It takes a village to catch rabbits. A Shoshone Indian village, that is. In the late 1800’s, this western North American tribe was as independent and unstructured a culture of hunter-gatherers as the modern mind can fathom. But when the situation called for it, they formed impromptu work teams under a leader they called the “rabbit boss.”
“Although the Shoshone had no big game to hunt,” writes cultural theorist Robert Wright in his book, Nonzero, “jackrabbits were afoot, sometimes in abundance. To harvest them, the Shoshone employed a tool too large for one family to handle – a net hundreds of feet long into which rabbits were herded before being clubbed to death.” More than a dozen families agreed to work the long net together and split the rabbit catch among them. The rabbit boss coordinated their effort to maximize the catch.
Why do teams form? To seize opportunities unavailable to individuals. And why do leaders lead? To help teams work well together. Teams form naturally when people find opportunities to do more together than on their own. And leaders emerge naturally to coordinate and unify the efforts of these teams. Synergy is the deepest root of teamwork and leadership.
