Team Super Chicken? "Let's not play the game... let's change it!"

One of my favorite TED talks is presented by Dr. Margaret Heffernan, entrepreneur, CEO, professor, speaker, and accomplished author. She challenges the status quo of team dynamics and illustrates through scientific results (i.e. Purdue University Chicken Studies by Dr. William Muir) how the best teams thrive in collaborative and conflict safe environments. Many organizations give all resources and power to a selected few (i.e. super chickens), only to end up taking from the rest leading to aggression, dysfunction, and waste. Peter Drucker has taught us "Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership."

In 2010, MIT Sloan Study shared 3 factors which make Teams Smart, outperforming others:

1. High degrees of social sensitivity to one another - EMPATHY

2. TIME in group conversations - no dominate voice and no passengers (all "in the Arena")

3. Higher percentage of WOMEN (who in the study scored higher than men in social sensitivity)

I believe helpfulness, empathy, and virtue will always outperform individual intelligence. Social capital is the reliance and interdependency through taking the time to build candor and trust, which ultimately accelerates growth. Dr. Heffernan tells us "conflict is frequent because candor is safe... which enables good ideas to be transformed into great ideas".

I learned early in my career that some of the best ideas are born from the lowest in rank and/or quietest in the room. I learned the importance of everyone's voice and the immense productivity and breakthrough results created in an environment of caring personally and challenging directly (as Kim Scott tells us in Radical Candor).

Remember that bringing out the best in others is how you find the best in yourself. Do you really know the person sitting next to you at the office or the person you are working directly with on your project? Do you know them personally? Maybe this week you get to know them better and their unique and valuable strengths!

Margaret Heffernan TED talk: Why it's time to forget the pecking order at work

© Nuri Dimler 2025