Jon Levy hosts the strangest of dinner parties.
The behavioral scientist convinces his guests to do all the cooking. Then he controls the conversation, barring them from speaking about their professions.
Aside from sharing their first names, guests essentially remain anonymous to one another until they sit down to eat what invariably turns out to be a mediocre meal.
That’s when they reveal their identities and learn they are in the company of non-culinary greatness – Olympic team captains, Nobel laureates, prime ministers, Fortune 500 executives and former commanders of the International Space Station, just to name a few.
Over the past 15 years, Levy has met more than 3,500 extraordinary leaders this way.
The more of them he met, the more he realized how different they were from one another. That realization led to his latest book, “Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius.”
It explores what makes successful teams more than the sum of their parts – and in the process deconstructs common myths about leadership.
Spoiler alert: It’s not about star talent. Well, sometimes a successful team happens to be led by a Bill Gates or an Elon Musk, but putting a superstar in charge of a team by no means guarantees its success. Indeed, every team member’s role matters.
Money Talks News sat down with Levy to learn more about his new book and the research behind it, particularly the aspects of it that the average person can benefit from.
Whether you are wondering how you can add value to a team even if you are not its leader, or just curious how a certain U.S. president gained so many loyal followers, Levy’s “Team Intelligence” has you covered.
The Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
‘The only thing that defines a leader’
MTN: If I judged this book by its literal cover, I’d assume it’s for business executives. But that assumption is flawed on at least two counts that I saw once I started reading it.
One problem is that I bought into the myth that there’s some magical characteristic that all the greatest leaders have in common. Another flaw in my assumption is that everyone leads something, whether it’s a corporation or a family.
It so happens I lead an editorial team, but this book would still be valuable to me even if that weren’t the case. So could you start by addressing the person who assumes that leadership isn’t applicable to them just because they aren’t in the C-suite?
Levy: Within an effective team, there’s actually leadership fluidity. So you might not be the CEO, but on all things editorial, your CEO is following your lead.
Even if you are a junior associate, you probably have something that you are leading within that group, and people still come to you for answers around that and take your advice and will follow you.
We’ve been confused. The reality is that if we look at what the top universities tell us are essential skills for the most effective leaders, what we begin to see is that none of it actually makes any sense, because there are all these wildly successful individuals who don’t have any of these skills.
Steve Jobs was not great at creating consensus or psychological safety (which makes people feel safe speaking up).
Those skills are all nice to have, but none of them are essential, except for one. And it’s kind of stupid because it’s self-referential: The only thing that defines a leader is the fact that they have followers. If you have no followers, you are not a leader.
What makes us follow someone
Now, what causes us to follow someone has to do with the fact that human beings relate to the future they believe they have. If you find out that you are suddenly going on vacation rather than going to an audit, life looks a lot better.
The reason that we follow people is that when we interact with them, there’s an emotional response. They make you feel that there will be a new and better future.
It does not mean that they’re qualified. They could also be unpleasant people. You might not want to be around them, but the feeling that they give you is so profound.
You could have the most socially inept accountant in the world, somebody you do not like being around, but they make you feel that you will save so much money when you interact with them that you go, “I’m going with that dude or that woman.”
You will also ignore and forgive all of their transgressions if they make you feel that the future will be better. This, I think, will make sense in a political arena. We will vote for people if we feel like they’ll make a better future, even if they’ve crossed all these social boundaries.
Now, the final point on this is that what actually makes us feel that there’ll be a new and better future isn’t perfectly defined skills but rather that the leader has a handful of super skills that are so profoundly strong that when we interact with them, people go, “Wow, with that person in charge, I don’t need to worry about that.”
Editor’s note: Don’t confuse super skills with star talent. Few of us are superstars, but virtually all of us have super skills. By “super skills,” Levy essentially means your strongest skills. In fact, he says an easy way to identify your super skills is to call up your friends and coworkers.
Ask them: “What do you think are my strongest skills? Just to be clear, I don’t mean that I make amazing PowerPoint presentations. That’s the result of a skill. For example, someone whose strongest skills include empathy can imagine how other people would hear an idea and then make great PowerPoint presentations.”
You can also turn to chapter 2 of “Team Intelligence” to learn more about super skills.
‘We’ve been fooled’
MTN: What then would you say to the people who assume they will never have what it takes to be a leader? If you could shake them by their shoulders, what would you emphasize to them?
Levy: In our society, we get obsessed with what’s easy to see rather than what’s useful.
When we look at the corporate world, the most famous executives are the ones that play a game with the media. And the game is: I’m going to cause a big fuss, and you are going to write about me, and that’s going to up my stock value.
The CEO of Ryanair does the most outlandish things, and then what happens is that Ryanair gets coverage, and then people see it and say, “Oh, I should fly Ryanair.”
He’ll say things like, “If drink sales are falling off, we get the pilots to engineer a bit of turbulence. That usually spikes sales.” What an outrageous thing to say. But that gets him coverage, and then he sees, you know, a 6% growth in sales in the following days.
