Real Teams Win: What Smart Leaders Need to Know Now About Achieving Peak Performance - Hardcover

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Tom Steding, Ph.D. has been CEO of more than 12 high tech companies and active chairman of several others. He is co-founder of the Mayfield Alliance with former Facebook Executive Blaise Bertrand whose mission is to deliver a transformational leadership methodology for everyone. He is the co-founder of Quadrix Partners providing leadership interventions. He is a “Seal Team Advisor” to the Stanford-Affiliated Alchemical Accelerator; a Founding member of the Silicon Valley Angel Group; the Executive in Residence of the Palo Alto-based Venture Capital Private Equity Roundtable and more. 

Dr. Steding holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, a MS in Management (Sloan Fellow) from Stanford as well as an MS and BS from the University of Michigan. He lives & works in the San Francisco Bay metro area.

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Real Teams Win: What Smart Leaders Need to Know Now About Achieving Peak Performance

Chapter One

Real versus Fake Teams

Real teams WiN. By “real” we envision a living system built around creative collaboration, intuition and trust, dramatically downplaying the role of ego, power-tripping and will to domination. We call for a new mandate for leadership: to develop and nurture an environment that is collaborative, creative, agile, supple, non-oppositional and courageous. This vision for real teams opens vast new territory for exploration and development—both within the organization and within each of us as individuals. There is much we can learn through the principles and practices in this book, from each other, across generations and from the ages. Real teams don’t worry about whether the boss is in a good mood today or not. Real teams loathe politics. Real teams spend their emotional energy focusing on the mission and figuring out how they can contribute. Real teams think gossip is for people who are taking their eye off the ball and not contributing to positive success. Real teams care as much about their colleagues as themselves. Real teams don’t look over their shoulders. Real teams don’t carry resentments but offload and resolve them as conflicts arise. Real teams see commitments as an opportunity to shine, not as obligations to evade.

The alternative to a real team is a pretend or fake team. Almost everyone has experienced this at one time or another. People who publically talk about the value of teamwork but who actually hate each other. People who gossip about their peers, the company and the management, but who never come up with any solutions to actually solve problems. Situations where sudden slippage appears out of nowhere. Meetings are endless with no resolution. Conversations are confrontational and offputting, ending with the fruitless “agree to disagree.” Leaders don’t listen, and team members stop contributing after the last smackdown they got in yesterday’s meeting. Morale is bad, and performance is deteriorating. Real teams win in two ways, one internal and the other external. Externally, benefits include the performance of the entity measured in the usual metrics of growth, profitability and brand success. Internally, they involve generating a meaningful work life for the participants. Now the team has the uncommon experience of creative collaboration without persistent toxicity, realizes the transcendent joy of a healthy connection with a bigger mission beyond personal ego boundaries, and celebrates how this team manifests its unique creativity in the external performance factors as the applause following a brilliant performance. Real Teams Win offers both by joining a deeper understanding of the underlying root causes for execution with the principles, practices and processes for execution.

Narcissism and Surrender of the Ego

The key factor underlying team dysfunctionality is narcissism or self-centeredness, either across the team or especially in the leadership. Real Teams Win is predicated on the mandate that ALL members of the organization—bottom to top—must accept a surrender of the ego to create an organization that functions at top capacity. The ego mind is, of course, essential to who we are. Clearly, we could not have evolved to our current state, with all of mankind’s achievements, without the ego. Yet the ego mind also includes its own bizarre combination of biases, misperceptions, defenses, strange beliefs, selfish longings and irrational fears. And it is this part of the ego that inhibits true creativity. To establish a high-performance team, real teams require egos subdued to a common purpose. In order to overcome any one particular ego malfunction in any individual team member, the organization must access the collective intelligence of the team. By “surrender of the ego” we mean the process by which individuals defer to the overall superior intelligence of the connected team, which most often does not share our peculiar ecentricities blocking our own creative path.

We know that companies with dysfunctional leadership (aka, “screwed up”) can be successful, at least for a while. More often than not, however, if you are screwed up, you’re probably gonna screw up. Many of these cases involve excessive ego, and where ego soars, souls suffer. Yet even these companies can be successful with new technology and fortuitous timing. We’ve seen it happen. We’ve also seen tyrannical leadership carry on for an impressive period of time. We also know, from experience, that companies can do better with the method we describe. And better is the goal.

Myth and Leadership

A story told at the US Army Armor School, perhaps apocryphal, is that the first tank assault in WWI was so successful it went in 30 miles…and ran out of gas. Similarly, in today’s world we are at risk of outrunning our supply line of hard-earned wisdom within the constraints of human nature. In search of a remedy, we look to myths that have provided guidance through the ages, relevant wisdom that we are at risk of losing.

So what do myths have to do with leadership? Turns out, a lot. Leadership is about people. And the more you know about people the more effective leadership can be to achieve desired results. A possibly underutilized resource to understand people is this mythic layer, the deeper region of our psyche that is expressed in the themes and drama of our ancient stories.

In order to understand their importance, take a look at how myths came to be. In the Greek Pantheon, for example, figures and stories were made up based on the projections (attributing your own feelings and attitudes onto another person or object, often unconsciously) of the various qualities of the human psyche. So our warrior instincts were located in the invented figure Ares, feminine qualities in Aphrodite and strength and power in Hercules. Mirroring the complexity of humans, they necessarily appeared in droves. As such, they are a readout of our own humanity, the operating system of we as people, and if you want to understand how an operating system works, read the source code. Along the way, we examine multiple stories from mythological traditions to illuminate the aspects of humanity relevant to effective leadership. We will invite heroes and heroines from ancient mythology into the room, only to discover they have been there all along.

One of the problems may be that myths suffer from the idea that myths are, well, myths and therefore not true. This misses the point that myths may be factually untrue but contain important truths to learn from. “Myths are false on the outside, but true on the inside. Stories that never been, but always true.” 

As you can imagine, the Director of the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Lans Smith, knows more than a bit about mythology. The introduction to his very accessible book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to World Mythology, explains that one way to understand the truth of mythology is to: Consider the myth of the ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf.’…Chances are no such incident ever happened. We tell this to children to understand that habitual lying makes it hard for people to believe you when you are telling the truth. So…the story is one of truth, whether or not it is actually fact. Fact doesn’t matter, as it has no effect whatsoever on the value of a myth.

We also suggest linkages that may offer insight into leadership and the human experience in teams. We understand...