People
Small moments from around town. And a few thoughts about how the office and the soccer field are similar.
Issue No. 32
My favorite topic to close out the year with—people. Understanding others helps us understand ourselves, and understanding ourselves helps us relate to others. People are fascinating.1
Three vignettes at the bottom for you this week, and some thoughts about what makes for good teams at the office and on the soccer field.
Also, 32 issues, and closing out a second year together. Wow. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
1 At work
In poker, a tell is an unconscious cue shown by a player that reveals their hand. With experience, I hear, a player can hone their instinct for picking up on other players’ cues.
I think teams at the office also have tells. And they too can give clues that reveal whether a team we’ve just joined, or a partnership we’ve gone into, will be a good one or a dysfunctional one.
Good in the sense that a team is productive, prolific, and the people on it feel a degree of positive cohesion between them. You enjoy being a part of it.
And dysfunctional in the sense that a team’s output feels subpar, and interpersonal rifts and ruptures lead to eventual disillusionment and disintegration.
Countless studies have codified that instinct. So for this week, I thought it would be interesting to share some of those insights.
The habits of effective office workers
On good teams, people understand each other’s styles. There’s a degree of familiarity between teammates. They know each other’s work and communication styles, and have a shorthand they can lean on. They’ve developed social sensitivity—”the ability to perceive and understand the viewpoints of others.”2 That heightened emotional intelligence leads to better coordination. And coordination is key to overall effectiveness.
Good teams offer psychological safety. Team members feel safe expressing themselves, disagreeing with each other, making mistakes, and taking risks, without fear of blame or retribution. The environment that creates is one of mutual trust, where everyone from the manager on down feel able and willing to show vulnerability without worrying about that being held over them or against them later on.
Good teams believe they’re working toward a grander purpose. Team members feel they’re making a valuable contribution and producing work whose impact goes being the myopic confines of a single team or a single project. Put differently, they’re doing work for what they believe are the right reasons. Not for ulterior motives, like political or personal gain, at least not principally, but for something whose benefit is far-reaching.
Good teams don’t needlessly strain people. As I was prepping for this issue, I learned about two terms that come from sociology—role strain and role conflict.34 Role strain is when you’re splitting your time between what you’re supposed to be doing and something incidental or extraneous. Role conflict is when you’ve got two roles that are orthogonal to each other, as in, they come at each other’s expense. When expectations around roles are set on a team, the potential for role strain and role conflict are minimized or, ideally, eliminated.
Good teams value everyone’s contributions. A tentpole of any successful team, I feel, is the common conviction that no one on the team is unneeded. That everyone, in their own way, brings something to the team that makes it better. The second someone doubts that, or believes other people are superfluous, or that that their job is easy or can be done by anyone else, the bond is doomed.
For this conviction to be ingrained, one has to take a nuanced view that people have strengths and weaknesses and that leveraging their strengths is what makes them valuable to a team. On these teams, people realize that intellectual diversity beats being a clone of the boss, so they leverage each other’s strengths and value what everyone brings without trying to change anyone into some ideal final form.
2 The soccer field
I’ve been playing pickup soccer regularly for over a decade now.5 I got thinking recently that on days when a game’s good, it’s usually because there’s a contingent on the team—say, four or five people, maybe more—who are well coordinated and who communicate well. In fact, one idea I’ve had in recent weeks is to actually validate that hunch, by tracking data on teams and scores and then seeing what sort of groups, of varying sizes, are often on winning teams.
The habits of effective soccer players
To rephrase, in the terms mentioned earlier, one could say that on good soccer teams:
Players understand each other’s styles, they know how to communicate, and they have an established shorthand. They have social sensitivity. The way they communicate is different based on the player. Some like to be called on by name, others are always looking up and around and can see when someone’s making a run into open space, others preemptively thank you for a pass, so you feel strangely obliged to make it.
Players offer each other psychological safety. Players aren’t blamed if they miss or mess up, so they feel safe to take risks—to take shots on goal and go for glory with that weird move. Players feel safe to self-reflect during half-time, analyze plays, and suggest ways to do better in the second half.
Players believe they’re achieving a grander purpose. Be it to win and make up for an otherwise stressful day. Be it to get a solid two-hour workout out of the game. Or be it to achieve a sense of accomplishment that can build a person’s self-esteem.
Players don’t needlessly strain each other. A player who’s a defender defends, a player who’s a striker strikes. A player isn’t expected to mark more than one person at a time. Roles are defined and expectations are set and understood early.
Players value each other’s skills. Some players are good at creating opportunities, others at scoring, others at dribbling, others at set pieces. Some players are good on the wing, others in the middle. Some in the back, some upfield. They don’t try to fundamentally change someone’s playing style mid-game.
