“For a long time, that was the million-dollar question,” Edmondson told me. “We knew it was important for teammates to be open with each other. We knew it was important for people to feel like they can speak up if something’s wrong. But those are also the behaviors that can set people at odds. We didn’t know why some groups could clash and still have psychological safety while others would hit a period of conflict and everything would fall apart.”
III.
On the first day of auditions for the television show that became known as Saturday Night Live, the actors showed up, one after another, hour after hour, until it felt like it would never stop. There were two women who played midwestern housewives preparing for the annual meteorological disaster (“Can I borrow your centerpiece for the tornado this year?”) and a singer with an original composition named “I Am Dog” lampooning the women’s liberation anthem “I Am Woman.” A roller-skating impressionist and an obscure musician named Meat Loaf took the stage around lunchtime. The actor Morgan Freeman and the comic Larry David were on the call sheet, as were four jugglers and five mimes. To the exhausted observers watching the auditions, it felt as if every vaudeville act and stand-up comedian between Boston and Washington, D.C., had shown up.
Which is the way the show’s thirty-year-old creator, Lorne Michaels, wanted it. Over the previous nine months, Michaels had traveled from Bangor to San Diego, watching hundreds of comedy club shows. He talked to writers from television and radio programs and every magazine with a humor page. His goal, he later said, was to see “every single funny person in North America.”
By noon on the second day of auditions, tryouts were running late when a man burst through the doors, leapt onto the stage, and demanded the producers’ attention. He had a trim mustache and wore a three-piece suit. He carried a folded umbrella and an attaché. “I’ve been waiting out there for three hours and I’m not going to wait anymore!” he shouted. “I’m going to miss my plane!” He marched across the stage. “That’s it! You’ve had your chance! Good day!” Then he stormed out.
“What the hell was that?” one producer asked.
“Oh, that was just Danny Aykroyd,” said Michaels. They had known each other in Toronto, where Aykroyd was a student in Michaels’s improv class. “He’s probably going to do the show,” Michaels said.
Over the next month, as Michaels chose the rest of the cast, the same thing happened again and again: Instead of picking from among the hundreds of people he auditioned, Michaels hired comedians he already knew or who had been recommended by friends. Michaels knew Aykroyd from Canada, and Aykroyd, in turn, was enthusiastic about a guy named John Belushi he had met in Chicago. Belushi initially said he’d never appear on television because it was a crass medium, but he recommended a castmate from the National Lampoon Show named Gilda Radner (who Michaels, it turned out, had already hired; they knew each other from Godspell). The National Lampoon Show was affiliated with National Lampoon magazine, which was founded by the writer Michael O’Donoghue, who lived with another comedy writer named Anne Beatts.
All of these people created the first season of Saturday Night Live. Howard Shore, the show’s music director, had gone to summer camp with Michaels. Neil Levy, the show’s talent coordinator, was Michaels’s cousin. Michaels had met Chevy Chase while standing in a line in Hollywood to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Tom Schiller, another writer, knew Michaels because they had gone to Joshua Tree to eat hallucinogenic mushrooms together, and Schiller’s father, a Hollywood writer, had taken Michaels under his wing early in the young man’s career.
The original cast and writers of Saturday Night Live hailed largely from Canada, Chicago, and Los Angeles and all moved to New York in 1975. “Manhattan was a show business wasteland then,” said Marilyn Suzanne Miller, a writer whom Michaels hired after they collaborated on a Lily Tomlin special in L.A. “It was like Lorne had deposited us on Mars.”
When most of the staff got to New York, they didn’t know anyone except one another. Many considered themselves anticapitalist or antiwar activists—or, at least, they were fond of the recreational drugs these activists enjoyed—and now they were riding elevators with a bunch of suits at 30 Rockefeller Center, where the show’s studio was being built. “We were all like twenty-one or twenty-two years old. We didn’t have any money, or any clue what we were doing, so we spent all of our time trying to make each other laugh,” Schiller told me. “We’d eat every meal together. We’d go to the same bars each night. We were terrified that if we separated, one of us might get lost and never be heard from again.”
In subsequent years, as Saturday Night Live became one of the most popular and longest-running programs in television history, a kind of mythology emerged. “In the early days of SNL,” the journalist Malcolm Gladwell wrote in 2002, “everyone knew everyone and everyone was always in everyone else’s business, and that fact goes a long way toward explaining the extraordinary chemistry among the show’s cast.” There are books filled with stories of John Belushi breaking into castmates’ apartments to make spaghetti late at night, or setting their guest bedrooms on fire with carelessly handled joints, or writers gluing one another’s furniture to the ceilings, or prank calling one another’s offices, or ordering thirty pizzas to the news division and then dressing up like security guards so they could infiltrate the lower floors, steal the pizza, and leave the journalists with the bill. There are flowcharts detailing who from SNL slept with whom. (They tend to get complicated, because Michaels was married to writer Rosie Shuster, who eventually ended up with Dan Aykroyd, who had dated Gilda Radner, who everyone suspected was in love with writer Alan Zweibel, who later wrote a book explaining they were in love, but nothing ever happened and, besides, Radner later married a member of the SNL band. “It was the 1970s,” Miller told me. “Sex was what you did.”)
