Chapter 10

Everything You Need to Know about True Teams (in about an Hour)

The greatest compliment one SEAL can bestow on another is to call him a teammate. In the sea underwater at night when it is the darkest, it is your teammate who swims beside you, always ready to provide you air if you run out, untangle your line if you’re caught under a ship . . . In the air, it is your teammate who checks your parachute before you jump . . . [and] lands beside you in enemy territory. On the land, it is your teammate who walks your flank, covering your six . . . And sometimes it is your teammate who lays down his life for yours.

—Admiral William McRaven, honoring SEAL Lt. Michael Murphy1

YOU ARE A SMART, AMBITIOUS PERSON with ideas, talents, unique life experience, and a fire in your gut that’s greater than your fear of trying. This makes you UnStoppable.

Now imagine you times four.

Think of how the four of you could brainstorm solutions, overcome obstacles, and take on risk and fear on any mission if, indeed, you all still acted as one.

You’d be making yourself into a new organism (something, as you’ll learn, like a SEAL team). An engine with just one cylinder could be made from the most advanced components in the world. Yet all you’d have is a lawnmower. But put four or more cylinders together and you have a Ferrari, a powerhouse that goes 180 mph. All you did is multiply 1 times 4 and make a team that will work in concert to fulfill one mission: to turn that crankshaft.

As a team you become far greater than the sum of your parts. You may have multiplied your power by 4 or by 400,000, but either way the synergy still bumps you up to a whole new league.

I’ve said on several prior occasions that teams are probably the ultimate multiplier of human potential in the pursuit of anything. No single lesson was emphasized more by the great practitioners I encountered during my journey to the heart of entrepreneurship than this one. It’s why the world’s ultimate doers on the most trying missions work exclusively in the framework of teams. They study the art and science of teams; they nurture, encourage, and flat-out demand that any individuals who qualify to serve will form themselves into, and only think of themselves, as teams and teammates.

But not just any kind of team. Not the kind of team that’s been given lip service by innumerable corporate Optimizers—the superficial kind of team thrown together by happenstance or by an arbitrary management fiat.

I mean true teams, a concept the founders of Rackspace discovered by bare entrepreneurial necessity long before Graham Weston and I got to know about SEAL teams or any other example from the outside world. (Graham said it to me this way in one of our conversations: “You know, we were instinctively putting together our own kind of SEAL teams inside Rackspace without realizing it.”) As an entrepreneur, you too will need to harness this power and put it to work for you, because a true team can take ordinary people and make them into champions. And it can take champions and raise them to a level of potential they could never have achieved in this world on their own. No individual, no matter how talented or adept, can compete with the exponential intelligence, creativity, ability to withstand challenges, and pure power of a true team.

Like each element of the UnStoppable Six, team is something the entrepreneurial leader needs to think about continuously. In this chapter, you’ll learn why and how.

THE ROOTS OF SMALL, SUPER-POWERED TEAMS

It’s no exaggeration to say that SEALs and Israeli commandos veritably worship the power of team and its effect on missions and personal survival. “In battle,” they say, “individuals die, teams succeed.” Team function is a strategic, tactical, and emotional issue for these warriors; it’s a must-have in the world’s riskiest, most dynamic environments. For all the same reasons, it’s a success accelerator for you as an entrepreneur.

Teams can be any size, of course, but for our purposes, we’ll be talking about a default team size of four—the primary functional unit that the SEALs and Israelis use in operations, based on decades of experience and team research that shows there is an inherent workable balance and proficiency in this number. A four-person SEAL fire team includes a commander and three specialists. Not coincidentally, this is a common number for many of the most successful founder teams we see in start-ups today. It’s not a mandate, just a good solid model. After all, the Beatles were the Fab Four. Do you need any better or more enduring model of creative global success?

Like Krav Maga, true teams are built on a few simple principles that leverage human instincts we’ve all been expert in since birth. Teams are powered by a universal social impulse to belong, to be needed by others we care about, and to feel important because we are valued by others.

