How to design teams that don’t suck

Hi, TED Podcast listeners. It's Elise Hu here from TED Talks Daily. Thanks for making our podcast part of your routine. We really appreciate it, and we want to make your favorite TED podcasts even better. We put together a quick survey, and we'd love to hear from you. It only takes a few minutes, but it helps us shape our shows and get to know you, our listeners, way better. Head to the episode description to find the link. Thank you again for listening and for taking the time to help our shows. It was the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, and the U.S. men's hockey team was facing off against the Soviets. On paper, the winner looked obvious. The Soviet team had won gold in four straight Olympics. Just a year earlier, they'd beaten the NHL All-Star team. And just three days before the Olympics started, the Soviets had destroyed the U.S. team ten to three. Yeah, they were the best. You know, it could beat you at the top end of their lineup, or they could beat you at the back end of their lineup. John Harrington was on the U.S. team. They knew the odds were stacked against them. At that time, it wasn't like, "Hey, we think we can win this thing." It was like, "We're hoping to get to the metal round." And I think we rallied around that feeling that we are underdogs. That might have given them an extra boost, because as the games began, the U.S. team started winning and upsetting higher-ranked teams. And I think as games went on, each game went on, we were getting better as a group. We're getting more confident as a group. All of a sudden, they found themselves in the metal round, facing down the Soviet team. To have a shot at gold, they had to beat the best team in the world. Team captain Mike Aruzioni remembers the anticipation the locker in. It was quiet. This is the biggest game we've ever played, and it's quiet. Nobody in the world thought we could win. The Soviets scored early on. The U.S. matched it, and the game continued neck and neck. And I remember as that game went on, you're still almost thinking, "Hey, at any time, these guys can fill up the back of the net." So it was like playing every second that we had to be at the top of our game or things might go wrong. Then came the deciding moment in the last period. The game was tied three-to-three. John passed to a teammate. Who passed to Mike? Who took a shot? And... Well, I'm glad it went in. We went absolutely nuts. I mean, it absolutely went crazy. You know, just like, holy smokes. Like, here we are. Like, this dream we all had about going to the Olympics and being successful and winning a gold medal. Like, we were there. We were getting there, and it was possible. Somehow, the team managed to hang on for the last 10 minutes. Then announcer Al Michaels made his famous call. You believe in miracle? Yeah, I always kid Al Michaels. I said, "Al, you know, it wasn't a miracle, but that's a really catchy phrase." The game became known as the miracle on ice. You've probably heard the story or seen the movie. But what you haven't heard is the science that helps to illuminate how the US team won. It's not just relevant to winning a gold medal. It can also bring out the best in us and make our own teams better. I'm Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with its head audio collective. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show, we explore how to unlock the potential in people and workplaces. Today, team effectiveness and how to make a group more than the sum of its parts. What I was really preoccupied with was how come the groups that I am in always seemed to suck so bad. And that I wanted to understand because there was possibly a personal relevance there. Richard Hackman was the world's leading expert on teams, and even he couldn't make them work. Richard was one of my mentors. Back in 2001, I had no idea what to do with my psychology major. Then I took his class on organizational psychology, and I was hooked. He dazzled us with his studies of teams in a wide range of settings, from airline cockpit crews, to symphony orchestras, to government intelligence units. Richard passed away in 2013, so I couldn't record a conversation with him. But we do have some archival audio. He once explained his struggles with teams on the People and Projects podcast. Well, of course, it is widely known that people who study something can't practice it. So, I mean, you know, shrinks are crazy, marriage counselors get divorced, shoemaker's kids have holes in their souls, and people who study groups are probably terrible at actually leading or being in groups. I find them frustrating beyond belief. Many of Richard's peers believe that the secret to improving groups was team building exercises. They assumed that icebreakers and bonding activities fueled liking and helped groups collaborate effectively. I'm guessing you probably know a few managers who still have the same theory, and you've probably had to suffer through a lot of name games and escape rooms as a result. But Richard wasn't sold. He thought we had caused an effect backward. A lot of people will go out and say, oh, the problem with this team is there's a lot of conflict, and there's mistrust in one