chapter 2

Team Instinct

You can take the view that the human race is made up entirely of individual loners, each of us making our way by ourselves, all alone in the world.

We don’t.

For the most part, we are social creatures. We not only like one another’s company, we seek one another out in one situation after another. Deep down, we need this interaction, just as we need air, water, and life insurance.

This urge to connect with others is not absolutely universal. There are a few of us, scattered about, who display a lot less need for interaction than the rest of us do. And psychologists and anthropologists have indicated that a dimension of the human psyche does crave solitariness. Some people experience more of this than others.

But most of us thrive on the company of others, and few of us need more than a few hours a week all to ourselves.

The Need for Interaction

We seek from the teams we belong to the same things we seek from other dimensions of life. These are the three As:

1.Affection. People living without affection can scarcely be said to be living at all.

2.Affiliation. The feeling of belonging to some kind of tribe, organization, or Moose Lodge.

3.Acknowledgment, and recognition. Who’s to say a tree falling in the wilderness was ever there at all? We need to know we are here, and that others see us.

In teams we also get:

Exchange of ideas. The easiest and fastest way to learn is from other people. Without other people, the old wheel must be reinvented again and again and again.

Personal self-worth. We see ourselves in terms of other people. Being social is at heart a process of personal benchmarking.

Truth is, despite that particle of us that craves isolation, our sense of ourself withers without contact with others. This is not a platitude; it has been proven many times, throughout history. The process of denying someone access to others—isolation, banishment, banning, scapegoating—has been used for centuries in many cultures as a means of punishment.

Many tribes declared a violator of tribal law a “nonperson.” In England, the practice of ignoring someone in disgrace was called “sending them to Coventry”; children were put “in Coventry”—a kind of extended “time out”—for being especially naughty. The Amish still practice a particularly nasty form of isolation called “shunning.” Deprived of community, those who are banished quickly die.

Disciplined societies such as police forces, the military, and private schools have long histories of using the mental cruelty of isolation to deal with people who tattle, sabotage, or otherwise undermine the group.

A contemporary example of the need for interaction is the explosion of computer networking. For decades, computer nerds have been isolating themselves in their fascination with technology. Today, suddenly, the isolation has come crashing down; the need for affiliation, for connection, was a driving force behind the development of the Internet.

Remember brainwashing? During the Korean War, it was discovered that you could make POWs believe anything you wanted, simply by cutting them off from interaction with other people. True-blue Eagle Scouts found themselves subscribing, in their lonely torment, to the politics of their jailers.

So, what has this to do with teams? The bright reader has guessed that what was true for the Akkadians in the 21st century B.C. is true for people at AT&T in the 21st century A.D. We still seek to affiliate with others. We still want folks to like us. We still use one another to learn, to achieve complex tasks, and to enhance our individual value as contributors.

Banishment is still the punishment of choice at most organizations. We withhold information (“leave ‘em out of the loop”). We isolate their jobs or their physical location (“our man in Murdo Bay”). We attack their credibility so no one is willing to work with them (the pariah syndrome).

Types of Interaction

Affiliation comes in different shades of intensity, and happens for different reasons. Following are various team types—the ways people differ in their ability to join with others and make connections.

Go-getters. For these people, the team is the best part of their lives. They adore putting their heads together with others and solving problems. They are in touch with their affiliation needs, and devil take the hindmost.

Pluggers. For these people, the team is their ticket to survival—quite literally their paycheck. The team provides the strength of numbers (“They can’t fire me—they’d have to fire the whole team.”) and, often, foliage to hide their failures or averageness behind. Pluggers put their noses to the stone; and the other people at work, also with their noses to stones, are their team. They will do whatever they must, including team up, to stay alive.

Doers. For other people, “stayin’ alive” isn’t enough. They need more than subsistence, more than a job. They seek a higher level of gratification, a feeling of self-worth, the high of achievement. They want their little lights to shine, and they see their team as the way to do it. Survival-plus.

Homebodies. Work versus home is an issue. People getting their affiliation needs met at home—the marriage-as-team and the family-as-team—will often fall into the plugger camp at work. People not getting their affiliation needs met at home will see the workplace as the place to find this satisfaction. There are people so fulfilled by their role as team members that they wind up on scores of different teams, at work and in the community.

Loners. Then there are people not getting their affiliation needs met at either end, home or work. Often they are dying inside, unable to team effectively, despite hungering to do so. They are the barstool-sitters of life, unable to come in off the sidelines and join in. If you have one on your team, keep the ball away from him.

Killers. Others, toxic loners, have no wish at all to team, and actively seek to destroy the team. They would prefer seeing their colleagues killed by stinging insects to linking heart and soul to them.

One reason teams fail is that the people on the team have widely differing social needs. A go-getter paired off with a killer is a recipe not for teamwork, but for beef Wellington.

The point of this is not to demonize or marginalize the loners and killers. Most everyone has some teaming capacity, and can be led to do his or her best. But most of us need to affiliate, and we equate it with survival. That is a powerful force, and team leaders who don’t make note of it, and use it in their team building, miss out on a big opportunity.

Remember that what you are attempting is not something artificial, or a management fad. We have always teamed. It was the heart of the hunt, hundreds of thousands of years ago. It was the heart of early agriculture, 50,000 years ago. Teaming is in our blood. We want to do it and do it well. But we have this tendency, because of our other human compulsions, to muck it up in the execution.

When the going gets rough on your team, never lose sight of this inner longing. Remember that nearly everyone’s intentions are good at heart, and that working together as a group is very, very natural.