Inject a sense of urgency. Action trumps inertia when the alternative is worse. Turn your team’s attention to the peril and the price of doing nothing. Make the most of a crisis by harnessing the focusing power of urgency to propel them into purposeful action. Build momentum through early successes that demonstrate progress is possible.
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Teams need a shared roadmap: a realistic appraisal of where they are, clarity on what success looks like, and a common path to that success. Asking each member to write down the team’s objectives soon reveals whether your team is on the same page – or even on the same planet.
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Agree your definition of victory. If everyone in your team shares the same specific understanding of what success looks like, when you shout ‘Go’ everyone will move in the same direction towards the same target. In sports winning and losing is usually clear-cut. The challenge for all teams is targeting the same level of clarity.
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Take a robust view of reality by taking off your rose-tinted glasses. Form a brutally honest assessment of what is working and what isn’t. Confronting the pain early enough to be able to do something about it is far better than attempting to recover from failure when it’s too late.
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Build the plan for your team together. Doing it as a team will help you get the most out of your team. You can draw on their diverse experiences, expertise and perspectives to build accuracy and robustness. In addition, involving the team engages them and fosters commitment to the purpose and plan.
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Keep focused and keep flexible. It’s like sailing: the team’s common purpose is the north star, the fixed point for navigating. To reach the destination the team needs to tack continuously to make progress. You cannot fight the winds of changing circumstances; you need to adapt and work with them.
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Constant communication of the common purpose sustains momentum over the inevitable bumps in the road. Forget mouse mats with inspirational slogans. This is all about making purpose a vibrant, continuous conversation amongst team members. Reinforce the message of common purpose and remind the team about it as often as possible.
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Consult. Have the confidence to recognize when and where you might not have the right answer. If you believe your team may know best, invite discussion and ask the right questions. You are looking to support your team and encourage them to take greater responsibility for future action.
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Collaborate. When the team is performing effectively, effective team leaders know when to get out of the way and hand over the remote control to the team. In this style of leadership, you will increasingly be collaborating as a first amongst equals in a web of mutual accountability.
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Create a team of leaders. Developing leaders across the team is developing a better team. The strongest teams are those in which more members inspire, support, challenge and hold each other accountable. Yet even in teams full of capable leaders you remain ultimately accountable. A leader’s work is never done.
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The ideal team member has a strong but not a big ego, with the confidence to flourish amid the give and take in a team. They are masters of their own role but also inspire, challenge and cajole the best from others. They act as multipliers of their teammates’ performance.
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Aim to build a team of the ‘best twelve’ not the ‘twelve best’. Great players are necessary for victory, but a constellation of stars will still lose against a star team. Chemistry matters. Target a balance between the cohesion of like-minded teammates and the creative abrasion that comes from diversity.
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Get rid of the derailers. The worst apple in a team is not the person with poor skills. The team members who can spoil the whole barrel are those with bad team attitudes. Man Utd manager Alex Ferguson’s terse law of creating a great team: ‘Get rid of the c**ts.
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Focus on those who fit your team’s purpose. Finding the right talent for your team is not a popularity contest about who has the most friends. Selection is the laser focus of separating the talent you need from everyone else. An effective common purpose will attract the talent you need and repel those who lack the right stuff.
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Keep standards high. One of the most certain ways of diluting your team’s performance is to allow selection standards to slide. Allowing weaker talent to slip through the net sends a strongly misleading signal to the rest of the team. Remember that first-class people hire first-class people, but second-class people hire third-class people.
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Design selection to mirror reality. If you want someone who can drive fast, put them in a car and grab your stopwatch. Creating selection tests as close to the challenges the team face is a sure way of separating good on paper from good in practice and great in performance.
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Excellence is a habit. No team becomes better without practice. The most powerful process for teams to become better is to identify the most important areas where they need to collaborate, define a shared approach to working together and then practise it over and over until it becomes second nature.
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Keep teams as small as the mission allows. As teams grow so too does the challenge of co-ordinating them, getting agreement and building cohesion. Where team size is an option, less will deliver more. Smaller teams make it easier to forge common purpose, build bonds between members and choreograph collaboration.
