Fighting for a blue

How do you get a team of people who are world leaders in their sphere, and fierce individualist at heart to collaborate? According to Mark de Rond, Reader in strategy and organisation at Judge Business School in Cambridge the key is “sociability” or “likeability.”

Rond spent months of early, cold, wet mornings working closely with the pinnacle of goal-focussed high achievers, rowers vying for a blue: a place in the 8-person race boat. He found that for expert teams, the key to success is mutual support where “our individual performance is a function of the social environment of which we are a part,” rather than just our innate star quality.

What does this mean for business away from the water? Rond recommends that when building and managing teams sometimes there are good business reasons to sacrifice a small amount of an individual’s competence for more sociability within the team as a whole. In plain language that means that you may be worse off having just a team of stellar performers without adding in someone who may be less of an expert in the field, but who can act as the social link, binding the group and smoothing over the friction so many of these experts groups experience. How do you design your teams?