Teams or Platoons?

I was interviewing some candidates last week for a technical management role. Most had some experience of leading teams and in general the resumés were impressive. One candidate made a big point of his management impact. On leaving his previous role, several of his team - most of them, in fact - wanted to join him at his new company. So that stood as evidence, did it not, that he was a good manager?

I’m not sure it evidences any such thing. I have seen this pattern several times before and it rings alarm bells for me.

Firstly, I would worry me that the team had become too dependent on the manager. I prefer a manager who can develop in staff the skills to face new situations and new working environments independently. I would want the team have confidence in themselves that they could do so.

It’s not necessarily the sign of a good manager, if they leave a role and team members follow to work with them again.

If someone could say, I left the company and no-one felt so protected by me, or dependent on me that they had to come too. In fact, they remained behind, confident in their ability to work through whatever changes may be coming. That sounds like a good manager to me.

One reason team members might want to leave would be if they did not trust the previous company, or feel aligned with its goals, or comfortable with its approach. But then, perhaps the characterful manager had not helped that situation. In fact they may even have made it worse by claiming to protect their staff from the worst dysfunctions of the company and made their little team an island of sanity. I am sure we have all seen this situation in one way or another - the team that believes they function well in a dysfunctional environment. It’s not us - it’s them!

I often describe these groups as not teams, but platoons.

I have no military experience, so no doubt my analogy is very inexact, but mostly people seem to understand what I am driving it. We can imagine a platoon as a tightly-knit organisation in a hostile environment. Perhaps most importantly while men may sign up for the army enthused with patriotism, when it comes to the horror of combat, they fight primarily for each other. See George MacDonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here, or James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War.

I’m very wary of platoons. Their focus is too clearly on their performance as a team, regardless of enterprise strategy or goals. You find them often in developer and sales organizations. You can often identify them because team members have followed an often compelling, even charismatic, leader through several re-orgs and even between companies. They often come to see themselves as having an authentic insight to strategy and customer needs which the rest of the organization lacks. At times they even work against official strategies to achieve their self-defined goals instead, quietly enough, because they know they know better.

One source of the platoon delusion is that the group may indeed have been very successful before. And so they seek to repeat that success again and again. We worked well together at CompanyX, look at what we achieved! Let’s do it again.

Rarely will you find much circumspection about all the other factors that led to their success, such as working on the right opportunity at the right time - which may well have been a strategic choice in the direction of CompanyX that they did not make.

And so we see teams trying to replicate their success - and too often failing.

How did the platoon leader do in their job search? He is still looking. He would have been an outstanding individual contributor, and I thought I had a recommendation for his, but he was hung up on management. But that familiar story is for another newsletter.