Loyalty and Team Building

One of many things I spend my days doing is working. Since this is something I have to do, I've decided that I should enjoy it, learn about it, and occasionally think of ways to make it better. My work involves managing teams that create, modify, and maintain software. For a long time, I referred to this job as "Project Manager". Now my title has changed and I refer to this job as "Product Manager". Anyway...

I read two extremely different Fortune articles while on a plane to Phoenix yesterday. One was about JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon - and how he has built a top notch team to support his organization while steering clear of the subprime mortgage mess. The other was about the rise of Russia as a global economic superpower, and the team of former KGB operatives that Putin installed to help consolidate power, nationalize certain industries, and generally run the show. These articles are both interesting in their own right, but as I was reading about how Putin assembled a team of folks committed to a nationalistic agenda - it became clear that both teams - JP and Russia - had a common thread - Loyalty to the the top guy. Putin has his "Lieutenants" that came through the KGB with him, and Dimon has his folks that came up through the ranks with him at Citigroup and organizations prior.

I've never really considered the impacts of loyalty on career choices and development, but as I get older, and make certain career choices myself, I've started to realize the weight that it plays in my life and in the lives of others. Granted, shared experience in the KGB is an extreme example, but if you think about a group of people that went through the crucible of espionage and fear that was the KGB, it might make sense to you that a crew like this would not just seek each other out, but actively try to better the lives of the comrades that had been where they had been. The same holds true for the team at JP - if you think about the high profile mergers that the company has taken on - you can't do stuff like that if you don't have a team around you that you trust completely. And once you have it, letting it go would be really difficult. And say you did let it go, you'd probably spend a fair amount of time trying to recreate it in your next venture, because you know it leads to success.