Protecting Mavericks and Instigators
Last week, I was listening to the audiobook version of Nick Greene’s How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius. It’s an interesting book for basketball fans, but contains many broader lessons.
The one that resonated most with me was that because basketball had such a threadbare list of initial rules when Dr. James Naismith invented it, the game was ripe for the massive innovations that helped it become a leading sport in the world.
For example, Naismith never envisioned dribbling, according to Green. One of his first rules was: “A player cannot run with the ball.” It was players who created dribbling when they interpreted another rule—“The ball may be thrown in any direction with one or both hands”—to mean that you could “pass” the ball to yourself via the ground.
Greene argues that the dribble, which is now a standard part of the game, was originally a flagrant violation of the spirit of the rules. But it caught on precisely because it was effective and entertaining, and because there was no powerful force that could block the innovation with a crack down on the “rule breaking.”
Even when the NCAA, the regulator of the college game, banned the dunk shot in 1968, people still practiced and pushed forward the art of the dunk. (Here’s Dr. J talking about how eager he was to show off his dunking skills when he turned pro.) It’s hard to imagine how much worse the sport would be without those innovators.
That got me thinking about just how often this tension between mavericks and the establishment comes up in the business literature.
In Call Sign Chaos, General Jim Mattis highlights the cultural impact of mavericks and their ability to generate divergent thinking. He writes: “I wanted disciplined but not regimented thinking. Commanders must encourage intellectual risk-taking to preclude a lethargic environment. Leaders must shelter those challenging nonconformists and mavericks who make institutions uncomfortable; otherwise you wash out innovation.”
In Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas’s book, Humor, Seriously, they argue that driving a culture of levity improves team effectiveness. But what should a leader do when the culture goes astray? Aaker and Bagdonas suggest that leaders leverage “instigators.”
They write: “When the culture strays off course, Instigators are catalysts—lightning bolts of fun who reignite the subversion and playfulness. Says [Ed Catmull, the head of Pixar]: ‘There will always be people in the company who are a little ‘out there.’ If everyone were like them, people probably wouldn’t get much done. But the culture needs some of these people, because they signal to everyone else that it’s okay to be different.’”
Of course, the problem is that many organizational cultures contain an embedded bias against instigators and mavericks—precisely because they think differently, it’s hard for them to fit in.
In the book In Search of Excellence, Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman write: “Most corporations fail to tolerate the creative fanatic who has been the driving force behind most major innovations. Innovations, being far removed from the mainstream of the business, show little promise in the early stages of development. Moreover, the champion is obnoxious, impatient, egotistic, and perhaps a bit irrational in organizational terms. As a consequence, he is not hired. If hired, he is not promoted or rewarded. He is regarded as ‘not a serious person,’ ‘embarrassing,’ or ‘disruptive.’”
Moreover, some strong-cultured organizations implicitly define the “right” behaviors and approaches in ways that they believe reinforce the strengths of the organization. If this sounds like a straightforward recipe for an inclusion problem, you’re right.
For example, in the Harvard Business Review article “Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage,” Robert Austin and Gary Pisano describe how neurodiverse people often present in ways that make them seem like they wouldn’t fit into a culture:
“[...] the behaviors of many neurodiverse people run counter to common notions of what makes a good employee—solid communication skills, being a team player, emotional intelligence, persuasiveness, salesperson-type personalities, the ability to network, the ability to conform to standard practices without special accommodations, and so on. These criteria systematically screen out neurodiverse people.”
So what’s the task for leaders?
General Mattis told his subordinate leaders that it’s “your job” to find space for and to protect those who don’t neatly fit into the culture or share the same perspective as others. In Call Sign Chaos, He writes: “If you’re uncomfortable dealing with intellectual ambushes from your own ranks, it’ll be a heck of a lot worse when the enemy does it to you.”
In Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code, he writes about strong cultures: “The groups I studied had extremely low tolerance for bad apple behavior and, perhaps more important, were skilled at naming those behaviors.”
For me, the key is that last part—“skilled at naming those behaviors.” It’s not that these groups abandoned behavior standards that made their culture strong. Rather, they were explicit about what behaviors were essential to achieving the objective and what behaviors would detract from that objective. And that’s what they used to develop standards for “fit.”
It’s less about style and the individual, and more about the impact of behaviors on achieving the mission.