Humble, Hungry, & Smart - Business Teamwork

So on Friday, I had an assignment in which I had to write a paper on teamwork, particularly in business settings, and how this one person said the three elements of an effective teammate were Humility, Hunger for Success, and Smarts as defined as emotional intelligence. And while that has already been written and submitted I was thinking back to last semester in my business simulation class.

In that class we worked in teams to manage a business, one of the teams shared work but with one clearly defined leader, one team worked together without a leader and lacking an understanding of the simulation’s data, one team had a leader tasked with most of the work due to inactive team members, and my team selected me as CEO and we worked together on most decisions while trusting each other to make necessary decisions regarding particular aspects of the business which they managed to become skilled in over the course of the class. Clearly I don’t have as many details on the other teams, but that's my perception.

The team that didn’t understand the data very well came in last place at the end of the semester, if we look at the key characteristics they were humble amongst each other and with competition, they were very hungry to build success for the majority of the semester (though lost it at the end), and were emotionally intelligent enough amongst each other. What set them back was a more traditional definition of smarts, my definition, the ability to use education or wisdom when needed; this course was a course for Juniors and Seniors in the program so some level of this should have been present in at least one member of the group but they were likely too humble to believe they understood. I think they likely had the wisdom and/or education to understand what to do, but weren’t confident nor smart enough to properly apply it. (Apologies to the members of that team.)

The 3rd place team seemed like a major threat before data began to be generated. They weren’t humble even in the beginning, prior to any data, to the point of convincing my team to target their team and underestimate the other teams. The first round of results they were in last, and only really managed 3rd place overall due to fourth place losing motivation. This team included a restaurant manager who went to manage the business between classes, and was very skilled in driving the hunger of his team and was emotionally intelligent enough to get that position at such a young age. Their hunger made them scary, but they weren’t humble enough to accept legitimate insider information from my team out of pity; a business would jump on that opportunity. It took them until the final quarter to accept, and at that point they were so little a threat we showed them EVERY DETAIL of our business and they barely made it into 3rd place.

In 2nd place was the team that was the surprise threat in the initial quarters, as everyone underestimated them. They had great humility, and were the most emotionally intelligent people in the room. They were the team where the leader did most of the work. The leader admitted to doing 90% of the work to my team, so we knew she was a massive threat when they were the main competitor. The issue is they lacked hunger, as mentioned most didn’t participate and the leader of the team while protective of secrets from a grading standpoint wasn’t trying to get first for competition sake, nor business success sake.

My team came first, we were hungry for that win, but I wasn’t initially confident. It took me the first set of results to get me fired up. We were second place by a good margin leading into the final quarter, but we managed to beat second place ~100 to ~20 because of aggressive strategies and risk taking in the final quarters. The most important decision being technology sharing agreements with each of our competitors, a teammate of mine negotiated so quickly I struggled to write all the contracts, to share the technology for our technology without additional costs, only one agreement requiring additional payment. The result of the negotiations was our initial technology being shared between all companies in the industry, with all tech being available to our company. This artificially lowered our threat level in the game because it showed we didn’t invest enough in the future due to the low costs, but allowed us to provide perfect products for good prices, properly marketed in the next quarter. Emotional intelligence was there certainly, we were the only team to very openly argue over decisions, but we made a decision based on everyone’s feelings and thoughts on the matter. Humility was there among team members, but we definitely trash talked the competition playfully, and boy did we enjoy the times we had first place. I mean it's not very humble to think that sharing EVERY DETAIL of your business to a competitor won’t make a difference (though we ended up being correct).

I wanted to explore my way through this explanation, because in the paper on Friday I talked about how the 3 characteristics of a team member are important, but aren’t the most important in my mind. Analyzing what could have helped the teams that performed poorly, and why the teams that did well won I think that there’s more to it and that I was justified in my paper. One thing I disagreed with was defining smarts as emotional intelligence, as humility kind of already covers that. Smarts is the ability to apply education and/or wisdom to a situation as I said above. While my team won by a healthy margin, it seemed like the second place team were destined to win by a sizable margin themselves for the later half of the class at least. 

We see elements of the 3 characteristics in each team, but what would have helped 4th place was a more traditional smarts definition and a confidence boost. 3rd place could have been more humble, but they were largely on par with my team in that and so it's clearly not too important a factor in teamwork successes. Second place needed hunger, they had the traditional smarts and other 2 “key” characteristics, they had a willingness to learn from the process, and honestly had a good shot at winning. I believe they likely planned the final quarter as if they were planning the final quarter of a business’s existence rather than one of the first few years of a company's existence in which we simply need an endpoint to calculate from. Here a suspension of disbelief and hunger would have benefitted the team greatly. 

I understand that theories like these are broad, and won’t always apply to every situation. But this was a hyper realistic business simulation that required some level of teamwork; and while I can manage to make all these teams successes and failures seem to fit the mold of the 3 characteristics, I could easily find some other 3 vague characteristics to define the success of the teams. I think it's a very intricate network of characteristics that one needs to be good at teamwork. So many millionaires and billionaires lack humility and lack emotional intellect despite the fact that it requires a team to build that level of wealth.

Key factors I would add in is luck, and the ability to learn. On longer term projects such as this class we got feedback throughout. The teams that learned how to interpret the data did better than the teams that misunderstood which metrics were important. And yes luck was a major part, because there were many decisions that were just educated guesses at the end of the day. In real life luck is even more important, luck to have resources, luck to be in a culture that appreciates the project, luck to have the time. I’m not necessarily saying that the 3 key characteristics are incorrect, I just think the theory is flawed, because it doesn’t acknowledge key variables. I don’t claim my suggestions are the correct ones, but these 3 just aren't cutting it.

To those who definitely know I’m talking about you in the post, I am sorry if I offended you or misinterpreted your actions. I am speaking from a place of analysis that I commonly use in ways that I try to leave my feelings out of it, I likely wouldn’t have made it so blunt otherwise. My analyses shouldn’t be used to cast any member of the class in a negative, nor in a positive light.

Thank you if you read through this, I hope you have a great week. If you’d like to follow me on social media find the social media page in the sidebar.