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The super platoon became the worst
Building the perfect platoon
As executive officer of SEAL Team One, the number two job, William McRaven built the platoons, the fighting units, much like an NFL draft: he went through every résumé and bio. He set out to build the perfect one, with Naval Academy graduates as officers, an Olmsted scholar, a chief petty officer with Vietnam experience, and the best enlisted men he could find.
The misfit platoon
He built the rest in order and got down to the tenth platoon, which looked like the Bad News Bears. The super platoon turned out worst because everyone had an ego and thought they were top dog, so they couldn't work together. The Bad News Bears had a chip on their shoulder, figured out how to work together, and became one of the best platoons he ever served with.
Choosing chemistry
It was an epiphany. Talent matters, and a team with both talent and chemistry is better still, but when he has to choose, he picks the people who can work together to get the job done. He looks at all the pieces of the puzzle first, because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Why do teams of stars underperform?
Roderick Swaab and colleagues analyzed professional basketball and soccer teams in a 2014 paper in Psychological Science. Performance rose as talent rose, until the share of top players got very high, and then it fell. In sports where players depend on each other, extra stars crowded out the passing and role-sharing that winning requires. The same drop did not show up in baseball, where players act more independently.
How do SEAL trainees learn to work together?
Trainees in Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, known as BUD/S, are split into small boat crews. The crews carry, paddle, and run with a rubber boat through the course. Crews that fail to move as one fall behind, because the boat's weight punishes anyone who isn't pulling with the rest. Hell Week, the longest test, runs about five and a half days with only a few hours of sleep in total.
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