Teams: they’re what dreams are made of
With very rare exceptions, greatness is achieved in groups. Multi-generational accomplishments begin as dreams, and - with luck - find the right team at the right time to nurture them into fruition. As human beings, it behooves us to consider, How do we create dream teams?
The easiest target for this study is sports. The game is performed publicly, and the points are clear. There are a few legendary coaches who have created multiple dynasties over multiple decades: John Wooden (college basketball), Pat Summit (college basketball), Phil Jackson (professional basketball). By happenstance, each of these coaches are from the sport of basketball. The manageable number of players (5) relative to other major sports probably helps in making it a more approachable subject for learning about team dynamics. This is just a random sample group, and each individual is worthy of their own search wormhole. However, I will draw particular attention to Bill Russell, a more famous player than coach, but a meticulous student of teams from the inside-out. His memoir Second Wind offers insights off all kinds, including those of being a part of a Boston Celtics dynasty that granted Russell 11 championship rings, 2 of which he earned while performing as the player-coach of the team:
On mental fitness:
“Rarely will you see an athlete who hasn’t put on ten or fifteen pounds over a full career, but even rarer are the ones who don’t put on the same amount of mental fat. That’s the biggest killer of aging champions, because it works on your concentration and mental toughness, which are the margin of victory; it prevents you from using your mind to compensate for your diminishing physical skills.”
On time together:
“I’v always thought that the main source of Celtic ‘togetherness’ was that we were literally together for so long. During my thirteen-year career the Celtics made a grand total of one trade: Mel Counts for Baily Howell… We all knew that the game was a business and that we could be traded tomorrow, but [our couch] Red did a good job of making us believe that we would stay as long as we contributed to winning, and this made us feel secure.”
On being a team player:
“[One teammate] thought a team player is one who simply passes all the time, which is not true. A team player is simply one who does all he can to help the team win. This may mean shooting more, rebounding more, sitting on the bench more - anything.”
On judging your level of play:
“Star players have an enormous responsibility beyond their statistics - the responsibility to pick their team up and carry it. You have to do this to win championships - and to be ready to do it when you’d rather be a thousand other places. You have to say and do the things that will make your opponents play worse and your teammates play better. I always thought that the most important measure of how good a game I’d played was how much better I’d made my teammates play.”
Another area of team study with too many books written that offer too little insight is: business. “Organizational management.” Most business books are written with the clouded judgement of survivorship bias. This post won’t dig into this vast subject, but it will offer one interesting example of a current leader - Netflix founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings - applying a sports team approach to corporate organizations.
Reed Hastings seems to be migrating over to the managing superstars mentality of sports coaches. Instead of recruiting individual talent only to strip it of its defining characteristics, Hastings argues for a supportive rather than controlling approach.
From an interview with David Rubenstein on Bloomberg TV:
“We’re really focused on inspiration over supervision. So the traditional paradigm is that good management is close management. Management sets objectives and manages tightly. All of that's appropriate in safety critical environments like airlines, producing vaccines, etc. But in a creative business you don't care so much about what goes wrong. You care that enough of the right things get done. And so we really focus on inspiring our people and having it be very open and collaborative. And from that you get amazing technical innovation and amazing content innovation.”
Hastings goes on to explain his employee contract structures that parallel sports today. At Netflix, if people do a reasonably good job, they still might lose their job if they haven't done a spectacular job. Therefore they get a good severance but not a continued job. This notably goes against Bill Russell’s observation that his sense of security contributed to his freedom to take creative risk. Nonetheless, it is a starting point and perhaps Hastings will read Bill Russell’s book after he finishes promoting his own.
“In the traditional industrial paradigm you know you have to do something wrong to get let go. You can think of a job as sort of a property right until you lose it by abusing your position. But if you think about professional sports, a team is going to win a championship it has to have a mix of the right players that work well together that are the absolute best in the world. And so we try to model ourselves like a professional sports team, so: highly paid but you gotta earn your position every year. And it's about performance. And you know that's not right for everybody. Some people care mostly about job security. Other people care mostly about excellent colleagues and playing great team ball to achieving something important for the consumers. And we're attracting that group of people who care about team excellence.”
