Super Chickens vs. Super Coops: The Power of Team Intelligence

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

For decades, we've been told that the key to performance is finding the best people, the high performers, the A players, the superstars. Build a team of super chickens, the logic goes, and you'll get more eggs. That phrase, by the way, super chickens, comes from a fascinating experiment by evolutionary biologist William Muir at Purdue University. He studied productivity in egg laying hens and found that when he bred the most productive chickens together, expecting a new generation of record breakers, something surprising happened. At first, productivity spiked. But over time, these super chickens began attacking one another. They pecked and they fought until only a few were left alive. Meanwhile, a group of average chickens, a control group, the ones who had to cooperate to survive, ended up producing far more eggs.

Todd Henry [00:00:53]:

Overall, the lesson is almost too perfect for the modern workplace. When we reward only the loudest, the flashiest and the most productive individuals, we create an environment where competition overshadows collaboration. We get more pecking and less producing. So much of how we talk about leadership still revolves around the individual hero. We mythologize the lone visionary, the founder, the rock star, while ignoring the quiet systems and relationships that actually make sustained excellence possible. What if the key to real performance isn't about leading better individuals? It's about building better teams? That's exactly what today's guest, John Levy explores in his new book, Team Intelligence. He argues that the smallest unit of effectiveness in any organization isn't the leader, it's the team. Levy's work challenges a lot of what we've been taught to believe about leadership.

Todd Henry [00:01:50]:

It's not about charisma, authority, or even having the smartest person in the room. It's about cultivating the conditions where leadership can flow, where different people step up and step forward at different times. Based on expertise, not title. It's about trust, emotional intelligence, and creating what he calls bursty communication. We're going to explode the myth of the lone genius, and we're going to differentiate high performing teams from merely busy ones. So if you've ever looked around and thought, we have all the right people, but something's just not clicking. This episode might give you the missing lens because great work doesn't happen through super chickens. It happens between them.

Todd Henry [00:02:32]:

This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Jon Levy [00:02:46]:

Oh, there's so many that I can't even get started on.

Todd Henry [00:02:49]:

That's John Levy, author of Team Intelligence on the myths that we hold about the qualities of aff effective leaders and.

Jon Levy [00:02:56]:

Teams the first is that there's a specific set of characteristics that a leader must have. And you see this everywhere from Harvard Business School to, I don't know, like consultancies come in and try to train people on like the 12 essential competencies or skills of a leader. And it's just like there's no evidence that that's true at all.

Todd Henry [00:03:17]:

I think that there are a lot of people who have a vested interest in trying to oversimplify what leads to effectiveness.

Todd Henry [00:03:24]:

Right?

Todd Henry [00:03:24]:

To over categorize and say, well, These are the 12 defining traits, or these are the four parts of the leadership flywheel or whatever it is.

Todd Henry [00:03:31]:

Right.

Todd Henry [00:03:31]:

Because these are typically anecdotes, right? People are looking at the data that fits their assumption versus looking at what actually leads to effectiveness and then trying to derive a philosophy from that. And when you look at what really goes on on teams, it's much more complex than what we often want to think. What has surprised you the most as you have delved into all of this research? What surprised you the most about what truly makes for effective teams versus what the sort of the popular conception is?

Jon Levy [00:04:00]:

So the first thing that I keep coming across is that the leader is this defining characteristic, that they must be all things to everybody and capable of handling every situation. And when we look at the research on effective teams, leadership tended to be more fluid. So let's say, God, I reported to you, but I have a certain expertise. Let's say I'm an expert on AI. If you are leading the meeting and ask me a question, I might then take over the leadership role in the area of my specialty or expertise. It doesn't mean that I'm getting the higher pay or the bigger office. But leadership is fluid. Then between us, depending on who we need answers from and who has the specialty or expertise at the time.

Jon Levy [00:04:50]:

So I think that's one of these kind of pervasive things. We keep putting things on the leader and expecting more from them. And there's no evidence that's necessary. Because the smallest unit of effectiveness is not leader, it's team.

Todd Henry [00:05:03]:

That's really interesting. The smallest unit of effectiveness is not leader, it's team. Because you're exactly right. So often we focus on the leader. As a matter of fact, we do that in almost every arena. And we talk about organizations that are doing really well. It's about the VP who led this initiative. Well, how many people were on that team? How many people worked nights and weekends and brought their collective genius or expertise to that problem? Or when we talk about companies I.

Todd Henry [00:05:27]:

Mean, you look at like Apple, Steve.

Todd Henry [00:05:30]:

Jobs was a visionary, no question. But look at the collective genius of the engineers and the designers and the people who are involved in bringing about those products right over the course of that sort of vector setting period of years where Apple became the most valuable company in the world. It's interesting how we so over emphasize the role of the leader and we ignore the collective genius of the team itself.

