Joy's Law

Unlocking People’s Potential

THE 1992 OLYMPICS WAS THE first to allow active professional basketball players from the National Basketball Association (NBA) to compete. The United States fielded a team dubbed the “Dream Team,” which the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame has called “the greatest collection of basketball talent on the planet." The team included legendary players Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson. In fact, eleven of the twelve players are in the Hall of Fame today. Collectively they defeated their opponents by an average of 44 points, including a 32-point victory against Croatia in the finals. Needless to say, it was a spectacle to watch. The 1996 Olympics had a similar result, with the U.S. team returning five members of the original Dream Team to join new stars like Shaquille O’Neal and Reggie Miller. Again in 2000 the United States won gold with relative ease. But then in 2004 something curious happened. Despite having the most talented players (including LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Allen Iverson), the U.S. team lost three games (the most ever for the U.S.) and left with only the bronze medal. In fact, it lost the first game of the tournament to Puerto Rico by a score of 92–73, the biggest loss ever recorded for any U.S. Olympic basketball team. Argentina then beat the United States in the semifinals in one of the most surprising upsets in Olympic history and went on to win the gold medal that year. Though Argentina had several NBA players itself, including Manu Ginóbili, hardly anyone expected it to be victorious. Why did the talented U.S. team fall short of the gold? The historical analysis converges on the fact that the U.S. “team” wasn’t much of a team at all—more like a loose collection of individual stars. They practiced together only for a few weeks before the tournament, not enough time to get used to playing with one another. They also didn’t have enough players with experience in all the different positions. By contrast, other countries selected players to complement one another, and then those players worked together for years, honing their collective playing styles and eventually gelling as teams. We relate this story because most of us are not able to put together or be part of a dream team packed with the most talented people in their fields the world over. Joy’s law is a mental model named after Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, who remarked at an event in 1990, No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said something similar, known as Rumsfeld’s Rule : You go to war with the army you have. They’re not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Both Joy and Rumsfeld acknowledge that organizations hardly ever have perfect resources, nor can they always afford to wait until they have better ones before moving forward. Joy’s law further stresses that great people are unlikely to be concentrated in a single organization. Don’t be discouraged, though. With the right leadership, a well-constructed team can accomplish incredible things, as Argentina and Puerto Rico did in the 2004 Olympics. As another example, startup companies that disrupt large incumbents routinely start with relatively tiny amounts of resources, often a hundred to a thousand times less. Yet they become successful because they are the right group of people led in the right way. Instagram had only thirteen employees when Facebook bought it for one billion dollars in 2012; a few years later Facebook bought WhatsApp, with fifty-five employees, for a whopping nineteen billion dollars. In the startup world, you will sometimes hear about a 10x engineer , an exceptional engineer who produces many times the output of an average engineer: a world-class all-star. Ten isn’t an exact number here—it’s just meant to signify that a person is much, much better than average, a true outlier. (Of course, this concept applies beyond engineering, as there are top performers in every field.) Organizations are always on the lookout for 10x individuals because they can be the ingredients of a true dream team. Keeping Joy’s law in mind, however, reminds you that just seeking out 10x people is a trap for two reasons. First, they are extremely rare; not every organization can hire world-class talent, because there just isn’t enough to go around. The second reason is subtler. There are many excellent people who, despite not being world-class, can achieve 10x output in certain situations, but that output may not be replicated when they switch roles, projects, or organizations. In other words, when you see outsized output by an individual, such as on a resume or via a reference, it is usually because they have many things working in their favor all at once to produce that outsized impact: role in the organization or team, personality as applied to this role, types of tasks assigned, resources provided, and the value of their unique set of skills and relationships in that particular situation. When one or more of those variables change, the person may not be able to produce at the same level. We actually view this as a positive. It means that such outsized output can be created within an organization, not by recruiting world-class all-stars, but by crafting the right projects and roles, ones that allow excellent people to reach extraordinary performance given their unique set of characteristics. As a manager, if you can help your team members in this way, you can create a 10x team around you. A 10x team arises when you’ve helped to arrange everything so that multiple people on your team become 10x contributors all at once. These are the teams that punch above their weight (see Chapter 7), as in defeating a U.S. Olympic Dream Team in basketball, competing successfully against much bigger organizations, and achieving other impressive and unexpected accomplishments. If the members of the team were on different projects, in different roles, or embedded in different organizations, they might not perform this well, but on this particular team, you’ve helped everyone achieve their full potential. That’s the dream of management in any situation. This chapter is about using mental models to form and lead such incredible teams, 10x teams. A February 4, 1996, quote from former U.S. senator Bill Bradley in The New York Times is apt: “Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better." When you foster a 10x team, you draw on people’s different skills and abilities, allowing each person to play their unique part and collectively achieve outsized impact.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

To work toward a 10x team, you must recognize that people are not interchangeable. On the same team, one person’s 10x role on a project might be another person’s 0.1x role on the same project. In figuring out who goes where, you must appreciate the nuanced differences between people, and in particular, appreciate each individual’s unique set of strengths, goals, and personality traits so you can craft roles for them that best utilize those characteristics and motivate them.

First, consider personality traits. Both of us are introverts . We strongly prefer small group interactions to large group ones, as we can easily be overstimulated or drained of energy by larger social activities. At the same time, we are totally fine and even thrive when working alone for long periods of time. So we enjoy roles that involve things like reading, writing, planning, and building things like programs and spreadsheets. By contrast, extroverts gain energy from large group interactions. They tend to avoid solitary situations when possible, preferring synchronous interaction. A team role that involves frequent interfacing with others (like many sales roles) and appearing in large group settings (e.g., conferences) is therefore well suited for an extrovert. And conversely, a team role that involves solitary work, like many programming roles, is well suited for an introvert.

