Team Behavior

For nearly all of my life I’ve been involved in organized sports. I’ve played baseball, basketball, and ultimate in more formal settings, and soccer and football in informal ones. And now, in my short life, I’ve been fortunate to work for several, diverse, employers. Being the observant fool that I am, I cannot help but make a big correlation between the behavior of sports and management teams.

Imitation

Whoever takes a position of leadership, de jure or de facto gets imitated. If they are nit-picky, verbose, and overly analytical your entire team will become that. If they are engaged, calculated, and careful how they speak your entire team will become that. The same goes for companies. The most influential culture gets created by the leaders. If they work with one another in personal attacks and silly arguments – that will be your company culture. If they work with ad-hoc, loose, and overlapping responsibilities – that will be your company culture. If there are clear, and refined boundaries for ownership, responsibility, in the management team the rest of your company will imitate it.

This works for both better and worse. It is why ‘groupthink’ can be such a systemic problem. The worldview in which decisions are made is never re-assessed. New data is simply slammed into the old view, resulting in poor decisions and frustration from everyone.

An Example

This past weekend we played at Bellcrack in Philadelphia. We played extremely well while losing. We were outmatched by many teams, but we kept our composure and made good decisions. But while we were winning some players started getting excited and very vocal. Once something went wrong, they took a leadership position by speaking out, and speaking out in areas they don’t know very much about. It really turned the team dynamic sour, and turned into arguments about fine points that just did not matter on the field one bit. People started imitating the vocal ones by being vocal themselves and taking the bait entering into arguments. Not because they were leaders, not because they were excellent players, only because they appeared to be leaders by being vocal. So the entire team got analytical and snippy, instead of letting the actual captain set the tone. Unfortunately our captain ended up getting sucked into the arguments as well and we would play worse and worse.