Meredith Belbin is one of the original ‘gurus’ of Team Building. In his first book on Management Teams (Belbin, 1981) he reported some unexpectedly poor results with teams formed of people who had sharp, analytical minds and high mental ability – he called this the Apollo Syndrome. His criteria for selecting these teams have elements in common with criteria for selecting IT, academic or scientific staff – using ability and aptitude tests to select those with high analytical skills.
In high tech, intelligence is always a critical element in any employee, because what we do is difficult and complex and the competitors are filled with extremely smart people. However, intelligence is not the only important quality. Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team.
Here are three examples of the smartest people in the company being the worst employees.
Example 1: The Heretic
Any sizable company produces some number of strategies, projects, processes, promotions, and other activities that don’t make sense. No large organization achieves perfection. As a result, a company needs lots of smart, super engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them.
However, sometimes really smart employees develop agendas other than improving the company. Rather than identifying weaknesses, so that he can fix them, he looks for faults to build his case. Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons. The smarter the employee, the more destructive this type of behavior can be. Simply put, it takes a really smart person to be maximally destructive, because otherwise nobody else will listen to him.
Why would a smart person try to destroy the company that he works for? There are actually many reasons. Here are few:
- He is disempowered—She feels that she cannot access the people in charge and, as a result, complaining is her only vehicle to get the truth out.
- He is fundamentally a rebel—She will not be happy unless she is rebelling; this can be a deep personality trait. Sometimes these people actually make better CEOs than employees.
- He is immature and naïve—She cannot comprehend that the people running the company do not know every minute detail of the operation and therefore they are complicit in everything that’s broken.
Often, it’s very difficult to turn these kinds of cases around. Once an employee takes a public stance, the social pressure for him to be consistent is enormous. If he tells 50 of his closest friends that the CEO is the stupidest person on the planet, then reversing that position will cost him a great amount of credibility the next time he complains. Most people are not willing to take the credibility hit.
Example 2: The Flake
Some brilliant people can be totally unreliable. At Opsware, we once hired an unequivocal genius—I’ll call him Roger (not his real name). Roger was an engineer in an area of the product where a typical new hire would take 3 months to become fully productive. Roger came fully up to speed in two days. On his third day, we gave him a project that was scheduled to take one month. Roger completed the project in 3 days with nearly flawless quality. More specifically, he completed the project in 72 hours. 72 non-stop hours: No stops, no sleep, no nothing but coding. In his first quarter on the job, he was the best employee that we had and we immediately promoted him.
Then Roger changed. He would miss days of work without calling in. Then he would miss weeks of work. When he finally showed up, he apologized profusely, but the behavior didn’t stop. His work product also degraded. He became sloppy and unfocused. I could not understand how such a stellar employee could go so haywire. His manager wanted to fire him, because the team could no longer count on Roger for anything. I resisted. I knew that the genius was still in him and I wanted us to find it. We never did. It turns out that Roger was bi-polar and had two significant drug problems: 1. He did not like taking his bi-polar medication and 2. He was addicted to cocaine. Ultimately, we had to fire Roger, but even now, it pains me to think about what might have been.
One need not be bi-polar to be a flake, but flakey behavior often has a seriously problematic root cause. Causes range from self-destructive streaks to drug habits to moonlighting for other employers. A company is a team effort and, no matter how high an employee’s potential, you cannot get value from him unless he does his work in a manner in which he can be relied upon.
Example 3: The Jerk
This particular smart-bad-employee type can occur anywhere in the organization, but is most destructive at the executive level. Most executives can be pricks, dicks, a-holes or a variety of other profane adjectives at times. Being dramatically impolite can be used to improve clarity or emphasize an important lesson. That’s not the behavior that I am talking about.
When used consistently, asinine behavior can be crippling. As a company grows, its biggest challenge always becomes communication. Keeping a huge number of people on the same page executing the same goals is never easy. If a member of your staff is a raging jerk, it may be impossible. Some people are so belligerent in their communication style that people just stop talking when they are in the room. If every time anyone brings up an issue with the marketing organization, the VP of marketing jumps down their throat, then guess what topic will never come up? This behavior can become so bad that nobody brings up any topic when the jerk is in the room. As a result, communication across the executive staff breaks down and the entire company slowly degenerates. Note that this only happens if the jerk in question is unquestionably brilliant. Otherwise, nobody will care when she attacks them. The bite only has impact if it comes from a big dog. If one of your big dogs destroys communication on your staff, you need to send her to the pound.
When do you hold the bus?
The great football coach John Madden was once asked whether or not he would tolerate a player like Terrell Owens on his team. Owens was both one of the most talented players in the game and one of the biggest jerks. Madden answered: “If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you’ll be so late that you’ll miss the game, so you can’t do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you’ll have a player that’s so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him.”
Phil Jackson, the basketball coach who has won the most NBA championships, was once asked about his famously flakey superstar Dennis Rodman: “Since Dennis Rodman is allowed to miss practice, does this mean other star players like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen can miss practice too?” Jackson replied: “Of course not. There is only room for one Dennis Rodman on this team. In fact, you really can only have a very few Dennis Rodmans in society as a whole; otherwise, we would degenerate into anarchy.”
You may find yourself with an employee who fits one of the above descriptions, but nonetheless makes a massive positive contribution to the company. You may decide that you will personally mitigate the employee’s negative attributes and keep them from polluting the overall company culture. That’s fine, but remember: you can only hold the bus for her.
