The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

by Sam Walker

It’s as if Duncan had used his Wake Forest thesis as a blueprint for how to be an effective teammate in a league where “narcissists” and “...

The public never fully got Duncan, but his teammates did. His leadership turned out to be something of a graduate seminar on the value of carrying water. Duncan was the rare captain who had the talent to take over games and put up some of the NBA’s gaudiest statistics. But his approach to leadership compelled him to suppress his skills, and even his salary, in order to focus on fixi...

One of the great paradoxes of management is that the people who pursue leadership positions most ardently are often the wrong people for the job. They’re motivated by the prestige the role conveys rather than a desire to promote the goals and values of the organization.

Researchers who have studied superstar CEOs have noticed that as these people raise themselves up, they often lower others. They have a tendency to make their subordinates feel incompetent and underauthorized, which creates a vicious cycle. The employees increasingly withdraw, and as they do, the star CEO becomes pessimistic about their ability and begins to “overfunction,” causing their charges to withdraw even more. Tim Duncan’s style of leadership took the opposite course. By lowering himself, he was able to coax the maximum performance out of the players around him.

“We mistakenly assume that the best leaders are those who stand on whatever podium they can command and, through their personal efforts in real time, extract greatness from their teams.” In reality, only 10 percent of a team’s performance depended on what the leader did once the performance was under way. But when it came to that 10 percent, Hackman found no evidence that a leader’s charisma, or even their specific methods, made any difference. It didn’t even matter if the leader performed all of the key leadership functions on the team—all that mattered was that these jobs got done.

Duncan was eminently flexible. He carried water on the court and put the team’s goals above all. Hackman called this style of leadership the functional approach. “From a functional perspective,” he wrote, “effective team leaders are those who do, or who arrange to get done, whatever is critical for the team to accomplish its purpose.”

After the U.S. won the World Cup, Overbeck’s teammates happily indulged in a weeks-long victory tour marked by dozens of pep rallies and television appearances—but she wasn’t interested in this part of the show. She flew home to Raleigh, North Carolina, to see her family instead. Asked what she’d been doing on the day her teammates appeared at a raucous rally in midtown Manhattan, she said she’d done three loads of laundry. “It just wasn’t my personality,” Overbeck said. “I’ve never cared about getting my name in the paper. As long as my team wins, I’m happy. I don’t care about all the TV shows. I was glad I wasn’t the one they were asking for.”

The Fordham study of shouters (see Chapter Five) showed that hard work is contagious and that one player’s exertion can elevate the performances of others. But Overbeck’s brand of doggedness had another component. Her work ethic in training, combined with her bag-schlepping humility on and off the field, allowed her to amass a form of currency she could spend however she saw fit. She didn’t use it to dominate play on the field. She used it to ride her teammates when they needed to be woken up, knowing that it wouldn’t create resentment.

At five foot seven, he knew he wasn’t the most physically intimidating midfielder, or the best athlete, so he wasn’t concerned about his own performance. He felt free to devote himself to serving others. On the French national team, his primary focus was putting the ball at the feet of the spectacularly gifted goal-scoring midfielder Zinedine Zidane. “For every ten balls that I played, I gave nine to him,” Deschamps said. Though he wasn’t familiar with the writings of Harvard’s Richard Hackman, Deschamps’s approach to leadership was as functional as it gets. On a team, he said, “you can’t only have architects. You also need bricklayers.”

To Deschamps, carrying water wasn’t just a servile act, it was a form of leadership—the sort of command that most of us, up in the stands, don’t appreciate or even notice. “I knew I couldn’t make a difference with a single move,” Deschamps said. “But over the long run, through hundreds of small acts of service and management, I was able to balance things out and to become indispensable.”