Extrovert Introvert Where personality traits come from is subject to debate, and that debate is generally referred to as nature versus nurture . Nature refers to traits being explained by genetics, and nurture refers to traits being explained by all the environmental factors that don’t come from your genes (parenting, physical environment, culture, etc.). Studies have shown that many personality dimensions (like introversion/extroversion) arise out of a combination of the two. Regardless of the root causes of people’s differences, the key insight to remember is that people really are different. What’s going on in your head isn’t the same as what’s going on in someone else’s head. You will approach and interpret the same situation differently, filtered through your personality, culture, and life experiences (see frame of reference in Chapter 1). Also, even if derived largely from nurture, most personality traits aren’t quick to change once established. That means an introvert isn’t likely to become an extrovert (or vice versa) when put in a new situation. You should therefore look to accommodate these traits in the roles you select for yourself or for other people. You should also know that there are other personality dimensions besides introversion versus extroversion, though we find that one to be the most actionable on a day-to day basis. There is no widespread agreement on the aspects of personality to focus on, but Lewis Goldberg presented one leading theory in “The Structure of Phenotype Personality Traits” that suggests there are five key factors:

Beyond personality, you’re probably familiar with IQ (intelligent quotient), a measure of general intelligence. A form of intelligence that you might not know about is emotional intelligence, measured by EQ (emotional quotient). People with high EQ are typically more empathetic, correlated with high abilities in these areas:

Thus, roles that involve group dynamics, coordination, or empathy (e.g., project management, leadership, sales, marketing) are best suited for people with high EQ. (Note that IQ and EQ are independent traits, meaning the same person could have any combination of high or low IQ and EQ.)

When considering people for roles, you must also consider their individual goals and strengths, which can vary widely. A few mental models can help you make some useful distinctions. For example, some people wish to know a little about a lot ( generalists ) while others wish to go deeper in one area ( specialists ).

Specialist vs. Generalist Think about physicians: primary care physicians are generalists and do a bit of everything, serving as the starting point for the diagnosis of any ailment. But for specific conditions, they will refer their patients to specialist physicians, trained and experienced to treat in one area, such as infectious disease or oncology. Or take retail stores: Sometimes you want to go to a general store like Walmart or Target to get a variety of things. Other times a specialty store like Home Depot (home improvement), Best Buy (electronics), or AutoZone is more appropriate. In your organization, you will need people who lean toward one side or the other depending on the situation. In very small organizations, for example, specialists are more of a luxury. You will want generalists because so many types of problems need to be solved but you have only a few people to address them. In these cases, problems that require specialists are often not frequent enough to justify full-time positions, and so organizations usually rely on outside resources to solve them. By contrast, larger organizations employ many specialists, who can usually get better outcomes than generalists because of their long-term specialist experience.

A similar model from author Robert X. Cringley in his book Accidental Empires describes three types of people required in different phases of an organization’s life cycle— commandos , infantry , and police . This model applies equally to well to projects. As entrepreneur Jeff Atwood put it in a June 29, 2004, post on his blog, Coding Horror :

People who like rules and structure are much better suited for police roles, whereas anti-establishment types gravitate toward and excel in commando roles. If you put a commando person in a police role (e.g., project manager, compliance officer, etc.), they will generally rebel and make a mess of everything, whereas if you put a police person in a commando role (e.g., a position involving rapid prototyping, creative deliverables, etc.), they will generally freeze up and stall out.

Another mental model that helps you consider people’s strengths is foxes versus hedgehogs , derived from a lyric by the Greek poet Archilochus, translated as The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin applied the metaphor to categorize people based on how they approach the world: hedgehogs , who like to frame things simply around grand visions or philosophies; and foxes , who thrive on complexity and nuance. Hedgehogs are big picture; foxes appreciate the details. Like other dichotomous pairs, foxes and hedgehogs excel in different situations. For example, in his book Good to Great , Jim Collins noted that most of the “great" companies profiled were run by hedgehogs who built up massive companies in dogged pursuit of one simple vision:

However, many of those "great" companies no longer exist. They were great only for a short period of time, often because times had changed while they held on to the same Hedgehog Concept. By comparison, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, writing in The New York Times on March 26, 2009, described research detailing why foxes often make better predictors:

Again, each type of person should be placed in roles that suit them. For example, a hedgehog will be better at marketing roles, communicating a vision clearly and succinctly. A fox will be better at strategic roles, wading through the nuances of uncertainty and complexity. And you will need both types of people on your teams.

Because 10x teams perform at such a high level, leaders should be actively thinking of ways to create and maintain them. Members of 10x teams tend to have different skills and backgrounds because this gives the team variety in perspectives (see divergent thinking in Chapter 6) and the ability to assign team roles and responsibilities to people well suited for them. This means that at the organizational level, you benefit from diversity because you can create multiple 10x teams by arranging people the right way, drawing on their wide array of skills and other individual traits that diversity provides.

For leaders, when constructing these teams, the starting point is knowing and appreciating the unique characteristics of your team members. Then you can craft team roles and responsibilities based on what will work best for the specific people available. As needed, you can recruit additional people with complementary skills who can further strengthen the team. You also need to keep individual characteristics in mind when you manage the people on these teams, and adjust your management accordingly. We call this managing to the person , as opposed to managing to the role or managing everyone the same. In other words, good people management is not one-size-fits-all. As with many challenges, Maslow’s hammer (see Chapter 6) can convince you that you should take the technique that worked for one person and apply it to all the other members of the team. But this is not effective; managing two different people will involve two different sets of behaviors, each individually calibrated to their unique characteristics and situations. This model can be extended to other settings: teaching to the student, parenting to the child, etc. Our two children are very different, and parenting techniques that work well with one child seldom work as well with the other. Approaching each relationship as unique will help you better appreciate its individual attributes and use that knowledge to ultimately create more effective relationships and teams.

