The Secret to Building a Successful Team According to Malcolm Gladwell: The Law of the Magic Third The Secret to Building Successful Teams According to Malcolm Gladwell

There is a certain mysterious magic when it comes to building high-performing teams. Science shows you can’t just gather the highest performers and throw them together. The individual skill of each team member matters, but that alone doesn’t predict how well either athletic or professional teams will perform. 

Whether you’re a coach, a manager, or an entrepreneur, how do you do that? That’s one of the trickiest questions in leadership. But in his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell explains one fundamental law everyone putting together a team needs to understand. 

It’s 2024, so pretty much every enlightened leader understands that teams benefit from diverse viewpoints. Having folks from different backgrounds and with different skill sets brings fresh ideas and perspectives to the work. (If you still need convincing, here is some of the copious research proving this is true.) 

As a result, many leaders will end up hiring one person from an ethnic minority, one person from a different generation, and one person with an out-of-the-box educational or professional background, and then they’ll throw them together on a team and hope for the best. 

In a recent appearance promoting his book on the HBR Ideacast, Gladwell draws on classic research by Harvard’s Rosabeth Kanter to explain why this approach rarely works. As you might guess by the title of his book, it involves tipping points. 

Kanter began her research on the subject by studying a sales team that had recently recruited a handful of women. The women weren’t performing well and the company wanted to know why. The answer wasn’t incompetence — the women were excellent salespeople. Nor was the problem a hostile work environment. The women’s male colleagues were supportive gentlemen. 

“Being one woman in a group of 10 men is a very different situation than being one of three women in a group of 10. When the numbers of outsiders or newcomers reach a certain threshold, the newcomer is allowed to be themselves,” Gladwell explains. 

In Gladwell’s famous terminology, there is a tipping point in which a particular type of person feels comfortable enough on a team to really speak up and make a difference. One on a team of many won’t do it. What proportion will? 

“I just called up a lot of women who were pioneers on corporate boards and asked them what it was like when they was the only woman on the board. And then what it was like when there were three of them on the board, and they all get the same answer, which is, as weird as it sounds, ‘When I became one of three, the way I was treated and the way I behaved just fundamentally changed,’” he explains.  

That means if you are building a team and you’re keen to get the perspective of a particular voice or background, you can’t just add one person with the relevant experience and say job done. Instead, you need to look at the overall composition of the group and ensure that you have at least a quarter to a third of your total headcount representing each critical perspective. 

As the research makes clear, this applies to women and minorities. But Gladwell is at pains to point out the magic third applies to all types of intellectual diversity. Whether you want to hear from Gen-Z or designers, risk management professionals or Midwesterners, hiring one token individual is rarely enough.