Everybody Wants to Be on a Tight Team

One of the things I notice in my own roles, as team member and as leader, is that I have a love/hate relationship with the key people around me.

Okay, maybe love/hate is a bit strong. More like like/dislike. Need/resent.

Those people, my team and my close colleagues, are the source of my support, and of my ability to achieve things I couldn’t do on my own. They are also the source of the most vexatious, mind-blowing ‘wrongness’. And they’re the ones I want praise and recognition and encouragement from.

I think about them on the way home. Over dinner I wonder whether what I said in the afternoon landed properly. At breakfast I’m trying to decipher their emails. Are they agreeing with me, or warning me that something is off? Why can’t they be clearer? And on the train into work I’m wondering, in the words of Thomas Erikson’s bestseller, why am I surrounded by idiots?

The more team members and close colleagues there are, the more this happens, and the less attention, empathy and energy I have to resolve any of it. It’s tempting not to bother. Not to care what impact I’m having. Not to try to bring us together.

Schopenhauer’s Porcupines

And it’s not just me. It’s a prickly subject, and an old one. Schopenhauer told a story about a group of porcupines on a cold winter’s day. They huddled together for warmth, but their quills pricked each other, so they moved apart. Then they got cold again, huddled again, got pricked again. Back and forth, until they found a distance where they were warm enough without hurting each other too much.

Freud liked the story too. His word for what the porcupines feel was ambivalence: affection and hostility mixed together, which he thought showed more openly at work. He also noticed that when people come together around a shared leader or a shared idea, the quills point outward, not at each other.

I’d take that further. I think really smart teams choose whether their quills are up at all, and which way they point. They raise them when the situation calls for it, and put them down when it doesn’t. That’s a big part of what I mean by being tight. It’s about the gap between reaction and action.

But this is all stuff I should know.

Nearly 30 years of coaching. All kinds of leadership and team experience of my own. Emotional intelligence training. Relationship systems work. And I literally wrote the book on difficult people.

I suppose one of the useful insights from all that coaching and training is knowing that if I am thinking “they’re great” and “they’re idiots”, and running out of resources to deal with it, then they are almost certainly thinking the same about me. And feeling as frayed about it as I am, if not more so.

So why don’t people do something about it? Have that difficult conversation. Be clearer when they communicate. Own up when something hasn’t been delivered. Tell me when I’ve got it wrong, instead of gossiping about it in the corridor afterwards.

Infuriating AND Inspirational

I’m not going to name her, but the most inspirational boss I ever had also regularly infuriated me. And I know why. We had a couple of core values that were different. Not better or worse, just different.

Ask me who I learned the most about leadership from, and it would be her. Ninety per cent from what she got right, in my opinion, and ten per cent from what she got wrong.

She also, inadvertently, taught me the most about putting that little space between reaction and action. Notice that’s different from how we usually hear it. Newton gave us ‘for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’. People are the other way around. Our reaction comes first, and it’s automatic, from our nervous system. The action is what we choose to do next – if we leave ourselves a small gap in which to choose, and don’t just shoot from the hip.

That little gap meant my boss and I could be allies, and work together to get things done that were actually pretty impressive.

Tight Is What Tight Does

Over the years, as I’ve turned more of my attention to how teams function together, what works and what doesn’t, I keep coming back to this word: tight. Good teams are tight. They don’t let the gaps show. If something gets dropped, someone else is there to pick it up.

It’s a bit like a choir holding a long note. I love this one. Singers use something called staggered breathing, each taking a breath at a different moment, so the sound never breaks, however long the note goes on.

What else makes a team tight? Decisions that still hold in the corridor after the meeting. Saying the hard thing to each other’s faces.

I think the most important one is recovering quickly. Tight teams still stumble. They slip back into old habits, they get things wrong, they infuriate each other. But in the choir, when a singer misses an entry, the voices around them carry the line until they find their way back in.

And I think there’s an important distinction here.

Tight is not the same as close.

Being tight is about how people behave with each other: what they do and say. Being close is more about how they feel about each other. Being friends. Being in each other’s lives, knowing whose kid has just started school and whose mum isn’t well. Liking each other, even.

And I notice I’m conflicted about this distinction, because part of me thinks all those close things are good, and I’d want them in a team I was part of.

So maybe it’s a question of degree, and of personal preference. Be tight, because the team needs it. And if you’re someone who also wants to be close, be that too. It just isn’t required, and it isn’t what everybody wants. Some people want the pizza after work and the WhatsApp group. Others want to do brilliant work together and then go home. A tight team has space for the feelings and manages the behaviours.

Yes, It Matters

Does it matter whether people in teams try to be tight together? Yes, and in a big way. It affects so much of how organisations function, and what they can achieve, that it’s almost ridiculous it isn’t persistently right at the top of the agenda. And the more senior the team, the more it matters. I’ve watched it play out in organisation after organisation. A top team that isn’t tight sends ripples of mixed messages, crossed priorities and unravelling decisions all the way down.

And it isn’t just about how organisations function. It’s also about the experience of the people in those teams, and in those organisations. Being part of a team that’s sailing along at speed, even in the roughest weather, is exhilarating, rewarding and bonding like nothing else. At times like that, I’ve woken up buzzing. I’m not trying to decode emails over breakfast. That energy gets me in early, or has me grabbing the phone to talk about what’s next, not picking over the bones of what happened yesterday.

So why don’t more teams do something about it? I’ve written about that at length in earlier articles. It’s risky, it costs time and energy, and nobody quite knows how. Or is it simpler than that? Maybe people just don’t want it …

You Know You Want It. I Do.

Which leaves one more question. Do people actually want to be part of a tight team?

I was reminded of this personally when I wrote my book a few years back. Naively, I thought being the author meant you were top of the pyramid. I soon learned, a little painfully, that you’re not. There’s a team of editors, commissioners, designers, marketers and many others, all contributing.

When I understood that, it was like a switch went on in my head. Yes, I had to respond to a lot (I do mean a lot) of questions and suggestions. “Why is this passage here?” “That’s a semicolon, but it’d be better as two sentences.” “Thanks for your comments on the cover, but the team thinks this is a better look.” The team. People trying to make my book good, and to help it sell. If I wanted, I could lean into that.

I really did lean into it, and I totally enjoyed it. It came back to me too, in support for promotion and launch events, and in sales to new markets and editions in other languages. I think my publishers understood that I wanted to be a tight team with them.

People sometimes ask me how I chose the cover, or how I drive sales in other countries. I usually say, “Oh, the team at Pearson does that.” And I watch their reactions, which I don’t always find easy to read.

So, for me, the answer is yes. Being part of a tight team is one of the best parts of the whole working experience. And I think I feel strongly enough about it, both from a practical point of view (it achieves stuff) and an emotional one (it feels great), to want to bring it to all the teams I can.

Does everybody want to be part of a tight team?

I believe they do.

And maybe sometimes the effort of having that, as well as dealing with all the other stuff, gets in the way. And maybe also the risks of working towards it (which are genuine) get in the way too.

And maybe, even more, not knowing HOW to become a tight team gets in the way.

If they could de-risk it, have it be the right level of effort, and knew how to do it, my view is that everyone would want to be on a tight team.