Read the Introduction to The Click Code
“Major Stewart you have a call. It's your sister Lisa,” my assistant Pam said as she poked her head into my office. Lisa? I thought.
My sister Lisa was three years my junior and was living in Kansas City, Missouri as a social worker. Initially, I thought she wanted to tell me some funny story about work. Of all the people in my family, my sister and dad were by far the funniest.
I answered the phone with, “What’s up Diva? What’s going on at work now?”
At first, she said nothing…there was a silence that seemed like an eternity. For a moment, I thought the call had dropped.
Finally, I said, “Lisa are you there?”
“Brucie, Karla is dead.” She replied with pain in her voice.
Those words swept over me like a chilly winter wind. I thought, surely, she did not say our sister, Karla, was dead. Shocked, I immediately replied, “What!?” Lisa repeated her words, the initial composure vanished. This time her voice quivered, fighting back tears. That is when I knew my dear sister was dead.
I stood up and swung the phone in the air as if warding off invisible attackers. My sister Karla was a year younger than me. My mom acknowledged her as the smartest, most athletic, and most caring of the four kids. She was an all-around great person. You know, the kind of person who was the glue that kept the family together. Sadly, however, she also constantly struggled with drug addiction.
After about a 10 second pause, I finally composed myself enough to ask Lisa “What happened?” She went on to tell me the police found Karla fully clothed in the shower underneath the curtain. It appeared she had inadvertently pulled the curtain down as she struggled to cool her body. the results of the autopsy revealed the cause of death was an accidental drug overdose prompted by a bad dose of heroin.
Addiction and the Mystery of Rat Park
If you were an isolated rat in a cage—instead of a rat who got to socialize with other rats—would you be more likely to become addicted to morphine? Addiction researchers Bruce Alexander, Robert Coambs, and Patricia F. Hadaway decided to find out. At the time they conducted their experiment in 1978, other studies showed that rats could become addicted to morphine. Isolated rats chose to drink morphine-laced water instead of plain water even though the drug hastened their death. However, those experiments were only conducted on rats isolated in cages. Rats are social creatures, they are, “normally gregarious, wide-ranging, and curious animals” explained Alexander et al. Would happy, healthy rats become addicted to drugs too?
The researchers built a rat enclosure they dubbed “Rat Park.” Inside the plywood walls, twenty-two rats were free to roughhouse in the sawdust, climb around on toys, and do whatever they pleased with one another. Ten of the less fortunate experiment mates were placed in isolation cages with sheet metal sides so they could not see any fellow rats. Both the Rat Park inhabitants and the isolated rats were given a choice of morphine-laced water and plain water. However, it was not a free choice 24/7. The scientists created four experimental periods: Limited Access, Forced Consumption, Nichols Cycle, and Abstinence. Depending on the period, and the day, the rats may or may not have had access to the regular water and morphine laced water.
When the Rat Park subjects were forced to drink morphine laced water “there was a statistically significant decrease in several categories of sexual activity and fighting behavior.” The researchers thought that might explain why that group of rats chose to drink plain water when they had the chance. Morphine is a depressant that hindered the rats’ ability to perform necessary social functions and stay competitive in their group. However, during the choice days late in the forced consumption period, the isolated rats chose to drink, “significantly more morphine solution than the social rats.” The researchers reasoned that because morphine relieves pain and anxiety, the isolated rats were responding to their difficult laboratory living conditions. The isolated rats also drank “significantly more” morphine water than the Rat Park subjects “between the Nichols cycles, and during a subsequent period of abstinence.” There was also a marked difference between the morphine consumption between males and females—the females indulged much more.
They concluded that housing differences impacted how much of the drug the rats choose to drink. It was not just the drug in and of itself that proved addictive, the context the rat is living in matters as well. When the Rat Park subjects had a choice, they chose not to consume the morphine while the isolated rats continued to indulge. Humans, like rats, are social animals. We also need to be in healthy interdependent relationships with each other to not only survive but to thrive.
