How to keep your superhero team together
Given the many cinematic and streaming TV network opportunities available to today’s super-powered crime-fighter, it is harder than ever to keep a tight-knit group of heroes together. Unless your team is a Dirty Dozen-style ensemble made up of hardened convicts, supervillains, and/or rogues forced to undertake a mission in order to avoid execution by firing squad/asphyxiation/banishment to a phantom dimension, you most likely find yourself working with what are, essentially, a bunch of volunteers. What keeps them motivated? How can you ensure that they will be there, as a functioning unit, still talking to one another, three years from now when aliens invade, or an AI plots to wipe out humanity, or a race of underground dwellers takes over the surface world?
A superhero team is an extreme form of what political scientists refer to as a “stag hunt”. Like the better-known Prisoner’s Dilemma, the stag hunt uses a few variables to explore a complicated question. In this case, the problem is this: suppose you’re a hunter, spending all day trying to feed your family with whatever game you can bring home. Rabbits are plentiful and easy to catch, but they don’t provide much nourishment. A mature deer, on the other hand, would make for a feast and would provide food for several days. But hunting stags is hard: you need a partner.
Like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the question is: can you count on another person to stick with something difficult? Can they count on you? It boils down to trust and accountability but also knowing that there is a plan and that it has a decent chance of success. The stakes are high in the stag hunt: failure means that you and your family go hungry. You want to know going in that you’ve got a rock-solid team with the right skills and the ability to function under pressure in spite of personality clashes.
The following tips are provided in the interest of keeping teams everywhere on track in their fight against chaos and disorder.
#1 Exchanging Vulnerabilities
Imagine how much easier Superman’s life would be if no one knew that kryptonite was his weakness. No kryptonite-laced food, no Lex Luthor coming at you in a kryptonite-powered suit. On the other hand, to suddenly stumble into it would be that much worse — no one would know what to do or how to help, not knowing what the source of the problem was. “What’s wrong with him?” you would say as you watched the otherwise indestructible Man of Steel collapse and expire in the middle of what looked like a harmless scale model of the Emerald City.
In a multi-disciplinary team like a meta-human crime-fighting squad, it is important to know who has a crippling fear of vampires, who cannot be exposed to the color (or vegetable) avocado, and what times of day are going to trigger a metamorphosis from human to monster, or vice-versa. Yes, there is a risk involved in letting people know how you can be undone, but until you reach that level of professional intimacy where you can ask for and receive help, you’re just people who work around one another — you’re not a team.
Everyone’s favorite philosopher Rocky Balboa put it best when discussing his relationship with Adrian: “She’s got gaps, I’ve got gaps, together we fill gaps.” When team members can understand, accept, and compensate for one another’s vulnerabilities, you’ve got the basis for a strong and effective fighting force.
Of course, the first step is for everyone to be comfortable talking about their vulnerabilities, which brings us to…
#2 Communication
It is easy to say that “communication is the key”. This is such pat, mechanically repeated advice that it has lost most of its meaning. The great blessing of modern communications equipment is not that it makes it easier to talk, it’s that it is many times more efficient than talking. Nevertheless, no technology is yet able to clearly map out the emotions, ideas, and intentions that any given individual has in their head. And even if your team has one or more psychic members who can extract that information, they have to be able to convey that information to everyone else. And even if that goes off without a hitch, the real problem is exchanging ideas and coming up with a plan together.
Remember — your team’s underlying structure is not that far off from a bunch of friendly folks from a church showing up at a soup kitchen on a Saturday morning. Yes, everyone wants to get the job done, but they also want to be valued and have their unique contribution appreciated — whether that’s coating the street in a sheet of ice to make it too slippery for a horde of enemies to run along, or it’s simply conjuring a refreshing pitcher of ice-cold lemonade. Handing out marching orders is no way to keep a team together over the long haul. Even if you, like most team leaders, are an avuncular billionaire genius with a penchant for strategy, you need to be open to criticism and some genuine give-and-take.