At seventy-four years old, Pelé cut a wan, frail figure; his eyelids were heavy, his shoulders stooped. As he took questions from reporters at an appearance in Manhattan in the spring of 2015, he was asked why he thought Brazil had been able to find so many capable captains during his playing days. Pelé sank into his chair and let a pause unfold. “It’s difficult to say why,” he said. “I do not know the reason. “I was invited to be captain,” he continued, “but I always said no.” His rationale, Pelé explained, was a tactical one. “Listen, if Santos or Brazil’s national team has a captain other than me, then we have two players on the field that have the respect of the officials—Pelé and the captain. If I became captain, we would lose one.”

Torres began by telling me that during his international career, he had played with many captains from other countries—and had always envied them. Their teams were homogeneous, he said. Their players thought alike and were often well educated. Leading this kind of team seemed like an easy job. “Brazil is another culture,” he said. “In Brazil, there is no uniform way of thinking, and there is less formal education. There are some very poor kids who only go to school for a couple of years before they start playing—and the captain has to know that. We need a leader who is a guide for many, many things. So being captain in Brazil tests the deepest nature of your personality. You have to try to understand people, to know their backgrounds. If you understand them better, you can help them more.” Torres clasped his hands together. “We need leaders to hold the players, do you understand? If you force a leadership upon them that’s not natural, they won’t respect the leader.”

When it comes to a competition, most people believe that the leader of a team is the person who does something spectacular when the chips are down. The leader is the one who takes the buzzer-beating shot. A team member who performs acts of humility off the field, or who assists others in making these decisive plays, is, by definition, a supporting player. The captains in this book suggest we’ve got the picture backward. The great captains lowered themselves in relation to the group whenever possible in order to earn the moral authority to drive them forward in tough moments. The person at the back, feeding the ball to others, may look like a servant—but that person is actually creating dependency. The easiest way to lead, it turns out, is to serve.

After laying out the state of play, Churchill closed his remarks with an appeal to the nation to gird itself for what was to come. “We shall go on to the end,” he said. “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., appeared in Washington, D.C., on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. On a sweltering August afternoon, he delivered another speech nobody will ever forget. “We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now,” he said. “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.”

They also left another legacy: the fervent belief that the right words delivered in a stirring tone will create a chemical reaction inside our bodies that lifts us to a heightened state.

Most Tier One teams had open, talkative cultures in which grievances were aired, strategies discussed, and criticisms leveled without delay.

During Jack Lambert’s captaincy of the Steelers, the team had a long-standing tradition of gathering in the sauna after games—away from the coaches and the press—to both decompress and have unvarnished conversations about how they had played. It was a no-bullshit zone where candor reigned, accountability was demanded, and no one was above criticism. It was also the place where Lambert felt most at home. “It was Jack Lambert’s haven,” his former teammate Gerry Mullins said. “He’d be the first one in and the last one to leave.”

One of the oldest puzzles of human interaction is why some groups of people, but not all of them, learn to operate on the same wavelength—to think, and act, as one. Scientists who study group dynamics have found some evidence that over time, when a group of individuals become accustomed to performing a task together, they can develop something called shared cognition. Their collective knowledge and experience help them to form a reciprocal mental model that allows them to anticipate one another’s responses and coordinate their work more effectively.

What these scholars observed in their laboratories suggests that a sports team might perform better on the field if its members merge themselves into some sort of telepathic whole in which everyone knows what everyone else will do next. What they didn’t explain, however, is what role communication plays in all of this—and more than that, how the members of effective teams talk to one another.

Right away, the MIT study confirmed what we all suspect: that communication matters. Whether a team was packed with talented, intelligent, and highly motivated individuals, or whether it had achieved solid results in the past, its communication style on any given day was still the best indicator of its performance.

When it came to that emotionally charged scene with Zidane in the dressing room, Deschamps said it was the same sort of approach he always took with teammates. In addition to the words he used, he felt it was also important to touch people while talking to them and to synchronize his words with his body language. “You have to match up what you want to say with your facial expression,” he said. “The players know when I’m happy or not. They can hear it and they can also see it.” Deschamps seemed to have arrived at another truth about communication that the MIT study had hinted at: When it comes to being a successful communicator, words are an important part of the equation—but there’s a lot more to it.