The Apollo Syndrome
The initial perception of Belbin’s Apollo teams was that they were bound to win in the team competitions. However, the results were quite the reverse, and the Apollo teams often finished near the bottom of eight teams.
This failure seemed to be due to certain flaws in the way the team operated:
- They spent excessive time in abortive or destructive debate, trying to persuade other team members to adopt their own view, and demonstrating a flair for spotting weaknesses in others’ arguments. This led to the discussion equivalent of ‘the deadly embrace‘.
- They had difficulties in their decision making, with little coherence in the decisions reached (several pressing and necessary jobs were often omitted).
- Team members tended to act along their own favourite lines without taking account of what fellow members were doing, and the team proved difficult to manage.
- In some instances, teams recognised what was happening but over compensated – they avoided confrontation, which equally led to problems in decision making.
How Apollo Teams Succeed
There were successful Apollo teams, however, that were characterised by
- the absence of highly dominant individuals, and
- a particular style of leadership.
Successful leaders were suspicious and sceptical people who sought to impose some shape or pattern on group discussion, and on the outcome of group activities. They focused attention on the setting of objectives and priorities, and shaping the way team effort was applied. Rather than ‘drawing out’ team members, the successful leaders were tough, discriminating people who could both hold their ground in any company, yet not dominate the group.
A key lesson from Belbin’s work is that putting together a team of the cleverest individuals does not necessarily produce the best results, and the team needs to be designed ensuring that there is a blend of team roles.
An Apollo team is one composed of exceptionally bright and clever people. The Apollo phenomenon was first described by English psychologist Meredith Belbin, who designed and ran many long-term management simulations for business and government in the United Kingdom and Australia.
Belbin identified several key team roles (which were different from functional roles) necessary for effective team performance. He also found out what happens when a team has too many intellectually gifted members.
Using personality and aptitude test results, he studied a variety of team compositions. One of his hypotheses was that teams with many highly intelligent, creative individuals would emerge as super (Apollo) teams when competing with other teams in management simulations. However, the Apollo teams always proved to be ineffective or worse when competing with teams of more heterogeneous makeups.
Belbin’s research showed some of the problems of having too many bright people under the same roof. Apollo teams are characterized by:
- Active debate – proposing and opposing.
- Potential flaws or problems spotted too easily – ideas shot down too quickly.
- Too many individual agendas – team members are too used to being right.
- Many ideas generated – diffusion of focus.
It takes high intelligence and individual competitiveness to do well in an academic environment, to compete for limited resources (grades, admissions to the best schools, etc.) and to gain professional credentials. But a person who makes it through all the obstacles and gains full professional accreditation has had an extended period of anti-teamwork training. By definition, law firms, medical practices, CPA firms, etc., are Apollo teams. Professionals are trained to be independent, while people who work in typical business settings are used to operating in a hierarchical environment.
Lateral relationship skills (to help influence those over whom one doesn’t have direct control) are crucial to success in leading a professional firm, but are often in short supply in the professions.
Granted, professional firms have their share of difficulties and breakups (usually boiling down to control and relationship issues). But when seen in this framework, it’s amazing that they work at all and that so many of them do stay together and thrive.
Belbin identified certain keys to leading an Apollo team. Our own experience with clients confirms these principles:
- A sense of humor helps to defuse competition and tension.
- The leader can’t be highly dominant but neither can he/she allow others to be passive or overly analytical. The leader must hold ground but not by dominating. The leader must be more concerned with broad essentials (mission, values, etc.) than with practical, detailed matters.
This is not to suggest that professional firms should start hiring only people from the lower end of their graduate school class. However, it does suggest that, if not used and managed properly, high intelligence and critical thinking skills contain the seeds of potentially fatal problems for a firm.
Individually, highly intelligent people too often tend to be abrasive, arrogant, overly analytical or overly philosophical. In addition, professionals are used to having others seek them out for advice rather than listening to advice from others.
Not only should these individuals be coached about how to deal with the excess baggage of critical thinking aptitudes, but Apollo team leaders need to remain aware of the difficulties caused by too many of these people in the same organization.
Fortunately, awareness of this problem can help professional firms avoid pitfalls. It is possible for people to learn to deal with the downsides of high intelligence. After all, they’re bright… right?
Successful leaders were suspicious and sceptical people who sought to impose some shape or pattern on group discussion, and on the outcome of group activities. They focused attention on the setting of objectives and priorities, and shaping the way team effort was applied. Rather than ‘drawing out’ team members, the successful leaders were tough, discriminating people who could both hold their ground in any company, yet not dominate the group.
A key lesson from Belbin’s work is that putting together a team of the cleverest individuals does not necessarily produce the best results, and the team needs to be designed ensuring that there is a blend of team roles. The term ‘Apollo Syndrome’ has also been used to describe the condition where someone has an overly important view of their role within a team. It is based on the (supposed) claim of someone to have played a vital role in the success of NASA’s Apollo missions to the Moon, where scientists had to work all through the night on many occasions, battling against fatigue. One person claimed a vital role to the whole programme – by making the coffee that kept them awake!
Perhaps a ‘Double Apollo’ is where a team is composed of highly capable people that achieve little, but claims great success!
References
Management Teams – Why They Succeed or Fail, (Belbin, 1981), ISBN: 0-7506-0253-8
From http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/tt/t-articl/apollo.htm