WHO GOES WHERE

The strongest teams have the right people in the right roles, allowing them to amplify their individual strengths and skill sets. Conversely, when people are in the wrong roles, you can get dysfunctional teams. At the very least, you don’t want people in obviously wrong roles. That sounds easy to achieve, but in practice it is not. Educator Laurence Peter introduced the concept of the Peter principle in his 2009 book of the same name, which has become known by the phrase managers rise to the level of their incompetence. What he’s saying is that people get promoted to a new role based on how they performed in their previous role; however, the abilities required of their new role may be completely different, and possibly ill-suited for them. Eventually, they will be promoted into a role that will not suit them (“the level of their incompetence"), where they will struggle.

Peter Principle

When people are excelling, it’s natural to reward them with promotions for their excellent performance. However, you need to keep the Peter principle in mind when doling out those promotions, so that you don’t put people in roles where they are unlikely to succeed. This can be more problematic the longer a person succeeds in your organization. Often higher roles involve different skills, such as more people management and less individual contribution, which may cut against someone’s strengths or career goals. To counteract the Peter principle, organizations can develop multiple career tracks, such as a technical leadership track that doesn’t require people management. In addition, higher roles tend to involve more strategy than tactics . Generally, strategy is the big picture; tactics are the details. Strategy is the long term, defining what ultimate success looks like. Tactics are short term, defining what we’re going to do next to get there. The Peter principle factors in because promoting someone who is great tactically into a strategic role can be problematic if that person is not strong strategically.

A related difficulty arises when a person wants a role that they are ill-suited for. In that case, you must determine whether they could grow into the new role over time. If you think they can, you can promote them and give them the support they need to grow. On the other hand, if you think the new role will be forever ill-fitting (perhaps because of personality or other factors that are hard to change), you should help them attain satisfaction in their current role or craft a wholly different role that both fulfills them and works for the organization.

However, just because someone doesn’t fit a role initially doesn’t mean that they will be forever ill-suited for it. Given time and practice, they might even excel at it. And there are several strong reasons why you might want to help people learn and grow into new roles rather than always hire outside the organization. First, it often takes a significant amount of time for new employees to ramp up and become truly effective contributors within your organization. This time length is obviously dependent on the job and organization, but as roles get more complex and involve learning a wide variety of new information and internal processes, it can easily be six to eighteen months. You could instead use this amount of time to help an existing team member rise to the same set of responsibilities. Second, if an organization doesn’t provide career paths to existing team members, many will leave for other organizations where they think they can get better opportunities. When they leave, they take with them some of the organization’s institutional knowledge , the collective knowledge shared by the entire institution . Your best people know how to be effective within your organization. They know the organizational history, who to go to for different pieces of knowledge, and ultimately how to get things done. When these people leave, their institutional knowledge walks out the door with them , and the whole organization becomes less effective. For example, Lauren continued to get questions about her projects at GlaxoSmithKline long after she left her position, even after one of the drugs she worked on had been purchased by another corporation. She answered them, but there is no guarantee that your former employees will be as accommodating.

A third reason to try to grow people into new, expanded roles instead of hiring externally is that organizations often craft unrealistic job postings. Such a position can be filled only by a unicorn candidate , a term that was coined to signify that finding such a candidate might be as rare as finding a unicorn (essentially impossible). It’s like people who have unrealistic or too specific requirements for a significant other or political candidate. If you try to fill a role for a long time and you aren’t seeing any qualified candidates, then you might be looking for a unicorn candidate (assuming there isn’t some other issue, such as the compensation offered mismatches the role, or your company has a negative reputation). Unrealistic hiring expectations are a form of grass-is-greener mentality, covered in Chapter 6: “If only our organization could hire the perfect person for this role, things would be great." In these situations, the organization may need to split the role and hire multiple people, focus on growing people from within, or do some combination of the two.

Another critical endeavor for your organization is making the boundaries around roles and responsibilities crystal clear. Apple is known for popularizing a mental model called directly responsible individual , or DRI for short. After every meeting, it is made clear that there is one DRI who is responsible and accountable for the success of each action item. DuckDuckGo similarly assigns a DRI to every company activity—from the smallest task to the largest company objective. The DRI concept helps avoid diffusion of responsibility , also known as the bystander effect , where people fail to take responsibility for something when they are in a group, because they think someone else will take on that responsibility. In effect, they act like bystanders , and the responsibility diffuses across all the members of the group instead of being concentrated in one person who is held accountable.

You can see the bystander effect in many situations, including when people need help in an emergency. In a famous 1968 study, “Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility," John Darley and Bibb Latané had a group of subjects participate in a group discussion about their lives, communicating with one another electronically from separate rooms. Unbeknownst to them, all the other "participants" were prerecorded, and the size of the group varied from two (with one prerecorded voice) to six (with five prerecorded voices). Each "participant" took turns speaking, and one of the prerecorded voices on their first turn revealed they were prone to life-threatening seizures. On the second turn, that same "participant" had a fake seizure, with their prerecorded voice saying, "I’m . . . I’m having a fit . . . I . . . I think I’m . . . help me . . . I . . . I can’t . . . Oh my God . . . er . . . if someone can just help me out here . . . I . . . I . . . can’t breathe p-p-properly . . . I’m feeling . . . I’m going to d-d-die if . . ." Darley and Latané found that people were much less likely to try to help someone if they perceived that at least one other person was also hearing them struggle. In the one-on-one configuration, 85 percent of the subjects sought help before the recording ended, but only 31 percent did so when they thought there were four or more other participants. Studies like this one have since been replicated in many other configurations and situations.

An everyday example just mentioned is the set of next steps that emerges from a work meeting—everyone attending might assume someone else will do them, and so they don’t get done in a timely manner. The DRI concept is a simple and powerful way to cut through this natural inclination by clearing up who is responsible for what.

