Gritty Team Building (#108)
Band of Brothers
Near the small town of Toccoa, in northeast Georgia, there is a small, nondescript mountain that towers over the surrounding countryside. The locals called it “Currahee Mountain” after the Cherokee Indian word for “stands alone.” Today, the summit is covered with towers, but in 1942 it was bare as the United States had just entered World War II against Germany and Japan. With the odds stacked against the country, the U.S. Army opened a training camp for paratroopers at the base of the mountain. Nearly 17,000 paratroopers trained at Camp Toccoa during the war where they were transformed from civilians to tough paratroopers.
There were over one thousand infantry companies (an airborne company had about 130 people assigned to it at full strength) that fought in the European Theater of Operations in World War II. Yet one company is more famous than all the rest: Easy Company (Easy was the phonetic letter for E), 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), 101st Airborne Division. By my count, there is the NY Times bestselling book Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose, at least fifteen other books about the company, the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers, and a half-dozen documentaries. This exposure has made Easy Company’s experience the epitome of the entire generation’s experience in World War II.
The 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment was one of the first units in the U.S. Army to take soldiers directly from civilian life, conduct basic training, advanced training, and deploy to combat. The regiment had the ability to select only the best individuals and send the rest that didn’t make the cut to other units. During the training at Toccoa, 400 officer volunteers were whittled down to the regiment’s 148 best officers. It is estimated that 5,300 enlisted volunteers were tested to find the 1,800 enlisted paratroopers who eventually made up the regiment. Due to their demanding selection criteria and tough training the 506th PIR and Easy Company were elite organizations.
Each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, the company would run up and down Currahee Mountain in under 50 minutes. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday the paratroopers would tackle the obstacle course. Other physical fitness events included the push-up, pull-ups, rope climbs, broad jumps, road marches (hikes with full equipment), and log exercises. As the soldier’s muscles hardened and endurance grew, the 506th added additional training in infantry tactics, map reading, orienteering, first aid, close order drill, marksmanship, and eventually, mock day and night attacks.
Basic parachute training happened at Toccoa, too. The future paratroopers learned how to conduct a parachute landing fall by jumping off a small platform, exit a mock airplane, and steer the parachute. Eventually, Easy Company would practice exiting a 34-foot-tall tower which simulated the initial exit from the aircraft. The officers earned their airborne wings at Toccoa in November, but the enlisted soldiers had to wait to travel to Fort Benning later in the year.
Toccoa was where the officers and non-commissioned officers of the 506th PIR learned their craft in teaching, training, and leading the men. The unit weeded out those that didn’t meet the high standards, and those soldiers that remained formed incredibly tight bonds between each other. During their time at Toccoa, they formed incredibly tight teams with their bunk and squad mates, they forged the culture of the paratroopers and the 506th PIR as they learned to operate independently, they earned their airborne wings and adopted the motto “Currahee,” and they received the right to blouse their boots. Most importantly, they developed the processes at the platoon, company, battalion, and regimental level that they would use to fight and win in combat.
Easy Company, however, had it far from easy under the petty tyranny of Herbert Sobel, the company commander. Sobel’s drive and desire to have the best unit in the regiment pushed Easy Company a little farther than the other eight rifle companies in the regiment. Although he had the rank and position, his lack of confidence during field exercises, inability to read maps, and poor judgment inspired hatred in the men of Easy Company. This shared hardship and shared enemy brought the Easy Company team together. The officers that survived Sobel eventually occupied key positions throughout the 506th and the soldiers, the Toccoa men, eventually became non-commissioned officers who led Easy Company through some of the the toughest times in Normandy, Holland, and Bastogne. As Stephen Ambrose concludes, Sobel must have been doing something right in the summer of 1942 at Toccoa.
Easy Company was built into a gritty team at Toccoa. Selecting only the best paratroopers, tough physical training, living together, shared meals, and the common enemy of Herbert Sobel forged Easy Company into an exceptionally gritty a team and organization, or one that possesses the “will to persevere to achieve long term goals.” Organizational grit is forged by providing the team a goal and a purpose, a plan, a scoreboard, a gritty culture, and building trust in the team, just like Easy Company. TFCG is proud to host a premier off-site team building event at Currahee Mountain starting in the Fall of 2021. Reach out here to find out more.
Hiring
Unlike Easy Company in World War II, you may not be able to hire only volunteers out of a 4,400,000-person organization and then take only the top third of that elite group. But gritty teams are built on their people, and one way to get gritty people on your team is to hire them.
