An escape from a bad team
Lessons on team performance, exponential AI, strategy and more
Welcome to Signals & Stories, a newsletter about finding clearer signals that lead to better decisions. Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a good start to the week.
—Brendan
Brendan’s MBA
(click above to read this article online)
Columbia Professor Hod Lipson on Exponential AI: Humans expect change to happen linearly, but technology grows exponentially. When tech starts to exceed our expectations, it’s just the prologue of a serious adventure…
On independent thinking and skepticism: “Good strategy grows out of an independent and careful assessment of the situation, harnessing individual insight to carefully crafted purpose. Bad strategy follows the crowd, substituting popular slogans for insights. Being independent without being eccentric and doubting without being a curmudgeon are some of the most difficult things a person can do.” —Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt
It’s the people, not the idea: In The Founder’s Dilemma: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup, Noam Wasserman writes that “65% of high-potential startups fail due to conflict among co-founders”. As we’ll see in today’s note, your team matters.
An Escape from a Bad Team
Escape rooms are usually comically dingy. This one’s trapped in a bleak strip mall in Tysons, VA. It’s 5:27 PM on a Friday, and we’re here for corporate team bonding.
Our manager is a Stanford grad who worries the puzzle might be too easy for us. Before that can register, we’re locked in the room. Me, the other equally nerdy intern, and Mark get to work on the puzzle, something faux-Egyptian… with hieroglyphics. And after 70 intense minutes, we finish.
Or so we think.
“You know you only made it past the first stage, right?” A bearded adolescent is grinning maliciously as he welcomes us back to the drab reception room. “That might be the longest anyone’s ever spent in that room!”
We look at each other in disbelief. We weren’t as smart as we thought!
I tell that story to illustrate that smart people can sometimes make dumb teams. The three of us were educated data scientists for a global tech company, and yet we were slow as camels at an escape room puzzle.
Why?
Psychologist Anita Woolley and her research team have found that the smartest teams share more than just having smart people. The smartest teams have smart people who are also socially sensitive, come from diverse professional backgrounds, and encourage others to speak and contribute.
And team member intelligence actually matters the least of all of those factors.
Most people don’t know that Jessica Livingston’s job at Y Combinator was to assess this equation among the startup teams they’d interview. If a co-founder curtly interrupted his teammate during the YC interview (no “even contribution”), that was a big red flag. And by the way, Livingston got a perfect score on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) that measures social sensitivity (i.e. how good you are with people).
When forming teams:
Prioritize people who can read the emotions of other people and listen well (i.e. social sensitivity)
Include people from different professional backgrounds
Have meetings that enable everyone to contribute evenly. Encourage the shy to speak up and be wary of anyone who tries to dominate the dialogue.
We struggled as a team because we were missing 2 of the 3 key variables. We were each data scientists (no diversity of thought). And, our manager took on a leadership role while us interns meekly went along. We were basically a team of one!
Thanks for reading. Signals & Stories is a newsletter about finding clearer signals that lead to better decisions—in life and business.
—Brendan