First Principles for Team Building

The building blocks for getting people to come together.

Jan 24, 2022

Teamwork makes the dream work by Charlie Hammond

Think of the last great team you were on. When did that team become a team?

I’d wager it wasn’t on Day 1.

Something happened to change everyone’s collective perspective, probably over the course of multiple practices, rehearsals, meetings, reviews, and performances or games or presentations. Maybe it was one acute event where everyone struggled together or maybe it was when the group realized that there was some bad guy out there who was coming for your lunch. No matter the how, it didn’t just happen.

There are three ways to get people to come together.

Experiencing Shared Hardships
Internalizing a Common Enemy
Pursuit of a Unifying Goal

Not every team is formed by all of these, but every team experiences at least one.

This is surprisingly constant throughout history. Ancient works such as Homer’s Odyssey have long recognized the power of shared hardship has to form bonds between people, while this scene from Gladiator is one of the best representations in film of how instant Internalization of a Common Enemy can create a team, and, of course, and Steve Jobs is almost mythical in his ability to get people to unify around the vision to “Dream Bigger” for products for Apple.

I’m naturally influenced by my time in the US Army (which thinks pretty hard about how to build both long and short duration teams). Army doctrine emphasizes the criticality of trust building to team formation (and indeed explicitly designs almost all of its training events to end with culminating hardships) and these three core ideas are the team building primitives that do just that.

Plainly though, building trust in groups of people who we have no reason to trust each other is tough. So how do we do get them start trusting?

Experiencing Shared Hardships

Going through things together brings people closer.

Shared victory, shared steady state repetition of day to day life, or even just shared jokes all actually bring people together, but nothing fuses people together at their most base levels of trust like shared hardship. It can be as extreme as being stuck in a storm or disaster scenario and being forced to work together to survive or even as banal as the best restaurant on the office block closing down unexpectedly.

The shared commiseration over a persistent problem gets the team intraconnectedness going.

The biggest risk teams face during this process is fighting against too big of a hardship. People can’t come together if they’re completely broken down.

That said, overcoming hard challenges is core to building confidence in individuals as well and are critical for groups to earn the right to call themselves a high performance team, so the trials must be real and challenging.

So think about how to take advantage of the limited time you have with your team.

What’s the best way to design a productive hardship for your org?

Is it a hackathon where teams compete with each other as they test their coding and creative endurance? Is it a hike or some sort of physical activity (unfortunately, these can be really tricky in the private sector because of disparate fitness levels)? Or is it going to naturally happen as your startup goes through its paces in the early days?

Just be deliberate about it and you should be fine.

Internalizing a Common Enemy

This has been how despots have controlled populations since time immemorial. Countless examples in history like Hitler, like McCarthy, like the various authoritarian regimes in power today, show the unfortunate power of this trust building primitive.

Modern leaders tend to realize, however, that this isn’t the most effective way to build teams. This is mostly because the common “enemy” people try to use is generally just a scapegoat and not actually a villainous entity that “should” be the focus of your team’s ire. This primitive is fueled by negative energy and sometimes hate, so it’s really hard to keep it up over long periods of time because the facts don’t add up in reality and your team will notice that.

You need an actual boogeyman to keep people perpetually united against the boogeyman and the boogeyman generally isn’t real.

This is especially true in business where your competitors are full of people that are probably nice, normal people and your team probably knows some of them and they might get hired by them in the future. They probably make decent products too.

Not a great reason to hate someone and definitely not a great source of team unification fuel.

That’s why even the American Revolutionists transitioned their rallying cry from “Anti-England” (Common Enemy) to “Pro-American” (Unifying Goal) over the course of the Revolution. The former just couldn’t sustain the momentum of the movement.

Pursuit of a Unifying Goal

The leader of a team is sometimes best thought of as the “Keeper of the Focus” and one of the most important things to focus on is the Unifying Goal of where you want your team to be in the future. This Unifying Goal is your Vision.

If you can get your team to want this Vision too, then you’ve won. The mental switch will flip that they are already on the same team and will act accordingly. No convincing needed.

How do you do this well?

Have a good Vision for starters. Easy to say, hard to do.

It needs to be worthwhile. For you and for your team.

It needs to be hard. No quarterly plans here. They’re not audacious enough.

It needs to be right for your organization. This is the hardest part.

And then when you feel you have one, you probably need to simplify it again.

You then need to think about how to communicate it.

Then you need to bring everyone else along. And then do it again. And again.

And eventually your Vision becomes your team’s Vision.

Once you see understand these abstractions, it’s not hard to map them back to your life experience.

That 3 week period of two a days for your high school cross country team? Shared Hardship. It’s funny how much more fun practices were once that period was over.

The hated professor who gave that brutal test that you and your fellow engineers studied for weeks only to barely pass? Common Enemy. That might have been the class when everyone started going for beers to commiserate together.

That time you somehow cranked through that tough work project over a long weekend filled with caffeine and struggle, but you needed to get it done? Unifying Goal.

Wysr by Cameron Armstrong