Team of Teams: Summary, and What the Research Says About Shared Leadership

What the book argues

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World is by General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell. Portfolio published it on May 12, 2015, with a foreword by Walter Isaacson (Penguin Random House, n.d.; Open Library, n.d.). The publisher describes McChrystal as a four-star general who retired from the U.S. Army in 2010.

The publisher's description says the book shows leaders how to make their teams more adaptable, agile and unified in the midst of change, because organizations now need to be faster, flatter and more flexible than ever, with examples ranging from NASA to hospital emergency rooms (Penguin Random House, n.d.). Kirkus summarizes the origin of the argument: in Iraq, the traditional centralized management style of the American forces no longer worked against jihadi terrorist networks, and creating teams and lateral trust altered the military's culture (Kirkus Reviews, n.d.). The publisher describes Al Qaeda in Iraq as a decentralized network (Penguin Random House, n.d.).

In my words: when the situation changes faster than a chain of approvals can move, the people closest to it need the information and the authority to act, and the teams around them need to trust each other sideways, not only up and down.

Who it is for

Leaders of large organizations where good decisions wait on approvals and where teams know little about each other's work. Kirkus found useful examples and takeaway advice in it, with some boggy, unspecific acronym-speak (Kirkus Reviews, n.d.).

What the research says

The book is a first-hand account, not a study, and I found no test of its approach as a whole in the evidence I use. Its main claims are close to research on shared leadership and decentralized ways of working.

Shared leadership goes with team effectiveness, more with complex work. Wang, Waldman and Zhang (2014) pooled 42 samples. According to their abstract, shared leadership had a positive relationship with team effectiveness (ρ = .34), stronger when the team's work was more complex. That fits the book's central claim that complexity is where centralized control struggles most. The abstract does not say which designs were pooled, so read this as association.

Decentralized onboarding went with higher sales in one firm. Wiseman, Ahearne, Hall and Tirunillai (2022) studied newly hired salespeople in one company. According to their abstract, those onboarded through a decentralized program, which mixed individual and institutional socialization, had about 23.5% higher sales than those who went through a centralized program, more so when their managers had fewer people to look after. It is one firm and a natural experiment, so it shows what happened there, not a general rule.

Trust within teams. Breuer, Hüffmeier and Hertel (2016) pooled 52 studies and, according to their abstract, found team trust positively related to team performance, more strongly in virtual teams. The book's emphasis on trust is consistent with that, as an association, though this research measured trust within teams, not between them.

Where the evidence is thin

The book generalizes from one extraordinary setting, and its outcome claims are the authors' own. The research I use supports sharing leadership and decision-making, mostly in correlational studies, and does not test the specific practices the book describes. I also found little evidence on the costs of flattening, such as the extra load on managers when more decisions and information flow through them.

How it maps to the Unfrozen Loop

This mapping is my judgment. Pushing decisions to the people closest to the situation is Start it close to the work, the part of the Unfrozen Loop that names leading the rollout as the manager's real job. Sharing information widely is Surface both ways. And the cost I flag above belongs to The middle's own weather: a flatter organization often means more coordination for the managers who remain. The Atlas answer on whether to cut middle management takes up that question.

What I take from it

The book's direction is supported, and its warning about speed is useful. The part I would add is capacity. Before you push more decisions down, ask which decisions your managers will stop waiting for, and what they will stop doing to make room for the new ones. For a single team's version of the same idea, see Turn the Ship Around!, and for the leader's habits that make it work, Multipliers.