As biologist Edward O. Wilson explains in The Social Conquest of Earth, the need to be part of a group is hardwired so deeply, it provides a new way to understand evolution:

Group selection is just as important as individual selection—“The human brain evolved to be intelligent and social at same time,” ruled by the amygdala and other emotion centers. [There’s that pesky amygdala again.] People yearn to be in the best groups—then discriminate against outside groups, judging opponents less likeable, trustworthy, even human. Fans at sporting events are lifted by seeing their group’s symbols—cups, banners, uniforms, etc. and repelled by opponents’. Our unconscious impulse is to divide into groups swiftly and decisively, to join and to belong. “Group selection lifted us to solidarity, genius, enterprise. But also to FEAR.” Fear of being humiliated and ostracized by the group, fear of not belonging, fear of losing the group’s love and approval and most critical—fear of losing the group’s protection which is vital for our survival. “Group instinct” creates the best in us—we reward altruism, selflessness, courage—but also the worst in us. We can be prompted to go to war at the slightest provocation, forgetting any of its past consequences.2

These drivers are far too powerful to ignore, to resist, or on the other hand, for us not to seize as our multiplier if we are to be the best leaders, citizens, or entrepreneurs.

TRUE TEAMS

I realized it wasn’t the world championships or the trophies and lord knows it wasn’t the money that made me commit my heart and soul to that 4-way team. I just loved being needed so much by three other people that I had such incredible respect for. I would’ve done anything not to give that up.

—Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld, six-time group skydiving world champion, author and lecturer

True teams leverage it all: the emotional mechanics of membership and belonging, the yearning for a higher cause, achievement, and trust—and the love that passes between those who are needed by one another. A company that understands and values this potential will build a culture of true teams from day one. Teams and the value-based culture that sustains them go hand in hand.

What Special Qualities Define True Teams?

The following are the ideal qualities you would find on any sports or military team that operates at an elite level. Inside companies, team dynamics can approach these ideals, too, and can yield extraordinary results—as long as members are given the respect and the authority to follow an inspiring mission.

1. True Teams Function as One Machine, One Organism

Each member feels like a vital part of that organism, without whom the others can’t succeed. As they practice together, their individual expert intuitions blend and are elevated into team intuition. Consequently, the team members function smoothly and seamlessly together, trusting their lives to one another’s ability to do their jobs. In CQC (or “close quarters combat,” the military term for house-to-house fighting), after hundreds of hours of team training, SEALs describe their movements together as a flow: “It’s like a hockey game, but almost graceful, like a ballet—we communicate without words, we know where our teammates are going and where they’ll be without looking.” Others have described it as a “four individuals with a single beating heart.”

2. True Teams Build on One Another’s Strengths

Members of True Teams admire one another’s talents and strengths. They build one another up, augment one another’s performance, sacrifice their own comfort, and root for their teammates because it’s the only way success is possible. They may criticize, but they never tear down, exploit, or control by fear. Leaders must believe it’s a privilege to lead and put their people first. But when they do, their people will love them back and follow them through hell.

The love of belonging and performing for one’s peers is among the most powerful incentives that compel human action. It is more powerful than money or individual reward. It motivates people to take the risks needed to innovate, even endure far higher levels of physical pain than any individual would endure on their own. It makes true teams UnStoppable—the most powerful force for achievement on earth.

After the Beatles broke up in 1969, each of the four team members went on to forge a career as a solo artist, with some commercial success. But none of the four created a body of work as memorable, popular, and influential as the music the Beatles crafted during their brief time as a team. Why? A major reason is that the three songwriters in the Beatles—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and later George Harrison—stimulated, inspired, and challenged the others. Every time Lennon wrote a new tune he hoped to break new artistic ground and so surprise and impress his band mates—and he worked and reworked his songs longer and harder in pursuit of that goal. It was the same with McCartney and Harrison. After the band broke up, these three artists were left on their own, and the relatively disappointing results they achieved reveal that something big was missing: the magic of the team.

3. They “Follow Like a Leader”

Although team members always subordinate themselves to the leader, they’re always aware of the big picture/little picture on their own, so they can add intelligence and corrective action should the others miss an opportunity or a threat.

It also means that if the leader is out of operation, the other members can step up and lead as needed because they understand the mission upward and downward.

