The Surprising Science of Better Teams

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Collaboration beats competition every time. We need to start measuring the things that cultivate it. Not convinced? Let’s step into the hen house.

In 1990, professor of animal science William Muir conducted a chicken breeding experiment in his lab at Purdue. As this thoughtful profile of Muir, his work, and how it’s traveled to the business and sports worlds describes it, he: “filled each of two cages with nine hens. The first cage housed what was essentially an “average” group of hens that had been collectively productive egg layers, while the other was loaded with the most prolific individual hens from different cages. And then he waited.” 

A few generations of chickens later, the competition between the so-called “super chickens” in the first cage proved literally deadly: “six of the nine hens in the genetically superior group were dead, and the three remaining hens were pecked bare.” Meanwhile, “the nine ‘average’ hens were getting along just fine, and their egg production increased with every generation. The lesson — that social dynamics might negate genetic advantages when so many hens share a cage — was obvious.” 

As it goes for chickens, so does it for us. Identifying the high performers (and, in the Sigma Six model, kicking out the low ones), then assembling them into a theoretical dream team may seem like a good idea. But since each superstar actually suppresses the best attributes of the people around them in order to stay ahead, it’s actually a disastrous one. Contrary to this article’s assertion that grouping high performers creates ideal results as long as companies “help them work together”, creating a truly productive team isn’t about managing the highest flyers in a different way. They don’t want to work together – they want to win. As Muir very memorably said of his chickens: “Bullying behavior is a heritable trait, and several generations were sufficient to produce a strain of psychopaths."

The super chicken method is a trap based on the false belief that objective performance metrics lead to meritocracy. In fact, it proves the opposite – that these metrics produce an organization filled with people who know how to work the system. Because most companies only measure relative output as opposed to actual output, most performance ranking is dependent on the system in which it happens. But as W. Edwards Deming showed in his Red Bead Experiment, rewarding individuals this way and getting rid of anyone who doesn’t meet the standard never brings the expected rewards of higher quality or better results. (You can see the experiment here, including Deming’s droll analysis: “Some companies take the top 10% of the class. Serves them right.”). Instead, we should reward the groups of people who together, each with their own contributions, to produce the best outcomes. 

Each of these contributions is a dimension of what we’ve simplified in the single term “performance”. Measuring people’s true and varied strengths includes looking at all the effects a person has on the business. Are they acting in alignment with company values? Are they making others unhappy (ask around any company – everyone knows who’s helpful and who drags them down)? Are they pecking their colleagues to death and hiding behind bad metrics as they do it? We need holistic reviews that look not just at how many eggs each individual person puts in the company basket, but all the attributes of the teams that come out ahead.

When people stop holding each other down, everyone wins. 

**Thanks to Alex Komoroske for telling me about super chickens.

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