#3 Trust
Like “communication”, it is easy to fall into threadbare platitudes when it comes to trust, and harder to remember what the word means in practice. Every major endeavor that humanoids (or sentient animals) undertake involves trust. Modern society substitutes things like contracts, profit incentives, and credit ratings for a good old handshake and word of honor, but a credit rating assumes you are not a shapeshifter who becomes a completely different person every six or seven minutes. There truly is no substitute for knowing that your partners in a major endeavor are committed to success and have your back. And like so many things, this is earned over time.
But even given time and commitment, betrayal is a constant threat to a group whose enemies may be bent on world domination. As we have already said, knowing one another’s weaknesses is critical to a functioning team. But armed with this knowledge, your comrades become that much more valuable as pawns in your enemies’ elaborate mind control schemes. Also, they might just jot everyone’s weaknesses down and then leave that pad of paper out where anyone can see it, thus compromising the whole shebang.
Getting your skin turned inside-out because a teammate inadvertently revealed to a supervillain the exact chemical composition of your weakness is going to make the office Christmas party even more awkward than normal. And it may be the kind of thing that no one gets over quickly — it may require a shakeup in personnel. If you have to let someone go or temporarily exile them to their own flying-mammal-themed base of operations in order to make sure that the rest of the team feels heard and listened to, by all means, do it. Which brings us to…
#4 Dealing with Grouchy Anti-Heroes
As counter-intuitive as it seems, teams benefit from a small number of misanthropes. Your standard-issue gruff, brooding, haunted, taciturn anti-hero is unlikely to initiate a cooperative endeavor, but if you can rope one of these ornery rogues into a team, and you can keep them motivated, they will be an asset. For one thing, they resist groupthink — in fact, they may scuttle consensus just for fun. This is a benefit: if a lone voice can scuttle it, it wasn’t really consensus. For another thing, they have a low tolerance for frills and inefficiency, which can push the team toward a streamlined approach.
On the other hand, this is the individual that’s going to want to split away from the group the earliest. This is the team member whose briefcase is bursting with hidden agendas. Cooperation means accountability and investing time and resources into communication and coordination. A one-man show is going to rankle against this. Your team’s assorted rebellious loners may also rankle against things like uniforms, call signs, and making their beds. As with parenting, the best advice is to pick your battles. Maybe your squad needs to get more flexible with its org chart: create an “auxiliary” or “special teams” branch with fewer formalities but less of a decision-making role. Alternatively, you can try to give these outsiders more responsibility for developing plans — up to a point. The bottom line is: as long as the loyal opposition remains basically loyal, they can voice their opposition as much as they want.
#5 Underwater Personnel: Working with specialists
A great superhero team is like a great hoagie: it’s a mix of diverse elements that all work together. For some reason, this means having someone who is 1,000 times more effective underwater than on land. This may seem difficult to justify when so much crime happens in buildings and streets, but there is a lot of water on the planet, so it makes sense to have someone patrolling it.
Heaven only knows what your water guy/gal is doing at the bottom of the ocean. The truth is, a specialist like that may be just goofing around and you’ll never know. Stick to operational questions: are they delivering their product on time or not? They’ve been sent to find a trident or a giant pearl or a lost shipwreck or whatever. Did they find it? If they did, leave them alone.
All of your specialists — your Undersea Prince / Princess, your tornado-generating android, the lady who can move so fast her molecules threaten to shake apart at any moment, your electricity guy — share a common problem, which is communicating their strengths, weaknesses, and abilities to other people. Mr. Granite seems bulletproof, but if he gets shot enough times, does he start to erode? Can he be dynamited apart like a regular rock? Again, it comes back to communication and trust, but also genuine curiosity about your teammates and their lives.
#6 Compensation
This is a tricky one. Most superheroes turn out to be extremely wealthy, and your average team can be counted on to have at least one billionaire member. (Alternatively, many teams are detached from material gain in some way and live in the sewers.) But if you’ve got a group of teenagers, some or all of whom have been bitten by various radioactive or cursed canines, insects, or arachnids, they are likely to be penniless as Russian serfs. This can distract the team from full-time crime-fighting. A union of justice-oriented heroes is already threatened with fractures resulting from the combination of internal personality conflicts and external threats. The average superhero team will have been miniaturized, mind-controlled, propelled to the other side of the universe, turned into babies, shifted back and forth in time, and been killed and resurrected dozens of times in their first couple of years as a unit. Worrying about keeping the lights on and the team’s van gassed up should be low on the list of problems.
