For the past seven years I have run an exercise in an IMD executive program in which leaders learn archery and then shoot under competitive conditions, coached by Juan Carlos Holgado, an Olympic gold medalist. More than 400 leaders have experienced it. They compete alone, with the top scorers identified after every round, and then again in teams of three.
The individual competition does what you’d expect: as more people watch, stress rises, and the people who most want to win often shoot worst. What I didn’t expect is that the team round is harder, because the pressure is different. The person who shoots first doesn’t want to let the team down, and the person who shoots last feels obliged to make up for whatever went before. Both are forms of trying harder, which runs into what we call the archer’s paradox: the harder you try, the more likely you are to miss. And it spreads, because under acute stress every member loses awareness of what is happening inside them at the same moment. So a team, left to itself, makes each of its members worse under pressure than they were alone.
Building Two Capabilities
If you want your team to perform under pressure, it needs resilience and adaptability. For an individual, resilience means executing when your physiology is working against you. For a team, it means continuing to work as a team when everyone’s is: information keeps moving, people say what is true, and nobody goes quiet. Adaptability is the judgment to recognize when conditions have changed enough to need a different approach, and the skill to change only what must change. A team can have one without the other: it can hold its nerve and keep doing the wrong thing, or rewrite the plan every time the wind shifts. Which one is your team short of? You probably can’t tell, because calm conditions are the only ones most leadership teams ever practice in.
Your company probably trains neither at the team level. It develops leaders one at a time, measures functions one at a time, and brings the leadership team together for strategy and the occasional offsite. None of that puts the team under load. If it rehearses crises at all, it rehearses process, who calls whom and what gets said to the regulator, and in my experience it rarely rehearses real pressure, where the behaviors that go first are the ones a team depends on most: saying you are struggling, asking for help, and letting someone else take the shot.
What the Archers Built
The team Juan Carlos won gold with in 1992 nearly didn’t become a team at all. Preparing to host the Games, Spain recruited Viktor Sidoruk, who had coached the Soviet team since 1975. He arrived in September 1990 to coach three individuals, and his regimen was 300 to 500 arrows a day in near-total isolation. By individual measures it worked, and as a team they came apart. His attention went to whoever was shooting best that week, so whoever was shooting best became the target of the other two. They practiced in silence and wouldn’t share a lunch table.
What changed it was one conversation. On his birthday, close to quitting, Juan Carlos invited the other two to dinner and told them he had started to hate them, that he knew they hated him, and that before he left he wanted to hear everything they couldn’t stand about him. His relentless positivity, which he thought was discipline, left them alone with their bad days, and his habit of stepping in whenever he saw a problem, which he thought was support, made them feel incompetent. He couldn’t have discovered either by introspection; he had to be told.
Then look at the Olympic final, where Juan Carlos’s form deserted him. He pulled his teammates aside, gave up the lead shooting position, and moved to the middle, the slot normally reserved for the weakest archer. This is the team round of our exercise, resolved: the pressure of not letting the others down, answered by a man who could hand the first shot to someone else. A year earlier his teammates would have read that as surrender. Spain beat Finland by two points. Two different things happened on that line. He held his technique, which is resilience, and he changed the one thing that needed changing, the order, and nothing else, which is adaptability. The second was only possible because of the dinner.
Three Practices
Three practices build what the archers built. The first is the foundation both capabilities stand on, the second prepares adaptability, and the third builds resilience and tests both.
Build the trust the work will need. The archers’ problem was a lack of information about each other: each was confident he knew what the others needed, and each was wrong. Your team is likely running on the same unverified assumptions, so the corrective is the question Juan Carlos asked, from you to each member and between the members themselves: what do you need from me that you are not getting? Then test what the answers built. Can a member of your team say “my function is struggling, someone else should lead on this” in a routine meeting without it costing them standing? If not, it won’t be said in a crisis, and you will hear of the problem from a customer or a regulator.
Decide in advance what holds and what flexes. When a storm hit on the final day of the 1987 Spanish championships, Juan Carlos changed his aim point, his shooting speed, and his expectations about scoring, and held his stance, grip, draw, and release constant. He knew which was which because he had worked it out in months of practice in weather everyone else avoided, not in the storm. Your team can do the same with a two-column exercise before the pressure arrives: what changes when conditions shift, and what stays constant. Put roles in the columns too, because roles are the first thing a crisis scrambles.
Put the team under load, in steps, and change the conditions partway. The method is progressive exposure: graduated exposure to the conditions you fear, with recovery practiced at each level. For a team, that means rehearsals of rising intensity. Begin with a realistic problem worked against the clock, then add incomplete information, then a colleague briefed to play the skeptical board member. Change the conditions halfway through (“the budget was just cut by 30 percent; revise the plan in five minutes”), because that is what trains adaptability and not only endurance. And remove yourself for part of it, because the team’s real test is what it does when the person it defers to is unavailable. You can’t predict the crisis you will get, but you can predict the category, and in crisis simulations I ran at Harvard Business School early in my career, teams that had rehearsed the category performed far better than teams meeting one cold.
Nobody scores the exercise, since a score would recreate the contest the archers were living in. Someone outside the team watches for four things: who goes quiet, who takes over, who stops sharing, and who starts protecting their own function. Then debrief the behavior and leave the decision alone. Did anyone admit difficulty, and what happened when they did? When the conditions changed, did the team revise the one thing that needed revising, or everything, or nothing? This is where you learn which capability your team is short of: the watched behaviors speak to its resilience, the response to the change to its adaptability.
What This Buys
It doesn’t buy you a team that feels no pressure. Juan Carlos’s heart was pounding in that final. It buys you a team that keeps shooting when hearts are pounding, and that can change the order when someone’s form goes. Ask each member of your leadership team, this quarter, what they need from you and are not getting. Then, before the year is out, put the team under load, change the conditions halfway through, and see what the answers were worth.
The Archer’s Edge: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Practice for Business Leaders by Michael Watkins and Juan Carlos Holgado is published by Wiley, priced £32.99.
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