In other scenarios, sometimes people step up right away, especially when they are particularly motivated by the task at hand or want to showcase their abilities. An organization can take advantage of this self-selection for roles and responsibilities by using a controlled power vacuum . This mental model is an analogy to the natural concept of a vacuum , a space devoid of all substance, including air. If you make a vacuum, say by pumping air out of an empty container, and then you open that container, air will quickly rush into it, filling the vacuum , normalizing the air pressure. In a power vacuum, the “vacuum" is created when someone who had power suddenly departs, leaving the opportunity for someone else to quickly fill the void. Throughout history, power vacuums have been common when despotic leaders are deposed, and others then rush in to seize their power (see hydra effect in Chapter 2). In a controlled setting, an organization can deliberately create a power vacuum, and actively try to get people to fill it. For example, leadership can carve out a set of responsibilities and offer people an opportunity to take them over. In other cases, leaders may wait to see if anyone steps up naturally. Setting up a controlled power vacuum like this can help determine who is intrinsically attracted to a role. By watching what people do as they step into the power vacuum, you can see how well suited they are for the role before officially giving it to them. However you decide to do it, discovering the right roles and responsibilities for the members of your team is a step worth taking. The ideal situation for any group setting is one where you have clearly delineated roles and responsibilities, and people who are well suited for each and intrinsically motivated to excel at them. Those are the ingredients for a 10x team.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

Crafting the right role for an individual—whether for yourself or for a colleague—doesn’t guarantee that they will reach their full potential. People, especially those in new roles, need guidance and mentorship to achieve at the highest level. If you’ve ever been on either side of a successful coaching or mentorship relationship, you probably know what we mean. In any case, you should be aware of several mental models to help you think about how to receive or provide such guidance and mentorship.

Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson has made a career studying the fastest way to get good at something, a model he calls deliberate practice . It works by deliberately putting people in situations at the limit of their abilities, where they are constantly practicing increasingly difficult skills and receiving consistent real-time feedback. As Ericsson noted in “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance": “The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain." Deliberate practice is more intensive than what you think of as regular practice. A kids’ soccer practice where the children spend the beginning of the session passing the ball back and forth is passing practice. However, it is not deliberate passing practice because the kids are not practicing at the edge of their abilities and also are not receiving real-time feedback on how to improve.

Deliberate Practice

Deliberate passing practice could take multiple forms. One example would be repeatedly trying to hit a target and getting coached on mistakes after each few tries. The goal could be to hit the target an increasing number of times in a row: first once, then three times, then five times, and so on. Once the last goal has been reached, then the target could be moved further away and the process repeated. This more focused type of passing practice is a more efficient way to improve passing skills.

You may have heard of the so-called “10,000-Hour Rule," which Malcolm Gladwell popularized in his book Outliers. Gladwell draws on Ericsson’s work and notes that world-class experts usually required ten thousand hours of deliberate practice to achieve world-class status. Please be aware that Ericsson and others have noted that this is not a hard-and-fast "rule," in that actual hourly amounts vary depending on the subject you are practicing, how deliberate the practice, how good your coaches are, and the degree of mastery you are seeking. Regardless, it is clear that in any field, deliberate practice is the fastest way to move from being a novice to being an expert. It is difficult to do alone, however, because it relies on continuous specific feedback about what you could be doing better. Unless there is a simulated environment where such feedback can be usefully received (e.g., some online chess programs), at least one other person needs to be involved. Ideally, this person is a true expert who can provide direct feedback and identify the best goals, practice environments, and coaching methods. Think of someone like a personal trainer, sports coach, or music teacher. In a professional setting, this person could be a manager or mentor who is helping you take on more and more responsibility, coaching you consistently along the way. Deliberate practice puts you outside your comfort zone. That is both mentally and physically taxing. Trying to impose deliberate practice on someone is therefore a losing battle. It is better to get buy-in from both the mentor and mentee before committing to this model.

A related model is the spacing effect , which explains that learning effects are greater when that learning is spaced out over time, rather than when you study the same amount in a compressed amount of time. That is, “cramming" is usually a suboptimal strategy, as we noted in Chapter 3. To really learn something, you must reinforce it over and over again. The spacing effect further holds that spacing between reinforcements can be increased over time. Think about when you learn a new word. The first day you learn it, you really need to study it. Then you might want to remind yourself of its meaning the next day or a couple of days later to make sure you’ve got it, but you don’t need to do that every day for the rest of your life. If you never use the word again, though, you’ll likely eventually forget it, and so occasionally you need to be reminded of it. This is exactly how many modern online learning platforms, such as Duolingo for learning languages and Quizlet for learning facts. The spacing effect should inform your deliberate practice. You don’t completely master a skill and move on. Rather, you must rotate among skills, reinforcing what you’ve learned over time. It’s like going to the gym and rotating among all the muscles in your body, gradually taking on more intense workouts that involve more weight and complicated movements.

The spacing effect has more wide-reaching implications, such as that spacing out advertisements is more effective than showing them back-to-back. Also, spacing out topics within a textbook is more effective than the standard mechanism of covering each topic in its own, single chapter. For example, in an elementary math textbook, if you teach fractions in different chapters, kids learn how fractions can be applied across different contexts and the concept is better reinforced than it would be if taught in a single chapter.

To make deliberate practice work in an organizational context, you need to find a way to provide people the continual feedback and reinforcement learning they need. One way to do this is through a weekly one-on-one standing meeting with a manager, mentor, or coach. This meeting can serve as a forcing function to deliver such feedback on a regular basis (as we noted in Chapter 4). These can be relatively unstructured meetings where you discuss current projects, as well as discussions about skill development and career growth.

In her book Radical Candor , Kim Scott describes a model of the same name for how to approach giving feedback in one-on-ones, weekly or otherwise, using the trusty 2 × 2 matrix (see Chapter 4).

