Team Intelligence summary

So, we’ve established that trust builds team intelligence. Now let's look at composition. Is there such a thing as too much talent? Surprisingly, the answer is yes.

Counterintuitively, research suggests a team can suffer from an excess of ability. When more than roughly 60 percent of a team consists of top-level performers, overall performance starts to decline. Even World Cup football teams have been shown to play worse when loaded with too many elite players. 

Trust and “glue players” provide the raw ingredients for a high-performing team. But ingredients alone do not make a meal. We need to know how to combine them to create action.

Anita Williams Woolley at Carnegie Mellon University has spent years studying this question through fascinating experiments. She brings groups of strangers together and assigns them complex tasks – everything from solving visual puzzles to brainstorming business strategies. 

In the 1930s, a Danish carpenter named Ole Kirk Christiansen started making wooden toys. He called his company Lego. Within a few decades, the company pivoted to interlocking plastic bricks and struck gold. By 1999, the company had sold approximately 203 billion Lego bricks worldwide.

Then came trouble. Video games were captivating kids everywhere, and Lego panicked. The response? Diversification on steroids – new product lines every few months, theme parks, electronic toys, movie tie-ins. The company had developed what can only be described as corporate ADHD. By two thousand and four, Lego was hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Now, while it’s best to discourage stealing millions in priceless diamonds, there are some key takeaways worth lifting from Leonardo Notarbartolo. He was the mastermind behind the Antwerp diamond heist, and his work offers a masterclass in team construction that we can actually use.

In 2003, Notarbartolo and his crew pulled off what’s been called the heist of the century. Their target: the Antwerp Diamond Centre, a vault protected by ten layers of security including heat detectors, motion sensors, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with one hundred million possible combinations. 

Finally, it’s time to address that question that might have been nagging at you this whole time: what if someone on your team just isn’t a team player? We’ve all dealt with toxic team members – the colleague who takes credit for others’ work, undermines decisions in passive-aggressive asides, or creates an atmosphere of anxiety wherever they go. It’s not pleasant. But, with the right management, this toxic team-mate won’t undermine team intelligence.

First thing to note: someone who once took your sandwich from the communal fridge or snapped at you during a stressful deadline isn’t a toxic team member. We all have off days and behave in ways we regret.