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Clarify roles. To get the most out of your team make sure that each member has three levels of clarity about team roles: 1) what is expected of them and why it matters, 2) a practical understanding of the other team roles and 3) how the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
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Ensure the team is as level as possible: to avoid unnecessary layers, deliver agile responses to changing events and allow a freer flow of information, ideas and feedback. But don’t discount the benefits of having a final authority to cut through the Gordian knots which teams can tie themselves into.
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Be flexible within a framework. Team structure will give you the platform for your team’s performance. But note Keith Richards’ view of a song: as a coathanger he can hang a different shirt on every time he plays. Structure should form the basis, not the barrier, to improvisation and teamwork.
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Control the controllables. So much in a team’s environment is beyond their control. Focus their energy on those elements they can affect, no matter how small. Being obsessive and detailed in preparation, improving tiny aspects here and there, has a cumulative impact that can add up to a winning edge.
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Focus on resources that are fit for purpose. Time, information, the right equipment and financial capital – resources are always in short supply. Prioritize, ruthlessly, the resources vital to your team’s progress. Shed any excess baggage. If in doubt, investing in the right people and their resourcefulness is the most effective way to secure the assets needed to succeed.
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Earn trust through competence. Team members earn trust when they can show off their skills, demonstrate that they are masters of their task and prove their competence to contribute to the team’s purpose. You can turbocharge trust-building by focusing on quick wins that build teammates’ trust in each other’s capabilities.
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Earn trust through reliability. Team members earn trust when they deliver on their promises. That can be as simple as turning up on time. Your own ability to remain consistent and reliable under pressure and through testing times will be the biggest determinant of how much your team trusts you.
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Earn trust by showing you care and that you have your teammates’ best interests at heart. Backing them up when they need help, going the extra mile to support them and showing your appreciation for their efforts are trust-building behaviours, especially if done equally across the team rather than only with a favoured few.
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Earn trust by spending quality time together. We trust people we know well. Getting to know each other is a tried-and-tested route to team-building. Having fun together needs to be natural: you cannot force it, but you can create the conditions where you can relax and enjoy each other’s company.
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Earn trust by overcoming conflict and crisis. Surviving the inevitable conflict accelerates trust in a team, but facing a crisis before trust is firmly established can cause terminal damage to your team. You should invest early in building cohesion as trust tends to be scarce when you need it most.
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Guard against groupthink and your team becoming too cohesive. The conditions for ‘groupthink’ are the presence of a strong leader, a cohesive group and strong external pressures. All three characteristics are positive determinants of a team’s success, but overplayed and unleavened by conflict they can push your team towards the dark side.
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Eyes on the prize. Clear, compelling common purpose ensures your team is committed to what really matters. Your objective should be to find a win-win-win solution, satisfying each side of the conflict and the team as a whole. Underlining common purpose ensures a focus on your shared goal and the need to work together.
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Commitment not consensus. Consensus is powerful, but getting everyone to agree can take an age to achieve. To build commitment it can help if you clearly differentiate between discussion and decisions. You are more likely to get your team to disagree yet still commit if they feel they have been heard and understood.
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Be obsessive about improvement. The team spirit you should nurture is one of experimentation and excellence. This is an essential paradox of high performance, the need simultaneously to aim for excellence and acknowledge the importance of failure. Teams that aim to make no mistakes end up making nothing of consequence.
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Start with what’s working and what isn’t. The first step in improving your team is to determine where the team currently is. Feedback based on good data is essential to help your team face up to reality. This baseline will help you build the case for change and provide the basis for diagnosing what needs to change.
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Don’t play the blame game. Whenever you conduct a robust and rigorous review you need to guard against your team playing the blame game. Fear of being blamed and shamed in front of their colleagues can force team members to hide problems – untreated, these can often come back bigger and with much more damaging consequences.
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Design the future together. The most powerful source of developing and executing new ideas and approaches for improving your team is . . . your team. Involving them ensures any change is not just theoretical but practicable. Getting your team to generate ideas also increases its ownership of the changes.
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Focus on the few vital areas of collaboration. Identify areas of teamwork with the greatest potential for change and choreograph how the team will now interact, reshaping role clarity with a scalpel rather than an axe. Aim for a series of targeted improvements, the effects of which can be isolated and measured, minimizing the scope for collateral damage.