Jon Levy [00:05:54]:

It's especially interesting to me because there's such a pervasive image of this lone genius working in a lab by themselves, like a Tony Stark inventing the Iron man suit. It takes so many people to do anything that if you don't have those team dynamics right, you're not going to win. The story about Apple is amazing, but if you ever watch the documentary on was it General magic, the group of people who tried to produce the iPhone before the iPhone and made a whole lot of stupid mistakes and couldn't function as a team. A lot of those people got absorbed into Apple and ended up being able to create their dream there. And so it was the environment, the people, the culture, like all of it together actually made a difference. There's a researcher by the name of Anita Williams Woolley and she was studying this concept of team intelligence. What makes the team capable of solving problems as fast as possible with the resources they have. And what she ended up discovering is that it's none of the things we've been told.

Jon Levy [00:07:03]:

For example, have you ever seen people obsess about we have to get the smartest talent? Of course, the IQ of the smartest person made no difference to the team effectiveness. Average IQ of the team made no difference. Well then we have to really bond them, get everybody to like each other, how much people liked each other. Not a predictive element. And Todd, I think you kind of know this intrinsically. You've probably worked on a whole bunch of teams with people that you would never want to hang out with, but you do really good work together. Of course, what she ended up finding was that the greatest predictor was the number of women on the team. The reason wasn't that there were women, it's that women index higher on emotional intelligence.

Jon Levy [00:07:44]:

Do you play a sport?

Todd Henry [00:07:45]:

I have.

Todd Henry [00:07:46]:

I'm an old man now, but I played basketball growing up. It was my main sport.

Jon Levy [00:07:50]:

So you probably know this from your basketball days. If you're in a single person sport like tennis, Serena Williams can dominate a court for 25 years. Or Tiger Woods. Right? Yeah. But when you go from that single person contributor environment and you increase what's called task interdependence, meaning my work is dependent on yours. You switch to focusing on passing either the information or the ball more than being able to shoot. And as a byproduct, having the emotional intelligence of understanding when to push a topic, when not to who to go to, what expertise they have. All these things that people might be tracking that have high emotional intelligence.

Jon Levy [00:08:36]:

Steve isn't speaking up, but he has great ideas. Maybe I should ask him to share. Those are the things that actually cause a team to be able to solve problems quickly.

Todd Henry [00:08:46]:

You talk about this in the book. You describe what you call super chickens versus super teams. Can you talk about that concept a little bit?

Jon Levy [00:08:54]:

Oh, for sure. So I think it was like 1970s, maybe it was early 80s. A company called DeKalb created a chicken called the DeKalb XL. I like to say it was like the Ferrari of chickens. It could outlay any chicken out there. It was incredible. Except the problem was that at a certain point, if you want to lay more eggs, you need more resources. And how do you get that? You end up pecking the other chickens, often to death.

Jon Levy [00:09:22]:

These chickens were wildly violent. There was one researcher named William Muir, who's an evolutionary biologist, and he said, this is awful. We can't have this happening. There has to be a better way to feed people that doesn't include this kind of unethical behavior. So he said, I'm going to take a crossbred chicken just like this random chicken. I'm going to create coops of them. I'm going to create 200, and I'm just going to weigh what each coop produces as a group. And the groups that produce the most, we will rebreed for six generations.

Jon Levy [00:09:58]:

At the end of it, he was able to create these groups of chickens that all stayed in the same coop together and just produced a ton of eggs. And then he ran a contest. The first was to compare one of the chickens from a super coop to a regular crossbred chicken. And he actually found no major difference whatsoever. And then he put the decalbec cells up against his super coops. And what happened was the super coupe demolished the DeKalb XLs, mostly because the XLs ended up pecking each other to death. There were only, I think, three even around at the end. I think this serves as a fantastic analogy for the workplace, which is if we keep incentivizing performance without pro social behavior, you end up in a situation where the only way I can stand out is by pushing everybody else.

Jon Levy [00:10:56]:

Down. If only 10% of people get a bonus or top 10%, then at a certain point, if I'm competing constantly against the top 10%, then I have to make sure you look bad in order for me to look good. That goes against the intention of a company.

Todd Henry [00:11:11]:

But that's how so many companies set themselves up, right? Our incentives are misaligned from our stated desired outcomes. And so to your point, we set up this winner take all scenario within our organizations where you really are incentivized to keep other people down or to try to steal business or projects, your own co workers, which is the opposite of what we're really trying to do, which is all of us get better. We all win when we all win. But it's interesting how so many organizations have those misaligned incentives.

Jon Levy [00:11:43]:

There's this really fun story I tell in the book about how in 1980 the US basketball team Team USA was planning on going to the Olympics. When it was discovered they'd be in Moscow. President Carter said, we're not legitimizing communism. You're not going. They were heartbroken. So the NBA did something to make it up to them. They set up a five game exhibition series between Team usa. Like super young kids, it was college students versus the best NBA players at the time, the NBA All Stars.

Jon Levy [00:12:22]:

When they went head to head, something Incredible happened. Team USA demolished the NBA All Stars in a five game series. The kids won four out of five games. The only game they lost, they lost by two points. And one game they won by 31 points. Just incredible. And herein lies the problem in basketball. There's only one stat that predicts a player's salary.

Jon Levy [00:12:46]:

Any guesses?

Todd Henry [00:12:48]:

I would say plus per game, it's total points.