In his 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence, the psychologist Daniel Goleman outlined a theory based on an idea that scientists had been kicking around since the 1960s. Goleman believed that a person’s ability to recognize, regulate, conjure, and project emotions is a distinct form of brainpower—one that can’t be revealed by a standard IQ test. People who have high emotional fluency understand how to use “emotional information” to change their thinking and behavior, which can help them perform better in settings where they have to interact with others. Goleman also believed that emotional intelligence was closely correlated to the skills required to be an effective leader, and that it can be more significant in this regard than IQ or even a person’s technical expertise.

“He doesn’t judge people,” Popovich said of Duncan. “He tries to figure out who they are, what they do, and what their strengths are. He just has a very good sense about people. When we learned that about him…we knew we were going to be able to bring almost anybody here, unless they were a serial killer, and he was going to be able to figure out what to do with them. Tim Duncan touching you on the back of the head or putting his arm around you, or leaning over and saying something to you during a timeout, is big. He knows that the attention from him is just monstrous in their development and their self-confidence, and that recognition has made him the leader that he is.”

whatever notions we have of what traits make somebody charismatic are implicitly wrong. It doesn’t matter what kind of body language or speech pattern people use when communicating with others. What matters is that they develop a formula that works for them.

One of the great scientific discoveries about effective teams is that their members talk to one another. They do it democratically, with each person taking a turn. The leaders of these kinds of teams circulated widely, talking to everyone with enthusiasm and energy. The teams in Tier One had talkative cultures like this, too—and the person who fostered and sustained that culture was the captain. Despite their lack of enthusiasm for talking publicly, most of these captains, inside the private confines of their teams, talked all the time and strengthened their messages with gestures, stares, touches, and other forms of body language. The secret to effective team communication isn’t grandiosity. It’s a stream of chatter that is practical, physical, and consistent.

The newspaper beat writers, in their rumpled khakis and dress shirts, had formed a semicircle in front of Lambert’s locker, waiting to collect quotes. This was a job no one relished. For all the attention he attracted on the field with his expressive, high-energy play, Lambert loathed the press. He was openly contemptuous of reporters and didn’t like being the center of attention. His scorn wasn’t only reserved for people with tape recorders. Lambert could be hard on his teammates, too, barking at them if they lined up wrong or showed a lazy attitude. He once told the team’s offensive captain, Sam Davis, it was time he went on a diet. As talkative as he was in the sauna, Lambert projected a solitary image by drinking alone at the hotel bar on road trips, reading novels in his room, or sitting by himself at the end of the bench. “I’m not a holler guy,” he once said. “I may say something in the huddle, but for the most part I’m quiet. I’ve always felt you should lead by example, not lip service.”

Though he wouldn’t become a captain until the following season, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Lambert was the engine of the defense. “Jack Lambert, without question, was the catalyst,” said Bud Carson, the Steelers’ defensive coordinator. “He was the guy that turned this from a very good football team and defensive team to a great defensive team. He was a very inspirational player, a tough player. I’ve never seen anyone like him. And without Jack Lambert I’m not sure we would have ever made it over the hump.”

Hall of Fame quarterback, recalled looking up and seeing Lambert staring at him from across the line of scrimmage for the first time. “He had no teeth, and he was slobbering all over himself,” Elway said. “I’m thinking: ‘You can have your money back. Just get me out of here. Let me go be an accountant.’ I can’t tell you how badly I wanted out of there.” In reality, Lambert was an introverted, cerebral player who overcame his lack of size by poring over game film and honing his techniques. The general impression among fans, opposing players, and reporters, however, was that he was a frothing lunatic.

