Nobody has done more research on this than the US Military, specifically the special operations community.
The key takeaways that you find in very effective SOF teams are:
1. Clear and accepted authority chain (Top guy earned their place at the top)
2. Candid and constant communication/feedback between all members
3. A clearly defined, proven effective and specialized role for every member with each member knowing how each others role plays together
4. Common sense of purpose (Objective etc...)
5. Common experience (BUD/s, Q, FTC etc...)
If you have all of those then pretty much everything else falls into place. Note also that this has no requirement for everyone to being an "A" personality or whatever and has basically no bearing on what they do outside of work. Those aspects can help, but they can equally hurt depending on the egos involved.
I recently went through a Boy Scouts Adult Training called Wood Badge.
The most important thing I learned there was a Team Dynamics study, reportedly used by the DoD, which was distilled into four words:
Forming
Storming
Norming
Performing
What blew me away was that I could literally see this happening right in front of my eyes with a small team of kids who I was coaching for an FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Robotics competition.
I finally understood the team dynamics and realized that I am not the only one experiencing it and it was not an anomaly.
Oh boy, that's a huge piece of teambuilding training throughout the military. It's a good description of how new teams form. Unfortunately most teams don't get past the storming phase.
#5 is very interesting. Top companies try to mimic this, but it's hard for companies that don't grow their own people.
Accenture/Facebook/McKinsey/Goldman all have common training programs that they put new hires through. It might vary by function, but almost everyone does it.
One caveat is that (in my limited experience) military hires tend to obsess a little too much on chain of command. Chain of command is important on the battlefield, but in corporate environments the best ideas come from anywhere. And in the best companies, people focus more on being "The best" than being "The leader".
> but in corporate environments the best ideas come from anywhere
I think the difference is that is important to have a clear process to make decisions. It doesn't need to be hierarchical, but it should avoid analysis paralysis or other ills of uncertainty.
Yes. One system I've heard that works is a 5 point system.
1 - You decide without my input
2 - You decide with my input
3 - Joint decision equal input
4 - I decide with your input
5 - I decide without your input
Most good decisions are Type 2 or 4, though sometimes they need to be others. (Compliance, etc.) Then one can say, "This is a type 4 decision - I need to hear you out, but it's on me."
> Chain of command is important on the battlefield, but in corporate environments the best ideas come from anywhere.
Many good ideas in the military and on the battlefield come from the ranks, too. The chain of command is about decision-making, as jacobr1 notes.
> And in the best companies, people focus more on being "The best" than being "The leader".
This is also true in the military, since there are dedicated tracks for enlisted and officers. But senior enlisted are still expected to lead (without being the senior officer), just as a senior employee should be expected to lead (without being the CEO).
I think common experience in a corporate setting can be achieved without formal training in certain cases. For example, if everyone involved in product development also does customer service on a semi-regular basis then that is common experience that can help bind the team.
Yes. Smart companies come up with rituals that recreate this. Customer Service calls are a great example because they have big benefits above and beyond just team building. Engineers and execs who intuitively understand customers are invaluable.
There was an interesting study done on the Norwegian Naval Special Forces Command (Marinejegerne). Some years ago, there was a national plan to fold the branch in under central Special Forces Command in Norway (FSK) -- but there was some push-back from the Navy branch. In order to better quantify the cultural differences (if any) between them and other Norwegian Special Forces (eg: Army) -- they did the sensible thing: they reached out and got an external anthropologist (Tone Danielsen) to do a full anthropological study: http://www.ffi.no/no/Rapporter/12-00516.pdf (Summary in English in second paragraph).
As for the sibling comment in this thread wrt: "breaking down and building up tweens" -- while the training to get into the Norwegian Special Forces training is though, and the subjects are often young -- I think there might be more of a cross-over in organization/leadership/group dynamics than what might appear on the surface.
There are a couple of things that are needed for military operations that are different from similar activities (eg: search and rescue) -- and parts of the military mind does go against what could be considered a sound human mind in today's society. War is inherently about violence and murder. But even if we do not want our programmers to actually be assassins/ninjas -- don't want them to actually have a killer mindset -- much of military training is about changing one's idea of what can be achieved by an individual and a team (to realize that one can indeed do the (previously) "impossible". To not give up, and part of the intense drills are part of making someone an expert. In physical arts, intense drilling is required for technique to become "good enough" for expert level (this is also AFAIK true for dancing, for example).
