The Essence of a Good Team

I’ve written before about the value of a good team, but what does a good team look like? Does it need to have a star player? A forceful, commanding captain? A great mission statement?

It might have any of those, but none of that is necessary.

Some of the best teams I’ve worked in had no star player, were led with a light touch, never wrote a mission statement, and repeatedly outperformed any prediction you would have made from just looking at the profiles of the people in the team. The best teams are far more than the sum of their members.

The most important necessities are a strong sense of and pervasive commitment to the team’s core identity and purpose. Most people won’t go above and beyond for the sake of a mission statement, but they will on behalf of their tribe. A great team taps into the subconscious instinct to help the tribe, and that generates a chemistry in which team members magnify each other’s capabilities.

Team sport is not the best place to look for examples. That’s a matter of each team vying against other teams in a league. But in life, a great organization takes it a step further. A great organization is a superteam of all its teams. I’ve worked with companies that are or at least contain superteams, but everyone has seen at least two more widely visible examples: the best militaries, and NASA.

The American space program is a particularly useful case to study. It isn’t a single organization. It is intentionally structured so that most of the actual work is done by companies under NASA’s guidance. This structure ensures that expertise developed for the space program becomes available to the marketplace instead of being kept within a government agency. It’s wonderful for society but adds to the challenge of creating and maintaining a superteam. NASA needs a superteam, so all the companies involved must work closely together even though some of them are commercial rivals.

What overrides the rivalry is not a mission statement or a boss issuing orders. It’s a compelling sense of core identity and purpose that pervades the entire program. That core is so powerful, it keeps thousands of people focused on work that can only put a select few into orbit. The public notices astronauts. Everyone else in the program is ground crew. During my years in the program I can’t recall ever hearing anyone express the tiniest bit of resentment about the attention astronauts get. On the contrary, we were often more excited than the public when an astronaut achieved a new milestone—and tragedies such as Challenger hurt us like death in the family.

That’s the essence of a good team and a good superteam. Being in the team becomes a matter of heart. You can’t force it to happen. You can prepare the groundwork, nurture it, and weed out any elements that don’t fit the core identity and purpose you want to foster.

And if you do succeed in forming a great team… the sky is (literally) not the limit.