another. So, what we will do are trust exercises to build trust. And there really is a cart horse problem here, because trust really is important. I agree with that. But trust emerges from a team that is operating well. It doesn't work the other way around. Sure enough, the evidence shows that teams don't have to sing kumbaya together to start excelling together. It's not liking that drives performance. It's often high performance that leads people to get along. And high performance is the result of good team design. Richard explained this in a Lifetime Achievement Award speech. This is a caricature, but the basic message is true. 60% of the variance and how well a team is going to do is the term of the group members even meet, okay? It's whether you've got the right conditions in place. Let that sink in. Team design is more important than team dynamics. And many groups aren't designed to be real teams. Think about the teams you've been on at work. How often are they built for collaboration with everyone working toward a shared purpose versus just happening to share an office and some projects? Some of Richard's key design conditions aren't common practice, but they are common sense. For starters, you need to clear who, what, and how. The who is stable membership, a group of people who stay together. The what is a compelling goal that creates a sense of purpose. And the how is a unique role well suited to each member. But there are a couple design conditions that aren't intuitive, and you can see them in the Miracle on Ice. Mike Ruzioni was the captain of our 1980 Olympic hockey team. And of course, known to all of us on our Olympic team as Mike Holiday and Ruzioni because he's America's guest. He has been for going on 43 years now. I swear to God, I've never heard him say that or anybody. I don't know where he came up with that. It must be a way to promote himself. He made some kind of comment about how you've never had to pay for a hotel, given your hero status. I have to have a talk with him. He should see my expense, Bill. No, he seriously has done a tremendous job and was a great leader for us and a great captain, and certainly somebody who was still as great a team player with all of our guys as he was in 1980. Mike was 25. That made him one of the two most seasoned guys on the team. The US didn't have the luxury of recruiting the most experienced players. The team was full of amateurs. Most were still in college, and several were as young as 19 and 20. You know, we were the youngest Olympic team, I think, at this point we'd ever put on the ice. Our first instinct is often that a great team should be full of experienced players. If you're in tech, you want to form a crew of seasoned coders. If you're in sales, you hope to assemble a group of salespeople with decades of practice under their belts. But when you're designing a team, you actually don't need the most experienced individuals. You want to design a group around shared experience, as Richard explained. The one that often gets overlooked is we need to learn how to work together when there is really a liability to newness. Research shows the teams are more likely to excel when they've spent more time training and working together. You can see it in studies of software development teams. They do faster, higher quality work after they've collaborated for months or years. The stakes of shared experience can be very high. Take flight crews. There's evidence that well-rested crews that haven't flown together before make more potentially catastrophic errors than exhausted crews that have just flown together. Even if you're tired, shared experience improves communication. And cardiac surgeons who do all their procedures with a core team at one hospital are about 10% less likely to lose a patient than surgeons who split their time between different teams at different hospitals. There's a general view that after a team has been together for a while, they'll start to get a little too relaxed and too accepting of each other's foibles and errors and so forth. There really isn't empirical evidence for that. What you see instead is the team continuing to get better at a decreasing rate, but continuing to get better over time. Shared experience allows people to leverage each other's strengths, compensate for each other's weaknesses, and build effective routines. It's especially clear in sports. NBA basketball teams win more games once they played multiple seasons together, in part because they get better at coordinating their plays. You can see that up close in the Miracle on Ice. Leading up to the 1980 Olympics, many members of the Soviet team had played together before. But even though the US team was new, one of their secret weapons was that they had a lot of history together. The US Olympic coach, Herb Brooks, recruited players with shared experience. Of the 20 guys on the final roster, nine had played for Herb at Minnesota, and four more had played together in Boston. Well, I think the big thing for us to play with the Minnesota kids is they played under Herb. So when we thought Herb was back crazy, they would just kind of laugh at us and explain, this is what he does. So it was very helpful being with the Minnesota kids