the Beatles and Teamwork

Try this little Beatles Trivia Quiz.

1. Who was the funny one?

2. Who was the quiet one?

3. Who was the edgy, intellectual one?

4. Who was the cute one?

(Answers: See bottom of page. )

Everyone who grew up in the 60’s knows the names of the Beatles. Although we recognize a lot of other bands from that era (The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Jefferson Airplane, The Doors ), except for their lead singers, I can’t name all the members of the groups; can you? Yet we know the names of each of the Beatles and even a little about John, Paul, George and Ringo.

We remember them because they were all essential contributors to the band’s sound and personality. Each one helped the Beatles become what they were – not just a famous singer with some backup musicians, but the “Fab Four” –the group we loved, and whose lives we followed for years, even after they broke up. This is the reason I chose them to illustrate the leadership principle –

Use Teamwork.

We have all heard the saying: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

For leadership, we could rephrase it: “The leadership team is greater than the sum of its members.”

I once knew a high school principal named Dr. Benjamin Marlin who had lunch with his administrative team of assistant principals every day. In that time together, they talked about many topics – how to handle tough student behavior cases, challenging staff problems and difficult parent issues. Years later, I was talking with a human resources specialist who said, that of the close to two hundred principals in the district, Ben had the greatest number of assistant principals promoted to principalships – and every one of them cited those lunch meetings as the source of their greatest professional development. Each one then carried the lesson forward and formed cohesive administrative teams in their own schools by meeting frequently and working closely together.

Anyone who has worked in a school or in a business or non-profit organization has, at some time, taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Inventory , or some other personality survey to identify your preferred operating style. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Are you thinking or feeling? Are you sensing or intuitive? Are you perceiving or judgmental? In addition to being useful for self-reflection, these tools also contain an important teamwork lesson: To make good decisions, we need as many of the various personality types sitting around the leadership table as possible.

Considering teams in terms of how they think, we can look at intelligence like Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner did. He rejected a narrow view of intelligence and instead defined it as “the capacity to solve problems.” Instead of thinking about IQ as the knowledge and skills assessed on college readiness tests like the SAT, he developed a theory of multiple intelligences – identifying different types of intelligences, some not usually tapped or valued in school or the workplace. This idea, that there are different ways of being smart, came home to me in a very personal way.

My wife and I have two sons, Dan and Ben. Dan is about two years older than Ben. When they were in elementary school, it was clear that they had different learning styles. Ben loved school – Dan hated it. Ben was very verbal – Dan avoided speaking whenever possible. Ben loved stories and learned to read and write early. Dan loved strategy games and could beat anyone at checkers and chess at an early age.

One day we were driving our big Suburban station wagon with both boys and their friends in the back seats. We decided to stop by the supermarket to pick up some ice cream. When we pulled into the parking lot, we all got out of the car and closed the doors – click, click, click – BANG! Three doors closed, but one slammed back open. Dan’s friend’s door, the one behind the driver’s, wouldn’t close. I said, “Try it again.” The boy shoved the door harder this time, but it banged back open again. I tried it with the same result.

I have a Ph.D. and I didn’t have a clue about where to start to fix the door. My wife was an English major and she had no idea. Ben, who flourished in school, just shrugged. But Dan, who struggled in school, silently kneeled down so the broken door’s lock was at his eye level and peered into the mechanism, studying it. He took a few steps forward and kneeled down in front of my door and stared into it. Then he went back to the broken door, kneeled down again, and like a doctor calling for his scalpel said, “Dad, give me your pen.” He took the pen and put it into the lock and pushed something that made a metallic snap. He stood up and closed the door which clicked shut just like the others.

Not one of us who had traditional school smarts knew what to do. The boy with different kinds of intelligence, who had other approaches to solving problems, figured it out.