So it’s this unwritten rule or game that’s played between the executives and the media: Give me something to publish, and I’ll write about you. And herein lies the problem: We don’t see the stories about the really quiet CEOs who are amazing at leading their company, have employees who love them, take care of their customers.
What we keep seeing are the ones that have a very specific skill set, the ones like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and so on who grab headlines through their sensational behavior. So we’ve been fooled into thinking that we have to be like them in order to succeed.
‘Everybody’s role on the team’
We’ve also been convinced that with the right leader, everything works out. And the truth is that the smallest unit of effectiveness is not leader, but team. What we forget is that you can be a leader, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be effective. It just means that people will follow you.
Now, if we then take it one step further, we have to ask, “OK, that’ll get the crew together for the heist. What lets them get away with the heist?”
The answer is the dynamics between the team members, leaning into their super skills so they round each other out. That’s what actually allows a team to be effective.
The fact is that all of us are leaders to some degree, even if we’re seen as subject matter experts or leading some portion of a project, because in a great team leadership is fluid.
So if you want to do a great job, you should understand the role of the leader, and the role of the leader is to ensure their followers have the highest level of intelligence as a team so they can solve problems quickly. It’s everybody’s role on the team to maximize the team’s intelligence.
3 pillars of intelligent teams
MTN: So for those people who aren’t a CEO but have now come to grasp that the behavioral science of leadership is nonetheless relevant and beneficial to them, what do you think is the most important thing for them executionally? What do they do now?
Levy: So I think what we need to understand then is: How do we get a team to maximize its intelligence, right? Meaning, OK, I’m not the leader, that’s fine, or I am the leader, great. Either way, I should want my team to succeed, right?
If you’re a basketball player, hopefully you want to win a championship. But what does that actually look like? It turns out that there are three core pillars to having a team be really smart.
1. Alignment
The first is that there’s an alignment.
You want to make a team stupider? A pretty easy way to do that is get them going in different directions.
What we want to do is make sure that everybody knows what the company mission is, what their team’s goal is, how that contributes to the company, and how their role fits into their team. Ideally, we’ve aligned people’s personal goals with their team goals, so that everything is in alignment and nobody’s wandering off.
2. Attention (and the surprising single greatest predictor of smart teams)
The second pillar is attention – what to focus on, when and how.
Teams that have what’s called bursty communication, they come together, they might argue it out, but they come to a conclusion, and when they’re done, everybody knows next steps and where to find the information that they need. This way nobody has to interrupt each other and reduce people’s focus.
We’ll also notice that these teams tend to have higher psychological safety, meaning people feel safe speaking up. This is why, when we actually look at what predicts a smart team, it isn’t the IQ of the smartest person, or average IQ, or even how much people like each other.
The single greatest predictor was the number of women on the team, and that’s because women score higher on emotional intelligence on average.
The important factor there is that when you go from an individual contributor situation – like a golf player who can be pure talent and win – to a situation where you’re on a team, then it becomes more about the ability to coordinate, to pass information or the ball, and that’s informed by emotional intelligence.
MTN: The emotional intelligence factor was particularly enlightening to me. As a side note, I sit on a community association board. At first, it was awkward because the other board members are all men who have lived here much longer than I have. I knew I had something to contribute, but it was hard to speak up without stepping on toes.
Levy: It’s one of those funny things. If you have technical expertise, it’s easy to share that you have that. It’s very awkward to tell people, “I don’t think you’re reading the room, buddy. You need to take a step back.”
MTN: Yes, exactly.
3. Resources
Levy: The final thing is the resources that the team has.
Most teams are completely unaware of the mental model, skills, education, contact, experience that their coworkers have. And each unique skill they have is one more tool in the toolbox that they can use to solve the problem.
The best teams make the implicit explicit. You are aware of all the skills of the people that you’re with, so you can get answers quickly when you move up and you know who to go to.
The best teams also hire for the diversity of thinking, skills and resources that will give them access to more solutions.
The big surprise
MTN: I was curious what took you most by surprise when working on this book. Was there something you didn’t see coming despite being a behavioral scientist?
Levy: I was just really surprised that none of the things that we are taught about are actually true when it comes to leadership.
Like the whole thing about the alpha leader. Everybody’s right now in this alpha mentality of, I’m an alpha male. I’m blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it turns out that that’s a terrible management style.
Nobody ever looks at the counter examples. Are there a few ultra-aggressive leaders that are famous that get a lot of attention? Yeah, but let’s look at all the people who are ultra-aggressive who don’t end up in the CEO role. They end up in prison.
All other things being equal, if you’re more likable, you’re probably going to be a better boss.
Harvey Weinstein may have had a run, but let’s be honest. People did not like working for him, and they were looking for any opportunity to take him down. And rightfully so.
So I think we’re really good at measuring what’s easy to see rather than what’s useful, and that was kind of the big thing.
No matter what I was looking at, I kept seeing, Oh, the metrics that we’re measuring these people on are the ones that are most obvious but not the most valuable.
Like these traits for a leader that MBA programs teach. These things don’t actually matter that much. They’re just really easy to see.
Levy’s book “Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius” is now available in print and as an audiobook and e-book.
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