because they knew Herb's antics. And on the other side of the coin, it was great to have the full Boston guys there because we knew each other. We played against each other. We grew up in the same, basically, pretty much the same neighborhoods. I'd known Jack O'Callaghan since he was 14 or 15 years old. So having that atmosphere for us as local guys was helpful. They had experience together before the whole team even met for the first time. What Herb did is called a lift out, recruiting an intact team. This is effective far beyond sports. In startups, instead of just launching a company with their friends, co-founders get along better if they've worked together in the past. And on Wall Street, research shows that if you poach a star security analyst from another firm, it takes an average of five years for them to recover their outstanding performance. But if you hire their team with them, they maintain their star status from day one. Of course, you don't always have the opportunity to recruit a team with shared experience, but you can build it by having the team practice and perform together. If you're setting up a team of data scientists, have them go through training together. If you're forming a board committee, role play some decisions together. And if you're building a hockey team, form a line that stays together. Nobody could play with those three clowns. Hamilton, Schneider, and Pavlich, they were the only line, I think, that stayed together all year because they each knew each other so well and where they were going and what they were doing. They became known as the Cone Headline. John was one of them. Yeah, that's a funny thing. I think Mark Pavlich said at one time, he goes, we might as well be cones out here because we never get to play on a power play. And maybe they could use us for cones. Why did your line play together so well? Like I know, like certainly I played with Mark Pavlich in college and we had played together and both were kind of rink red guys and outdoor hockey guys who understood how to play in small spaces and move the puck. And then Mark Pavlich, his hometown was like four miles from mine and by Schneiders was like 20 miles from my hometown. So we're all from the same area up there and grew up playing the same way as the season we're on in that Olympic year and stuck together. So we got to understand each other's games a little bit better and certainly gain confidence in our ability to play the game for her. That's so interesting. I never thought about that. It was pretty clear to me that the guys who had been on a college team together would have benefited from shared experience. They had some familiar routines. They knew each other's strengths and weaknesses. It did not dawn on me that the fact that a lot of you guys grew up playing basically the same style of hockey in the same places also kind of spoke the same language. Yeah, it did. And I knew as a younger player too. Like, I mean, when I'm learning the game, when you're playing with friends and playing on an outdoor rink or on a pond, I mean, you're watching the older guys and going, how are they playing? I want to be like them. Another design condition that many people miss is shared responsibility. Extensive evidence reveals that the bond between people is less important than their bond around a mission. In other words, mission cohesion matters more than social cohesion. And what creates that cohesion around a mission is shared responsibility. This is one of the reasons why team bonding activities are often ineffective. If you and your teammates don't have a shared goal that you're invested in together, your team will still flounder no matter how much you like each other. Her Brooks didn't worry much about the relationship between his hockey players. He focused on their responsibility to the team. Yeah, I think that was certainly one of the things that he had to do early in our season was to convince everybody that, you know, what's on the front of your jersey, the USA is more important than what's on the back, your own name, and that we have to play together. And he certainly did a great job of making us believe that as the season went on. I love the front of the jersey is more important than the back. Just it's such a powerful illustration of what we often talk about in my world of putting your mission above your ego. Well, exactly. And we certainly had to do that on our team, Adam. I mean, we had great individual players, but we had to play together. And when we played together, I think we needed to be greater than those individual parts. They had an important mission of representing America. To reinforce that the outcome was in their hands. Herb gave them an extra common enemy, him. Herb always stressed to us that everybody has a job and a role and understand what that is and will be a team. And I think Herb created that chemistry for us because it was always us against him. He started out from the beginning when he said, I'll be your coach, but I won't be your friend. So it was really upon us to bond and come together knowing that it was going to be us against Herb. He was very demanding. And that I think the way he coached us made us come together even quicker. One key moment