When we’re on a team and putting our heads together to try to solve a problem, we can make good use of all the multiple intelligences to help us find a solution. We need people with strengths in logic and mathematics and language, as well as those who can construct abstract mental models. We need people with interpersonal skills and those who are more reflective about themselves. We need the global thinkers and the linear thinkers. We need the ones with strong data analysis skills and, as we learn from psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman , we also need those with heightened emotional intelligence who can understand their own feelings as well as other people’s emotions and can use this understanding to guide their thinking and actions.

We need everybody’s observations and insights. When a team draws on different perspectives, it’s a better team. Paul McCartney once explained that every Beatles’ song was submitted to the group for approval. Each Beatle reviewed it and added his own ideas to make the song better. The whole group had to come to agreement before the song was recorded. That is what effective teams do.

When team mates experience that kind of collegiality, it impacts both the quality of their professional relationships and their productivity. In the most successful schools, staff members are true colleagues who talk about their work to make it better, says researcher Judith Warren Little. But it is not always easy to build these relationships.

Anita Prince and Margy Hall were elementary teachers who I recruited to lead sixth grade teams at Gaithersburg Middle School (the same school we read about in Chapter 10 where assistant principal Diane Switlick exemplified the leadership trait of being daring and high energy when she convinced the staff to include students with special needs) I asked Anita and Margy to work at the middle school, not only because they had the reputation of being excellent teachers, but because we were facing a huge challenge, converting an intermediate school for 1,200 seventh- and eighth-graders into a middle school for students in grades six, seven and eight. Now we would be organized, not by individual academic departments like a typical junior high or high school, but by interdisciplinary teams with each team composed of an English teacher, a math teacher, a science teacher and a social studies teacher and sometimes a special education teacher or teacher of English for students new to learning the language. We needed to make a shift from a focus on individual courses taught by individual teachers who operated primarily in isolation, except for their affiliation with a department, to a focus on teamwork.

Margy and Anita went to work. They named their teams after Maryland symbols: the Chesapeakes, the Orioles. They asked the teachers to plan special events together – field trips, student recognition assemblies. They developed team spirit and team rules for student behavior. They emphasized Chesapeake and Oriole pride in everything they did. They even held parent conferences as a team so that parents could meet all their children’s teachers and talk about what their children needed.

At first, some teachers didn’t like the new direction. After all, working together as a team takes time – time that could be spent making lesson plans and grading papers – and teachers never have enough time to get all their work done. It takes a lot of time for teams to talk things over, to figure out how they will operate, how they will make decisions, how they will analyze their students’ achievement needs and how they will address them. It’s not easy work, even without the natural human dynamics that take place as people sometimes disagree and have to learn how to cooperate and get along. Management consultant Patrick Lencioni describes all the typical dysfunctional behaviors of teams we witnessed at first: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results.

Eventually Margy and Anita did build teams in which the teachers trusted each other and shared their ideas even if it meant they had to work out disagreements. They made decisions and plans together and committed to carrying them out. They held each other accountable and took pride in their achievements and in their collective results. Their teams eventually became what the educator Rick DuFour calls professional learning communities with a shared vision and values, a focus on their students’ learning and a real culture of trust, respect and collaboration.

And what were their results? Students began feeling that they were not just members of any team – their first loyalty was to their team –even more than to their school, which was alright with us. What we were seeing was what some people call the “Cheers” effect – the positive results you see when you’re in a place, as the show’s theme song says “where everybody knows your name.”

If you are a student, how do you act when you are part of team where the teachers really know you and care about you? Your grades go up and you have no need to misbehave. The Chesapeakes and the Orioles saw student achievement rise and student misbehavior fall dramatically. Within two years, the seventh and eighth grade departments had transformed into teams working just as cooperatively. Within five years, the state of Maryland recognized the school twice for making such significant gains in student achievement.

In their insightful book, Why Teams Don’t Work, Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley tell the story of William Deming, the statistician who later became a celebrated management theorist and consultant. After World War II, Deming contributed many of the ideas that turned Japanese corporations around and helped create the Japanese economic miracle. After the war, the Japanese had no raw materials, no technology, and no infrastructure – but, he observed that they did have people who were culturally disposed to work together. When Deming was later asked what he had learned from the Japanese, he didn’t hesitate even for a moment to answer, “People are important.”

