Sean Glaze explains how external enemies unite teams. In the 1950s Robbers Cave experiment, two hostile groups of boys stopped fighting when a stuck food truck forced them to cooperate. Honda used this idea in the 1970s with the mission statement "Destroy Yamaha" to rally its workforce.
So why does your team need an enemy? Well, you may not have heard of the Robbers Cave experiment from the 1950s, but it's a very interesting study where a scientist brought together a group of a little over 20 young boys, about 10 or 12 years old, and basically put them in competitions and ultimately established two different groups. And these groups were very competitive and very aggressively against one another until they were faced with a superordinate challenge that caused them to have to unify in order to be able to overcome that challenge. The challenge was basically there was a truck of food that they had to be able to get unstuck so they could eat back at camp. Well, because they all had to work together to achieve that goal, all of the petty, uh, differences and all the internal struggle seemed to dissipate once they had to pull together to achieve something that made them more effective as a team. So what does this mean for you? Well, your divisions or different parts of your organization may not be collaborating or sharing information or working together as well as you'd like, but if you can identify an enemy, you can unify your people. Honda knew that back in the 1970s. Their mission statement in the 1970s at Honda was "Destroy Yamaha," because once you have an enemy, once you have that unifying challenge that people can rally against, that actually begins to make those petty differences among and between the people inside your organization disappear. So if you'd like to create a more unified, connected, cohesive, and committed team, find an enemy for your organization. I'm Sean Glaze. That's what effective leaders do.
