Rza, the de facto leader of the Wu-Tang Clan, needed just one year.
U-God, fresh off a prison sentence, was at his house. Guns, money, and drugs from U-God's pockets stacked high on the coffee table, Rza looked him over and made a simple request: Give me a year of your life, and if making hip-hop albums doesn't work out, you can go back to the streets, the group explained at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 to promote their four-part documentary "Of Mics and Men."
U-God, tired of the street game he had been in since he was a boy, took him up on his offer.
A year later, and the group created, in my opinion, the greatest hip-hop record of all time, an album Rolling Stone ranked No. 27 on its list of 500 best albums of all time: "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)."
How the group pulled this off -- in a music industry that would have preferred to see the Hanson brothers succeed instead of nine Black emcees from Staten Island and Brooklyn -- and the success they each saw later individually, it turns out is replicable.
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If you had to guess what predicts team success the most, what would you say?
For Wu-Tang, the personalities of each of the emcees in the group were unique, brilliant, and capable of success on their own. It'd be easy to draw the conclusion that the number one predictor of a team's success would be the talent each member individually possessed.
And what J. Richard Hackman, one of the foremost researchers on team effectiveness would say is that we're looking at the wrong thing.
Hackman has been studying teams for nearly 40 years, and his discoveries give us insight into why teams like Wu-Tang are so successful.
His conclusion? There are three criteria the most effective teams have in common: a strong structure, a supportive context, and a compelling direction.
And those conditions, much like Rza and Wu-Tang did, can be cultivated, reflected on, and become a part of any team.
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Rza's recruitment of U-God wasn't too dissimilar to how he was able to convince the other seven members to join, as well. A gifted producer, Rza found members who complemented each other's styles, yes, but more importantly created a structure amongst the team for learning from one another.
Frequently creating songs together, it's easy to tell on smash hits like "Protect Ya Neck" how influential each member was on one another, with each verse building on the previous one, despite being rapped by a new emcee.
"Inspectah Deck had a quote -- he used to say steel sharpens steel. You want your sword sharp, you gotta rub it against some other steel," Rza explained.
Hackman found that one of the primary enabling conditions strong teams have is, what he described, as a strong structure, one in which each member knows their own role and how they can collaborate with someone else on the team.
But it wasn't just that structure that led to Wu's success. The group created a supportive context, in which excellent performance led to more than just record deals and album sales. Rza's promise to each of them after a year of their time was that they'd be involved in all of it, but also that they'd still be able to go and create their own individual albums if they wanted, with different record labels if they chose.
Rza's ability to create conditions for the team to be successful as a group and later as individuals sent a message that what his team needed, he would provide.
Hackman found that the most successful teams create opportunities to transparently reward members for outstanding performance. His research points to the strongest teams knowing how to identify strong performance and reward it fairly, and providing the resources and materials to their teams to get results.
Above all else, Rza founded Wu-Tang with a clear mission. His words: "To open up the minds of the youth and the people and become aware of our people, our situation, our community, martial arts, knowledge of self, and all the things that we put into those songs. It was wisdom of the universe. It was something that should inspire."
That jives with Hackman's research, as well. The best teams, he found, have a compelling direction, a common identity, and regularly call back to that direction and purpose with each other whenever they can.
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What Rza and Wu-Tang were able to pull off was not accidental. It was a reflection of intentional choices by the members and their leader to build a strong structure, supportive conditions, and a compelling direction.
And we can do the same with the teams we lead. Hackman argued that any team, regardless of its current performance, could benefit from a team assessment that would allow the team to collectively diagnose strengths and areas of growth.
How? A version of Hackman's team diagnostic tool is below, one that I've used with teams regularly -- say, once a month -- because it's so simple.
Score our team on a 1-5 (1=worst, 5=best) scale on the following aspects:
Strong structure
Do we have clear norms for acceptable conduct?
Do we each understand what our role is in contributing to the success of the team?
Supportive context
Do we have the resources and development we need to succeed in accomplishing our goal?
Are we appropriately rewarded for success and clear when we are not successful?
Compelling direction
Do we have a common goal that is clear, challenging, and important to each of us?
Do we have a shared sense of purpose that aligns with that goal that we can each articulate?
Regularly having team members take that assessment as prework before meetings for quick diagnostics on team health will help uncover small fissures that might become larger problems later.
Empowering your team to reflect on the following questions and play a role in helping create the conditions they want to see on the team could look like asking them the following questions:
Where are we most successful as a team? What have you done to support that success? Who else on this team has done something to contribute to that success?
Where do you feel like our biggest area of growth might be? What can you do to support us in improving in that area of growth? What do you think we all collectively might need to do to improve in this area?
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Raekwon, one of the group's nine original emcees, once said, "When I sit here and see that the eight brothers from the neighborhood that I grew up with still have success, it had to be magical."
Turns out it might not have been so magical after all.
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