happened after an exhibition game. So we played Norway in Norway. The game ended, it actually ended in the 3-3 tie. And we started to skate off the ice and then all of a sudden Herb's out there and he blew the whistle and he brought us down on one end of the rink and we started to proceed to do the Herbys. Herb wasn't happy with their performance, so he gave them a challenge to face together. A tough skating drill that became known as the Herbys. It was goal line to the near blue line and back to the goal line and then to the red line and back to the blue line, then to the far blue line and back to the goal line and then all the way down to the end boards and all the way back. Then we'd stretch, then he blew the whistle and we did him again for 15 minutes and then we stretched, then he blew the whistle and we did him again. It was tiring and it was tough, but I think that was a that was a drill that was always somewhere between doing conditioning and doing punishment and so he kept everybody out there and and then the I remember the arena guy, the arena ice guy, was up in the corner screaming in Norwegian. I think he wanted to go home. He turned the lights out. And then I remember the drill ending because guys were smashing their stick against the boards. We were pretty pissed off and then Herb said, "If I hear another goddamn stick smash against the boards, you'll skate till you die." Well, nobody said a word and we finished the drills. We went back in a locker room and we had to play Norway the next day and Herb said, "If you play this way again tomorrow, you're going to skate again." They didn't play that way again. The next night, the U.S. crushed Norway nine to nothing. So maybe Herb made his point. I wonder if you know some of that was let me let me put these guys under adversity together and see if that brings them together. Yeah, I think it does. And I think he wanted to show everybody he was going to treat everybody the same that there weren't going to be any favorites on the team that we're all in this together and that everybody played for everybody else. That they understood that that we wouldn't be successful if we didn't try to play together. And I also knew that, you know, he expected us and wanted us to be the best conditioned team, but he also wanted us to be the mentally toughest team, too. And I think that everybody would always remember that lesson in Oslo there, that we have to be able to bring it when we're in the heat of the battle because eventually we were going to get the late class of where you wouldn't get a second chance. It wouldn't matter if you did stops and starts or herbies or lightnings after the game. If the game was lost, you couldn't get it back. Herb's methods were a little intense, but there's something to be said for creating collective challenges as one way to design for shared responsibility. A second approach is to flesh out a common identity. This means focusing on what's central, distinctive, and enduring to the team. For example, you can invite members to create a team name, a vision, and a set of shared values. Evidence from non-profit professional theaters suggests that which identity the team chooses is less important than whether they're aligned together or rounded. A third option is to reinforce the importance of the goal and of each person's unique contribution. I found in my research that it's not enough to just talk about how the work will make a difference. It's more effective to bring in a customer, a client, or an end user to speak firsthand about why the work matters. That underscores the meaning of the task and reminds the team that others are depending on them to succeed. The US hockey team had a whole country counting on them. Their shared responsibility and shared experience helped them bring out the best in one another, which enabled them to beat the Soviets and then win gold. Honestly, God, I sit there and watch that, and I get goosebumps when I watch that. I could see you getting chills. I mean, it's amazing even just to watch your reaction, watching it 43 years later. Yeah, I mean, never get tired of watching that, never get tired of what happened in the games, and that experience and having to be a part of it is certainly the greatest thing that's happened to me as an hockey player. We had individual parts, and we had players that played different ways in different systems and came from different areas of the country. But over that course of the year, we grew together as a team and we grew together as teammates and people who just, when we played together, we somehow could make it greater than we could do individually. You could see it at the medal ceremony when Mike went up to accept the gold medal as the team captain. I'm standing on the podium after the flag and after the anthem. My teammates are looking at me and I'm looking at them. So for me, it was a reaction just to call them up and we all fit on it. I don't think we'll all fit on it today, but we all fit on it then. Good design is only part of the recipe. Once you have shared experience and shared responsibility in place, how do you launch a team to set them up for success? And if they start to struggle, how do you intervene to turn things