Nothing groundbreaking, but that’s how the five takeaways from before transfer pretty well to the soccer field.
Not only that, but the soccer field feels like a microcosm of life in general. The way people show up on the field feels like it mirrors how they are off the field.
You’ve got people who keep a team organized and disciplined, partly with encouragement and partly with tough love. These are your focused people in real life.
You’ve got people who are hawk-eyed and know the rules of the game by heart and can cite them, chapter and verse if need be. These are your detail-oriented people in real life.
You’ve got people who roll around on the ground if they’re so much as tapped on the shoulder, who like being the center of attention. These are your thespians—prima donnas—in real life.
You’ve got people who, like a river, let things pass. No matter what happens, they’ll say Play on. Life is short, they realize, and very few things in the world are worth fretting about. These are your stoics in real life.
And so on.
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3 Lenny
Yo, Ali. Any cafes open this morning?
The first time I spotted Lenny I couldn’t help not stare at him. Some people have the gift of being easy to like.
There he’d be, on the corner of 12th. Sitting on a milk crate, one leg draped over the other. His back leaning against an abandoned storefront with a For Lease sign glued to it. A radio in his lap playing jazz. The tip of his black sneakers bobbing up and down to the beat.
Generous with his smiles at passers by—morning commuters rushing to work, eyes glued to screens, ears covered with headphones. Deep dimples whenever he’d smile despite the stubble beard.
He was calm, collected. In another life, I could imagine him being my dad. Maybe that’s why I’d felt drawn to him.
Eventually, one day, we got chatting. Just pleasantries whenever I’d pass by, nothing too personal.
He was sitting on a curb on 9th early this Thanksgiving morning.
The cafe on 12th is closed today, huh? I said.
Yeah.
I’m walking to the one over on 14th.
Oh, that’s too far.
The one down by the station opens at 8.30, so in twenty minutes, I said.
OK, I’ll head there then. Never been.
The owner’s a nice guy, his name’s Mo.
Mo, got it.
One more thing, he said. Don’t work too hard.
A good man, that Lenny. Dignified. Proud.
4 The barber
In need of a haircut, I walked into a barbershop.
The barber had his back to me. He turned around as I approached the counter revealing acrylic glasses and a bowl cut.
His bangs were slanted. They covered his left eyebrow, but were an inch above his right one. He reminded me of that Australian standup comedian, Aaron Chen.
It’s wrong to judge, isn’t it?
He asked whether I had an appointment or was walking in.
I brushed my fingers along the edge of the wood counter like the carpenter I wasn’t.
I said I was just looking.
5 Kevin
I’d usually sit inside the cafe to work, to avoid the cloud of cigarette smoke outdoors. But the group of smokers that shows up on most nights weren’t there that night, so I figured I’d try the parklet for once.
On the table next to me was someone dabbing a brush into one of several tiny plastic compartments filled with paint, looking up at the bohemian hotel across the street, then looking down and stroking brush on paper.
From under his black beanie, wisps of white hair fell over his forehead. A short beard. White. A round face. Chocolate brown eyes. Sunken. His fingers had remnants of dried paint in the ridges around his nails. He wore a black rain jacket and had a tote bag full of watercolor pads to his side.
He noticed me staring.
Do you paint? he eventually asked.
I don’t, I said. Sometimes I write though.
To eat? he asked.
No, not to eat, I said.
I paint to eat.
A matter of months went by. And then one December evening as I was walking home, away from the brighter, busier streets and into the quieter blocks, I spotted a man in the alcove of a shop tucking into a sleeping bag. A black beanie on his head. Wisps of white hair over his forehead.
Our eyes connected for a second. I immediately looked away. In that instant, an illusion I’d held onto had been broken. And I was overcome with a feeling of shame.
When our illusions are broken, we become disillusioned. A good thing. What’s crucial is what one does with that feeling. Something constructive, ideally.
The rub is no matter what I tell myself about how I’ll make up for that moment with something constructive, insofar as Kevin is concerned, his situation remains unchanged. Nothing I have done, or likely will ever do, will help him with his specific conditions.
“The past,” he thought, “is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.
―Anton Chekhov (The Student)
Until next time.
Be well,
Ali
A cafe in a busy part of town, seated behind a window, people watching. Heaven.
https://hbr.org/2023/08/what-makes-some-teams-high-performing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_theory
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318660434_The_effect_of_team_emotional_intelligence_on_team_process_and_effectiveness
My relationship with pickup soccer mirrors how other aspects of my life have played out. I was on the soccer team in high school. In two years, I don’t think I was ever subbed in. But, hey, I stuck with it. And what I lost in vanity back then, I gained in lower cholesterol now. A worthy trade.