"All for One and One for All" Chivalry, honor, heroics, and willingness to fight for the principles of justice.

Chivalry, honor, heroics, and willingness to fight for the principles of justice. These are just a few notable characteristics displayed by each of the main characters in the well-known French novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Fortunately, the Three Musketeers shared in the lofty ideals they embodied but what would have happened if they chose individual ambitions and pursuits over the combined effort of the group? Surely, they would have not been as successful.

We know that a group approach has the potential to yield exponential rewards, however, all too often in businesses and organizations, diverse individuals are placed together without a sense of shared goals or belonging, which can lead to feelings of apathy at best, and exclusion or even marginalization at worse. Forming bonds and a sense of inclusivity helps prevent groups for devolving into factions and breakdown. Short of swearing an oath for honor, how do we, in modern times, get employees and participants to work together effectively?

The Inclusion Rule

“Un pour tous, tous pour un.” You may know this famous phrase as “All for one and One for All,” the motto of the Three Musketeers. This line embodies the inclusion rule discussed in chapter five of my latest book, The Click Code: Why Some Teams Click and Others Don’t. An all for one mindset means each person in the group feels supported by others while offering their personal best.

Inclusion is a departure from the belief that a singular person, no matter how great their talent, can win a game, lead a successful organization, or fight against a monarchy/tyrannical regime on their own. The Three Musketeers were fortunate enough to have a natural chemistry that continued to strengthen overtime as each displayed bravery and unwavering dedication to their goals. In today’s business landscape this means delegating, collaborating, and using each person’s talents effectively.

The greatest athletes, businesspeople, and successful leaders understand that reaching one’s goals requires bringing out the best in teammates, collaborators, and employees. The loftier the plans, the more harmonious and effective team strategy must become.  The leader must play to each member’s talents and strengths while understanding that no one person can carry a team. 

Find meaning and purpose: Application of The Musketeer Metaphor

Building a successful team means the group must have a commitment from all parties involved to achieve a goal or have the discernment to speak up when one knows they have an idea that will move the team forward. This sense of inclusion means fairness, cooperation, support, openness, and empowerment are essential to creating a cohesive team.

Further, it is the role of leadership to understand how each person fits in and what they bring to the table. As we can learn from the Musketeer trio, each member has an equal role in not only protecting their shared set of principles but each other as well. Use your team’s talents to help your company reach its goals, because after all, the adventures of One Musketeer is not nearly as catchy as Les Trois Mousquetaires.

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Rosa Parks Was Badass and the Ultimate Connector

Rosa Parks wasn’t a physically tired, old Black seamstress who wouldn’t give up her bus seat to a white man. Rosa Parks was 42 years old and a pillar of Montgomery, Alabama society at the time of her arrest in 1955. When she broke the bus segregation laws, her contacts and networks spanned the city’s economic and social hierarchies. A well-known white lawyer, Clifford Durr, knew Parks because she’d hemmed his daughters’ dresses. Durr accompanied the former head of the Montgomery National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), E.D. Nixon, to bail Parks out of jail that night. Durr became one of Parks’ lawyers in her fight against segregation.

Parks was a courageous, practiced activist decades before her resistance to bus segregation laws. In 1931, she fell in love with her husband, Raymond Parks, who was a barber by day and activist by night — or whichever hours he could go undetected. Civil rights activism during that time was dangerous. Two of Raymond’s associates were killed while they were trying to free the Scottsboro Boys — the nine Black youths who were wrongly accused of raping two white women. In The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Jeanne Theoharis writes that “Rosa and Raymond married in December 1932 ‘right in the middle of the campaign to save the Scottsboro Boys.’”

In the decades to follow, still well before her Montgomery bus action, Parks continued to deepen her activism. She became one of the first women to join the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943. Then, after multiple attempts to register to vote, she was finally allowed in 1945 after passing a literacy test — a Jim Crow era barrier to prevent Black people from voting. That’s why, when she didn’t give up her seat, it wasn’t because her feet were tired. Theoharis quotes Parks:

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. . . . No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

While her resistance to bus segregation laws lives on in popular memory as an individual act, the truth is that Parks was part of a rich tapestry of community. She was dedicated to her church, the Civic League and voting rights efforts. While multiple Black bus riders before Parks had also refused to give up their seats to white passengers, they were not embedded in activist networks like Parks and therefore did not galvanize the movement. Parks’ networks leveraged her sound reputation and alchemized her refusal into a 382-day bus boycott. This complex coordinated effort amongst a wide range of community groups resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that the bus segregation laws were unconstitutional.