around? More on that after the break. In college, I did my senior thesis on team effectiveness. The first time I went to meet with Richard Hackman about it, he was sitting at his desk with his feet on the table. No shoes, just socks. So he liked to take off his shoes. So he would be frequently viewed walking with his shoes off. He had a sweet tooth, so to get him to read my paper, I would clip a candy bar to it with a note saying, "Don't eat this until you're reading my paper." Sounded like you were describing a dog more than a human. No shoes. Must use treats to motivate. That's right. Exactly. Well, you know, there's some of those things in all of us, probably. Anita Woolley is an organizational behavior professor at Carnegie Mellon. She was one of Richard's protégés, and she's now one of the world's foremost authorities on teams. When Anita started working with Richard, they were fascinated by team beginnings. The quality of the launch of the group, that is, what happens when the members first come together. Anita and Richard collaborated on a study to see if a simple intervention at launch would help teams work better together. They pre-screened thousands of people and formed teams. Some teams were staffed with multiple experts. Others were given no experts at all. Then they gave all the teams a task. And it was a counterterrorism scenario that we came up with based on a combination of cases that we had seen in our intelligence community work. So there was a ground truth. We knew what happened. Each team was supposed to solve the case. And surprisingly, when teams of experts were left to their own devices, they actually performed worse than teams without experts that had one little design advantage. Instead of diving right into the task, the successful teams had been randomly assigned to do a collaborative planning exercise. They talked about who would be responsible for what and how they would integrate their knowledge. Team planning led to a successful launch. And it was just a matter of setting the groundwork and the norms and giving them a kind of script to follow for how to work together. And I think it's played out a lot, actually, in other teams I've been part of. And I have make all the student teams do that. Students regularly will say, "Wow, this was one of the best teams I've ever been on. I don't know what you did. All the magic and composing." And I'm like, "It's not really magic. It's kind of pretty basic, but it's pretty powerful." I need to guide them to create a team charter together. This is basically a team manual, a document that maps out goals, roles, and routines. Does your team have one? The not-so-magical formula for a good charter is the same as the one for a good team design. Who, what, and how. So when we think about team design, we think about who's in the team, what they're trying to do, and how they're going to work together. How are they going to be structured in terms of decision-making? How are they going to actually combine their inputs? And even if you assume everybody is on the same page about all of those things, I think often you're surprised as you start to talk about them. You realize that you're not. People had different assumptions, and it's just hugely valuable to clarify that as early as possible. We all know the value of post-mortems when things don't go right, but my favorite part of a team charter conversation turns that idea upside down. Before the work begins, you do a pre-mortem. Imagine that your team has crashed and burned and discussed the most likely causes. There's evidence that a pre-mortem can help to prevent overconfidence and promote better routines. You kind of think, visualize the future and you failed, and how did you fail? Why did you fail? What did you do wrong? It's really powerful how that change in perspective can really reveal new ideas that you wouldn't have thought about before. So absolutely kind of trying to project forward, I think is a very important piece. Yeah, I'm a big fan of them, and I think it's so much more effective to anticipate problems and prevent them than it is to have to solve them later. Ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure. Benjamin Franklin. There you go, and he's still right. Once your team is off and running, it still needs help to thrive. Sometimes it's clear when a team is struggling, but not always. Richard Hackman found that if you want to know how your team is doing, it's not enough to consider performance. A manager or coach should also monitor learning and well-being. Are people growing together and enjoying the experience, or are they hitting each other's guts and feeling like they're stagnating? And you also need to look at viability. Is the team going to be capable of working together in the future, or are they burning bridges as they go? If your team isn't quite there, you might need an intervention. Often, when we think about fixing a team, our first impulse is to swap people in and out, or coach specific members. But what's more useful is coaching people together as a team and looking at problems with collaboration. Absolutely, and I mean, clearly there could be individual deficiencies and sort of a technical skill or whatever. So, you know, those