As part of your hiring process, you may want to try to determine your applicant’s grit. It is not worth using a grit quiz, like in Chapter 2 or asking direct, gritty questions since both can be gamed in the interview process. Instead, focus on the applicant’s past gritty achievements at work and in life. Here are six questions to get you thinking:
What is your most significant achievement that took the most time to accomplish?
What achievement did you strive for, but fail to accomplish? How long did you pursue it before you gave up?
In the last 12 months, what long-range goal, either personal or professional, did you achieve?
In the last 12 months, did you have any personal or professional long-range goals that you worked towards but didn’t achieve?
What was your biggest professional failure? How has that failure influenced you professionally since?
Did you wrestle, box, or do martial arts in junior high school or college?
Once you have an understanding of the applicant’s grit, it may be worth looking at them from both a talent and grit perspective. Some professional sports teams have begun to use a matrix to differentiate their potential talent. Of course, the best players are in the upper right with high talent and high grit. Riskier players for the teams to pursue are the ones with high talent and low grit or low talent and high grit. Most professional sports teams aren’t going to draft, trade, or hire anyone they consider in the low grit and low talent area.
Hiring for Grit
Looking back on my high school athletic career, I fell within the low talent, high grit area and that trend has continued to this day in both cycling and triathlons. Modifying your hiring process so you understand your applicant’s grit is a helpful perspective and one which may result in a higher performing team.
Team Building
Once your team is set, trust is built in your teams through shared experiences and hardships. Research has shown that team building activities can positively enhance team performance, increase communications, and build trust. The five team building activities that produce the best results are physical activities, field trips, professional development activities, shared meals, and volunteering.
Let’s take a deeper look at each of the activities and discuss ideas on how you can use them to build your team.
Physical Activities — Sports are great ways to bring the team together, get exercise, and see people in a different setting. From personal experience, if your team is bigger than four people, I would not recommend a golf outing — the foursomes limit the amount of team building that can happen. Ultimate frisbee, ultimate football, flag football, soccer, softball, paintball, ziplining, hiking, whitewater rafting, and even a group bike ride can all help bring groups together
Field Trips — A trip to a museum, a sporting event, or a park can bring new ideas to the team and help build the bonds within the team
Professional development activities — Workshops, guest speakers, trade shows, and webinars can get your team thinking about new ideas or revisiting the fundamentals of something you do regularly
Shared Meals — Rather than everyone eating at their desks, a gathering over lunch is a great way to encourage casual conversation, get to know one another’s interests outside of work, and build the bonds within the team
Volunteering — An activity the entire team can feel proud about doing can bring it together. A construction project for a good cause or volunteering at a shelter or food bank can help people get to know one another outside of work and build the bonds within the team
The organizations I was part of in the military relied heavily on physical activities, field trips, professional development events, and shared meals to build the team. I can still remember some of the flag football games I played in and the field trips we took over the years, while the PowerPoint driven meetings have faded away.
Virtual Team Building
A virtual team typically describes a group of individuals who work together from different geographic locations and use technology such as email, texts, Slack, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom to collaborate. The COVID-19 pandemic created many new virtual teams when the threat of the virus forced more people to work from home. In the future, the cost savings of not having office space may drive many companies to rely more heavily on virtual teams.
Virtual team building events are valuable too. More than in-person events, it is helpful to be deliberate and put energy into them before doing them live for the first time. Here are three virtual team building activities that enhance performance, increase communications, and build trust.
Virtual professional development — Bring in a guest speaker via Zoom or Teams
Leader Decision Exercise (LDX) – An LDX is a military technique that uses a scenario to give leaders the opportunity to develop a plan based on limited information in a time-constrained environment. Think of them as a situational puzzle, but one not as complicated as a business school case study. They require few resources and provide huge returns in developing your leaders. All it takes is a slide with the scenario, an hour, and Zoom or Teams to bring the group together
Shared meals — Host a virtual happy hour at 4:00 PM on a Friday. It gives your team a chance to end work early and socialize. Plus, you don’t have to watch everyone try to eat on Zoom or Teams
Whatever technique you choose, team building doesn’t happen organically, especially in a virtual environment. There has to be time on the calendar each month or quarter to build your team’s bond intentionally. Find the time to do one of these events in the next three months.
Corporate Team Building Example: Squarespace
Based in New York City, Squarespace is an American website building and hosting company. Founded in 2004 by Anthony Casalena in his dorm room at the University of Maryland, it had grown into an exceptionally popular website design and hosting platform. With over $500 million in revenue and over 1,000 employees last year, it is regularly voted as one of the best places to work.