If you removed Rosa Parks from her local Montgomery networks and placed her on a different segregated bus, in a different segregated town, her action and arrest would likely not have caused more than a stir. As much as United States popular culture champions the individual, it takes a village to achieve greatness. In a village, or community, the relationships of various strengths between people give that group its power. To move mountains or challenge unjust laws. A team is a small version of a community and so too rises or falls based on the amount of social capital amongst the group members.

Ron Burt, a network scientist, wrote about people who had very diverse networks like Rosa. He called those types of networks Open Networks. These open networks from Burt’s research explained a full 50 percent of career success for individuals. In other words, half of your career success can be predicted by the diversity of your network. The chart below illustrates this point:

It clearly shows that having a large open network predicts individual performance while having a small, closed network is problematic. Rosa’s network as I stated before was wide, open, and diverse. Therefore, all of us have heard of Rosa Parks and not Claudette Colvin. Claudette refused to give up her seat on the bus 9 months before Rosa, but Claudette was only 15 years old and pregnant, embedded within a closed, small, and narrow network.

There are many reasons why Rosa was a connector. One was she did not give in on forming ties or connections with people who looked like her. She intentionally overcame the generally unconscious desire for all of us to engage in homophily. Ronald Burt also illustrated this natural tendency to engage with similar others. As Michael Simmons states in his article:

Most people spend their careers in closed networks; networks of people who already know each other. People often stay in the same industry, the same religion, and the same political party. In a closed network, it’s easier to get things done because you’ve built up trust, and you know all the shorthand terms and unspoken rules. It’s comfortable because the group converges on the same ways of seeing the world that confirm your own. To understand why people, spend most of their time in closed networks, consider what happens when a group of random strangers is thrown together:

Simmons continues…

By understanding this process, we can begin to understand why the world is the way it is. We understand why Democrats and Republicans can’t pass bills with obvious benefits to society. We understand why religions have gone to war over history. It helps us understand why we have bubbles, panics, and fads.

But not only does it help us understand fads, panics, and bubbles it also helps us understand why Rosa Parks is a charismatic connector and such a value to others. Through her intentional effort, stubbornness, and courage she refused to be put in a box as a meek Black woman or just the wife of an organizer. Rosa knew that her greatest contribution in the service of equality, justice, and freedom was her relentless pursuit of not “giving in”.

Rosa Parks was Badass

The Teamwork of Westside Story

The Broadway musical, Westside Story was met with high critical acclaim. It featured a heart-pounding tale of doomed love in a time of prejudice. Maria, one of the main characters, had a brother who was a member of the Sharks, a fictional Puerto Rican gang. She fell in love with Tony, a member of the Jets, a rival white gang. Youth gangs were a new phenomenon at the time and a fresh theme not yet explored on stage. The Sharks and the Jets paced and fought on New York City’s multiracial, blue-collar Upper West Side. West Side Story was groundbreaking not only in theme but also form.

While the public witnessed the magnificent effects of the script, song, and dance, they did not see the tremendous level of teamwork needed to make the story come to life. This teamwork led to one of the most iconic and well-recognized musical scores in entertainment history.

Creating an Award-Winning Soundtrack

West Side Story’s soundtrack album still holds the record for most weeks in the number one spot on the United States charts. Six collaborators created the hit production: writer Arthur Laurents, composer Leonard Bernstein, director and choreographer Jerome Robbins, producers Robert E. Griffith and Harold Prince, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. The first three were Broadway legends at the time. It was Sondheim’s first gig on a Broadway musical. Little did the public know, the group experienced distrust, disloyalty, and contained members with little track record of success. The show and theme were risky, yet as we know, the work paid off greatly.

How to Predict Teamwork Magic Using Q Theory

Researchers Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro studied all the creative teams that made Broadway musicals from 1945 to 1989. They wanted to know if small world networks would influence the success of each production. Small-world networks are made up of tightly knit teams that have the right mix of seasoned experience, fresh perspectives, and previous collaborations.

What is Q Theory?

The researchers gave the value Q to quantify the degree to which a network showed small world qualities. In short, it is a combination of whether your friends are also friends with each other and how many people it takes to connect one person to another in a network, or how many degrees of separation are between you and someone in your network.

