Whereas culture’s focus leans toward conformity to a common core of behaviors, teams focus on the opposite. Teams aren’t about sameness—they aren’t, at their best, about marching in lockstep. Instead they’re about unlocking what is unique about each of us, in the service of something shared. A team, at its finest, insists on the unique contribution of each of its members, and is the best way we humans have ever come up with of harnessing those distinctive contributions together in the service of something that none of us could do alone.

Successful institutions almost always develop strong cultures that reinforce those elements that make the institution great. They reflect the environment from which they emerged. When that environment shifts,it is very hard for the culture to change. In fact, it becomes an enormous impediment to the institution’s ability to adapt.

This is doubly true when a company is the creation of a visionary leader. A company’s initial culture is usually determined by its founder’s mindset—that person’s values, beliefs, preferences, and also idiosyncrasies. It’s been said that every institution is nothing but the extended shadow of one person.

Tools for Increasing Interdependence and Decentralization

Study Groups/Learning Community

This one seems so simple and old school, but having community to learn with is actually really crucial for human development. It means we learn to see ideas, not just through our own singular and limited perspectives, but to see how different experiences create different ways of thinking about things, of comprehending and applying ideas.

Loretta Ross teaches us that, “When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that’s a cult. When people think many different ideas and move in one direction,

that’s a movement.”...

The more people who grow understanding and vision together, the more people who will feel at home in the resulting experiments. Right now we are living inside the results of other peoples’ imaginations—people who couldn’t imagine Black people being free, fat girls being sexy, disabled people being leaders. People who could only imagine their own power and dominance. When more people imagine together, and then step from imagining into thinking through the structures and protocols of a society together, then more needs are attended to. Responding to common text is a great way to do this. And it doesn’t have to be just a reading group—it can be a group that watches films, listens to music, or compares experiments in changing movement practices.

Charismatic leaders sometimes assume that they can avoid this trade-off by sheer force of personality. If they just get everybody fired up, the kinks will work themselves out. But you can't design a system that is based on the faith that all of your employees will perform heroically, all day, every day, for an indefinite period. For a system to work, excellence must be normalised. And you don't get to that point by demanding extraordinary sacrifice. You get there by designing a model where the full spectrum of your employees — not just the out- standing ones — will have no choice but to deliver excellence as an everyday routine. You get there by building a system that just doesn't produce anything else.

Charismatic leaders sometimes assume that they can avoid this trade-off by sheer force of personality. If they just get everybody fired up, the kinks will work themselves out. But you can't design a system that is based on the faith that all of your employees will perform heroically, all day, every day, for an indefinite period. For a system to work, excellence must be normalised. And you don't get to that point by demanding extraordinary sacrifice. You get there by designing a model where the full spectrum of your employees — not just the out- standing ones — will have no choice but to deliver excellence as an everyday routine. You get there by building a system that just doesn't produce anything else.