should definitely be addressed. But sometimes when we're looking at a group, even if we're talking about conflict or pick your favorite group disease, sometimes there is a system level contributor that would take care of a lot of things that seem individual level, right? So, for example, there could be somebody who has skills that are not being utilized and because of, you know, other norms in the group. And so then that person gets to be difficult. They start being, you know, very irritable. They don't show up. They don't deliver what they are supposed to do because they feel disrespected and whatever. And so, if you were going to try to coach that person, you know, to fix the problem, it wouldn't probably fix the problem, right? So, at least considering the system level issues is an important piece to really getting at the heart of what might be happening. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of saying to a conflict mediator, like, you have two people who are having a fight. You can talk to each of them, but you're never going to talk to them together. Not going to work. And probably, like, even more difficult, there's probably some other pieces to their shared context that are contributing that are going to be hard to really detect or figure out. Just can we just go around and introduce ourselves? Sure. My name's Alex. My name's Emily. Kaylee. My name's Javier. I'm Judy and I'm based out of the Bay Area. This is a marketing team at Atlassian, the company behind software like Jira and Confluence. Their specialty is collaboration. They make tools for teams. So it's not surprising that they have an international reputation for their excellence in running their own self-managed teams. This team has gathered for a coaching session led by the company's resident work futurist, Dom Price. Awesome. Just to wrap things up, I'm not in this team, but I'm your facilitator for today, Dom Price. I'm joining you from sunny Sydney. The team just started working together a few weeks before this call. On a recent offsite, they did what Atlassian calls a team health monitor. The health monitor is our diagnostic. The teams do to get a feel for how they're working. This is similar to the kind of team monitoring that Richard Hackman suggested. The Atlassian team found they were struggling with coordination and communication. Most crucially, they hadn't decided where and how to make decisions. They wound up retracing each other's steps and relitigating choices that were already made. To make this more difficult, they were scattered across different time zones. And because they're so spread out around the world, they were just missing those conversations. They all arrived with the assumption of going, "I assume we'll just work the way my old team worked." And you're like, "Yeah, no, unfortunately, you've now glued together seven different ways of working and it doesn't work." And so it's like, "Okay, time out. Let's have an agreement." Specifically, they needed agreements on where to have different types of conversations. Like, I don't think we have any of those standards in place. So we're all over the place right now, me especially. I'm number one guilty. I'm terrible at Slack. So short conversations, really long conversations, like full text posts, like decisions, like all of that happens on Slack. Some team members liked casual spur-the-moment calls. I will choose to Slack-huttle overwrite anything, but there is a method to the madness. If I don't think it needs to be documented, and if I don't think there's certain steps to getting to whatever the discussion is, I will always choose to Slack-huttle. I feel a little bit closer to the person, and then it's a little less formal than Zoom. I tell people it's like speaking on a walkie-talkie and you're just going back and forth and just getting ideas flowing or just catching up. Other team members wanted more official communication, because without it, they ended up redoing a bunch of work. Sometimes I get nervous with huddles or like these exam chats. It's because there's no way for me to document or reference back, you know what I mean? Like, we might have lied on something, and then what I have to do anyway, is if it's a bigger thing, is recap what we just said, and so that's just an extra step. Yeah, so Judy, make that a standard for me. Let's give Havi a rule that says Havi. You can do your Slack-huddles because they work for you, and we want you to be the best version of you. Have we wanted you to have those chats? Thank you, Don. But I can't have those decisions sat in secret, sat in a brain bubble somewhere. So the Atlassian team came to a compromise. So we're going to give everyone the rule, not the law, we can't make laws, everyone the rule that if we're in a Slack-huddle and we make an impunction decision, that's a good thing, but not if no one else knows about it. So any decision needs to be, document decisions and share with impacted, yeah? Because none of us want a team with an upset program manager who doesn't know the decision that we've made. They'll make our life hell. These kinds of conversations could happen individually, but when they happen as a team, there's an opportunity to bring out the best in everyone's