Why does Q Theory Matters?

Q values indicate what kind of relationships exist in a network. Connections amongst team members are called strong ties while connections between teams are called weak ties. These factors are also known as bonding and bridging, respectively. Bonds within a team create bridges with other teams. All these relationships of different qualities and strengths create social capital. Social capital refers to social relationships and the results of the interactions of those relationships. If a team is highly bonded but does not interact with other teams, it is isolated and works in a silo. Creativity is less likely to flourish. It has a low Q value. When a network has both bonding and bridges social capital then there is the potential for it to become a small-world network. It will have a higher Q value.

The Goal is “Bliss Point”

Uzzi and Spiro found Q levels determined both the artistic and financial success of a Broadway musical to a surprising degree. They mapped all the links between the production team artists, who were the core six to seven people responsible for masterminding the show. After statistical analysis, the researchers put a numerical value on collaboration and cohesion within each team and between the teams. They found a “bliss point.” When the right number of inexperienced newcomers join with artists who are experienced co-collaborators, the musical will succeed. If Q is too high, the positive effect decreases. If Q is too low, the production will be a flop.

Creativity is not just the result of a lone artist, working feverishly in an isolated cave. Creativity happens when artists bring their unique sets of knowledge to the group. When members and teams contribute to new production, innovation happens. Agreed upon recipes can be tweaked and made fresh and exciting, depending on the spices that each artist has access to. One artist’s routine dance move has never been witnessed by a fellow member of their team. That creates sparks.

The Takeaways:

The Q-Value can be applied across disciplines. When diverse sets of knowledge are more easily accessible via connections within the small-world network structure, a show is likely to succeed. Artists can learn from and riff on each other’s material. They watch each other’s performances and collaborate.

Assess your team’s Q-Value by checking for the following:

• Who is willing to take creative risks?

• Is there a mix of experienced and new members?

• How strong is the bond between team members?

• How well are new ideas accepted?

• How heavily do members rely on old patterns?

Remember, there is more danger to a production’s success if Q is too low rather than too high.

See the full analysis on Q theory in my latest book, The Click Code.

5

Faultline Theory: Why Teams Fall Apart

The concept of faultlines is typically associated with geography. A faultline occurs when there is a fracture or break in the ground that causes great shifts, often resulting in earthquakes, which of course, have the potential to cause great destruction. The same can be applied to teams. Both in group and geographical faultlines, the shifting starts on a foundational level and can be difficult to detect until the rumbling rises to the surface.

Faultlines in groups are potential areas of internal conflict that affect overall performance. When group divisions are strong, like the antagonistic “us versus them” groups have strong faultlines. When divisions are weaker amongst group members so too are the faultlines. Weaker faultline groups perform better than those with stronger faultlines, or internal divisions.

Faultlines in Sports

Keeping with sports analysis, researchers have taken the time to study how faultlines impact group performance by looking at 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams from 2004 to 2008. The diversity in MLB teams creates a fertile environment for faultlines to arise. Bezrukova et al explained that faultlines “occur when multiple attributes (e.g., race, age) of group members come into alignment and divide a group into relatively homogeneous subgroups.” For example, a team faultline can occur between young Latino players and older white players. Two exclusive cliques, or subgroups, form. These subgroups may have their own goals that distract from the overall team goal. They might put their own subgroup’s interest ahead of the team’s best interest.

Faultline rifts cause team cohesion to fall apart. Further, the more defined the subgroup is, the clearer the behavioral associations will be for that subgroup. On the other hand, those behaviors can be internally defined, or what each member decides to do as part of their subgroup. If a subgroup is less defined, then the faultline is weaker. For example, if there are both younger white and younger African American players in addition to older white players on the same team, then the faultline is less clear.

Teams with more internal conflict experience a sharp drop in performance as their internal subgroups, or faultlines, become more defined. We know from Q theory that it is important to have the right balance of different perspectives within a team. That is what sparks creativity and innovation. However, diverse perspectives also create the potential for internal conflict. When that internal conflict deepens faultlines, it leads to lower team performance, but this is not an impossible situation. Differences do not need to be ignored or destroyed to eliminate faultlines. The solution is quite the opposite.