4. True Teams Shift Leadership on Demand

True teams are flat, informal organizations that transfer authority to whichever specialist team member is “up” in any phase of the mission. When the task is demolition, the explosives specialist holds authority for that piece of the operation and is deferred to—even by the commander. When the sniper or the mini-submarine driver is up, authority for the maneuver goes to that member. Such informality and flexible authority is only possible when these values are burned in from a larger culture. The SEAL ethos says, “We expect to lead and be led. In the absence of orders I will take charge, lead my teammates and accomplish the mission. I lead by example in all situations.”

5. True Teams Run on a Simple, Clear Set of Values Anyone Can Articulate

This is the larger organizational culture. It’s reinforced by a unique language, symbols, and traditions that represent the proprietary bond among its members.

6. True Teams Are Not Formed or Assigned by Management Decree

To quote a world champion I know, “True teams choose themselves.” There must be a standard for admission that matches the standards of the group. Members and leaders are either accepted and respected, or ultimately ejected. But all of this happens based on the decisions of the team members themselves, not on orders from some outside expert or boss.

If you want to wield the power of the true team for your entrepreneurial mission as its leader or a founder, you must create an environment and a set of values that enable it. You must promote an UnStoppable team culture with values, standards, measurements, and traditions right from the start.

HOW AN UNSTOPPABLE CULTURE NURTURES TEAMS

True teams don’t spontaneously appear any more than plants germinate without soil. They require what we have already called a Belief Culture—to some, another of those soft, amorphous terms that don’t belong in business. But in UnStoppable organizations like the SEALs where teams are practically deified, the culture that advances and sustains the team ethos is as hard an asset as any part of the machine. It’s planned, structured, and maintained by a few time-tested elements that UnStoppable cultures always seem to share.

Graham Weston first learned those lessons at Fish Camp.

FISH CAMP

We’ve seen the power of culture shape success in every kind of organization, but there’s no better example than Graham’s exposure as a freshman to the legendary culture of the Texas A&M Aggies.

The Aggies are so cognizant of cultural power, they send every new freshman on a week’s retreat before he or she ever sets foot on campus to learn how to act like an Aggie, talk like an Aggie, know tradition like an Aggie, sing songs around The Bonfire like an Aggie—in short, be a team member who belongs to the Aggies. For some reason, this weeklong orientation retreat is called Fish Camp. It’s done in fun and in love but it’s also taken very seriously. And the influence of Fish Camp has carried all the way through to the culture of belonging that embraces 5,000 employees at Rackspace.

Graham recounts the experience and explains what it has meant to him this way: “I went to a little rural high school, and I was never one of the popular, athletic kids who everyone wanted to invite everywhere and be with. I wasn’t the last to be picked for sports—I wasn’t even picked! The only guys not on the football team in high school were me and the goth guy. (I was on the Milk Judging team.)

“My parents weren’t from America and so I didn’t know about a lot of traditions, including applying to college. My high school chem teacher, a loyal Aggie, sat a small group of us who must’ve looked like we had some promise down one day and put an application in front of us. We just filled it out. It was the only college I knew about and the only place I applied.

“The first thing they did when we became new Aggies was send us all to orientation at Fish Camp. It was a revelation for me. It was the first time I was ever invited to join a winning team—in this case, a whole long tradition, a long line of greatness. They tell you the stories, the traditions, the songs, all the stuff you need to walk into freshman year as a member of the clan. Accelerated Aggie Proficiency training. ‘Once an Aggie, Always an Aggie,’ ‘Highway 6 runs both ways,’ ‘Anything you do twice is a tradition,’ ‘Don’t be a 2 percenter.’ You learn about The Bonfire,3 Aggie Muster, and Silver Taps.

“Suddenly, you belong to something really big, really important. A&M was masterful about building that sense of belonging. State schools were easy to get in and easy to flunk out of, but you definitely wanted to be one of the 50,000 who stayed.