One should also remember that as long as the organization in question is able to do meaningful self-reflection and improvement, training methods can change and result improve.
I believe SOF is Special Operations Forces and BUD/S is Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training (the intense training regimen through which all incoming Navy SEALs must pass). Not sure about the others.
"Nobody has done more research on this than the US Military, specifically the special operations community. The key takeaways that you find in very effective SOF teams are:"
This is insightful, though comparing SOF teams and commercial work teams fails in the critical areas of complex interdependency and trust. [0],[1]
I think what this google study highlights most is, candidates are not selected for man management and emotional robustness: ie: emotional honesty, self awareness and the ability to equally lead and follow. This cannot be taught. Emotions are traits. They can be shaped somewhat through team assignment as shown with the experience of Matt Sakaguchi.
[1] You fail, people around you get dead. Those around you fail, visa versa. The mission is compromised. You do not see sacrifice & self sacrifice like this in commercial world.
> emotional honesty, self awareness and the ability to equally lead and follow. This cannot be taught. Emotions are traits.
At the very least - [citation needed]. The medical community seems to disagree on that when it comes to teaching self awareness, at least for the majority of students[1][2].
I'm not sure what you mean by "emotional honesty", so it's hard to reply to that. If that's the equivalent of emotional intelligence - yes, that is teachable. Quite well.
Emotional honesty is pretty simple. Will you speak up when necessary, even if it contradicts peers or the leader? What was the last time you told the boss, "this is a stupid idea Boss, change it, or this will happen" and then the boss does so without recrimination? Remember the outcome, not ego matters.
As for the field of medicine, of which I know nothing about, in Melbourne (Aus), selection into health sciences is filtered by both self awareness, emotional maturity and smarts via both academic results, independent Uni examination (Monash) and panel interview. This the "spectrum" filter for those sufficiently smart enough to get through the academics, yet are more suited to research.
Could you teach MDs to program and work at google? Probably. Could you teach the clinical skills MDs require to make medical decisions on patients to Google SEs? Probably not.
Doctors work with people. Google engineers work with languages and data on silicon.
As it turns out, Google engineers maybe don't work with people, but they sure work with a lot of other Google engineers ;) The idea that software engineering is a solitary activity done in a cave by antisocial hermits is at least 20 years out of date - so let's let it go.
But that aside - your reply has nothing to do with what the studies I shared demonstrated: Emotional awareness is teachable. Your idea that it isn't seems entirely based on your personal assumptions. (If you have actual evidence, please share)
As for "emotional honesty" - that's pretty much the same as honesty, no? There's no emotional component to it.
The US marines in particular went through a massive transformation int he 80's after their experience in Vietnam. The name people want to look up is John Boyd.
I would hazard a guess the average Marine officer knows more about Kurt Gódel's incompleteness and its real life applications than the average techie.
Boyd's ideas are laid out really well by his acolyte Chet Richards in his book Certain to Win which applies the military theories to business. If interested at all in this space, check it out.
Thanks for bringing up Boyd. He was my inspiration for joining the military actually. The OODA loop is in my opinion the best template for how to approach problems.
I'm not disagreeing with the US Military research, but the effectiveness of teams in command-and-control environments probably doesn't translate well to more voluntary, at-will engagements like your typical work-place. Besides, companies aren't (yet?) able to break-down and rebuild tween males as armies have been doing for millenia.
I wish they would start. I guess I'm far from a tween now but please draft me and instill discipline better than the schools I'm attending where no standards are properly enforced and the grade inflation is out of control. I'm tired of getting good grades for being the only one trying while I freak out trying to teach myself to fill all the massive holes in my education...
The article contradicts your first point, and suggests too many takeaways are a sign of trouble.
Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be played down? The data didn’t offer clear verdicts. In fact, the data sometimes pointed in opposite directions. The only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them.