Faultlines in Business

In an increasingly globalized workplace, leaders are faced with deep faultlines: “residual bitterness between historical enemies, culture clashes, turf battles and generation gaps.” Yet, an overwhelming number of the leaders in the study did not know how to build strong, diverse teams across these differences. Differences are not only demographic but also include hierarchical boundaries and separations based on areas of expertise. Additionally, people feel strongly about topics based on associations with their self-identified subgroups, including emotions such as “loyalty, pride, respect and trust.” Humans want to both be unique and belong — identity serves those needs. But identity is also “[t]he emotional force that serves both to separate and connect us…”

Mending Faultlines

Thankfully, unlike geographical faultlines there are remedies to same in business. Researchers, Ernst and Chrobot-Mason offer six strategies for leaders to bridge these intense, emotional boundaries. These practices create connections, healthy relationships, and high-performing teams.

1. First, team members need to feel safe. Leaders can create this psychological safety for their team by shielding members from threats such as ridicule, judgment, and exclusion for example. Intense insecurity does not help the shared identity of a team.

2. Second, differences need to be discussed openly and experienced in a way where all members feel seen, heard, and understood. Try finding common ground and building empathy.

3. Third, connect or form one-on-one relationships. Encourage team members to interact on an individual level, away from group dynamics. Neutral zones are communal spaces, like cafeterias and libraries, where people can meet and mingle at random.

4. Fourth, mobilize a group towards a common purpose. This could mean rallying against a rival team in sports, championing against issues of social and racial justice, or community services. This collaboration effort unites and motivates teams.

5. Fifth is called “weaving,” which researchers Ernst and Chrobot-Mason describe as integrating different groups with unique skill sets to work together toward a common goal. This respects the identities of groups built around specific areas of expertise and builds more cross-group or bridging bonds.

6. Sixth, is “transforming.” Ernst and Chrobot-Mason explain that leaders need to give group members time and space to “open themselves to change.” People are in the process of forming new identities that are aligned with overall group goals. This happens when team members feel safe and supported in their reinvention.

When all six of these boundary-spanning strategies are practiced, “safety, respect, trust, community, interdependence and reinvention” will result.

Takeaways:

Consider where there might be potential faultlines on your team. Pay special attention to how and amongst whom subgroups naturally form. Encourage team members to interact with others who they would not typically associate with.

• Teams do not fail because of their differences. They fail when those differences are used to divide people.

• Productive conflict, the kind that creates innovation, can only arise amongst team members who trust one another.

• People need to know that if they speak up and voice their opinions, they will not be ostracized or kicked out.

• Trust comes from a feeling of psychological safety, a sound strategy for bridging differences.

• We do not need to avoid conflict on our teams. Rather, we need to cultivate resilient foundations of respect and trust that can ground conflict in strong person-to-person relationships.

• Teams with strong faultlines performed worse than teams who had weaker faultlines.

• Faultlines Increase internal conflict lowers team performance.

See the full analysis on faultline theory in my latest book, The Click Code. Pre order it from Amazon

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Ants Know How to Make Their Teammates Better, Do You? Inclusive Intelligence is the New IQ

Did you know supercolonies of ants span massive swaths of the globe? One colony in Europe crosses 3,728 miles. However, out of the 12,000 known species of ants, only about 20 have shown the behavior of forming supercolonies. Instead of fighting with ants from other nests, these special ants are tolerant. Separate colonies combine into supercolonies where individuals can travel freely amongst nests without incident. No matter how far apart the nests are in the supercolonies, if you’re a member of the supercolony you get the same friendly treatment. But if a supercolony ant encounters an ant who is not a member of the supercolony, it will try to destroy it.

This behavior shows the supercolonies have high collective intelligence, where individuals combine their efforts to achieve a common goal. But the ants don’t stop there. New research argues that ants also exhibit inclusive intelligence, which is based on the individual’s ability to make their teammates better.

Ants, like humans, can organize to lift something together that’s heavier than any one individual could carry on their own. However, ants might be able to move a couch down a flight of stairs with less shouting and collisions than humans. Researchers Gelblum, Pinkoviezky, Fonio, Ghosh, Gov and Feinerman found that ants carrying a Cheerio switched leadership positions every 10 to 20 seconds. The ant that was the first to understand how to get around an obstacle became that moment’s leader. Once that ant in charge decided which way to go, that is the way the Cheerio went, without any argument.

