Teamwork Lessons from Fleetwood Mac

Stevie Nicks, former singer with Fleetwood Mac was interviewed on Sunday afternoon by Johnny Walker on BBC Radio 2. In the course of the interview they discussed the ‘issues’ around the making of ‘Rumours’, the group’s iconic 1977 album.

I remember researching this after watching the ‘Rumours’ episode of ‘Glee’ earlier this year. It’s quite a story. Just to quote one small paragraph from the Wikipedia entry for Rumours:

As the studio sessions progressed, the band members’ new intimate relationships, formed after the various separations, started to have a negative effect on Fleetwood Mac. The musicians did not meet or socialise after their daily work at the Record Plant. …drugs were readily available. Open-ended budgets enabled the band and the engineers to become self-indulgent; sleepless nights and the extensive use of cocaine marked much of the album’s production.…Fleetwood Mac brought “excess at its most excessive” by taking over the studio for long and extremely expensive sessions… [My underlining.] 

Now, I’ve been in business and done my fair share of thinking about what makes organisations, and teams especially, tick. And if I’ve learned anything it’s this: Dysfunctional teams are, well – er, how can I put this? – dysfunctional.

We’ve all experienced it: The team members who so loathe each other that they block each other’s every move so a project stagnates or goes backwards. Personally, I’ve been in a room with two co-authors and the reasons for their book’s delay became only too clear to me: nothing to do with time and work pressures, everything to do with the fact that they cordially loathed each other.

Yet here was an example of exactly the opposite. A group of people whose personal relationships had sunk to about the lowest point imaginable, producing collectively the work for which they would all be best known.

How was this possible? What new understanding of teamwork might this teach us?

I don’t know for sure, but I suspect one of the keys is this: They had rules. They knew they hated each other, they knew that they only wanted to spend ‘office hours’ together, and that after hours they would go their own way. But they acknowledged it. They parked it at the door, and focussed on the task – a task they all cared deeply about, deeply enough to be able to put the rest aside for a defined period of time. Sure, their was fighting – but it was the ‘normal’ friction between creative people. And it was creative.

As managers and leaders we can’t expect everyone in our team to get along on a personal level. And in any case, people don’t go to work to make friends. But it is our responsibility to manage the dynamic to achieve the best outcome. So, identify and acknowledge the problem, if you have one, talk about it and put it to one side. And then you will be able – as a team – to make great music.