Radical Candor

The two axes for this matrix are “challenge directly" and "care personally." When you give feedback to someone, you can give it in a vague, abstract way ("I think you could do a better job at communication"), or in a specific, actionable way where you challenge directly ("This sentence you said was confusing, here’s why, and here’s what I think you should have said"). Being vague and abstract is much easier to do because it avoids the hard work of identifying specific examples and the psychological stress of debating the nuances around those specifics. Many people thus take the easy way out. But for your feedback to be effective, you are going to need specifics. Caring personally involves nurturing the relationship you’ve built prior to giving feedback. If you’ve consistently shown that you have this person’s best interests at heart, then you’ve laid the groundwork for that person to be receptive to your constructive criticism. On the other hand, if you don’t have much of a relationship at all, or worse, have a negative one, your feedback is not likely to be accepted. It is too easy at that point for the receiver to disregard it.

Radical candor is giving feedback in a way that both challenges directly and cares personally (upper right quadrant of the matrix). Your feedback is completely candid and gets to the root of an issue, its radical form. It goes hand in hand with deliberate practice because this type of feedback is exactly the type that should be given in a deliberate practice session: a specific account of what the person could be doing better at a particular skill they are trying to improve.

The other quadrants create suboptimal feedback patterns:

When you engage in deliberate practice outside an organization, you and your coach can design practice sessions that are specially tuned to your goals and skill level. Think about the soccer practice where you can arrange the cones just so. Inside an organization, by contrast, constructing these ideal practice sessions is more challenging because you do not control the environment. For example, you might want to work on your presentation skills, but you may have only so many possibilities to do so given your position. Additionally, these real-world situations come with constraints and consequences. However, you can still try your best to find learning opportunities. An excellent start would be declaring your intention to engage in deliberate practice for a particular skill set and recruiting a mentor who is willing to coach you regularly. Then you and your mentor can look out for situations where you can work on improving your skills without much consequence to the organization. For example, you can take a role where you practice your skills on a project that won’t have a big impact on the company. Of course, you can also find additional practice opportunities in your time outside the organization.

How can the organization help you determine which projects are suitable for practicing your skills, or, as a mentor yourself, how can you help determine the same for your team members? Venture capitalist Keith Rabois developed a related mental model, called the consequence-conviction matrix , to do just that. As he explained in his lecture “How to Operate":

The consequence-conviction matrix can help you free up your time as a leader, and also categorize situations into learning opportunities for your team members. You can even apply this matrix to family situations. For example, we try to have our kids attempt things that won’t cause much harm if they fail, such as buying something at a store themselves or making their own lunch.

Tying it all together, activities in the high-conviction, low-consequence quadrant are perfect to help someone (or yourself) with deliberate practice. These are times when what should be done is known, so that coaching can happen effectively, and at the same time it won’t be so consequential to the organization if the associated tasks initially fail. These situations are perfect deliberate practice exercises where the particular tasks that are on (or just outside) the edge of someone’s ability are delegated, and then that person is given radically candid feedback about how to improve. That’s a compelling method to help people grow quickly, including in new roles.

UNLOCKING POTENTIAL

Certain psychological mental models repeatedly arise when you are helping people unlock their potential. First, even if someone agrees to the idea of pursuing deliberate practice and receiving radically candid feedback, the process simply doesn’t work very well if the person doesn’t have the right mindset. Psychologist Carol Dweck developed the fixed mindset versus growth mindset model, which explains this wrong-versus-right frame of mind, popularized in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success . A fixed mindset means you believe that your personal attributes and abilities are fixed , with no ability to grow or change. For example, you may believe that you are “just bad at math," and this lack of ability is "just part of who you are." Of course, if you believe that your abilities (or lack thereof) are fixed, then you are naturally going to resist feedback to improve them. The opposite of the fixed mindset is the growth mindset , where you believe that you can grow and change over time. When you have a growth mindset, you are more open to critical feedback, since you believe that you can grow your abilities and recognize that receiving and acting on constructive criticism is a necessary part of the process.

You have to be careful about your mindset, especially with things you’re already pretty good at. The reason is that when you’re good at something (e.g., math), being good at that thing can become part of your identity ("I am a person who is good at math"). Yet effectively growing that skill, such as through deliberate practice, requires consistently getting out of your comfort zone and periodically failing. If you have a fixed mindset, this process is perceived as an attack on your identity ("How can I be a person who is good at math and keep failing at these math problems?"). As you start looking at whether people have a fixed or growth mindset, you will find that these concepts can apply selectively to certain characteristics (e.g., public speaking, athletics, etc.), though for certain people a fixed or growth mindset can be pervasive across most of their endeavors.

What do you personally have a fixed or growth mindset about? Originally, Dweck theorized that delivering educational instructions in school might encourage one mindset over another. For example, telling children they are smart encourages a fixed mindset because then students may take fewer educational risks in an effort to protect their "smartness." On the other hand, praising students for working hard encourages a growth mindset because then they want to put in more effort, including taking on new challenges. Since Dweck’s original studies in the 1970s, many others have been conducted. A recent meta-analysis in March 2018 in Psychological Science found that these types of "growth-mindset interventions" have a positive effect, though a modest one. However, there is an opportunity to replace these subtle interventions, like praising hard work instead of intelligence, with a much more direct approach, which is simply talking through this model explicitly with the person being coached. You will reap significant benefits if you can get someone to commit to having a growth mindset for a particular skill.

