The Corner Office: How Top CEOs Made It and How You Can Too. Adam Bryant

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СКАЧАТЬ morning, but McCullough came to appreciate her keen sense of people, and her insights about whether they understood the basics of teamwork.

      “Rosemary had an uncanny ability to discern who was going to make it and who wasn’t going to make it,” McCullough said. “And I remember, when I was probably almost a year into the organization, she told me I was going to be okay. But she also told me some of my classmates who were with the company weren’t going to make it. And she was more accurate than the HR organization was. When I talked to her, I said, ‘How’d you know?’ She could tell just by the way they treated people. In her mind, everybody was going to drop the ball at some point. And then she said, ‘You know you’re going to drop the ball, and I see that you’re good with people and people like you and you treat them right. They’re going to pick up the ball for you, and they’re going to run and they’re going to score a touchdown for you. But if they don’t like you, they’re going to let that ball lie there and you’re going to get in trouble.’ Again, I think it’s those intangible things.”

      Being team smart begins with the foundation of learning to work with another person. The next step is to understand team dynamics, and the role that individuals play on each team. Many CEOs have learned these lessons through sports.

      Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, the online gaming company, said his experience playing soccer on his school team was a formative leadership lesson.

      “We were on the same team together, most of us, for eight or nine years, and we were at a really little school in Chicago that had no chance of really fielding any great athletes,” he said. “But we ended up doing really well as a team, and we made it to the state quarterfinals, and it was all because of teamwork. And the one thing I learned from that was that I actually could tell what someone would be like in business, based on how they played on the soccer field. So even today when I play in Sunday-morning soccer games, I can literally spot the people who’d probably be good managers and good people to hire.”

      He explained the qualities he looked for on the soccer field:

      “One is reliability, the sense that they’re not going to let the team down, that they’re going to hold up their end of the bargain. And in soccer, especially if you play seven on seven, it’s more about whether you have seven guys or women who can pull their own weight rather than whether you have any stars. So I’d rather be on a team that has no bad people than a team with stars. There are certain people you just know are not going to make a mistake, even if the other guy’s faster than they are, or what ever. They’re just reliable.

      “And are you a playmaker? There are people who don’t want to screw up, and so they just pass the ball right away. Then there are the ones who have this kind of intelligence, and they can make these great plays. These people seem to have high emotional intelligence. It’s not that they’re star players, but they have decent skills, and they will get you the ball and then be where you’d expect to put it back to them. It’s like their heads are really in the game.”

      Andrew Cosslett of InterContinental Hotels Group also learned about team dynamics from sports—in his case, rugby.

      “Everyone’s different, so you have to know people,” Cosslett said. “I think having a sense of self-awareness is very important, like how you impact each of the people you’re with differently. The whole thing about staying alive on a rugby field is about reliance on the guys around you. Each one of those people on a rugby team responds differently because it’s physically dangerous as a game. It has a tension in the changing room before you go out to play that’s not like any other sport, and I’ve played lots, because it is almost like going into battle. There’s a chance you’re going to break your neck or have a very bad injury.

      “You need to jell with them as a team, but each one responds individually. So it’s about seeing the world on their terms and then dealing with them on their terms, not yours. I think you’re born with some of this as well. I’m very sensitive to how people are thinking and feeling at any given moment. That’s really helpful in business, because you pick things up very fast.”

      Part of team building is understanding the roles that different personalities play in a group. For example, Will Wright, the video-game developer behind best-sellers like Spore and The Sims, sees people either as potential “glue” or “solvent” in a team setting when he is considering hiring someone.

      “There is the matter of how good is this person, times their teamwork factor,” Wright said. “You can have a great person who doesn’t really work well on the team, and they’re a net loss. You can have somebody who is not that great, but they are really very good glue, so that could be a net gain. A lot of team members I consider glue within the team in that they disseminate things effectively, they motivate and improve the morale of people around them. They basically bring the team tighter and tighter. Others are solvents, and it’s their kind of personal nature that they might be disagreeable. They rub people the wrong way. They’re always caught in conflicts. For the most part, that is at least as important as their competence in their roles.”

      Team smarts is about having good peripheral vision for sensing how people react to one another, not just how they act. George S. Barrett, the CEO of Cardinal Health, described an example of how he assessed different managers when he moved into a new role.

      “I was running a company that was acquired by a bigger firm,” he said. “I stayed with them after the acquisition, and then I got a call from the chairman and he said, ‘We’re having some issues with our flagship company. Would you be willing to come in and run it?’ I was thirty-four years old, and I said to myself, ‘Well, it’s already struggling. How badly could I mess it up?’ So I went there. Everyone on the management team was in their fifties, so the first day I was introduced to them, I thought they were going to collapse. You could sort of see them thinking, ‘That kid?’

      “I realized I was going to have to win these guys over pretty quickly. I also knew that there were some folks in that group who were probably not going to come along for the ride. It was a turnaround, so I knew that I was going to have to move quickly to fix some things. I was very clear and direct about what I thought we were facing and what we needed to do about it, without blame. I had to create an environment in which people knew it was their job to tell me things that we needed to do because we were going to run out of time. I tend to be very direct. I expect people to be that way with me.

      “I concluded fairly quickly that not many of them would be staying. There were some very capable people there, but I just think the employees had lost confidence in them. That’s very hard to recover, because so much of leadership is about trust and belief. People have to believe in you. And when they stop believing in you, you can say all the things in the world, but it’s very, very hard to mobilize an organization when they’ve lost that belief.”

      Barrett said that watching the managers, and watching the or ganization respond to them, helped him figure out who was going to remain on the team.

      “I’ll give you an example,” he said. “We’re sitting with a large group of folks, about forty to fifty managers, and people are standing up to raise certain issues. And I watched this one executive. People were watching and riveted to him, really listening and engaged. And then this other executive spoke, and I watched him address the group, and I watched everyone’s eyes. And their eyes went back down to their tables. They couldn’t even meet eyes with him. It was a clear signal that said, ‘You’ve lost us.’ So sometimes you don’t know what the messages are that you’re going to get, but you have to look for them. They come from your peripheral vision. And that was one of those cases where I just knew it the second it happened.”

      How do CEOs build a sense of teamwork, and not just team spirit? Mark Pincus of Zynga used an unusual strategy at one company to encourage each СКАЧАТЬ