“Looking back, it wasn’t conscious at first but the culture we built at Rackspace is so obviously Aggie-inspired. The seeds are all over: Calling ourselves ‘Rackers,’ our traditions, belonging, being in a family. Rackers who get career offers from outside come to us saying things like, ‘I just don’t know if I’m ready to stop being a Racker.’ The Aggies probably weren’t thinking about it this way, but they were creating an incredible brand.”

Isn’t it fascinating to see how an amazing team-oriented culture in one institution (Texas A&M) can inspire a fantastic culture in a totally different and separate organization (Rackspace)? Like a beneficial virus, great cultures can spread their positive infection in unlikely and powerful directions.

BIG, SIMPLE CULTURAL SYMBOLS

If you want to build a culture of belonging that can support true teams, the ingredients are actually pretty basic. Just follow the example set at Texas A&M that transferred over to Rackspace.

Names and Language: Invent Your Own Names and Words

Names and words signify a common identity among members of anything. There’s an insider’s pride in knowing and using them. Everyone at Rackspace, from the chairman on down, is called a Racker. Not an associate, a rep, or an employee. A unique term that symbolizes membership in a unique organization.

“Racker” is just the start of the distinctive glossary of Rackspace. Graham Weston explains, “We have our own names for all kinds of things. To most people, a castle is a medieval fortress. To us, ‘The Castle’ is the converted mall in San Antonio that we’ve turned into an amazing global headquarters. We name traditions like our own version of Fish Camp, ‘Rookie O’ and ‘Graduation.’ We hold celebrations like ‘Racktoberfest.’ We don’t give service, we give Fanatical Support. And to be asked to put on The Straightjacket in front of the whole company for actually providing Fanatical Support is one of the highest honors we can bestow. It’s all part of our language and we’re proud of every word of it.”

Traditions: “Anything We Do Twice Is a Tradition”

The point is, traditions root cultures in ritual and continuity, and we humans love them. That’s why great organizations like Rackspace are happy to err on the side of too many traditions any day. Putting every new Racker, from junior staff to managers through Rookie O is a tradition they experience right at the door. Taking the StrengthsFinder test and displaying the results, winning The Straightjacket, putting the Flags at their work stations, and the famous T-shirt wall, are other notable Rackspace traditions. The list goes on and on.

Visual IDs

There is a reason sports teams and armies wear uniforms. It’s not just professional looking, it instantly identifies members of teams. Rackers aren’t asked to wear uniforms, but the company employs consistent signage, logos, and visual cues, like the Racker name tags that show team members’ personal strengths, as a way of visualizing reinforcing and emphasizing their unity and shared mission.

Big, Repeatable Cultural Values

It all comes down to the values the culture lives and dies by, not just the ones they talk about or hang as prints on a wall. Every member of the team must know those values, say them, and understand how decisions are guided by them every day. Remember, the greatest value- and mission-statements ever written are brief yet powerful—a small number of very important words. Some religious scholars have pointed out that the most important value statement in the Bible can fit on one line: “Do unto others as you’d have others do unto you.”

The SEALs’ values might be summarized like this:

In battle individuals die, teams win: team is everything. We never quit, we are never out of the fight. We are all in, all the time. We will accomplish our mission.

At Rackspace, the company values are captured in just thirty words:

Deliver fanatical support. Do the right thing always. Love our customers and believe in each other. Always manage to strengths, never fear. Leading Rackers is a privilege, not a right.

TRUE TEAMS AT RACKSPACE: THE UNTOLD STORY

Lorenzo Gomez has been a Racker from the earliest days of the company. We asked him to describe his experience of team at Rackspace, and the story he recounted was frankly remarkable:

“We were lucky enough to have set off the magic of true teams early on at Rackspace, and it became one of our greatest competitive advantages. It wasn’t because we knew anything about the power of SEAL teams, true teams, or any of that at the time. What we had was (1) an existential threat to the company, (2) an entrepreneurial need to solve a problem, (3) we were all on the same mission, and (4) we tried a solution and, fortunately, it worked.

“The solution was to consolidate our service people into dedicated small teams for the first time. It was right after 9/11, when the economy went into a temporary tailspin and our smaller Internet-hosting customers were going out of business in droves. The churn turned into a hemorrhage. The customers that survived were the larger companies with more complex websites and service needs, but now there were a lot fewer to go around and they were demanding 24/7, high-touch service. We had to multiply our service levels overnight with the same staff and resources if we wanted to stay alive, let alone compete.