It is similarly important for you to believe in the growth potential of your team members, as your expectations may influence their performance. The Pygmalion effect is a model that states that higher expectations lead to increased performance, as people try to meet the expectations set for them. (It’s named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who crafted his ideal spouse, whom Aphrodite then gave life to as Galatea.) Conversely the golem effect is the phenomenon where lower expectations lead to lower performance. (That one’s named after a clay creature in Jewish mythology that came to life, grew increasingly corrupt and violent, and eventually had to be destroyed.) Both are types of self-fulfilling prophecies. As with fixed and growth mindsets, there is an ongoing debate on the strength of these effects across different circumstances. The original studies in classroom settings have also been criticized, but stronger effects have been shown in other settings, such as organizational leadership. For example, a meta-analysis in the October 2009 issue of Leadership Quarterly found the Pygmalion leadership style to be the most effective of the methods studied. This meta-analysis of two hundred different studies on leadership methods was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and compared Pygmalion leadership interventions with traditional methods (popular ideas from the 1970s and earlier) as well as newer techniques described variously as charismatic, inspirational, transformational, or visionary methods. Setting high expectations came out on top. If you set high expectations for your kids or colleagues, that alone will likely not be enough to propel them to reach their full potential. But setting low expectations or lacking expectations altogether will likely create a significant barrier for them and prevent them from reaching their full potential. Again, being explicit can help: if people understand what they are shooting for, they can rise to the occasion .

However, setting high expectations for people and repeatedly putting them into challenging situations can be exhausting or unsettling for them. You may have experienced these feelings yourself. Effective leaders need to be sensitive to this reality and put support systems in place to help people overcome the psychological barriers that can arise. There are several psychological models to look out for in these settings.

First is impostor syndrome , in which someone is plagued with the feeling that they are an impostor , fearing being exposed as a fraud, even though in reality they are not. Surveys indicate that 70 percent of people become inflicted with impostor syndrome at some point in their careers. Have you?

Dunning-Kruger Effect

When people fall victim to impostor syndrome, they dismiss their successes as luck or deception and focus on their failures or fear of failure. This constant focus on failure can lead to high stress and anxiety, and negative behaviors like overexertion, perfectionism, aggression, or defeatism. You can take the following steps to help people overcome impostor syndrome:

A second model to consider is the Dunning-Kruger effect , named after social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. This model describes the confidence people experience over time as they move from being a novice to being an expert. You usually make a lot of progress when you start out learning something, because there is so much new to learn. For example, you can learn to juggle three tennis balls relatively quickly. This quick progress up the learning curve propels you to have high confidence in your abilities. However, you may trick yourself into thinking that this must be a really easy skill, when in reality you are not yet fully grasping everything you don’t know about the skill and how you could be better. Your confidence plummets and, as you learn more, you start to realize everything you don’t know, and see how much effort it will take to truly become an expert at the skill. For juggling, trying to juggle more than three balls or switching to different objects quickly drives this point home. Then your confidence gradually builds back up as you put in that effort and gain meaningful experience.

As a coach, you should keep in mind the Dunning-Kruger effect and be aware of where your team members are along the curve. When you are working with people who have less expertise, help them properly recognize their level of abilities so they don’t become overconfident, but at the same time praise their learning progression so they don’t become discouraged. It’s a balancing act. As they get closer to the middle of the curve, they will need more and more encouragement as their confidence plummets. And don’t forget to also keep the model in mind when you are learning a skill yourself. While the Dunning-Kruger effect explains what happens psychologically across the whole learning curve, it is often used to refer to just the first spike, i.e., the phenomenon where low-ability people think they are high-ability, unable to recognize their own skill level (or lack thereof) in a particular area. This is really the opposite of impostor syndrome: instead of thinking they are much worse than they are, they think they are much better than they are.

A third mental model about psychological barriers was proposed by psychologist Abraham Maslow (of Maslow’s hammer fame) in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation," and is now known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs . Maslow says that to reach your full potential (a state he calls "self-actualization"), you first need to satisfy basic psychological and material needs: physical (food, water, etc.), safety (shelter, freedom from fear, etc.), love (relationships, support, etc.), and self-esteem. He represents these categories of needs as a hierarchy, with self-actualization at the top.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow suggests that you can focus on self-actualization (the top layer) only once all of the more basic needs are met (bottom layers). Through the lens of this model, impostor syndrome reflects an unmet need in the esteem part of the hierarchy, since you feel somehow undeserving of success. Thus, it is preventing your growth into ultimate success at the top layer. A couple of other examples: If you’re in the middle of a tumultuous personal relationship (like breaking up), then the middle-layer needs (love/belonging) may be unmet. Or children who live with food insecurity or in a violent environment may have trouble learning due to their safety-layer needs being unmet.

Critics have raised questions about whether Maslow’s hierarchy differs across cultures or circumstances, or even if there is an actual hierarchy at all. Nevertheless, thinking about this model can help you identify why you or others are not reaching full potential.

Finally, let’s suppose you’re coaching someone and together you have been able to work through all their psychological barriers. You are helping them engage in deliberate practice. You are actively providing actionable feedback on a regular basis. When you are helping them analyze past situations to give such feedback, you still need to consider another psychological phenomenon: that sometimes your memories of the past, even the very recent past, can be biased or distorted. We covered some of these biases way back in Chapter 1 with availability bias and the like. One other mental model to consider is hindsight bias , where, after an event occurs, in hindsight , there is a bias to see it as having been predictable even though there was no real objective basis on which it could have been predicted. Monday morning quarterbacking and hindsight is twenty-twenty are formulations of the same concept . Turn on the TV after any major event to see hindsight bias in action. Talking heads will explain why something occurred, and yet, if you had watched coverage before the event, you would not have found many predicting it ahead of time. Think of the 2007/2008 financial crisis or the U.S. 2016 election cycles. Hindsight bias arises in many other situations: judges weighing evidence in court cases, historians analyzing past events, and physicians assessing earlier clinical decisions. For example, in negligence cases, for guilt to be found, it must be shown that the person who committed the negligent act would have known that their actions would endanger others. When experimental subjects are presented with various negligence scenarios, they typically rate an outcome as more foreseeable the worse the outcome is, even when the negligent act is the same. In other words, the worse the outcome, the worse the hindsight bias.