It doesn't though, I just didn't explain how that role works. Consider the "leader" as the lead coordinator rather than someone barking orders.
Once all of the debate is over, a decision needs to be made and followed through with, with the understanding that new information will require tweaks or wholesale re-evaluation of the plan until completion.
So in that sense, the leader ensures that everyone is executing their role well, and that everyone is aware of any deviations to it - while also delegating authority or decision making as needed as the task unfolds.
It's way more nuanced and delicate than it would seem from the outside.
I would like to hear about more about point number two. Specifically, is "talking about our insecurities, fears and aspirations" (quoted from the nytimes article) part of it?
Okay. That's in fact how the nytimes article started:
> One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was "direct and straightforward, which creates a [psychological] safe space for you to take risks."
However the rest of the article went onto to talking more about expressing one's feelings and vulnerability.
I think this is a key difference between Google's and the US Military's approach to team building.
Of course, there are some other, unspoken prerequisites to this sort of perfect harmony of flower children prancing through the meadow.
- pre-selection of qualified individuals
- dictatorial authority precluding much superfluous decision making
- martial and capital punishment casting a long shadow
- high stakes besides all of this
- weeding out according to fitness long before harmony is reached, where the weak are pruned mercilessly
What about:
- shitty HR negotiations
- lies during interviews, that can neither be proven nor disproved
- grooming habits
- sexual tension
- and the rest of all of our human foibles
The dismissive exaggeration with which this comment describes the topic seems to indicate a hostile disdain that I find confusing, all the more for how common it seems to be.
I can't quite get my mind to really understand why some viewpoints respond with aggression to ideas like what the article calls psychological safety.
I think it might have to do with how it's the aggression itself that were being called on to remove.
From the study linked in my comment higher up, I seem to recall that one thing that surprised the anthropologist was how the team came together and helped each other deal with feelings and grief when a team mate died during a training exercise. (Don't think that's in the English summary -- and it might have been from a comment made in a Norwegian interview).
A couple of things. For one, the motivations, constraints, and goals of a software development team (or the vast majority of business units, for that matter) are clearly quite different from those of military units. For another, that same culture which you are praising to the rafters (that of the U.S. Special Forces) is also famously knowing for producing colossally obscene fuckups -- of which on one in particular
may, in just 45 minutes, very well have undone all the putative good the U.S. and its allies were trying to accomplish in all of their 14 years in Afghanistan.
So on balance it seems that the culture of elite U.S. military unites is something to be shunned and avoided in civilian contexts, rather than followed and replicated.
All true, but irrelevant. No-one is putting their life on the line for "shareholder value". Your cow-orker isn't going to take a bullet for you either. And whiteboarding a red-black tree is nothing like waterboarding in SERE...
> 3. A clearly defined, proven effective and specialized role for every member with each member knowing how each others role plays together
This is much easier for a SEAL team, which has "someone else" dealing with all the other stuff, from procurement to catering to writing the paychecks. As a result, the same rule will work for making teams in an enterprise, but a SMB cannot do this - there isn't much room for "not in my job description" at a SMB.
These are great qualities for making a team which follows orders and makes field decisions within a extremely narrow scope.
These are terrible qualities for teams who are self-assigned, entrepreneurial, and have to disrupt standard accepted behaviors in order to create new products.
For example in Number 4: How does this work when the teams assignment is to come up with an objective, rather than just have one assigned to them.
Answer: They would splinter and struggle because they are following a chain of command.
Which follows to Number 1: To make products you need a diverse set of leaders who share authority in varying decisions, not a chain of people who wrongly think themselves to be universal experts. This does require Number 3, but in a different cultural fashion that isn't so rigidly hierarchical.
Basically these are great for teams who just take commands from the actual guy makes the decisions. Google and the NYT are interested in the teams that make decisions. I think the modern workplace is actually trying to UNDO these very narrow minded and ultimately damaging behaviors and their misapplication to the creation process.
No offense but I don't think you understand Special Operations. You are describing how conventional forces largely operate.
SOF on the other hand are typically given a problem and asked to figure out a solution. Watch Charlie Wilson's war or read any of the books about the weeks after 9/11 in Afghanistan as a good example of this in practice.
