Book Review: "Team of Teams"

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World                                                                   By General Stanley McChrystal

Filled with helpful illustrations and engaging stories from military history and corporate management, Team of Teams shows how Stanley McChrystal accurately identifies challenges, crafts effective responses, and models successful leadership while commanding the Joint Special Operations Task Force in their fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). 

THE CHALLENGE

When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2003, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing.  AQI was a decentralized network that could move quickly, strike ruthlessly, then seemingly vanish into the local population.  The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training—but none of that seemed to matter.  They were struggling to cope with a new environment that was fundamentally different from anything they had prepared for.  Recent technological changes had led to a world less predictable – more complex – and demanding agility and resilience.

While the organization was made up of specialized teams—highly trained and significantly gifted—each team tended to view its role in isolation.  The magic of teams is a double-edged sword once the organization gets big.  Then the goal becomes to accomplish missions better than the other teams in the organization, rather than to win the war.  The Task Force needed an unprecedented transformation into a true team of teams.  To accomplish that would require a complete reversal of the conventional approach to information sharing, delineation of roles, decision-making authority, and leadership. 

THE RESPONSE

McChrystal set about to remake the Task Force into a network that combined extremely transparent communication with decentralized decision-making authority.  The walls between silos were torn down.  Leaders looked at the best practices of the smallest units and found ways to extend them to thousands of people on three continents, using technology to establish a oneness.  The things that make small teams successful – trust, common purpose, shared awareness, and the empowerment of individuals to act—became the goal of the Task Force.

McChrystal’s contribution was three-fold: 1) shared consciousness, achieved through centralized forums for information-sharing and extreme transparency; 2) empowered execution, the radical decentralization of managerial authority by pushing decision-making and ownership to the edges of the organization; 3) leader as gardener, as opposed to chess-master.

The most critical element of transformation was the Operations and Intelligence (O&I) brief, a daily exercise in pumping information out and empowering people at all levels.

McChrystal redefined the role of leadership as gardening.  As leader in this new environment, McChrystal began to view effective leadership as akin to gardening – nurturing the organization—its structure, processes, and culture.  Shaping the ecosystem, creating and maintaining the needed teamwork conditions, driving the operating rhythm, transparency, and cross-functional cooperation became his leadership priorities.

The Task Force became “a team of teams” – faster, flatter, more flexible—and beat back AQI.

THE APPLICATION

The challenges McChrystal addresses in Team of Teams are similar to challenges the church is facing today.  The church has not adapted to a complex, rapidly-changing environment.  The world is changing faster than ever and the church appears to be falling more and more behind in its ability to engage the world.  Things that once worked well are now ineffective.  We have developed tremendous competencies for dealing with a world that no longer exists.  We are less and less effective at seeing heart transformation take place in individuals and communities. 

The creativity and innovation so vital to McChrystal’s approach is often absent in the church.  In many places, the church needs to re-invent itself.  We must honestly assess our present situation, prayerfully develop the ability to adapt to complexity, and gracefully commit to embrace the change necessary to engage our world with the Gospel.  Key to this will be the sharing of information, authority, and resources, both inter-denominationally and intra-denominationally.

McChrystal’s purposes for visiting operational centers under his command also provide insight for denominational jurisdictional overseers in our visits: 1) to increase the leader’s understanding of the situation, 2) to communicate guidance and resources, 3) to motivate, encourage, and inspire.

THE QUOTES

·       “To succeed, maybe even to survive, in the new environment, organizations and leaders must fundamentally change.”

·      “An organization must be constantly led or, if necessary, pushed uphill toward what it must be.  Stop pushing and it doesn’t continue, or even rest in place; it rolls backward.”

·      “Teams whose members know one other deeply perform better.”

·      “Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other.  Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole.”

·      “The larger an enterprise gets, the harder it is for it to act and think as one.”

·      “Most organizations are more concerned with how best to control information than how best to share it.”

·      “Working together always works.  It always works.  Everybody has to be on the team.  They have to be interdependent with one another.”

·      “In the old model, subordinates provided information and leaders disseminated commands.  We reversed it: we had our leaders provide information so that subordinates, armed with context, understanding, and connectivity, could take the initiative and make decisions.”

·      “Individuals and teams closest to the problem, armed with unprecedented levels of insight from across the network, offer the best ability to decide and act decisively.”

·      “The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.”

·      “As a leader, however, my most powerful instrument of communication was my own behavior.”

·      “If you come to ask questions, leave time to listen to the answers.”

·       “More than directing, leaders must exhibit personal transparency.  This is the new ideal.”

·       “’Thank you’ may be the leader’s most important phrase, interest and enthusiasm the leader’s most powerful behaviors.”

·      “The central predictor of productivity is engagement, even more than individual intelligence, personality, and skill.”