“We’d been operating as one big department, with Rackers working individually with clients on whatever problem was at hand. Whenever there was a bigger issue, they had to get up, walk to another area, and plead with an account person, a billing person, a tech person, or a business development person to help. All these specialties were needed at certain points to service larger customers. But the specialists had their own problems and their own managers to deal with. They weren’t automatically willing or able to switch gears to help a junior account manager with another customer they’d never meet.

“And then a couple of entrepreneurial account leaders got together and had this ‘what if?’ moment. What if we put one Racker from each specialty into a bunch of self-contained units: small but complete teams that could handle any client problem? What if they physically sat within spitting distance of one another so they could collaborate by swiveling a chair or talking to the next desk? What if each team worked on a dedicated set of customers whose businesses and people they got to know like nobody’s business? What if they all had skin in the game, so they all would share in the bonuses if they grew that customer’s business or opened a new account?

“And here was the big game changer: what if each team actually ran itself like a mini-business, having P&L responsibility, tracking the sales revenues, the continuity, and the costs of each of its accounts so it could keep score?

“We tried it. It was amazing.

“Suddenly, everybody on each team was committed to the same goals and to solving the same problems together. The teams not only got to know their customers’ issues, concerns, and businesses on a deep new level, they developed group expertise and a closeness that made them collaborate more smoothly and quickly as a team on every case. They started identifying with their teams and competing healthily for new business, bonuses, and better churn rates versus the other teams. Because they had P&L knowledge and accountability, they cared about the big picture and the little picture—profit, costs, and customer satisfaction, along with the need to fix the immediate problem.

“The amazing thing was that suddenly geeks, technical people, and billing people who’d never bothered and could just stay in the background—suddenly they were all selling! They were thinking about customers, proactively offering suggestions and solutions that would improve the customer’s experience or expand an opportunity. We kept the size of the teams very small on purpose depending on the needs of each customer, but the basic rule was, ‘No team bigger than one large pizza.’”

Customers loved the new teams. Rackers loved the new teams, too, because of the quantum leap it gave them in providing Fanatical Support. They loved the pride and camaraderie it built along the way.

The leaders of Rackspace didn’t know it at the time, but they were carving their organization into a collection of true teams, not just nominal ones. They were giving each team important authority, responsibility with their accountability, a chance to be valued members of a winning unit, and a renewed, sharpened sense of inspiring mission where they depended on each other to avoid failure and reap the rewards. They were all in together, and it felt great.

Looking back on it now, Graham and other Rackers have come to recognize the similarity of their system of small powerful teams to the kind of teams the Navy SEALs rely upon. (They even occasionally refer to them in internal conversations as “our SEAL teams,” while recognizing of course the enormous difference between the missions pursued by business-oriented teams and the literally life-and-death challenges that the heroic Navy SEALs undertake.)

What makes true teams true makes all the difference. The keen sense of mission, risk, mutual dependence, importance, and responsibility, all accepted together by teammates, unleashes the emotional mechanics that power it all. This requires cultural acceptance by the organization of one risk in particular—the risk of managing with lighter reins. In the case of Rackspace, that meant trusting the teams to track their own P&Ls like mini-businesses rather than having middle-management overseers, and allowing more entrepreneurial latitude in deed, not words.

But valued members on an inspiring mission will step up to it if you let them. What true teams can accomplish is a level of success not found any other way: true teams can be UnStoppable. Rackspace and the Navy SEALs show the way.

1 Daniel Klaidman, “For Navy SEALS, The Biggest Threat May Be Hollywood,” Newsweek, November 5, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/11/04/daniel-klaidman-the-seals-biggest-threat.html.

2 Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Norton, 2012).

3 As described in Wikipedia, “The annual autumn event which symbolized Aggie students’ ‘burning desire to beat the hell outta T.U.,’ a derogatory nickname for University of Texas at Austin.” Now that’s a famous college tradition.