'Me' versus 'we' culture for productive teamwork

Before breaking the bank to recruit superstars, companies should first decide what goal they are trying to achieve.

Paris Saint-German (PSG) has a problem of plenty in the ongoing UEFA Champions League, courtesy their much-celebrated trio of forwards--Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe. In fact, many are seeing Neymar’s injury as a welcome opportunity for the club to try something different and get more balance in the team. That may be apparently surprising, considering that any club would give an arm and a leg to have the trio in their team.

But it shouldn’t be such a surprise. After all, can a team with three super-stars who only want to attack really win the League in the modern era? Listen to Mbappe who admitted recently that the trio needed to do better. Asked about the lack of balance, with the forwards too often being disconnected from the rest of the team, Mbappe said the trio must create something to make sure they were not cut off from the rest of the team. 

There is a huge lesson here for companies which are perennially involved in a war for talent and spending immense resources recruiting the best and brightest to elevate their operations to the highest levels. Talent, of course, is necessary--after all, without the superstars, an organisation can’t prosper and will get bogged down in mediocrity which is a recipe for disaster. But too much of a good thing can be counterproductive.

Too many talented individuals in the same team with somewhat inflated beliefs of their competence and power can ruin the overall group dynamics within a team and the overall collective intelligence. That in a way explains why Mbappe is talking about steps to ensure that the talented trio is not cut off from the rest of the team.

While there is no denying that exceptional talent can lift a team’s performance, there is now strong evidence to suggest that there is a limit to the benefit of talent in teams. Research has shown that talent facilitates performance--but only up to a point, after which the benefits of more talent decreases and eventually becomes detrimental as intra-team coordination suffers. Too many super-talented stars can often compete among themselves to establish who the alpha male is, often with disastrous consequences.

Consider the following experiment. Egg sellers selectively breed the chickens who lay the most eggs. But when some of them placed a high number of best egg-producing chickens together to maximise productivity, the opposite happened. While egg production plummeted, chicken mortality also rose. Reason: the best egg producers, who happened to be the most competitive birds, started fighting over food and territory and pecked each other to death.

What is true of chickens is also true of the corporate world. Too many superstars try to compete with each other rather than integrate the team into a seamless whole. For any business which needs coordination between the team’s members, there needs to be a proper hierarchy. One just can’t have too many bosses – all trying to outdo the other.

Psychologists Adam Galinsky and Roderick Swaab have tested the theory of 'more talent is always better’ by using soccer data. According to their study covering teams competing at the 2010 and 2014 World Cup, having more highly talented players on a national team leads to worse performance. In fact, too much talent is a burden in a team sport like soccer or basketball. That’s because if everyone thinks they should be the one with the ball, who will play the role of assists and defence?

Their final conclusion was that “hierarchically-defined” groups (teams made up of different levels of people, all of whom embrace their individual roles) perform better than teams made up solely of “high power primed” (superstar) individuals.

A team composed of high-flyers is more susceptible to a power struggle than a team with individuals used to more subordinate roles. That’s because each high-flyer feels the need to preserve their “leader” status, which creates role confusion and threatens team dynamics.

So before breaking the bank to recruit only superstars, companies should first decide whether the goal they are trying to achieve relies on individual talent or a collaborative effort from the team. If it’s the latter, it would be wise to have a mix of talent and team players. That’s what the world’s best companies do. They recruit super talented people mostly for individual roles (think researchers). For teams, they recruit the superstars only after creating a framework that forces them to collaborate with their teammates. In management parlance, it’s called surrendering the 'me’ for the 'we’. Unfortunately, only a few companies have been able to build that kind of framework.