Trust, Diversity, And Passion—The 3 Ingredients Of Successful Organizations

I previously published this article on Forbes.com.

It was August 1990. I was a young second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve, training as an artillery officer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

And I’d just watched an entire team die in the desert.

OK, no, they didn’t literally die: We were running leadership scenarios, in an exercise where we’d supposedly crashed in the desert. We were divided into six teams—each of six trainees, who had to work as a team to prioritize supplies for their survival.

But one of the teams had just spectacularly imploded...

The Post-Mortem

Any time you bring a group of young people together, you’ll often find differences of opinion.

And this team, sitting at a table in the center of the room was the epitome of “difference of opinion.” Loud and brash, they’d been yelling and challenging each other, as the team attempted to work together.

When our time was up, each officer had two scores. The first was our own individual effort at ranking each survival item and the second was the team score—where we came together and agreed on a ranking for each item.

As the scores were read off in class, the loud team in the center of the room had an individual who had a perfect score, but when the team’s score was read off, the same team failed even to meet the minimum score. So they ‘died’ as a team, even though they had a member with a perfect score.

1. It’s A Question Of Trust

Of the six teams, my team finished first, even though we didn’t have a single member score in the top 10 out of 36. That didn’t seem right.

I asked the instructor for an explanation. How was it possible for a team with an individual perfect score to lose at the scenario?

When asked, the individual with the perfect score confessed that in their regular life, he was a specialist in Search and Rescue: He’d been trained in survival, and practiced it for a living.

So what went wrong? The rest of the team didn’t trust him.

Specifically, they didn’t trust his judgment, instead relying on their own experience—even though his was far superior. Each team member fought for the right to lead, believing that ‘leadership’ meant the team should accept their ideas, and listening to someone else was a weakness.

By giving respect and trust to one another, you open up two-way communication. When explaining the success of the company’s culture, Tom Mendoza, Vice Chairman of NetApp, often says:

"People have a different emotional response to something when they know they’ve been heard—versus being dictated to. If people know they’re respected and listened to, and that their idea is heard, they go home and think for you. Which can be a powerful contribution to your organization."

They each believed they were in a position of authority, so others should trust them. But they had it backwards: Authority doesn’t generate trust. Instead, it’s trust that generates authority.

As a result, they failed to survive as a team—even though they were each extremely capable.

2. Diversity Is A Fact Of Life

Whether in the military, sports or business, we are surrounded by the need to work in diverse teams. But it’s harder than it looks.

Rich Karlgaard, in his book The Soft Edge, talks about this skill of teamwork and trust as one of the soft edges of business. He asks a great question in the chapter on Teams:

If sharing is good, why is it so hard?

Vivek Wadhwa, an affiliate with the Singularity University in Silicon Valley answers Karlgaard’s question: “When you and I went to school, we were taught to be individuals. ... If we shared knowledge with each other, it was called cheating.”

But sharing and cooperation are critical to any successful team. To be successful, teams must go through a process of sharing—specifically, sharing different opinions and perspectives.

The very things that should have benefitted the team of officers—their diverse opinions and perspectives—actually caused their ultimate failure, even with the perfect expert in their ranks.

While diversity helps bring different views to an issue, Karlgaard points to studies saying diversity can interfere with communication, creating disharmony. For diversity to work at enhancing team performance, leaders must realize how to deal with the differences.

It takes effort and it takes something Karlgaard calls cognitive diversity. He explains that cognitive diversity includes differences in mental processes, perception and judgment. We need to mix analytical types with creative types (or the gut checkers with the number crunchers). We also need a range of experience, education and ages, he explains.

This cognitive diversity increases the ability for the team to make sound judgments on major decisions.

3. Teamwork Flowers With Passion

And finally, Karlgaard says a core part of any successful team is passion.

He reminds us that every great invention—every significant advance in human history—began with passion. A team full of passion can accomplish nearly anything.

But, as we’ve seen, passion alone is not enough.

The Bottom Line

Trust, diversity, and passion—these are the ingredients of successful organizations. These soft-edge traits can be taught, but not easily duplicated.

In today’s world of increased communication and collaboration, they’re needed more than ever. Embrace each one of them, and you can find lasting success.

But ignore even one of them, and you may end up like that group of young army officers: Passionate in their pursuit of being right, but not trusting in each other’s diversity.

Which is why they died in the desert.

Rich Karlgaard is a friend of mine and publisher of Forbes. He is also the author of The Soft Edge, where he examines a variety of enduring companies and finds that they have one thing in common: All of them live their values, which alongside great strategy and execution, allow them to fuel growth and weather hard times. He identifies Trust, Smarts, Teamwork, Taste, and Story as the five variables that make up this “soft edge.” I review his book in a previous post located here: