Too many teams are less than the sum of their parts, and building a great team requires more than just picking an all-star roster or doing trust falls. Adam dives into the hard-hitting research on what makes teams work — with members of the “Miracle on Ice" Olympic hockey team and organizational behavior professor Anita Woolley. You’ll also hear some special tape from Adam’s late mentor Richard Hackman, a leading expert on teams. Available transcripts for WorkLife can be found at go.ted.com/WLtranscripts
Ted audio collective thanks to canva for sponsoring this episode.
It was the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, and the us men's hockey team was facing off against the Soviets.
On paper, the winner looked obviously the soviet team had won gold in four straight Olympics.
Just a year earlier, they'd beaten the NHL all star team.
And just three days before the Olympics started, the Soviets had destroyed the us team ten to three.
Yeah, they were the best.
You know, it could beat you at the top end of their lineup or they could beat you at the back end of their lineup.
John Harrington was on the us team.
They knew the odds were stacked against.
Them at that time.
It wasn't like, hey, we think we can win this thing.
It was like, we're hoping to get to the metal round.
And I think we rallied around that feeling that we were underdogs.
That might have given them an extra boost, because as the games began, the us team started winning and upsetting higher ranked teams.
And I think as games went on, each game went on, we were getting better as a group.
We were getting more confident as a group.
All of a sudden, they found themselves in the medal round, facing down the soviet team.
To have a shot at gold, they had to beat the best team in the world.
Team captain Micah Rusioni remembers the anticipation in the locker room.
It was quiet.