Since its start, Casalena focused Squarespace on beautiful design. This goal enabled it to gain market share in a crowded market. To support this goal, he hired talent that all “have a similar aesthetic and are wired with a design-focused mindset.”
In addition, Casalena has built strong teams in Squarespace using shared experiences and hardships. Samantha Kogle, Squarespace product designer, says, “I like to think of our team as family oriented — we get coffee and lunch together, share inspiration and memes in Slack, celebrate both big and small wins together, and in general, foster a positive environment.” Mackenzie Clark, a Senior Software Engineer, highlights the twice a year “Hack Week where engineers have a full week to build whatever they want. It’s always a mix of technical explorations, internal products, or new Squarespace features that haven’t made it into the road map.” These shared experiences, shared meals, and shared “Hack Week” has built strong bonds, great communications, and trust amongst Squarespace employees. Squarespace is a gritty, high performing team.
Sports Team Building Example: The Tour de France
The Tour de France (TDF) is the biggest cycling event in sports. In 2020, 22 cycling teams with 176 riders raced during 21 stages (a day’s worth of racing, usually 100+ miles) over 2,156 miles of French countryside. Each day’s race is a separate competition and the overall race results is a competition as well. Although an individual rider will don the yellow jersey as the winner in Paris, the race is a test of perseverance and the strength of the team.
Each TDF team has 8 cyclists under a team director (think coach) with different roles and abilities. There is typically an overall rider (called the GC contender), a sprinter specialist, a couple of mountain climbing specialists, and four all around helpers called domestiques (there job is to do the hard work to get the others to a position to win). Lots of leadership training uses sports as an example. I like the TDF as an example for corporate groups since the bicycle teams have to execute and perform every day for over three weeks. Like with corporate groups, building a team to operate at a consistently high level, day-in and day-out is more challenging than surging once-a-week.
Team Ineos Grenadier won the Tour de France from 2015-2019 so it is useful to look at their team building philosophy. For the non-cycling fans, Ineos is like the New York Yankees in baseball or the New England Patriots in football — fans either love them or hate them. Team Ineos is a massive organization with the ability to field a team at two cycling races simultaneously. Under the leadership of Sir David Brailsford, the team has a budget of $52M per year (believed to be more than any other team), 30 riders, and 76 team members from sport directors, performance coaches, doctors, psychologists, chefs, mechanics, and brand managers.
Team Ineos Grenadier builds its team very deliberately. The goal of Team Ineos is to win the Tour de France and as many other bike races as they can. Ineos then lays out a roadmap for the season that usually revolves around hiring the best bike racers that they can with their large budget, hard training, being disciplined, and being dedicated to the pursuit of marginal gains — a series of tiny improvements in many different areas that result in a win. The concept of marginal gains isn’t new, it is borrowed from the Japanese concept of kaizen, which was a popular concept in the 1980s. For Ineos, the concept of marginal gains includes a better bus for the riders, an air-conditioned truck for the mechanics, separate washing machines for each rider’s kit, biofeedback for each rider, keto nutrition, and much more. The team also develops trust in each other during tough training camps in remote locations, shared meals, and through the rigor of the early season races, like the Criterium du Dauphine and the Tour de Swiss.
Team Ineos Grenadier didn’t with the Tour de France in 2020. Their best rider, Richard Carapez, finished 13th. The team later rebounded and won the Giro d’Italia and came in second at the Vuelta a Espana. Not a typical year for Team Ineos Grenadier, but they still ended up as the 3rd best team in cycling and still represent the correlation between strong team building and success in sport.
Obstacle
One of the biggest inhibitors of teamwork is lack of camaraderie. The normal day-to-day may not build the trust and cohesiveness needed to bring the team together to perform at its grittiest. Using physical activities, field trips, professional development, shared meals, and volunteering events in a deliberate, regular manner can help foster the bonds needed to build a gritty, high-performing team.
Conclusion
You may not be building the next Squarespace, training the next team to win the Tour de France, or developing a team that needs to parachute into Normandy, but hiring talented, gritty people and building a better team can produce outstanding results in any organization. The first step in building a gritty team is hiring people that can help the organization grow its grit. Whether building a military unit, a sports team, or a corporate group, team building, especially by leveraging shared experiences and hardships such as physical activities, field trips, professional development, shared meals, and volunteering. Great teams don’t happen organically; they must be grown. Go on the offensive and enhance your organization’s grit by building a gritty team.
If you’d like some help with your team building, start the conversation here.