Saturday Night Live has been held up as a model of great team dynamics. It is cited in college textbooks as an example of what groups can achieve when the right conditions are in place and a team intensely bonds.
The group that created Saturday Night Live came together so successfully, this theory goes, because a communal culture replaced individual needs. There were shared experiences (“We were all the kids who didn’t get to sit at the popular table in high school,” Beatts told me); common social networks (“Lorne was a cult leader,” said writer Bruce McCall. “As long as you had a Moonie-like devotion to the group, you were fine.”); and group needs trumped individual egos (“I don’t mean this in a bad way, but we were Guyana on the seventeenth floor,” said Zweibel. “It was a stalag.”).
But this theory becomes considerably more complicated when you speak to the people on the original Saturday Night Live team. It’s true those writers and actors spent enormous amounts of time together and developed a strong sense of unity—but not because of forced intimacy or shared history or because they particularly liked each other. In fact, the group norms at Saturday Night Live created as many tensions as strengths. “There was a tremendous amount of competitiveness and infighting,” said Beatts. “We were so young, and no one knew how to control themselves. We fought all the time.”
One night in the writers’ room, Beatts made a joke that they were lucky Hitler had killed six million Jews because, otherwise, no one would have found an apartment in New York City. “Marilyn Miller didn’t speak to me for two weeks,” she said. “Marilyn was completely uptight about jokes about Hitler. I think she hated me at that point. We would glare at each other for hours.” There were jealousies and rivalries, battles for Michaels’s affection, competition for airtime. “You wanted your sketch to go on, which meant someone else’s would have to get cut,” said Beatts. “If you were succeeding, someone else was failing.”
Even the closest relationships, such as between Alan Zweibel and Gilda Radner, were fraught. “Gilda and I came up with this character, Roseanne Roseannadanna, and on Friday I would go into the office and stay up all night writing the script, like eight or nine page
s,” said Zweibel. “Then Gilda would arrive midmorning, totally refreshed, and take a red pen and start crossing shit out, like she was some kind of schoolmarm, and I would get pissed. So I would go back to my office and rework everything, and she would do it again. By the time the show went on, we usually weren’t speaking to each other. I once stopped writing sketches for her for three weeks. I purposely saved my best stuff for other people.”
Furthermore, it’s not entirely true that members of the SNL team enjoyed spending time together. Garrett Morris, the show’s only black actor, felt like an outcast and planned to quit as soon as he had enough money. Jane Curtin would escape to her home and husband as soon as the show was done for the week. People would form allegiances, and then get into fights, and then form counter-allegiances. “Everyone was in these cliques that were constantly shifting,” said Bruce McCall, who came aboard as a writer for the show’s second season. “It was a pretty dismal place.”
In some ways it’s remarkable the Saturday Night Live team gelled at all. Michaels, it turned out, had chosen everyone precisely because of their disparate tastes. Zweibel was a specialist in borscht belt one-liners. Michael O’Donoghue wrote dark, bitter satires about such topics as the assassination of JFK. (When a distraught secretary told O’Donoghue that Elvis had died, he replied, “Smart career move.”) Tom Schiller aspired to direct art films. And everyone could become scathing critics when their sensibilities clashed. “Great, Garrett,” O’Donoghue once said when he read a script the actor had spent weeks writing. Then he dropped it into a trash can. “Real good.”
“Comedy writers carry a lot of anger,” said Schiller. “We were vicious to each other. If you thought something was funny and no one else did, it could be brutal.”
So why, given all the tensions and infighting, did the Saturday Night Live creators become such an effective, productive team? The answer isn’t that they spent so much time together, or that the show’s norms put the needs of the group above individual egos.
Rather, the SNL team clicked because, surprisingly, they all felt safe enough around one another to keep pitching new jokes and ideas. The writers and actors worked amid norms that made everyone feel like they could take risks and be honest with one another, even as they were shooting down ideas, undermining one another, and competing for airtime.
“You know that saying, ‘There’s no I in TEAM’?” Michaels told me. “My goal was the opposite of that. All I wanted were a bunch of I’s. I wanted everyone to hear each other, but no one to disappear into the group.”
That’s how psychological safety emerged.
Imagine you have been invited to join one of two teams.