Deming was right – People ARE important – but to form a great team you have to remember that you don’t want everyone to be the same. The easiest mistake is to hire everyone who thinks as we do – because “we’re on the same wave length.” We need some new thoughts and some new ideas, to stretch us so that we become better, but more importantly because we want our schools and organizations to be the most innovative and successful schools and organizations possible. That takes a lot of different strengths, more than any one of us possesses alone. The Beatles were a great band – a great team – largely because they weren’t all the same – but because they brought different talents to the table, or in their case, into the recording studio.

When members of a team are all different and all have their own strengths, sometimes you face the problem of lack of cohesiveness – an inability to work together productively. Columnist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times drew a lesson from the 2008 Summer Olympics. He said, “The American men’s basketball team did poorly in the last Olympics (2004) because it could not play as a team. Our stars were beaten by inferior players with better teamwork. Our basketball team learned its lesson.” (It certainly did; that year the Re-Deem Team took home the gold.) You could argue that it took Mike Krzyzewski, the incredible Duke coach, to forge that kind of group commitment out of uniquely talented individuals. That’s what great leaders do – they use teamwork as one of the keys to succeeding.

There is also a second way to think about teamwork: the need to build a team outside of your school, department or office. Dr. Jerry Marco retired after a career spanning over thirty years as one of the most successful high school principals his district had ever known. He could be a model for many effective leadership practices, but the one I want to highlight here is the way he built a sense of team beyond his school.

When Jerry would arrive at a meeting of high school principals, he would often be carrying a stack of papers. If he found a useful research article he would distribute copies of it at the meeting, assuming that he ought to share anything of value he came across. If he had arranged for the appearance of a prestigious guest speaker at his school, all of his colleagues were invited to come. If you were new to your job, he would take you aside and offer to help you with anything you needed. I took him up on the offer and sometimes emailed him asking for advice. By the end of the day he always responded with a thoughtful reply – either supplying the answer or making a suggestion or providing a lead about how to find the information I needed. Who knows how many other people he was simultaneously mentoring, even while running his own large high school, always finding the time for each of us?

Most memorable were Jerry’s emails just before each major holiday. Of course, they wished us a happy holiday and a healthy and restful break. But more importantly, he always asked us to reflect on what was really important to us – our families, and he urged us to leave the work on our desks (“It’ll be there when you get back.”) and to make time for our loved ones. He asked us to remember that we were doing important work and that we were in it together, but there were times to leave the work at work and enjoy our families and replenish our bodies and spirits. No one who ever received these messages ever forgot them. In this way, Jerry built a team outside of his school – a team of colleagues throughout the system who Jerry respected and cared about and who felt the same way about him – and so we became a more cohesive group who could depend on one another. That is teamwork too.

A coda: Years after Jerry retired, I was sitting in a restaurant with Benjamin OuYang, a young man who had just been promoted to become the principal of a middle school. Ben saw Jerry across the room, sitting in a booth with his wife having lunch, and said, with reverence in his voice, “There’s Dr. Marco. I need to go say hello. I’m only a principal because of him. I was teaching in his school and he told me that I should become an administrator because he saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.” The new young principal rushed over to Dr. Marco, with me trailing behind and, when he got there, thanked Jerry for encouraging him and then told him the good news about his promotion – wanting his mentor to share the happiness he felt – but also the credit for the accomplishment. When you use teamwork, sometimes you only find out years later about the mark it made on your teammates, the meaning it had for them and the long-term results it produced.

Beatles Quiz: 1. Ringo, 2. George, 3. John, 4. Paul

[If you enjoyed this excerpt, read the book: Lead Like the Legends (Routledge or Amazon) or

check out the keynote (davidisteinberg.com).]