In the context of leadership and learning new roles, hindsight bias can keep you from learning from past events. If you believe an event was predictable when it was not, you may take away that you made the wrong choices leading up to the event, when in reality you may have made the right choice given the information available at the time. For example, if you make an investment in a new technology or even personally in a stock or startup company, and it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good bet at the time. The odds may have been in your favor, but the luck of the draw simply didn’t go your way. The questions to ask are how accurate your risk assessment was at the time, and whether it could have been any more accurate given the time and resources available. Answering these questions moves you away from black-and-white thinking (the event was totally predictable or not) and into more nuanced thinking (considering how predictable it really was). Counterfactual thinking (see Chapter 6) can reduce hindsight bias because it forces you to consider other ways events could have unfolded. Ask yourself how things would have changed if you had done X, Y, or Z instead.

Another related model is survivorship bias (see Chapter 5), which, as applied here, tells you that when looking to see what past failures had in common, you should consider that past successes might have also had these things in common. For instance, when analyzing past investment decisions, you need to look at how your decision-making criteria applied to the winners and the losers as a whole, and not just to one of those subgroups, or else you may take away the wrong message.

Another way to counteract hindsight bias is to take notes as events occur in real time. That way you have a more objective record of what happened and are not relying solely on potentially compromised recollections. Of course, literal recordings are the most objective record and are increasing in popularity. Some organizations record some meetings or produce structured notes, journalists record interviews with sources, and police are increasingly using body cams to document encounters.

It is important to realize, though, that hindsight bias can affect you only in instances where the outcome could not be foreseen. Hindsight bias is not a factor when you are reviewing the many instances of predictable errors out there. The key is distinguishing between the two situations. Self-serving bias (see Chapter 1) suggests that you will be more inclined to say that your own or your group’s mistakes could not have been predicted (“Who could have known?") and you are more likely to apply hindsight bias to be critical of others.

The mental models from this section can help correct psychological mischaracterizations (e.g., impostor syndrome), artificial roadblocks (e.g., fixed mindset), and misinformation (e.g., hindsight bias), all in the service of helping people, including yourself, think objectively about current performance and ways to improve.

TOGETHER WE THRIVE

So far in this chapter, we’ve covered the mental models that help people reach their full potential and thrive as members of 10x teams. There is another set of mental models, however, that can dramatically increase (or decrease) the likelihood of creating these special teams—those related to the makeup of organizational culture . Every group of people has a culture. Often described on an ethnic, national, or regional level, culture as a concept also applies to smaller groups: organizations, immediate family units, extended families, groups of friends, and offline and online communities built around common interests. Culture describes the common beliefs, behavioral patterns, and social norms of group members. For example, different families have different norms for resolving disputes: some talk openly about emotions, some hardly ever; some have heated discussions, some much less so. What is the norm in your family? Similarly, two highly functioning organizations can have widely different norms and processes for information control (open versus need-to-know), communication delivery (spoken versus written), how new ideas get proposed (ad hoc versus formal), punctuality (always on time versus flexible), and many other dimensions.

In any group setting, it is important to understand the culture, including whether it is one that prefers high-context or low-context communication. A low-context culture is explicit and direct with information, preferring that you be real and tell it like it is . You need a low amount of context to understand low-context communication, because most everything you need to know is clearly expressed.

High-Context/Low-Context Continuum

At the other extreme, in a high-context culture, information is conveyed much more indirectly, less confrontationally. For example, how things are going in a project or role is communicated less explicitly. You need a high amount of additional context to fully understand such high-context communication, appreciating the nuances of nonverbal cues, voice intonation, and adherence (or lack thereof) to usual processes as clues. In other words, what isn’t said is just as important as what is said, if not more so. This high-context/low-context continuum applies to all cultures, from small-group ones all the way up to the cultures of whole countries.

As with personality traits, there are many dimensions that sociologists use to describe culture. Some other commonly cited dimensions besides low context versus high context include the following:

In any case, when you recruit new members to your organization, it may take significant time for them to adapt to its culture. For example, someone who is used to extremely low-context environments will expect you to be very direct, whereas someone used to extremely high-context environments may be offended by your directness, and such low-context communication could potentially hurt their morale. While new hires can grow accustomed to a new culture, they may be resistant initially. So the more up-front you are about the culture of the organization, the better. In fact, being explicit about your cultural norms is one of the most high-leverage activities you can do as an organizational leader (see Chapter 3). It can help prospective team members figure out whether your organization is a good fit for them.

Strengthening cultural norms also helps existing team members work together more efficiently. It’s sometimes said, “Culture is what happens when managers aren’t in the room." It’s what people do when they’re left to their own devices . And that’s exactly why it is so high-leverage to develop and reinforce culture: You can’t look over people’s shoulders all the time. It takes time and energy that is usually best spent elsewhere. If your team makes progress in the way you want only when you’re scrutinizing them, then they won’t get very far in the direction you desire. Additionally, if you don’t shape your organization’s culture, it will shape itself, and may develop in ways you don’t want. Some organizations, such as Uber, were at one time infamous for having a toxic culture . Characteristics of a toxic culture include preoccupation with status, territorialism, aggression, poor communication, fear of speaking up, unethical behavior, harassment, and general unhappiness.

Fortunately, there are many straightforward ways to positively shape culture:

Taken together, these techniques clearly express cultural norms to everyone in the organization and show that they are taken seriously. They also convey that a person who aligns with the organization’s vision, values, and related cultural norms and processes is more likely to excel within the organization.