Team A is composed of eight men and two women, all of whom are exceptionally smart and successful. When you watch a video of them working together, you see articulate professionals who take turns speaking and are polite and courteous. At some point, when a question arises, one person—clearly an expert on the topic—speaks at length while everyone else listens. No one interrupts. When another person veers off topic, a colleague gently reminds him of the agenda and steers the conversation back on track. The team is efficient. The meeting ends exactly when scheduled.
Team B is different. It’s evenly divided among men and women, some of whom are successful executives, while others are middle managers with little in the way of professional achievements. On a video, you see teammates jumping in and out of a discussion haphazardly. Some ramble at length; others are curt. They interrupt one another so much, it’s sometimes hard to follow the conversation. When a team member abruptly changes the topic or loses sight of their point, the rest of the group follows him off the agenda. At the end of the meeting, the meeting doesn’t actually end: Everyone sits around and gossips.
Which group would you rather join?
Before you decide, imagine you are given one additional piece of information. When both teams first formed, each member was asked to complete what’s known as the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test. They were each shown thirty-six photos of people’s eyes and asked to choose which word, among four offered, best described the emotion that person was feeling.*2
This test, you are told, measures people’s empathy. The members of Team A picked the right emotion, on average, 49 percent of the time. Team B: 58 percent.
Does that change your mind?
In 2008, a group of psychologists from Carnegie Mellon and MIT wondered if they could figure out which kinds of teams were clearly superior. “As research, management, and many other kinds of tasks are increasingly accomplished by groups—both those working face-to-face and ‘virtually’—it is becoming even more important to understand the determinants of group performance,” the researchers wrote in the journal Science in 2010. “Over the last century, psychologists made significant progress in defining and systematically measuring intelligence in individuals. We have used the statistical approach they developed for individual intelligence to systematically measure the intelligence of groups.”
Put differently, the researchers wanted to know if there is a collective intelligence that emerges within a team that is distinct from the smarts of any single member.
To accomplish this, the researchers recruited 699 people, divided them into 152 teams, and gave each group a series of assignments that required different kinds of cooperation. Most teams began by spending ten minutes brainstorming possible uses for a brick and received a point for each unique idea. Then they were asked to plan a shopping trip as if they were housemates sharing a single car: Each teammate was given a different list of groceries to buy and a map showing prices at various stores. The only way to maximize the team’s score was for each person to sacrifice one item they really wanted in exchange for something that pleased the entire group. Then the teams were told to arrive at a ruling on a disciplinary case in which a college basketball player allegedly bribed his teacher. Some teammates represented the interests of the faculty; others were stand-ins for the athletics department. Points were awarded for reaching a verdict that maximized each group’s concerns.
Each of these tasks required full team participation; each demanded different kinds of collaboration. As the researchers observed groups going about the tasks, they saw various dynamics emerge. Some teams came up with dozens of clever uses for the brick, arrived at a verdict that made everyone happy, and easily divvied up the shopping trip. Others kept describing the same uses for the brick in different words; came to verdicts that left some participants feeling alienated; and managed to buy only ice cream and Froot Loops because no one was willing to compromise. What was interesting was that teams that did well on one assignment also seemed to do well on the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything.
Some might have hypothesized that the “good teams” were successful because their members were smarter—that group intelligence might be nothing more than the intelligence of the individuals making up the team. But the researchers had tested participants’ IQs beforehand and found that individual intelligence didn’t correlate with team performance. Putting ten smart people in a room didn’t mean they solved problems more intelligently—in fact, those smart people were often outperformed by groups consisting of people who had scored lower on intellect tests, but who still seemed smarter as a group.
Others might have argued that the good teams had more decisive leaders. But the research showed that wasn’t right, either.
The researchers eventually concluded that the good teams had succeeded not because of innate qualities of team members, but because of how they treated one another. Put differently, the most successful teams had norms that caused everyone to mesh particularly well.
“We find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks,” the researchers wrote in their Science article. “This kind of collective intelligence is a property of the group itself, not just the individuals in it.” It was the norms, not the
people, that made teams so smart. The right norms could raise the collective intelligence of mediocre thinkers. The wrong norms could hobble a group made up of people who, on their own, were all exceptionally bright.
But when the researchers reviewed videos of the good teams’ interactions, they noticed that not all norms looked alike. “It was striking how different some of them behaved,” said Anita Woolley, the study’s lead author. “Some teams had a bunch of smart people who figured out how to break up work evenly. Other groups had pretty average members but came up with ways to take advantage of everyone’s relative strengths. Some groups had one strong leader. Others were more fluid, and everyone took a leadership role.”
There were, however, two behaviors that all the good teams shared.
First, all the members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” In some teams, for instance, everyone spoke during each task. In other groups, conversation ebbed from assignment to assignment—but by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount.
“As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,” said Woolley. “But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined. The conversations didn’t need to be equal every minute, but in aggregate, they had to balance out.”
Second, the good teams tested as having “high average social sensitivity”—a fancy way of saying that the groups were skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.
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