For example in Number 4: How does this work when the teams assignment is to come up with an objective, rather than just have one assigned to them.
Answer: They would splinter and struggle because they are following a chain of command.
This is completely wrong. In fact the majority of the problems SOF are given are within the domain of objective identification for effects. When problems come down, everyone works together equally (back to the communication piece) to come up with a solution just like we do with startups. When it's time to execute, you execute within that chain and take direction based on your role.
Basically these are great for teams who just take commands from the actual guy makes the decisions.
Again, that's not how it works. Often the "commands" are even more nebulous than within narrow software domains. For example: "Keep [wartorn city] stable enough to allow for elections to run."
Special Ops::Conventional forces :::: Skunk Works :: corporate workplace.
They are specially selected and are non-representative. Whatever lessons that can be drawn there are inapplicable to conventional forces, let alone regular teams in the corporate environment. They might apply to special project teams ('skunk-works' type projects), but that has limited value as it is not scalable.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss its applicability.
I imagine a large part of what SOF do is solve unforeseeable problems in the context of trying to accomplish some goal, and to be able to adapt quickly if the goal changes. This is pretty analogous to what a startup is faced with when trying to accomplish a goal, when you'll find that most of your team's initial ideas, as good as they seemed at the outset, were wrong, and you'll be trying to face problems and seize opportunities that you didn't even know you had. For both SOF and these teams, being able to adapt quickly to new information and circumstances, and to resolve the problems that come up which will destroy you, are critical.
I apply "startup" also in the sense of "startup-like" teams in large companies who are required to innovate rapidly.
> I apply "startup" also in the sense of "startup-like" teams in large companies who are required to innovate rapidly
I think we are in agreement - the applicability is likely to limited to 'small' specially chosen/specially tasked teams. i.e. it does not scale to thousands of employees (otherwise the army would be doing the same for conventional forces)
I think your answer shows how you are already narrowing and then differing to an authority to give you scope. Relative to you, that might seem like creation, but its actually just following through on a pre-planed, however vague, agenda. This is common among military-mindset types who scope out the problem they can't process and then claim to have solved it. They are rightly trained to ignore what is "above their pay grade."
The "higher pay grade" problem a team must solve in your example is to shift a popular mindset in a region to inspire them to create elections, not keep the city safe while elections occur as assigned from your superior officer.
These teams need to decide the human social agenda, not just the strategy and execution of one given to them.
narrowing and then differing to an authority to give you scope.
I think the difference is that you assume that is not happening in the entrepreneurial world. In fact it is, only guided by consumer demand, or some broadly defined corporate niche or group of uncoordinated individuals [1].
But that gets off the point however. Lets be clear here though, the scope of the article was how Google builds teams within the already defined "higher pay grade" problems. So by definition that is the context of what I am discussing teams already within a system. As it relates to Google they have "higher pay grade orders" from the Executive team of Page/Brin etc.... This is not Valve we are talking about here.
I think you are trying to make a larger statement about entreprenurial endeavors in sum total at the economy level which is not the scope of this discussion and it not relevant.
The larger statement is that civilian teams are focusing on optimistic futures to create value and military teams are focusing on horrible realities to mitigate loss. The team configurations for those two things I think should be radically different.
We become dystopian when we apply the ultimately violent tactics of the military to the creation based goals of civilians.
The SOF individuals are some of the smartest entrepreneurial individuals you will meet. They are able to work together as a team because they build from what the OP has said.
Taking a simplified example to make further arguments is not fair. There can always be further counter-arguments. SOF will be deployed and then they adapt to problems with a clear goal.
If you told the team, develop plans for the stabilization of a government, they can do it.
> This is common among military-mindset types who scope out the problem they can't process and then claim to have solved it. They are rightly trained to ignore what is "above their pay grade."
I'm sorry, but you could not be more wrong. Even in the "conventional" Marine Corps infantry, we were not trained to ignore any problem. We were constantly being taught to take over the job of our superiors at a moment's notice. All downtime was filled with adhoc classes to train the lowest grunt to operate at several levels above his pay grade.
If you think SOF or even Marines defer silently to officers, you only know what you have seen on TV. You are just completely off base here.
