What team chemistry, it’s talent that talks in elite sport

The IPL is in its mad dash to Sunday’s final and there’s a clutch of phrases that are going to keep appearing – ‘team spirit’, ‘team chemistry’, ‘family’, ‘bonding’, ‘celebrating other’s success’. They will be uttered regardless of victory or defeat and be heard resoundingly at both ends of any result.Key in the words “team spirit/chemistry” and Google will spit out hundreds of sporting quotes, management mantras and corporate wisdom in nano seconds. But many in sport believe talent does what talent does and winning and success is what creates all this cocktail of chemistry and bonding. During the last World Cup, when talking about Gareth Southgate’s England, legendary Manchester United midfielder Roy Keane said, “I never believe all that nonsense about team spirit; I never hear a manager or in the media say there’s a bad spirit in the group.”Early on during American sports journalist Joan Ryan’s research for Intangibles: Unlocking the Science and Soul of Team Chemistry, baseball manager James Leyland said the same to her, “To me, chemistry was a subject you took in school, I had teams that’d go to chapel every Sunday, couldn’t win a game… so that don’t mean a shit to me. Forget chemistry out here. Don’t worry about it. Don’t think about it. It’s so overused in sport… listen, it all begins and ends with talent.”Except, as we find out in Intangibles, teams that work out the correct amalgam to use the talent and the personalities that hold it succeed best. It took Ryan ten years to research team chemistry, and while the book is mostly centered around US sports, teams and characters, what we find in there can be applied across disciplines. The most easily transferable aspect of Ryan’s findings is that of ‘Seven Archetypes’ which covers the broad range of personalities she kept running into in every successful/good chemistry team.They are the Sparkplug, the Sage, the Kid, the Buddy, the Enforcer, the Warrior, the Jester. It doesn’t need to be seven different people, it’s fundamentally seven different qualities that Ryan concluded are found in successful teams. She describes each of these archetypes with carefully detailed examples, but you can recognise the core of the personality in any team.Pick any of the four IPL playoff teams (or your most beloved team in any sport) and you will find these qualities sprinkled in the mix. What are MS Dhoni and Mohammed Shami if not Ryan’s Sage-Warriors? Hardik Pandya and Suryakumar Yadav are Titans and MI’s Sparkplugs, the kind who works the room and gets it buzzing. There’s a Buddy in Rohit Sharma, a Jester in Ishan Kishan, the Enforcer married to discipline and method and maintaining standards in Rashid Khan and Shubman Gill. In Tilak Verma, Noor Ahmed and Mathisha Pathirana we have the Kid, who “throws off energy like a puppy shaking off water”.Intangibles is a most lucid and logical examination of team dynamics I have read, that too without the word ‘culture’ sprinkled everywhere; there is plenty of reference to science and man management. Ryan contests another popular analogy of successful teams being ‘machines’ and says they are not.Teams, she writes, are “complex systems and machines are complicated ones.” In that, machines can be deconstructed, their standard parts replaced and reassembled to create an identical copy of what the machine once was. You could not do that with a team no matter how hard you tried because you cannot replicate one individual’s skill in another person.Teams “are like an ecosystem or a national economy” where a change in the environment can lead to a cascade effect. In sports, those come from, she reminds us, injuries, losing streaks, trades (in club sport), loss of form. The big difference between teams and weather systems is that because people are involved, we can recognise the disruptors and impending disruption and attempt course correction, or at least temporary fixes. Intangibles is packed with examples from psychology, physiology, medicine, and of course, sport itself to demonstrate their intersections within a team environment. Data analytics, Ryan says, is not quite the team-building golden bullet as we may imagine. No matter how much data can break down performance into its tiniest components, human intervention and interaction are as fundamental for the creation of a successful team as number crunching. That is because “analytics are a tool. Like a wrench or a hammer, they have a specific function, which is to shape strategy. They cannot carry out the strategy. Only humans can do it.”Eventually, Ryan arrives at a definition of team chemistry – “an interplay of physiological, social and emotional forces that elevates team performance.” Among Intangibles’ many wisdoms is also inevitable truth; that team chemistry does not last. Ryan quotes Sir Alex Ferguson’s calculation that the lifespan of a successful team is about four years/seasons. Because success changes people, their energies and their impact on each other.At the IPL playoffs, you will be watching many kinds of team chemistry at work. Keep a close track on which formula has enough legs to keep going for the next few seasons and who may run out of gas the fastest.