One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams

the intentional creation of personal relationships among members of the bureaucratically unrelated but functionally interdependent teams allowed us to break down the walls of silos.

briefer, meanwhile, was free and encouraged to keep the discussion at the “here’s why this matters” level, rather than diving too deeply into the hard data.

a very mortal human who was willing to demonstrate behavioral standards and facilitate the interaction of teams rather than pretending to know all answers to their many problem sets.

Face-to-face interaction with others is closely correlated with trust and quality of relationship formation.

the next-most-important element is how to divide time usage and schedule the presentation of subject matter.

When left isolated from the rest of the organization, teams become strategic echo chambers, and soon adopt divergent cultures.

“when traders had the right balance and diversity of ideas in their social network, their return on investment increases 30 perfect over individual traders.” Similarly, when housing a wide variety of intel specialists directly next to members of operator teams who indirectly depended on their work, information could be communalized, and bureaucrati

O&Is allowed for more than a select few influential individuals from each team’s small network potentially to be converted into boundary spanners—it allowed for every one of them to.

We were one extended unit with one culture—whose actions were influenced not by the identity or narrative of a single unit but by the aligning narrative that was constantly recommunicated and transcended our previously festering cultural divisions.

Many teams in your organization are likely frustrated with the bureaucracy while also subconsciously comfortable with their solid-line leaders filtering and contextualizing relevant information, despite the easily offered complaints. Bureaucracy can be frustrating to individuals in the system, of course, but their complaints are overlain by a sense