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Teams learn best by doing things together. Your team needs to rehearse the revised approach, again and again, until it becomes second nature. The fastest way of getting your team to adopt a new way of behaving is for them to experience directly the real benefits of the changed approach.
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Excellence is a habit. Weave new behaviours into the fabric of the team by recognizing them through rewards and crafting team stories that celebrate collective achievements. Over time and through repeated rehearsal and success, the shared approach will become a habit, a part of the team culture, ‘the way we do things around here’.
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THE SAS IRANIAN EMBASSY SIEGE TEAM
Camaraderie and clarity
‘“Who dares wins” is a way of life. It is living and breathing this motto that makes the SAS the best at what they do.’
Andy McNab
1924 hours, Monday, 5 May 1980, the Iranian embassy, Prince’s Gate, London
Five days after terrorists supporting the independence of Iran’s Khuzestan province have taken twenty-six people hostage at the Iranian embassy in London, the situation comes to a head.
Over a Bank Holiday weekend the tense stand-off between the terrorists and negotiators representing the UK authorities has been played out in the full glare of media scrutiny.
During the course of the weekend five of the hostages have been released, but on the sixth day one of the remaining hostages is murdered. Immediate action is vital to save the others. There is now no way back. The decision is taken: send in the SAS.
At 1907 hours on Bank Holiday Monday the SAS teams surrounding the Iranian embassy receive the order to attack. Seven minutes later the codeword ‘Road Accident’ informs them that a key explosive distraction device is now in place.
Nine more minutes, and a second codeword, ‘Bank Robbery’, indicates that a unit of SAS soldiers is ready to abseil down from the roof. And one minute after that, the one unmistakable order: ‘Go! Go! Go!’ Extract from Superteams
The successful assault by the SAS on the Iranian Embassy in 1981 lasted just over quarter of an hour, but – seen on live TV – it exemplified all the hallmarks of the SAS’s elite operation: the power of highly rehearsed practice, seamless teamwork and improvisation under fire.
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The world, and other special forces, took notice. It also demonstrated the strength of the core SAS four-man unit and the value of the regiment’s fearsome selection process.
Through a series of ever more demanding physical and mental tests, the SAS weeds out those who do not have the right stuff, which is far more about resilience, determination and self-belief than simple brute force.
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The few who are accepted know that their comrades have endured the same rite of passage, a powerful bond, and their interdependent, transferable skills – as medic, communications, intelligence, engineering and sniper – lock them together as a resolute compact force.
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The world, and other special forces, took notice. It also demonstrated the strength of the core SAS four-man unit and the value of the regiment’s fearsome selection process.
Through a series of ever more demanding physical and mental tests, the SAS weeds out those who do not have the right stuff, which is far more about resilience, determination and self-belief than simple brute force.
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The few who are accepted know that their comrades have endured the same rite of passage, a powerful bond, and their interdependent, transferable skills – as medic, communications, intelligence, engineering and sniper – lock them together as a resolute compact force.
Over that Bank Holiday weekend in May 1980 the SAS teams trained non-stop, acting out various scenarios again and again and again, so that when the assault was launched they could deal with all the inevitable hiccups of the real thing, all driven by one simple, clear mission objective: Free the hostages.
There was so much trust between us. We all had slightly different talents and there was immense respect for what each person brought to the collaboration. It doesn’t matter whose idea it is. We use the one that makes the movie better.’ John Lasseter > To Pixar
I didn’t hit a shot out there. My players all played magnificently, all twelve of them.’ Colin Montgomerie > To Ryder Cup team
‘Good enough is never going to be good enough. It sounds dramatic, but what we are doing in those early days is saving lives, and you are never ever going to be good enough.’ Mike Goodhand, Head of International Logistics, British Red Cross > To Red Cross
The Rolling Stones is a vehicle that only works when we put it in motion.’ Ronnie Wood > To Rolling Stones
Dialogue is crucial to any effort to find a solution to conflict.’ Gerry Adams > To Northern Ireland Peace Process
‘Ferrari is the myth of Formula 1. The tradition, the soul, the passion.’ Ayrton Senna > To Ferrari F1
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A BETTER TEAM
A BETTER TEAM
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