working styles. If you do it individually, what tends to happen is the leader decides the communication channel in the meetings and you're like, okay, if you say that's how we're doing it, I think it's terrible, but we'll do it and I'll pretend it's fine, right? It's very top down. What you would have noticed in that exercise is sometimes I got Javier to lead, sometimes I got Alex to lead, sometimes I got Emily to lead. Know what? It's a team activity. The team turns up to these meetings. The team is in these channels communicating. So we're always solving for the team. Think of the multiverse where this Atlassian team doesn't pause and have this conversation. Maybe you've been in that multiverse. They get stuck in loops, wasting time, redoing work, resentment builds. A team intervention can help to head off tensions before they start to fester. Something everyone goes, ah, you can even see during the session, people are going, ah, like stuff that we just thought, I thought I'd said that out loud already and I hadn't and then when you say it out loud, people really recognize it. So that's how a lot of these plays go. It's stuff that you already knew that you just get to surface, that you then get to resolve that gives you a better way of working. Empirically, team coaching tends to be most effective at inflection points and these tend to happen at certain predictable times, in particular, the midpoint. That's when teams become more open to changing up their strategy and process. They also have enough information about the work to have insights about maybe what changes would be useful. But you really have to force that process too. So when I do it with teams that I work with, I have the members individually do an evaluation of things and then I give them an aggregated report that sort of compares them to some norm and says, okay, you know, are we using member skills very well? Do you feel like your skills are utilized or where are we falling short? Do we all agree on what we're still trying to do? Do we still think that's the right direction and how about the ways we're working together? You know, are they effective? The key to better teams isn't magic. It's also not a miracle. Sometimes it just takes a little prompt to reflect and evolve. Humans kind of have these sources of inertia, you know, where they don't want to bring things up or maybe they don't want to open conversations, but it doesn't take much to get them to do it. Richard Hackman would be the first to tell you that he never really mastered working in groups. But thanks to his research and the work of his protégés, we know a lot about how to help teams work better. Richard believed passionately that designing a great team wasn't just about producing great results. It was also about creating meaningful experiences. What happens to the team itself over time? Does it grow in capability? Is it a better performing unit? And what happens to the individuals? Did they learn something? Did they grow and develop professionally or was this a waste of their time or something that frustrated and alienated them? The greatest teams of any kind are the ones that get better over time and that provide a setting in which individual members can continue to learn and grow. This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our team includes Courtney Guarino, Constanza Gallardo, Dan O'Donnell, Greta Kohn, Grace Rubinstein, Daniela Balarezzo, Ben Ben Cheng, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Highlash. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our show is mixed by Ben Shano, original music by Hans Dale Sue and Allison Layton Brown. Add stories produced by Pineapple Street Studios. Special gratitude to the late, great Richard Hackman for all his wisdom. We miss you, Uncle Richard. For Richard's audio clips, big shout-outs to Andy Kaufman's People and Projects podcast and the Academy of Management's Organizational Behavior Division. And thanks to Christine Parker and the Atlassian team for letting us listen in. For their research, appreciation of the following lead authors and their colleagues, Rebecca Grossman on team cohesion, Clayton Fushi on flight crews, Ralph Katz and Robert Huckman on shared experience and software teams, Huckman and Gary Pisano on cardiac surgery teams, Sean Berman on NBA teams, Boris Groysberg on Wall Street analysts and lift-outs, Noam Wasserman on founders, Krista Jager on common enemy effects, Stuart Albert and David Wetten on identity, Zannie Voss on identity alignment, Beth Vynott on pre-mortems, Connie Gersic on midpoint transitions, and Ruth Wagamann on team coaching. Also, John Gilbert for writing about the miracle on ice. The nostalgia's got to be tricky. I guess I've met some people over the years who feel like, okay, you know, I had a peak moment that I will never experience anything like it again. And there's a part of me that always wants to be back there, but there's a part of me that also appreciates how rare and special that was. Like, how do you think about that? Yeah. Well, the first thing I say about that is like, it happens so long ago, people ask me about that and about talking about it. And I say, well, you know, the older we get, the better we were.