During the Vietnam War, deployed U.S. troops used heroin and other drugs in what researchers describe as “epidemic proportions.” However, when the troops returned home, most of them stopped using drugs. In their study of drug use permanence in these troops, researchers Lee Robins, Darlene Davis, and David Nurco found that while 43% of the veterans used narcotics in Vietnam, only 10% used narcotics upon returning to the U.S. Eleven percent of the troops used narcotics before deployment. These findings are akin to what researchers found in the Rat Park study. The extent to which we can express our innate social behaviors influences our desire to numb our experiences via drugs or other addictions. Our ability and opportunity to form relationships with each other matters.
Karla struggled with drugs since high school. As I reflect on our childhood, she also had some behavioral issues as well. One day, in kindergarten she took a classmate's coat from the rack and threw it across the room. When mom asked her why she threw the boy’s coat, Karla’s reply was, “I wanted to hang my coat on that hook!” Even though I was only in first grade, my mother looked at me as adults do when they realize that there is something seriously wrong with their kid.
During the beginning of middle school, Karla’s behavior took a severe turn for the worse—along with her grades. As I think about this period now, something else was going on. That something else was the arrival of my mom’s younger brother who was about six years older than me. My uncle came to live with us because my mother thought a new environment might stop him from getting into so much trouble in his hometown. However, my uncle’s arrival did not stop him from getting into trouble. Even worse, I believe it changed the course of my sister’s life and indirectly led to her death in that cramped apartment shower.
After Karla’s death, I found out that my uncle began sexually abusing my sister when she was 11 years old. As I look back now, being sexually abused turned what had been an independent child, or what my family would call, a “hardheaded kid,” into one whose behavior started to spiral downward. This meant skipping school, poor grades, and drug abuse. In a sense, my sister had become disconnected from her family. It was a lack of connection that cause my family to view her addiction as a social problem rather than a behavioral problem. They thought it was something she could overcome if she just tried hard enough.
Rat Park researcher Bruce Alexander continued to study addiction throughout his career and wrote the book The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit in 2008. He argues that the conventional theories of addiction are wrong. Those theories put the fault of addiction squarely on the individual. Alexander argues that addiction is a societal issue. He explains that “social determinants are more powerful than any of our individual genetic, experiential or personality quirks.” In modern society, people are, “being torn from the close ties to family, culture, and traditional spirituality that constituted the normal fabric of life in pre-modern times.” This creates a vulnerability for individuals to become addicted to myriad substances and behaviors, far beyond drugs. The antidote to the social fabric being torn apart is to weave it back together. This is called “psychosocial integration,” Alexander explains, which is “a profound interdependence between individual and society.” It is a combination of building relationships with each other, which in turn, gives us meaning in our lives. We matter to each other, and we matter to ourselves.
Those interactions, bonds, and relationships between people create social capital, or the trust produced by people connected to each other. Social capital is not just related to families but is the lifeblood of high-performing teams as well. Conventional theories about teamwork argue that a team needs motivating values or a compelling vision. We have always thought that the best teams need to have top talent and great leaders. It turns out, the conventional wisdom is wrong. It is our relationships with each other that energize a team to achieve greatness. When we create trust amongst each other, trust built on positive moment-to-moment connections, our ties strengthen. This is not a team of best friends, necessarily, but it is a team built on respect. It is a team intentionally structured with the right mix of personalities who employ honest and constructive feedback styles.
High-performing teams focus not so much on developing people, but on developing relationships between teammates. Those relationships center around bringing out the best in each other. This book details how to make a team of people click. I discuss the building blocks of high-performing teams whose success seems magical, elusive, and difficult to replicate. Good teamwork magicians, however, do reveal their secrets. Those secrets reveal a code, a DNA if you will, common to great teams that explains how to repeatedly achieve great teamwork.