Making the Team Stronger

How do you make a team stronger?  When the word team is mentioned, baseball may come to your mind (or at least it does mine seeing as how it is World Series time) and then you may think that it takes hours and hours of tough training on the playing field to become a champion.  Blood, sweat and tears…right?  But did the Yankees and Phillies practice harder than all of the other teams this past year so that they would be the last two standing right now?   Do their players have more hours of training than players from other teams? 

I would submit that at the Major League level, pretty much all of the players have comparable amounts of training, so absurdly large amounts of it is not the key.  But then what is?

In my opinion, many factors contribute to making high-level teams great, but they have much more to do with team chemistry than tough training.  This is because every individual on a high-level team has already put in the countless, grueling hours to rise to the top.  Everyone in Major League Baseball is already an individual superstar, but not every team is the greatest.  So…back to my question: How do you make a team, particularly a high-level one, stronger? 

At Special Operations Command Europe (SOCEUR), we tackled that challenge this past week when we gathered all of the component commanders (1st Battalion-10th Special Forces Group, Naval Special Warfare Unit 2, 352nd Special Operations Group and the SOCEUR Signal Detachment) and senior staff together at the Edelweiss Resort in Garmisch, Germany.  Maj. Gen. Frank Kisner, the SOCEUR Commander, directed that the conference be conducted in civilian clothing and ensured that there were multiple opportunities to bring everyone together socially. Why civilian clothing you ask?  Well, it seems that when the uniforms are put away and people gather wearing ‘civvies’, traditional service barriers are put away as well.  Put the uniforms on and the Air Force folks tend to hang out with other Air Force folks, Navy with Navy, Army with Army and so on.  When everyone looks like the State Department guys that were in attendance, they are more likely to go interact with them and thus learn something about how to make the larger (read: National) team stronger.  There’s got to be some sort of sociological study that can explain this phenomenon, but I saw it work in real life, which is the ultimate laboratory.

We did gather to talk about where the command is headed and some of the major challenges facing each of the components, but the primary goal was to strengthen the team, and the times when that occurred most readily was after the PowerPoint-heavy (yet informative) ‘conference’ portion finished each day. 

Traditional German dancers entertain the SOCEUR crowd at the Restaurant Frauendorfer. Photo by Lorie Warchol

Our visit to the Restaurant Frauendorfer in the Partenkirchen area of the city really seemed to highlight this.  Amidst the awesome German food, beer, music and folk dancing (although there were some potentially capable folk dancers in our crowd, the restaurant provided the entertainers) emerged great stories about where people had traveled, what crazy things their kids were up to, what personal ambitions they had…all on a personal level that had nothing to do with anything but getting to know each other better.   Learning about each other on a personal level built chemistry.  We learned that despite our service differences, we were all pretty much the same. 

The point is, as we get to know and become more familiar with each other, we are more willing to go the extra mile and ‘dig deep’ for each other when times are tough.  Most everyone accepts that, as ADM Stavridis has pointed out, we are stronger together, but it is when we know each other beyond the professional level that we are truly willing to sacrifice for one another.  That is what makes teams stronger and contributes to true teamwork.  Whether you are a baseball fan or not, you can bet that both the Yankees and Phillies have developed strong personal bonds among themselves, and that, not their level of training (or even funding) is why one of them and not any of the other 28 Major League Baseball teams will be the World Series Champion next week.

MAJ Jim Gregory, SOCEUR PAO