Weakest Link

There is an urban legend that has been referred to as The Buffalo Theory. It’s generally a bunch of nonsense, but according to Urban Dictionary it, in part, says:

A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And, when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.

I mean, it sort of makes sense. Where this theory goes a little wacky is where it says that drinking excessive alcohol makes you smarter because the alcohol kills off the weaker brain cells. ????

Disclaimer: I’m not suggesting we kill off or even fire our weakest employees.

Let’s rephrase that theory a bit:

A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And, when the slowest are encouraged to move faster, the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving.

A stretch maybe?

It’s not a 100% correlation to business – buffalo have no real aspirations in life other than to eat, reproduce, and stay alive. But in order to stay alive, they need to be able to move fast. If there were a buffalo gym, don’t you think they would use it to get their slower members moving a bit faster?

Enough About The Buffalo

Look at your business. There are naturally some employees who are stronger in certain areas than others. Sure, you can let the superstars shine, but then you’re limiting your business to only be as good as those one or two people are.

What happens when your superstar gets a better offer at another company or gets hit by a bus?

What happens when your superstar gets a better offer at another company? Share on X

Now your business is only as good as your #2.

Instead of letting the perfectly capable #1 carry the weight of the team, give them the responsibility of mentoring your junior or less experienced employees. This will help your #1 by reducing the amount of errors they’ll have to correct or rework they’ll need to do. It will help your business by making the whole team better, faster, more efficient.

I talked about the saying slow is smooth, and smooth is fast previously. This is sort of the same idea.

Have your top talent slow down from their normal process. Have them work to smooth out the rough edges of the less experienced team members. Once the whole team is running smoothly, your business will be much more efficient and able to work faster.

So the other day, I was looking through some old pictures of my time in Afghanistan when I was in the army, and I came across this one picture of one of my good friends, another soldier, who was over there with me. And in this picture, we had just gotten to Afghanistan. We were probably there for only a couple days. We were at the top of a mountain on our base. That day, a group of us had decided to go walk up to the top of this mountain to visit with some of the Afghans who worked up at the top of this mountain. And just kind of get to know the people who were kind of around us, and that we’re going to have to spend the next, you know, almost a year with, you know, on this base. So we decided to go try to walk up this mountain. Well, when you first get to a new climate, a new area, your body takes some time to acclimate to this new environment. It was much higher elevation than any of us were used to. It was warmer. We had lots of heavy equipment that we were carrying with us and everything. It was just, it wasn’t an easy hike. It wasn’t a Saturday morning, let’s go out for a stroll and go for a little walk. It was a more strenuous hike than any of us were really expecting. Well in this picture that I came across, my friend was basically doubled over, it looked like he was about to puke, and he was sucking. And I remembered it and I remember we all had a good laugh about it. And it’s not that this guy was was weak or he couldn’t handle the hike, it just was… It was a new thing. You know, it was a new environment, a new challenge that we all were in. We all kind of struggled with, to be honest. He just seemed to have a little bit more trouble than the rest of us. Either that or he just was unlucky enough to be caught near me with a camera at the time. I think that it was more the latter. But anyways, it kind of triggered in the back of my mind, a good thought about how the group of us who went up that mountain that day, were only able to really go as fast as the slowest person in our group. You know, we couldn’t just… Just because we were doing fine, we couldn’t just move ahead of him. We had to kind of stop and wait until he caught his breath or, you know, did what he needed to do and was able to keep going. So when you think about your business or really anything that you do in life that’s kind of a team thing, whether it’s a sport or business or whatever, every once in while you’re going to get one of those hard-charging kind of people who want to get ahead. And that’s not a bad thing in and of itself. But when they do so at the expense of the rest of the team, when they are putting themselves above others and they are doing things that are not really… They’re not really productive to the rest of the team. They’re just really serving their own self-interests. They’re trying to get ahead on their own, it kind of hurts the team as a whole. It’s good, you want to have those really highly motivated people, but you want them to be able to help out the, the weaker link if you will. The slower people on the team. Maybe the less experienced people who are not quite as… Quite to that level as that person is. And when they do that, when they’re trying to serve their own self-interests, and they’re trying to get ahead, it hurts the company, or the team, or whatever, we’re talking about. So, instead of doing that, I would encourage, as a leader in a company, I would encourage those people to maybe mentor some of the junior members of your team. Or to show them how things are done maybe in your company that maybe they weren’t done in another company where this other team member came from. So that way, everyone kind of is on the same page. It’s a more level playing field and things like that. And when you do this, it frees up that senior person’s time, that person who is maybe a little bit more advanced. It frees up their time to not have to go back and fix the mistakes of the more junior people who might not be be kind of up to speed with how everything is working. So if it’s one of those things where it seems like it’s going to be a hard sell to this person, you don’t want to lose this person, because they’re a good employee. They’re a good team member or whatever. You don’t want to lose this person and drive them away, but at the same time, you may need to do a little convincing to make sure that they know that what they’re doing is going to help them in some way too. So you may need to say, you know, look, this is going to help you in the long run. This is going to help you by not having to fix their mistakes. This is going to help you by freeing you up to be able to do all those great things that you are wanting to do and to advance your own career, or whatever the case may be. So just kind of, was a little thing that I came across in an old picture, but it was, I think, a good segue into how to help grow your team by utilizing the strengths of your senior people to help bring up the bottom so that the whole team can move forward together faster, just like the example with my friend, who was kind of doubled over there. We, as a leaders, we were supposed to get him up to speed, and to be able to be in better shape and everything like that and that kind of stuff, unfortunately, takes time. It takes conditioning to the new environment, but that’s one of those things that we do to try to get the whole team to be able to move faster, just like in business, you want the whole team to be able to accomplish a task faster or ship a product faster. Or whatever the case may be. But, you can only do that if the whole team is able to move together, faster.