Winning hearts and minds is a related mental model. It was first introduced in 1895 in a military context by French general Hubert Lyautey as part of a strategy to counter the Black Flags rebellion along the Indochina–Chinese border. It is a recognition that making direct appeals to people’s hearts and minds through communication can effectively win them over. In relatively recent history, the U.S. has led hearts-and-minds campaigns that directly explain its perspective to the populations of foreign countries like Vietnam and Iraq. In a business context, the concept has been successful when upstarts like Airbnb have made direct appeals to citizens to contact their representatives and lobby against regulations that would negatively impact consumer (and business) interests. Establishing and communicating a shared vision, values, and cultural norms helps organizations win the hearts and minds of its members, and thus intrinsically motivates them to reach their full potential. Otherwise, motivation tends toward the extrinsic, such as compensation and title.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson uses the idea of loyalists versus mercenaries to explain the way members view an organization. According to a June 23, 2015, blog post, he believes loyalists are devoted to an organization even in the face of adversity. Mercenaries , by contrast, are in it primarily for the money, and are much more likely to leave for greater rewards elsewhere. Wilson explains some factors that draw more loyalists:

As Wilson notes, culture is one of the key ways to attract and retain loyalists, which should be the goal if you’re seeking 10x teams for the long term.

When working to craft a positive organizational culture, there are a few tactical models to keep in mind as well. First, you can show employees that you value their contributions by understanding that people in different positions need different kinds of support to make progress on challenging efforts. Consider what startup investor Paul Graham, in a July 2009 blog post, called the manager’s schedule versus maker’s schedule :

When you work with people who could benefit from a maker’s schedule, you must work to create a culture that allows them these long uninterrupted blocks of time. To do so, you need to ensure that people on the manager’s schedule are not consistently interrupting the flow of people on the maker’s schedule. Gabriel’s company (DuckDuckGo) has a policy of no standing meetings on Wednesdays and Thursdays, which facilitates schedules that incorporate deep-work blocks (see Chapter 3). Another approach is to allow people to work in environments more conducive to deep work, such as away from the central office, where they will get fewer interruptions from colleagues.

Next, you must be wary of culture eroding as your organization grows. Consider Dunbar’s number —150—which is the maximum group size at which a stable, cohesive social group can be maintained. (It’s named after anthropologist Robin Dunbar.) The idea behind Dunbar’s number is that at about 150 group members and below, you can relatively easily know everyone in the group and their roles within it. Above this number, however, you cannot easily remember everyone and what they do. Organizational processes that worked before Dunbar’s number is reached all of a sudden seem to break down when it is exceeded, and new ones need to be constructed for the organization to be similarly effective again. A group of more than 150 people needs more explicit structures. This concept of the stability of group dynamics being dependent on the size of the group extends to smaller groups as well. Two other well-known breakpoints are when the size of a small organization or team reaches about ten to fifteen people and when it further expands to between thirty and fifty. When your group consists of only a few people, such as an immediate family unit or a tiny company, everyone can be involved in most major decisions and understand everything relevant to the group. At ten to fifteen people, though, this simple system breaks down, and you need some more organizational structure (subgroups, discrete projects, etc.), or chaos ensues. At thirty to fifty people, the same thing happens again—you need to create even more structure (teams, formal management, etc.) to avoid another round of disruption. And when you get to 150, Dunbar’s number, you start to need more traditional corporate structure (strict policies and procedures, processes to interact with other departments, etc.). If you are a leader in a growing organization or team, you need to plan for periods of adjustment when you cross these thresholds.

You should also be wary of growing your organization too fast. If you have too many new people—who by definition aren’t ingrained in your culture—come in at once, then that culture you’ve worked so hard to craft can quickly become diluted and much less effective. Anecdotally, this type of hyper-growth scenario risks significant trouble if an organization grows its team more than 50 percent in one year.

Another model to keep in mind that can quickly erode culture and morale is the mythical man-month . It comes from computer scientist Fred Brooks, who originally presented it in a book with the same name . Man-month , or person-month, is a unit of measurement for how long projects take (e.g., this project will take ten person-months). Brooks declares that this entire way of measurement is flawed, based on a myth that you can simply add more people (person-months) to a project and get it done faster. A silly though memorable example is gestating a baby, which takes about nine months no matter how many people you try to add! The same is true for more mundane projects, especially the later it is in the project life cycle. If you bring someone in to a project late, you need to get them up to speed , and usually this onboarding actually slows down the project timeline. Often it is just faster for the existing people to complete the project. However, you run the risk of burning out the team, especially if you have a strict deadline. But if you extend the deadline and do bring people in, you risk demoralizing the team that way as well, since you had to bring in reinforcements . Better planning can prevent you from ending up in this no-win situation.

A final tactical model to keep in mind when building positive culture is another military one: boots on the ground . It refers to actual troops on the ground in a military conflict, who are wearing boots as part of their uniforms. It is often referenced in the context of making the point that you need boots on the ground to be successful in a military campaign, and that conducting a war just from afar—for example, using only air power—will not achieve the ultimate goals. A military case is also often made that to really win hearts and minds, you need boots on the ground to interact with the population and humanize the outside intervention. That is, you cannot just broadcast and enforce your message from afar. This concept has taken hold within the U.S. through community policing, where police spend time in the community building ties and therefore trust with the population they are policing.

The same is true in an organizational setting when you want people to buy in to your organization’s vision and culture. You can’t just define the culture from afar and hope that it will take hold. Instead, leaders must lead by example and put their own boots on the ground. This is way more effective than leaders who are always set apart, seen as sitting in their ivory tower . There are several common phrases that showcase the desired behavior: rolling up your sleeves , getting in the trenches , showing that you are one of us . As a leader, your job of winning hearts and minds and setting your teams up for success is never done. You must continually reinforce vision and values, doing your best to evolve culture in a more optimal direction, setting up the conditions for those around you to grow. If you can do that well, then the culture you create will help set up your organization to be one that supports and cultivates 10x teams.