Look at what he's saying, it's not a deep insight but there is a credible amount of truth to it.
At the bottom entry level units do defer. Boots stick around for morning formation after weekend leave still buzzed drunk because they're just told what to do and face consequences otherwise.
But then in the Corps the TIG promotions tend to weed those types out so that the motivated and qualified ones go upward the chain as NCOs. Then TIS promotions tend to be push those more qualified into SNCO roles.
To say that every single boot, or that every single service member is immediately capable of stepping up to be field officers because the one charge that was saluted all the time got sniped off is a ridiculous assertion.
But it is heavily incorporated, and more specifically in the Corps, for lateral movement up, or even down, a few ranks.
That's setup to optimize for the resiliency of the organization whereas in a corporation that's fragile because people working there are merely linked by bank account and therefore inspire no loyalty.
Similarly, not every company can hire and pick and choose from a bunch of highly motivated individuals like Google could. Skills are easy to find, but finding people to have any enthusiasm for large corporations' work is incredibly hard and the military tends to use peer pressure basically to get people to conform to certain standards, but I can't do that as a lead in a behemoth corporation people only stay awake for because of a paycheck. If I fired everyone that wasn't engaged, I wouldn't exactly have a team.
Hence, I think it's massively important to realize that hiring for elite anything is really nothing like hiring for random warm bodies-at-problem techniques oftentimes used by mediocre performing companies that have a lack of leadership capabilities.
Okay motivator, I get what you're saying and if the entirety of the operators community is all we needed for every situation and conflict we got going on in this world then so be it.
But there's still plenty of work for everyone else. Turning a 17 year old high school dropout into a team player with good attitude and good work ethic and good mind set is what this thread deviated to.
Contrary to popular belief the personalities that appear most successful in the military are those that tend to be the most independent and anti-conformist.
As a counterpoint everybody follows a chain of command. In all the corporate jobs I have held I never experienced a chain of command noticeably different from the military. Just like in corporate world the military allows you some latitude to push back on your leaders if they make a completely disastrous decision. The primary difference there is that you are more motivated to push back if a bad decision could mean increased risk to security (people's lives). I have never experienced this level of critical impasse in the corporate world.
The military is mostly like working for a corporate employer with some key differences:
* In theory the military expects everybody to be a leader, though in practice not everybody is willing to step up and make leader-like decisions or in some cases toxic leaders will suppress the opportunity.
* The military is a really big bureaucracy, which can constrict many creative (unorthodox) leadership decisions, but sometimes produces extremely unorthodox solutions to work around the bureaucracy.
* There are points in the military where you are demanded to work really long hours (like 12-16 hours, 6 or 7 days a week). In that amount of time everybody's personality is hyper-amplified. Some people can make this work really make their teams gel, where other people become terminal destructive forces.
* The military is often really bad at a constant work pace. Consider the phrase "hurry up and wait". You tend to get really good at accomplishing tasks at 4x human speed so that you can go back to being paid to self-study or watch movies.
* Look at how hard your corporate CEO works, the number of simultaneous tasks they have to balance, and the constant uncertainty in their schedules and travel. When you deploy in the military the entire team works at that tempo all the time.
* You don't get to be a conformist tool as a military technician, because then the bureaucracy will crush your soul. You quickly learn to invent your own solution to many common problems. This is substantially less true of many corporate software developers.
I know this is probably an unpopular idea around here, but I generally think "self-assigned" teams are a terrible idea. Without a top-level roadmap to guide progress a company would quickly devolve into an uncoordinated mess. Sure, it can birth some really innovative gems from a very large organization. That's the exception rather than the rule, though. This kind of "teams making decisions" structure nearly killed Sony when they started infighting and reinventing wheels. Google, IMO, succeeds in spite of rather than because of this structure at this point, and only because of their ridiculously high hiring bar.
There is a middle ground between Google and, say, Lockheed where teams are given a general direction to pull to keep them organized and working towards the company's goals but are otherwise free to determine how to accomplish those goals on their own.
> makes field decisions within a extremely narrow scope.