Biologists call the drive to join groups eusocial behavior. This means individuals perform altruistic acts for the best interest of the group. It is a new way of understanding evolution that combines the theory of individual selection, where individuals compete against each other, with group selection, where groups compete with each other. This shift towards performing altruistic acts, rather than selfish ones, creates the most advanced level of social behavior. Ants are part of a special group of creatures that show this behavior, along with bees, termites and humans. But perhaps, it could be argued, some of those creatures are more sophisticated in their teamwork methods than others.

Researchers found that the ants “optimize the efficiency of this collective behaviour in a way that works to minimize the duration of transport.” If we all work together, we can eat dinner sooner. This is an example of collective intelligence, where groups of individuals work together to solve problems. In order for this coordination to happen, the ants needed to communicate efficiently, explain researchers. This allows for seamless switching between individual and collective action. Once the leader no longer had the most relevant information, it returned to being part of the group’s muscle.

Those groups of ants demonstrated a complete commitment from each individual to achieving the group’s goal — get the Cheerio to the nest. Each individual’s job was to use their talents at just the right time, being a leader when necessary and a follower when needed. To speak up when they knew their idea would move the group in the right direction. No power struggle necessary. Feierman, the study’s lead author, explained:

“The individual ant has the idea of how to pass an obstacle but lacks the muscle power to move the load. The group is there to amplify the leader’s strength so that she can actually implement her idea.”

High performing groups, both in the ant and human spheres, exhibit inclusive intelligence, which we call the New Inclusion Quotient or the New IQ. On these teams, individuals maximize the talents of their fellow teammates in order to achieve the group’s goal. Teams with high levels of the New IQ implement practices that foster fairness, cooperation, support, openness, and empowerment. As we know from Q theory, diverse teams contain the ingredients for innovation. But that potential remains untapped unless teams cultivate inclusion. When we include differences in a friendly, flexible, and fair way, making our colleagues feel welcome and important — only then will our teams thrive. The New IQ is the next evolution of intelligence in organizational, team, and individual performance.

But wouldn’t it just be easier to go it alone? To avoid having to cultivate inclusive intelligence and altruism altogether? Alas, human beings need to live in groups in order to survive.

Despite what rugged individualism espouses, our existence depends on our membership in cooperative, interdependent groups. These groups allow for the division of labor, resource sharing and mutual protection. But all of those benefits come at a cost. Each individual has to contribute their resources and effort to the group. They need to put the group’s needs ahead of their own at times, in a reciprocal give and take. Trust is foundational for this to work. You need to know that your sacrifices will be returned in kind. This evolutionary desire for inclusion is balanced by a competing and balancing desire — for differentiation.

Our social identity and sense of self depends on differentiation, the feeling of being an individual. Different and special from the people around us. These two opposing internal motivations, toward inclusion and differentiation, keep each other in check in what is called Brewer’s Optimal Distinctiveness Theory. When we lose our sense of self because we’ve become too subsumed in a group, we seek ways to differentiate and regain individuality. If, on the other hand, we become too differentiated and separated from groups, our desire for inclusion increases. It is a delicate equilibrium.

People can find this balance already baked-in with membership in “moderately inclusive (optimally distinct) groups,” explain researchers Leonardelli, Pickett and Brewer. Optimally distinct means that the group has a shared identity and is the right size so members feel both inclusion and differentiation. The researchers argue that we choose our social identities to achieve a balance between inclusion and differentiation, and these identities change based on context. For example, for an Mexican-American, identifying as American while in the United States may be too large of an identity to offer enough differentiation. Whereas identifying as Mexican-American while traveling in France is not necessary. Just identifying as American may be sufficient to meet both inclusion and differentiation needs. Different context, different social identity.

Leonardelli et al explain that people identify with “salient numerical minorities” because they meet the needs for inclusion and differentiation. Large enough to offer much-needed communal support and unique enough to sustain the feeling of being an individual. While this human inclination opens up the potential for conflict along faultlines, with the right strategies, it can instead open up human societies and businesses for opportunity and innovation. We can work with our needs instead of suppressing or ignoring them..

Cultivating inclusive intelligence doesn’t mean you lose your sense of identity or specialness. Quite the contrary. Giving and taking in a reciprocal way, while at the same time deepening our unique skills, helps balance both our foundational needs to be included and to be different. Maybe the ants are onto something.