Assuming your team can get grant money or an angel investor or stumble on a cache of silver ingots from an ancient, alien civilization, there is the very real question of how to divvy up the funds. No less a font of wisdom than Tom Petty is known to have identified the problem in splitting up everything evenly: as front man and lead singer, he needed to take a bigger cut than the Heartbreakers or he was going to become bitter and the whole thing would be over.
Similarly, if your team relies on a wizard/mage/socially-minded demon to work both defense (by conjuring protective shields) and offense (by hurling energy bolts toward enemies) and healing up wounded team members, you need to consider a tiered compensation package. Paying your magic wielder the same rate you pay a rage-based, “point me at a problem and I will punch it” berserker is counterproductive in the long-term. This is not something that should be left to intuition or to each individual’s preferences: it should be spelled out in black and white in a formal agreement when team members sign up. When it comes to compensation, no matter how altruistic the cast of characters, it will sting if it seems arbitrary and less than what is expected or deserved.
#7 What exactly is the mission? When is it over?
It’s one thing to battle off a planet-eating giant for a few weeks. It’s another thing to constantly patrol the solar system for “evil”, with no firm endpoint. Evil and chaos are hardwired into the human (and alien, and monster, and for some reason AI) condition: they’re a feature, not a bug. Your team’s mission should have a focus, such as a specific geography or a specific villainous project. While we’re at it, it wouldn’t hurt to build that mission into your theme song/slogan/team charter. You don’t hear a whole lot about superhero team bylaws and charters, but they are out there. (Most superhero teams have a large “backroom” team that handles reports, accounting, tax issues, and property damage claims.)
In the heat of the moment, when a comet’s trajectory through the solar system has been diverted by sinister forces to head directly toward Earth, it is splitting hairs to hesitate to take action simply because “comet threats” are not called out by name in the bylaws. But on the other hand, if you originally got together to protect a city from a kaiju, once that threat is averted, do you stick together? Do you disband? Do you just trade numbers and call it a day? This is a tough nut to crack. It will depend on the team’s members and what else they have going on. Some of your more down-to-earth crime fighters actually have successful and interesting alter egos with other hobbies and careers and families that they care about. Heck, Buckaroo Bonzai has a singing career and a career as a neurosurgeon on top of keeping the Hong Kong Cavaliers in line. If your team members have even a smidgen of this kind of schedule overload, you need to develop a sustainable work-life-patrol balance.
Some factors to consider:
- Coordination has costs. At some point it is more efficient to disband with the option of getting together again as needed. Your various two-way wristwatch communicators and other gizmos can do a great job of getting the team back together as needed.
- Everyone doesn’t need to be on the satellite every day. Whether your base is out in low Earth orbit, in a swamp, a castle, or just some dude’s basement, it is a little silly to have the whole team there all the time. Split up planet/city/neighborhood-monitoring duty sensibly.
- Nothing gold can stay. As both Robert Frost and Ecclesiastes will tell you, there’s a time for everything, including endings. The best-case scenario is that you accomplish your goal and erode the threat to your community to such a degree that uniformed patrol officers can handle it. It may be painful to turn your super suit into your Saturday afternoon knock-around clothes and to re-purpose your headquarters into a community center, but it is also practical. You need a limit on your sense of responsibility for the entire planet’s well-being. You need to reach a place where you can accept the idea of not dying with your cowl on.
Like any group of extremely conscientious people with godlike abilities, a superhero team is held together by its mission. Divining each individual’s specific motives — which can be all over the map and can include prestige, friendship, and even filthy lucre — is not critical. The operative question is: will they show up at the moment of crisis and beat that giant squid with its tentacles around the Empire State Building back into the East River? If you’ve done your job right, the answer will be: aye!