What? Modern Western armed forces, and especially special forces units, make many independent decisions requiring great amounts of creativity and initiative. The hallmark of over 300 years of Western military units is the ability to operate without consulting the chain of command for every decision.
Were you a member of an armed force from a more centralized military, such as Russia or China? If so, then your perspective makes more sense.
>> To make products you need a diverse set of leaders who share authority in varying decisions, not a chain of people who wrongly think themselves to be universal experts.
Works fine in case of actual universal experts Steve Jobs's, Jonathan Ive's, Larry Wall's or Linus Torvald's of the world.
That argument begins to break down when you appoint the wrong people to that job. You now have to follow orders only because some one is giving them, not because they are right.
This is exactly the opposite of what the article says. Please don't try to hijack it with pro-military stumping.
Excerpt:
As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as "equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking." On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. "As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well," Woolley said. "But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined."
Second, the good teams all had high "average social sensitivity" — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt...
That is way more fluid in terms of authority and touchy-feely than rigid military hierarchies.
Which makes sense given that roles are much more fluid in creative enterprises and there's no life-or-death quick decisionmaking that favors decisiveness over debate. Not to say that there's no creative thinking in the military, but role and responsibilities can be more clearly defined at the outset.
I think it's pretty unfair to categorize the prior comment as "pro-military stumping". It read to me like the commenter was providing some possibly alternative information from a different field that might provide interesting insights others could use. There was no strong pro-military tone that I can see after a couple re-readings. Moreover, the items the commenter laid out weren't inherently the opposite of what you provided as an excerpt. The original comment doesn't say anything about equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, or intuiting how others felt. I mean, item #2 is advocating the benefit of constant communication among the team ... so it actually sounds like it could complement the article's findings.
people may speak over one another, go on tangents and socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda. The team may seem inefficient to a casual observer. But all the team members speak as much as they need to. They are sensitive to one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions.
Overwhelmingly the key point of the article is "In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs." It focuses heavily on emotional and psychological needs, not "clear authority" or "clearly defined, proven effective and specialized roles," which is what the comment was trying to hijack this to emphasize (that stuff is nowhere in the article).
It's true the previous comment did include a line on "candid and constant communication," but that is quite overbroad and omits the key distinction of the nature of that communication. The key point of the article is that it is of a tangential and/or personal nature, not just candid operational feedback. This is why I think it's fair to criticize the comment as missing the whole point of the article.
Except you did not criticize the commenter for missing the point of the article (as you see it), you combatively accused them of hijacking the discussion with "pro-military stumping".
This doesn't contradict it at all and you are confusing line-infantry with SOF, which is specifically what I am referring to.
CONOPS (Concept of operations) planning goes exactly like described with equality of input throughout the process. In fact it goes beyond that with team members continuously providing input throughout the run-up and execution of whatever operation is in play.
In many cases during whatever operation is happening, any team member, regardless of rank, can call "knock it off" if something is not going well and the team will respond to that.
That is way more fluid in terms of authority and touchy-feely than rigid military hierarchies
Again, this rigidity of hierarchy is a myth within high performing SOF teams (CAG (Delta), DEVGRU, 75th Ranger Regiment etc...)
there's no life-or-death quick decisionmaking that favors decisiveness over debate.
Again, this misrepresents how battlefield decisions get made and overplays how democratic decisions are within [insert startup]. There is advantage to "violence of action" - meaning making a decision can be made and emphatically executed quickly - but it's not the case that it needs to be approved by TOP (the leader). One of the key benefits of SOF is that everyone has the ability to make a decision that might veer from the plan without it being insubordination or some other offense.
The key takeaways that you find in very effective SOF teams are:
1. Clear and accepted authority chain (Top guy earned their place at the top)
2. Candid and constant communication/feedback between all members
3. A clearly defined, proven effective and specialized role for every member with each member knowing how each others role plays together
4. Common sense of purpose (Objective etc...)
5. Common experience (BUD/s, Q, FTC etc...)
If you have all of those then pretty much everything else falls into place. Note also that this has no requirement for everyone to being an "A" personality or whatever and has basically no bearing on what they do outside of work. Those aspects can help, but they can equally hurt depending on the egos involved.