Jon Levy [00:12:50]:

Which means that we've incentivized players to be as selfish as possible. Right? They're better off taking really bad shots because it might increase their total score and thereby their value. There's also only one stat that predicts an effective coach and that is the increased rate in passing under that coach. Which means that if you're my coach and I go from passing 50% of the time to passing 80% of the time, now the ball can get to the person who has the best chance of scoring. And it means that I've stopped thinking just about myself and started focusing on the team. And I think that's really important to understand is that you could have individual success focusing on yourself, but achieving anything extraordinary requires other people. And for that you got to put your ego to the side.

Todd Henry [00:13:47]:

One of the concepts you describe in the book is closely akin to that. You talk about glue players. What are glue players and how do they enhance overall team intelligence?

Jon Levy [00:13:58]:

This originally comes from, I believe it was a study from Brigham Young and it was an economist trying to figure out are there employees that cause other employees to outperform. And so we know there's some kind of stuff like this. Like if I operate a till right, people are coming to the cash register and I'm ringing them up. If I'm really fast and in a position that people can see me, it causes the other register operators to actually move faster. That person has a spillover effect. It doesn't cost any more to put them in the front than in the back. And it causes the other employees to work harder. So does that kind of effect exist in basketball? Do people who play with LeBron actually perform at a higher level or not? What these researchers found was unexpected.

Jon Levy [00:14:53]:

That there's an entire class of players that barely score, but when you put them on the team, the entire team outperforms by a factor of 1.6. Nothing has a 1.6 times multiplier. If you take creatine, you're lucky to get single digit improvements to your muscle building. This person literally multiplies everybody else's results. And the question is how and why? There's this incredible player who's now retired named Chain Battier. He's known as the no stats all star. He literally doesn't pass or shoot much, he doesn't score much. If you looked at the easy to see stuff, you would be wildly disappointed that this person's in the NBA.

Jon Levy [00:15:38]:

But in the NBA there's also this thing called a plus minus. It's how many more points do you expect your team to score with this person on the court? The top players in the NBA top five are somewhere between a plus eight and a plus 12. We're talking Steph Curry, LeBron, like legends. Shane Battier, a plus six at his peak, but didn't score himself. So the question is how? And the answer is that there are three major characteristics. The first is that he has really high emotional intelligence, so he knows how to maneuver the team and connect with them. When he'd get on the court, people would call him Lego because everybody else would click into position. It also meant that he knew when it was okay to give LeBron a tip or an idea and LeBron wouldn't get defensive.

Jon Levy [00:16:37]:

The second is that he was forward thinking. There's a stat book produced on every player in the NBA. And he would take it before a game and know that if, let's say I pushed you to the right corner, it reduces your chances of scoring by 5%. So if I can keep doing that over the course of a game, that would reduce the total points scored by your team. The third thing he would do is put the team above himself. He's one of the few players to ever say, take me out, coach. Because he was uniquely capable of defending against somebody. He's like, save my energy, so I'm ready to play against that person.

Jon Levy [00:17:13]:

Or this other player is actually better for this. You should put them in. And when you have those three things running the show, you get a massive multiplier effect on everybody else's performance because he'll be shouting to people across the court and communicating information that he uniquely has and people trust him enough to actually listen. Realize the job of the leader really isn't to like lead. The job of the leader is to maximize the intelligence of the team so that they can solve problems quickly.

Todd Henry [00:17:44]:

John Levy's new book, Team Intelligence, is available now wherever books are sold.

Todd Henry [00:17:48]:

And if you'd like to hear our.

Todd Henry [00:17:49]:

Full conversation, you can do so@dailycreativeplus.com when.

Todd Henry [00:17:54]:

You think about it, the best teams.

Todd Henry [00:17:56]:

You'Ve been a part of probably didn't have the smartest people or the flashiest resumes. They had something deeper. Trust, awareness, and a kind of collective rhythm. That's what John calls team intelligence. The ability to sense what the group needs, when to step forward and when to get out of the way. Now, that's not to say that talent doesn't matter. Of course it does. But talent may not be the most important thing.

Todd Henry [00:18:19]:

That's what John calls team intelligence. The ability to see what the group needs and step forward and then also know when to get out of the way. It's not about outshining others, it's about amplifying them. And in creative work, that's everything. Because creativity doesn't thrive in isolation. It grows in the space between us. It grows when someone feels safe enough to share a half formed idea. Or when a teammate notices what's missing in quietly fills the gap.

Todd Henry [00:18:44]:

Or when the group values contribution over credit. As leaders, our job isn't to be a super chicken. It's to build a super coupe. To create an environment where everyone can lay great eggs, metaphorically speaking. So maybe this week, ask yourself, where.

Todd Henry [00:19:00]:

In your work have you been trying.

Todd Henry [00:19:01]:

To be the star performer when you.

Todd Henry [00:19:03]:

Could instead be the glue, the one.

Todd Henry [00:19:05]:

Who helps others connect, contribute and shine. Because in the end, the true measure of your leadership isn't what you produce, it's what you unleash in others. Hey, thanks so much for listening. My name is Todd Henry. You can learn more about my books, my speaking events, and more at toddhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused, and brilliant.

Todd Henry [00:19:28]:

We'll see you then.