Welcome to Module 4 of the superbosses course. I call this module the superboss playbook because we are going to play a little bit with all kinds of interesting ideas and bring together some of the ideas we already talked about. We've talked about recruiting talent. We've talked about different ways in which superboss leaders motivate and inspire. We talked a lot about in the last module in particular, about how they develop people and how anyone can develop anyone else, how anyone can help other people get better. What we have not talked about so far is teamwork, at least not very directly and that's what this is about. The cohort effect is all about teamwork. It's about bringing together really motivated people. By the mere fact that they are together with a clear purpose, it actually will help each of them get better. It's an innate process. It's almost like a magical process. I think about say, a school. It could be a business school, it could be a university, although that's a bigger scale. It could be a high school, private or public. Or could even be a classroom where you have one class of kids. You bring them together, you challenge them, you give them opportunities to be creative. But there's something that happens. It doesn't always happen, but you can make it happen. You can push it along where they interact. By the mere fact that they're interacting with each other, they get better. Another example of something we created at Dartmouth in the business school at Tuck, which is called Tuck launch. Tuck launch is one part orientation, one part boot camp for brand new MBA students. They do some courses, they do some classes and they do a lot of experiential work, team-building, diversity, equity inclusion, training and discussions. There's a lot of social time. There's a lot of meeting other people. We create this kind of thing within two weeks that by the time they're done with the two weeks and they're ready to start some regular hardcore classes, they are bonding. That first part of the bonding process has happened. It's really a self-driven process where you put together smart, interesting people and something will happen. That's called the cohort effect. They start to connect with each other. The trick is to support that as a leader. For example, coach Bill Walsh, San Francisco 49ers in the NFL, he believed in creating a sense of belonging for his people. This meant insisting that he, his players and his coaches overcome their egos and foster an atmosphere of open dialogue and debate. If during studying films of the previous week's game, the lowliest assistant coach saw something that Walsh had missed. Walsh wanted him to feel comfortable sharing his idea. Walsh even encouraged this type of open environment on the sidelines during games. On Sundays, because the games are almost always on Sundays, coaches and players were expected to provide input and feedback in order to make appropriate changes in real-time and personnel or in how plays were called. On other occasions when Walsh analyzed potential recruits, he met with his talent scouts individually and then brought them all together as a group to really hash it out. In other words, there's a real team dimension that's occurring and it's not just a regular team. It's this cohort. It's this cohort of almost equals, where they push each other, they challenge each other and they help each other get better with a leader that helps facilitate that. By the way, you don't even have to have the leader to make this happen. Because if you're an individual contributor and you have your peer group of people you're working with. You can do some of this yourself by looking for ways to create that bonding. One of the great ways you can do it, aside from the various social ways you can do it. One of the great ways you can do it is to demonstrate how open you are to learning. You do that. People say, how do you do that? It's actually easy. You listen, you listen really well. You ask a lot of questions and you genuinely want to get better and learn and when you start to do that and model that behavior, it turns out a lot of people around you start to replicate that. That will get you on the path towards this cohort effect. In the case of Bill Walsh and the San Francisco 49ers, he said, we create an atmosphere in meetings in which a scout or a coach was able to express himself completely. If he overstated or understated in any category, he could later change his opinion without being criticized. That's okay. But everyone was expected to participate. You see this in other groups as well. A lot of proteges, a lot of people that work for superbosses, they vote for me the deep emotions they felt so many years later, sometimes relating to how even the slightest note, the slightest trigger is, for example, the theme song from Saturday Night Live, in the case of Lorne Michaels people, it would bring back a flood of warm memories. In the interviews that I did with so many of these people, it didn't take long to have a superboss progeny, to have somebody who work for superboss to give voice to all manner of names and slogans that define their alumni networks. For Norman Brinker, they were known as the Brinker boys. For Michael Miles because it was craft, they called themselves the Cheese Whiz Kids. It's pretty corny, but that's what they did. Or I already mentioned the Tiger Cubs in the context of Julian Robertson and hedge funds and working for Norman Brinker again, was seen as Brinker university. There was this sense that they were in something together. That's a very powerful thing to be able to create and to have, and to be able to rely on. That's what the cohort effect is, something you can do and you could build towards no matter what your job is in an organization.
