Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams

Copyright © 2023 David Burkus

Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5445-4175-4

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-5445-4174-7

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5445-4176-1

Audiobook ISBN: 978-1-5445-4177-8

To those who do work that matters,which is all of you.

Contents

Introduction

Part One: Common Understanding

Chapter One: Clarity

Chapter Two: Empathy

Part Two: Psychological Safety

Chapter Three: Trust

Chapter Four: Respect

Part Three: Prosocial Purpose

Chapter Five: Meaning

Chapter Six: Impact

Conclusion

Join the Team

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

About the Author

Introduction

USA Curling had a problem.

Their Olympic teams were failures. Repeat failures, actually.

In 2010, Team USA finished the Olympic curling competition—known in curling as a bonspiel—in exactly last place. Their performance was so bad that their team captain—known in curling as a skipper or skip—had to be benched in an attempt to stop their failing performance. That skip, John Schuster, would become well-known shortly after his total failure at the 2010 Games. His failure was so bad that an entry for Schuster was once added to Urban Dictionary, the website for pop culture words and phrases, the Wikipedia of slang. At the time, the definitions read: A verb meaning to fail to meet expectations, particularly at a moment critical for success or even slightly respectable results. Slightly derogatory, indicating the type of disapproval that can only be backed by the weight of a nation’s scorn.

Team USA’s performance in the 2014 Olympic Games was slightly better but equally disappointing. This time, somehow again led by John Schuster, Team USA finished the bonspiel in second to last place.

The repeated failures were seen as Schuster’s fault. The problem of fixing things fell on USA Curling, the governing body for all curling in the United States. USA Curling wanted to assemble a better team—known in curling as a rink—to take the ice, which is known in curling as a sheet (these names are meant to avoid confusion but actually create more of it), before 2018’s next Olympic bonspiel. To accomplish that, USA Curling launched what they called a high-performance program designed to find promising talent and develop it over years into a rink of chosen curlers led by a superior skip… Okay—actually, let’s be done with the curling lingo.

For obvious reasons, John Schuster and the other failures from the 2014 games were not invited to participate. But that didn’t stop any of them.

Schuster assembled a team of his own. He partnered with John Landsteiner and Matt Hamilton, both of whom had also been rejected by USA Curling; and with Tyler George, who hadn’t been rejected, but mostly because he’d never bothered to try out. They trained together and competed together, determined to work their way back onto the curling’s world sheet. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

They weren’t well funded—each had real jobs they had to maintain just to pay for their equipment and their bills—but little by little, the group of four, known in curling circles as Team Reject, started to attract some attention. In 2015, Team Reject beat both of the teams enrolled in the high-performance program at the national curling championships. Their win obligated USA Curling to send Team Reject to the world championships, instead of sending their chosen teams. Schuster and his team finished in fifth place. It was not ideal, but it was way better than last time—and good enough for Team Reject to be un-rejected and invited to also join the high-performance program.

In the 2016 world championships, they did even better and won a bronze medal for the United States. In 2017, they failed to medal but did finish well enough to earn an automatic bid to the Olympic trials. At those trials, Team Reject had to face off against all of the teams hand-selected by USA Curling—the supposed best of the best—and Team Reject bested each of them.

Their victory led to an even bigger problem for USA Curling.

They now had to send a team they saw as failures and rejects to the Olympic Games one more time. The move was criticized by just about everyone—and no one was left uncriticized. USA Curling and the hand-selected teams were criticized for failing to put down the rebellion from Team Reject. Team Reject was criticized for being…well, rejects. And John Schuster was criticized for even wanting to lead a team of such proven failures. Some critics went so far as to say that USA Curling should have neglected to send a team at all, and thus spared the United States from another Olympic embarrassment.

And in the first few rounds of Olympic competition, it looked as if those critics may have been right.

Schuster and the team were failing—again. They lost four of the first six games, almost leading to their removal from competition. In order to have a chance at a medal, Team Reject would have to win every single game left in their schedule of round robin play.

And that’s just what they did.

We’ve played our best when our backs were up against the wall. We took it to another level this week, said Tyler George, aptly describing not only their performance during the second half of the Olympics, but also the last four years of their curling careers. Usually, we’re fighting and scrapping to get into the playoffs, but for five days we were the best team in the world, and we did it at the right time.¹

In the medal rounds, Team Reject—now Team USA—went on to defeat three-time defending Olympic champions Team Canada and then played Team Sweden for the gold medal. Faced with needing to win or go home, Team USA curled a nearly perfect game. They were so good, in fact, that after Schuster threw a pristine stone, the captain for Team Sweden conceded the match, handing them the gold medal.

Team Reject had become American curling’s best team ever. Their dominance could no longer be denied—even though USA Curling tried to deny it for years. In the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, three of the four members of Team Reject were chosen to represent the United States once again. And, in a twist of fate, the fourth man on their rink was Chris Plys, who had replaced Schuster after his 2010 benching. This next iteration of Team Reject finished in a respectable fourth place. Schuster and company didn’t finish on the podium, but even before the competition began, they were honored for their career success. Schuster was chosen to lead Team USA during the opening ceremonies as a flag bearer.

The man nobody had wanted to lead USA Curling found himself leading all of Team USA.

Why Teams Win

This is not a book about Team Reject.

Well, those first few pages were.

This is really a book about USA Curling’s problem. It’s the same problem that’s nearly universal in sports, business, and everywhere else teamwork is necessary. It’s a problem you’ve likely had in the past and definitely will have in the future. It’s the problem of explaining why teams win. Or, better said, it’s the problem of building a team with the best chance of winning.

Humans were designed to work in teams. The archeological evidence suggests that the earliest humans lived and hunted in tribes. Even as hunter-gatherers gave way to farmers, humans still preferred to work in teams. Farming together actually allowed them to expand their teams and build whole cities. We can still see the imprints of those early humans in our anatomy today. Our brains, facial muscles, vocal cords, and so much more were developed to enhance our ability to collaborate.

And enhance our collaboration abilities we have.

Today, the entire world runs on teams. Jobs that could have been solitary at one time or another are done more efficiently and at higher levels of quality because we work in teams. Teams build our houses and manufacture the appliances we put inside of them. Teams perform surgeries and develop our medicines. Teams teach our children. Teams protect our society. Teams run our worship services. Teams write and edit the books we read and the software we work on. We work in teams—and many of us work on multiple teams. The number of teams we form, along with the size of those teams, has increased exponentially since our ancestors first formed teams to chase down prey.

Accordingly, the importance of building teams that perform well together has also increased. Not just any teams—but teams that share a great culture.

You’ve probably felt what it’s like to be on a high-performing team. You feel energized. Your brain is on fire with great ideas, and conversations with the team spur even more. You finish work each day with more energy than when you started. Unfortunately, you’ve probably also felt what it’s like to be on a team with a broken culture. You end each day drained. You feel let down after every meeting and wonder if it’s worth it to continue.

And, if you’re like most, you’ve probably felt the impact of a positive or negative team culture even more strongly over the last few years. As more collaboration has occurred in teams, team culture has become the dominant influence on our experience of work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of our interactions with coworkers were limited to the dozen or so people serving on the one or two teams we worked most closely with. If you were asked to describe your company’s culture, odds are you would share much more about your team’s culture than about the company as a whole.

We know we need to build the