The Indicator from Planet Money

Episode•September 8, 2025•9 min

Teamwork actually does make the dream work

Behavioral scientist Jon Levy’s new book — Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius (https://www.jonlevy.com/team-intelligence) — argues that, in the workplace, leadership is overrated and teamwork is underrated. Today on the show: How super chickens and NBA All-Stars demonstrate the perils of individual performance. Related episodes: Why women make great bosses (https://www.npr.org/2022/05/24/1101064874/why-women-make-great-bosses) The Virtual Office (https://www.npr.org/2021/03/31/983097569/the-virtual-office) The Science of Hoops (https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/911898347/the-science-of-hoops)For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org (http://plus.npr.org/). Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez (https://www.npr.org/people/1268825622/sierra-juarez). Music by Drop Electric (https://dropelectric.bandcamp.com/). Find us: TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/planetmoney/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/planetmoney), Newsletter (https://www.npr.org/newsletter/money). To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: See pcm.adswizz.com (https://pcm.adswizz.com) for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices (https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices) NPR Privacy Policy (https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy)

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Transcript

0:01

Npr.

0:12

When you're looking for a job, you put together a resume of your achievements. I initiated this. I led that.

0:18

I leverage multiple synergies.

0:20

If you haven't leveraged multiple synergies, I mean, what are you doing in the workplace? But the point is, the workplace is all about rewarding leadership and individual performance.

0:31

Yeah, sure, you might get a question in a job interview about working well with others, but being a quiet force for teamwork doesn't get as many accolades.

0:39

Behavioral scientist John Levy has a new book arguing exactly. That leadership is overrated and that teamwork is underrated.

0:49

These days, we tend to focus completely on the leader. If we have the right leader, then the team will perform. But when we look at the research that's out there, it tells a different story.

0:58

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods.

1:01

And I'm Waylon Wong. Today on the show Teamwork makes the dream work. We learn how important group dynamics are, whether you're an NBA player or an egg laying chicken.

1:13

Both are about getting round things into baskets. Is there a link there? We'll find out after the break.

1:19

Talk about a layup.

1:26

To explain why rewarding individual performance can lead us astray, behavioral scientist John Levy gives us the example of egg laying hands.

1:35

Several decades ago, a company called DeKalb produced a chicken that was like the Ferrari of chickens. It could outlay any chicken out there.

1:43

It was called the DeKalb XL, okay, the Ferrari chicken. Just laying eggs everywhere.

1:48

This was great for farmers because they were getting a lot of product. The problem was that they were bred for individual productivity so intensely that at a certain point, they started attacking each other. This wasn't good for business.

2:05

So they're individually good, but when they're in a coop with a bunch of other chickens, they're kind of attacking each other. And that's not very good for laying eggs.

2:13

Essentially, there were a lot of casualties. And so in the long run, you end up producing less eggs anyway. At the same time, society was moving on from this idea that it's okay for animals to experience these kinds of conditions. And an evolutionary biologist by the name of Dr. Muir said, what if we could actually breed chickens that were both prosocial, they could be around each other safely and produce a lot of eggs. So he took chickens, put them into groups, and then the groups that as a whole laid the most eggs were rebred. So that generation by generation, what he was both rewarding was pro social behavior and the total amount of eggs they laid.

2:57

Huh. So it's Maximizing the group and not the individual hen's performance.

3:03

Exactly. Now, Muir had a name for these coops. He called them the KGB or the Kindler Gentler birds.

3:10

Got it.

3:11

And he, he then wanted to compare a coop of the KGB versus these super chickens. And what he found was that the kgbs or the Kindler Gentler birds absolutely far and away outperformed the super chickens. Mostly because the super chickens had pecked each other to death and only three of them or so were left at the end of the year.

3:38

That is a grim but very vivid reminder of how we work together is maybe more important than how talented an individual is.

3:48

Talent is table stakes, right? But the question is, how do we coordinate that talent? I think to answer that question, we need to look at how we actually give people status and reward them. And if you look at most companies, we reward people on an individual bonus structure or we rate people individually, not as a team. NBA players who score a lot of make a lot of money. NBA players who score a lot and have a profound negative impact on the team still earn a lot of money.

4:16

And this brings us to a really interesting period in basketball history. In the 1980s, you've got two teams. Team USA, which is the Olympics team of the US and then the NBA All Stars. Can you describe what happened there and what it says about teamwork?

4:34

In 1980, Team USA actually wasn't allowed to participate in the Olympics because President Carter didn't want them going to mountain. It's the heat of the Cold War.

4:43

Neither I nor the American people would support the sending of an American team to Moscow.

4:48

What they ended up doing to make it up to these athletes is they created a five game series between basically the youngest Team USA in history. These were a bunch of college kids back then, and the NBA All Star, the most seasoned, experienced players in the entire league. And they got demolished. I mean, it was just crazy.

5:10

The NBA All Stars were just completely overrun by these young upstarts.

5:14

Yeah, 100% out of five games, Team USA won four of them. In one game, they won by 31 points. And the only game they lost, they lost by two points.

5:25

So what was happening?

5:26

It turns out that there's something called the too much talent problem. And the too much talent problem is when teams reach about 50 to 60% top tier talent, you see them underperforming in terms of their score in sports. And what the researchers realized was that as task interdependence goes up, meaning how much my role interacts with yours, then selfishness has the ability to destroy performance. So much like in the business world that we've incentivized people with personal bonuses, we've incentivized basketball players to shoot the ball regardless of if it's a good shot or not. I go from passing 50% of the time to 70% of the time, then I'm doing exactly what you talked about. I'm able to get the ball to the player who has the best chance of scoring.

6:12

So you're saying the Team USA group of mostly college basketball players, they were more focused on the team than about the individual, can I shoot this ball into the basket? Kind of thing?

6:25

Absolutely. Because for Team usa, it was about representing their country, whereas for the All Stars, most likely it's about them doing well.

6:33

How do these stories of the David Goliath on the basketball court and these super chickens that are kinder, gentler, how does that relate to the office?

6:45

There's a really incredible researcher by the name of Anita Williams Woolley. She spent years trying to understand what causes teams to solve a problem as quickly as possible with the resources they have. And she looked at kind of the standard stuff. The IQ of the smartest person had no predictive element, or not a valuable one anyway. The average IQ of team members, not really that valuable. In fact, the single greatest predictor she could find was the number of women on the team.

7:16

Why is that?

7:18

The answer is that women index higher on emotional intelligence. And so having a huge superstar on the team, or like the NBA All Stars, a team completely comprised of superstars, isn't necessarily helpful if they don't have the emotional intelligence to be able to coordinate, communicate, understand when to push certain topics or when not to.

7:43

So you've convinced me. Team dynamics and emotional intelligence are underrated parts of any workplace. What were your overall takeaways from writing this book?

7:53

I think one of the biggest things that I've taken away is that we've always separated the leader from the team. We've always said, let's give them separate training. Then if we can get the perfect leader, the team will perform. But what I've really learned is that in most teams, leadership is fluid.

8:10

It may not be a job title, not at all.

8:12

It's in our best interest to have leadership be fluid. The most important thing we need to focus on constantly is how do we make our team as intelligent as possible?

8:23

John Levy, author of Team Intelligence thank you so much for joining the Indicator.

8:28

Darian, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

8:32

This episode was produced by Corey Bridges and Angel Carreras with engineering by Sina Lofredo. It's fact checked by Sarah Juarez. Cake and Cannon edits the show and the Indicator is a production of npr.

Teamwork actually does make the dream work

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