Third of Three

Why ambition needs a team — and how you build one

During the summer of 1993 I decided I was going to become a professional basketball player. It was my game. I was tall. I played for my local team. I had a jump shot I'd been practising in the drive until dark, much to the annoyance of my dad.

And that same year, during a school summer camp in Yorkshire, in which the heat was almost unbearable – yes, it can be hot in Yorkshire despite what many believe – I was building towards tomorrow's basketball tournament. I was with a hundred and fifty gangly teenagers playing sports in a field, but my mind was on the tournament. Basketball was mine. I was ready.

There was only one problem, and it was the entire rest of the team. Apart from my mate Rich, not one of them knew the rules, or had even played a game before. Our team, assembled by the random logic of who happened to be standing nearby, consisted of a drummer with one arm, a small collection of video-game enthusiasts, a lad known only as Chunk, and two or three others who could, if you were feeling humanly generous, be described as sporty.

We finished third in the tournament. There were three teams.

I tell you this not because it scarred me – at thirteen a podium is a podium, and we celebrated last place like NBA champions – but because it was a remarkable lesson. I had the ambition and the goal and the desire and the future ahead of me. I had, by the standards in my own mind, a little of the talent. What I did not have, clearly evident in the first 5 minutes of the game, was the team to get it done.

There's a question that gets skipped almost every time people set out to do something that matters – start the business, launch the movement, form the band, chase the thing they can already picture. The direction's clear, there's sometimes a painted picture too. Everyone's keen, enthusiastic, ready for the challenge. The plan's been talked through and agreed, and often signed off through several committees. And then, in all the excitement of where we're going, few stop to ask the important question in the room: is this the team to get it done?

Not as a suggestion that we take an away-day, or do a skills matrix or build a performance framework. But rather as an honest view, and sometimes uncomfortable look, at the people beside you and the mountain in front of you. Hand on heart – are these the ones who'll carry it over the line?

Because a plan doesn't do anything. Neither does a strategy, a mission, or a beautifully drawn roadmap with nice fonts. Neither does pure hope and spirit – although they're important. Neither does best intentions or a wish. The future ambition comes about when you apply judgement, bring craft and care and take the actual creative action of people, to turn your idea into the thing you want it to be.

The map describes the route. The team is who walk it.

If the honest answer is yes, this is the team, then the job is easy and remarkably noble: protect them, clear their path, enjoy the journey with them, learn, grow and mostly get out of their way. Although, I suspect you're maybe not looking as hard as you could, or being honest.

If it's not yet – which is the far more common answer – then the interesting work begins. And here's where most people reach for the wrong solutions. They assume "not yet" means new people: a cull, a star hire or two, swap out whoever's holding it back. Occasionally that's true. Far more often it isn't. The team you need is mostly the team you already have, developed in three directions worth investing in. Craft, constellation, and field.

I wont tread over ground already covered when it comes to craft, field and constellation. There's a richer treatment of these three areas of learning here.

Craft is simply what the team do – the skill, the judgement, technical ability and the ability that only comes with time on the thing they do for a job or role. When craft is what's missing, the instinct is to buy it in. But craft is better grown than bought. It comes from doing the work and being supported doing it: coaching, pairing, an ask that pushes a little, feedback, and enough room to be wrong on the way to being good. A training course rarely changes anyone; the reps do. And if the craft isn't there and nobody's deliberately growing it, you don't have a talent problem. You have a nobody's-tending-the-people problem – which is a different thing, and squarely with those in charge.

Field is about the deployment of that craft with others and in the work itself. It's about whether the craft you have can sit and play with the craft of others. The way the team work together, communicate, build relationships and bring their expertise to the challenge effectively with other people. A team that gets it done is not a collection of individuals who don't work together, it is a mix of good people, with good talent, coming together to amplify each other.

Constellation is different in kind entirely and one that takes a great team to being a magnificent team. It's the topics and subjects and skills that sit above and around the day job. Employment law, economics, behavioural science, regulation, marketing, PR, biology, physics, sociology, communication science, mechanical engineering, history, the way money actually moves through a company. Learn a little of it and you stop seeing your work with a narrow lens. People become something more complex, and harder to replace.

What you reach for is driven by what genuinely interests you, the plan you have for your career and life, how much you want to change things, and what your role demands. It isn't sharpening your craft. It isn't deploying that craft alongside others. It's understanding the systems and topics that surround and govern the work – and, if we're honest, the life you wish to lead.

Run the team through those three and you'll almost always find one of them not attended to. That's not a shortcoming; it's the normal condition of every team. There is always more to learn.

A team is a living thing, nudged, shaped and formed a little every week by the attention put into it — or eroded, just as steadily, by the attention that isn't.

The problem was never having gaps and not being able to say "yes! this is the team to get it done". In fact, the yes answer suggests we may have stopped looking at all. The problem is when we pretend we have the team to get it done, and we set off, knowing deep down inside, that we haven't done the work, or aren't prepared to do the work, to build the team to bring about the future we want.

Nobody arrives at anything ambitious already equal to it, capable and with ease. You grow into it, and you grow the people beside you into it at the same time, and one unremarkable day you notice that the team that couldn't quite do the thing has become the team that can.

That's the whole point of the story we're writing. Not a new framework. Not a methodology. Not a plan. A story. A story in which, whilst trying to achieve something remarkable and exciting, everyone involved became more capable, better at working with each other, and better supported than they were a year ago – growing because of the work, not despite it.

We were never going to win that tournament in a field in Yorkshire, and it didn't matter in the slightest, because we weren't really trying to. We were trying to have the best weekend of our lives, and at that we were genuinely unbeatable.

But when the thing does matter – when you can picture where you're going and it's bigger than a random basketball tournament in Yorkshire – the question is exactly the one I should have asked at thirteen, looking down our bench at our random misfits and a lad called Chunk. Not how do I find a better team? Just: what would it take to become one?