuff that needs to get done, at some point, in some order (which can also change). Because of that, we need a team that can adapt.
Which leads us back to Bernie Mac.
Bernie’s job in Ocean’s 11 was the croupier — he was the inside man at the casino. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about then go, right now, and watch Ocean’s 11. Go!) His job was to gather information such as the location of the cameras, entrances, and exits, and when the casino takes the money from the tables.
But let’s say Bernie (Frank Catton), gets a stomach flu and can’t come into work for the heist that day. What’s the team to do? None of the other team members know how to deal blackjack. The explosives expert is going to be like, “I can blow something up,” and the muscle is going to be like, “I can beat someone up,” and the contortionist is going to be like, “Put me into a Coach suitcase!”
None of these things would be helpful. And that’s the problem with every single heist team: one person, one job, zero intersection of skills.
Let’s get heisting
When someone doesn’t come into work, we can’t be shutting down the whole heist. When we build teams, we need to do so with an anti-heist-movie mentality. Redundancy is required and cross-training is a must. A team needs more than a group of people, each with a special skill — they need to have overlapping abilities. The reason? We need to be able to go on vacation, take a leave of absence, have a baby, get sick, or leave the company without hurting our team.
In the US, we often forget this, which leads to bizarre cultural rituals. When people take vacations, they keep their phones on and laptops open so they can still work while at the beach (or other exotic location). And what’s worse than getting sand in your laptop? Sending an email in a Speedo.
As you build your team, try asking yourself:
- Does the team have more than one person with the same skills?
- Can the team teach itself?
- Would it hinder the group if a specific person didn’t show up?
Building a cross-trained team that’s capable of pulling off the heist of the century — even though Bernie Mac has bronchitis — is a much better way to live and work.
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