Are You Leading a Gymnastics Team or a Hockey Team?

“Are we a hockey team or a gymnastics team?” Dan was looking at the survey feedback I was sharing with the leadership team of which he is a member. The graph showed how interdependent he and his fellow directors think they need to be to accomplish their team’s work: there was strong agreement that they need to work interdependently. But at the next level down – the manager level – the picture was different: in all but one of these teams, the team members thought working interdependently was less important than did Dan and his peers, who led these teams!

In short, Dan was saying their teams need to be playing hockey but it looked like their direct reports think they are on a gymnastics team.

What’s the distinction?

In gymnastics, you can score well even if your team does poorly. Of the 14 men’s and women’s Olympic events this summer, all but two are individual competition events. To win the team gymnastics medal, everyone’s individual score is simply added to get the total. To win a team swimming medal, there is a little more interdependence: any swimmer on the relay team can swim exceptionally, but the entire team gets the same time. The strategy in both gymnastics and swimming is for each athlete to simply deliver his or her individual best.

But to win a hockey team medal, the entire team needs to play as a team and the strategy is more complex. Every team member needs to do not only his individual best, but has to work seamlessly with every other play on the ice. Same with beach volleyball, in the sand.

To be successful, you and your team have to agree about what kind of team you’re on. You can win a medal on a hockey team or a gymnastics team, but you can’t win a medal in hockey with the mindset of a gymnastics team.

What kind of team do you need for your team to succeed? How interdependent and accountable to each other do you and the other members need to be? What kind of team do your direct reports think they are playing on? If you or your team’s answers to these questions don’t align with the demands you’re facing, but you want that spot on the medal stand, what do you think needs to change?

Originally Published August 2012