guy receiving the pass every time? This is also why low-cohesion teams struggle away from home; we call it complexity under duress but basically they fall apart under pressure. It’s not about developing skill. The thing to remember is that the talent you see is not the talent you get. They are different things.’
The TeamWork Index has a universal principle applicable to all businesses. ‘Not everyone can afford to bring in the best people, and if you do, you will have problems,’ Darwin continues. ‘You might be judging talent on the wrong standards if they are coming in from a different system to yours. New people may be indoctrinated into other systems. It’s more important to think about if your new hire is a good person – can they adapt to your system? – and remember that the younger they are, the more adaptable they are.’ We will look at the importance of adaptability in Chapter 2, where we will find out just what happened to Ousmane Dembélé after he appeared in the ‘Next Generation’ feature.
The question does not always have to be a ‘build versus buy’ one: some positions are more suited for buying in talent, and others for developing your own. One study looked at the portability of talent, by position, in the more measurable environment of American football.10 It took performance data from 75 star wide receivers – whose results are often linked to the relationship and understanding of set plays with their quarter-back – and 38 punters, whose job of kicking the ball is based more on individual skill. The data took into account the best season the player had and the two seasons that followed, dividing the groups into switchers (those who moved teams) and stayers.
The result: star wide receivers who switched teams suffered a decline in performance compared to those who stayed put. All wide receivers decline over time, but these declines were steeper than normal. Punters who switched teams did not experience a greater drop in performance than those who stayed. This suggests that punters have more portable skills than wide receivers – and in business terms, that wide receivers have what is known as company-specific human capital. David Moyes developed his company-specific human capital over ten years at Everton, so a short-term performance decline was inevitable after he moved jobs. Although, when he was appointed manager of Sunderland in summer 2016, Moyes had his own approach to talent portability. He went back to his former clubs to sign eight players: Steven Pienaar, Victor Anichebe, Joleon Lescott, Bryan Oviedo and Darron Gibson, whom he worked with at Everton; and Donald Love, Paddy McNair and Adnan Januzaj from his period at Manchester United. Sunderland finished bottom of the Premier League, and none of those signings improved on their previous performances. You could say that these players did not have the portability skills Moyes had hoped for.
‘Managers should consider minimising the portability of certain star positions in order to retain those individuals as a source of competitive advantage,’ the study concludes. In other words, if your star player wants a huge pay hike in his new contract, you pay it.
Darwin knows one cricket coach who has a tactic right out of the Athletic playbook: he makes training sessions voluntary attendance. ‘They all turn up of course, but that’s because he is empowering them and relying on their character to be professional. That leads to stronger relationships within the group.’
I ask Darwin if he could identify underlying reasons for Leicester City‘s surprising Premier League title-winning campaign in 2015–16. The team began with a relatively low TWI that had them down as a mid-table side. What helped is that they were playing in the Premier League, where cohesion has dropped by over 30 per cent since it was launched in 1992. The cohesion dynamic of the competition itself affects teams as much as their own cohesion does. The Premier League had four different winners in the years between 2012 and 2016 and the last team to successfully defend its title was Manchester United in 2008–09.
Leicester were able to jump up the table because so many other teams lacked cohesion: the Manchester clubs were struggling under coaches approaching the end of their reigns, Chelsea was in freefall under José Mourinho and Jürgen Klopp joined Liverpool after the season had started. As the season went on, Leicester’s cohesion rating topped their rivals’. They had no injuries and coach Claudio Ranieri picked his best XI every week. He would also regularly play down the team’s ambition to win the title, saying it was not possible until the point at which it was almost impossible not to win it.
There was also the super-chicken factor. An evolutionary biologist called William Muir was interested in productivity, and he devised a study of chickens, assuming theirs would be easy to measure as you could just count their eggs. Chickens live in groups, and so he left one group of chickens for six generations and monitored their productivity. He then created a second group, taking only the most productive chickens from the first group. He called the second group a ‘super-flock’. He waited another six generations, and then compared the results.
The first group was getting along just fine. The chickens were plump and feathered and their egg production was up. The second group, the one with the ‘super-chickens’, was not so good: only three were alive. They had suppressed the productivity of the others and pecked them to death. ‘Most organisations and some societies are run along the super-chicken model,’ says Margaret Heffernan, an expert in corporate cohesion.11 ‘We’ve thought success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest … in the room and giving them all the power. The result has been exactly the same as in Muir’s experiment: aggression, dysfunction, and waste.’
Leicester’s win was a triumph of the collective over the individual, of the group chicken rather than the super-chicken model. Even the three best players – Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez, and N’Golo Kante – always put the group first. Mahrez gave up his penalty-kicking duties against Watford in November to allow Vardy to score in a ninth successive game (he would go on to break Ruud van Nistelrooy’s record and score in 11 straight games).
And what about the slump that happened the following season? Because of their original low TWI, Leicester dropped back to their long-term Performance Capacity (remember, that’s skill multiplied by cohesion), while their runs in the FA Cup and Champions League diluted in-season cohesion because of the squad players being rotated in (having sole focus on the league in 2015–16 was a huge advantage).
So a team with a low TWI can have a good season, but Darwin’s data suggests that they cannot sustain it. The last team with a low TWI to win the Premier League was Blackburn Rovers in 1995. That side was relegated in 1999.
What makes one group more successful than another? A team from MIT tried to answer that question, bringing in 697 volunteers, putting them into groups and giving them hard problems to solve. Each team worked together to complete a series of short tasks, one involving logical analysis, another brainstorming; others emphasised co-ordination, planning and moral reasoning. Overall, the groups that did well on one task did well on the others. Anita Woolley, one of the academics who conducted the study, identified the three characteristics that marked out the best teams.
‘First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group,’ Woolley explained. They also showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other.12 And thirdly, the teams with more women outperformed teams with more men.13 (Athletic Club de Bilbao understands that its policy is open to the charge of lacking in diversity, but the club has six women on the executive board, which is more than any other club in Spain.14 In Chapter 5 I will look at how one French club found an edge by appointing a female head coach.)
Woolley’s MIT experiment showed that social connectedness is key to performance. Heffernan visits companies that have banned coffee cups from desks because they want people to talk to each other around the coffee machine. Idexx, an American