The greatest misperception about communication is the idea that words need to be involved. In the past few decades, a wave of scientific breakthroughs has confirmed something that most of us already suspected. Our brains are capable of making deep, powerful, fast-acting, and emotional connections with the brains of people around us. This kind of synergy doesn’t require our participation. It happens automatically, whether we’re aware of it or not.

To avoid groupthink, some have adopted a method called “red teaming,” in which a team working on a project will designate one person, or a small group of people, to make the most forceful argument they can muster for why the idea that’s currently on the table is a bad one. By embracing dissent in this way, these companies believe they’re better able to protect themselves from thoughtless agreement and complacency.

I turned to the research of one of the foremost authorities on group conflict, the management professor Karen Jehn. During her long career, with stops at Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania, Jehn had conducted studies on teams that showed that certain kinds of disagreements didn’t have a negative effect—in fact, teams that had high levels of conflict were often more likely to engage in open discussions that helped them arrive at novel solutions to problems. The worst outcomes came when groups engaged in thoughtless agreements.

Teams that had engaged in personal conflict had shown significant decreases in trust, cohesion, satisfaction, and commitment—all of which had a negative impact on their performance. For teams that had undergone task conflict, however, the effect on their performance was basically neutral. Arguing about the job at hand hadn’t helped them, but it hadn’t hurt.

“We have found that task conflicts are not necessarily disruptive for group outcomes,” the authors wrote. “Instead, conditions exist under which task conflict is positively related to group performance.” In other words, teams that get quick, concrete feedback on their work, as they do in sports, got better results when they battled over the details.

Lahm’s example suggested that tranquillity isn’t more important than truth—at least the kind that’s told by a captain who is known to be fiercely committed, who labors in the service of the team, and who avoids attacking people on a personal level. To lead effectively, Lahm believed, a captain has to speak truth not only to power but to teammates as well. “It’s a totally romantic idea that you have to be eleven friends,” he said.

On teams in competitive environments, personal conflict is the toxin—but that’s not what these elite captains engaged in. When these men and women broke china, they either did so to defend their teammates against management or to make a practical point about what the team was doing wrong. These were not acts of petulance driven by ego. They were acts of personal courage aimed at helping the team play better together.

Even though her coach questioned her fitness to lead, Hawkes had the strength of character to block out her humiliation, remove her own concerns from the equation entirely, and continue leading the players in the face of enormous pressure. “This wasn’t about me not running out on the field first,” she said. “This was about the collective of a team—and I wouldn’t play on a team if I wasn’t one for giving to the team.

After eighteen months of humiliation, just a few hours before it was set to end, she had to cope with the biggest setback of her career. She may have had the right sort of brain to handle these things—it might be as simple as that. But when I asked her about this ability, she didn’t see it as a sign of her exceptional biology. Emotional control, she told me, was just another form of discipline. “You have to regulate emotion,” she said. “You can bring it back at some later stage, but when you know you’ve got something to do, you can remove it from your thoughts, put it in a vault, and get on with what you need to get on with.”

The kinds of teams that play for these championships are at the summit of their ability. They are finely calibrated and battle tested. They aren’t just exciting to watch, they’re also deeply evocative. Part of what makes us human is the desire to join a collective effort. That’s why our brains are wired together. In America, it’s a notion that’s printed on every dollar bill on a banner held in the beak of a bald eagle: E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many, One.”

“They were a big team, and in the tunnel they were even bigger,” Keane said. “So I said to myself, ‘All right, let’s go.’ Aggression must be met with aggression.”

“Sport is not a place for flawless people,” Gary Neville, a teammate, wrote. He believed that Keane’s “fight and passion” helped pull his fellow players along.

Abrams found that the studies presented more evidence that playing angry can produce negative returns. It wasn’t just that anger could draw sanctions from the referees. Intense anger, he wrote, could also harm a player’s performance “due to impairment in fine motor coordination, problem-solving, decision-making and other cognitive processes.”

“Aggressive players may be prone to recklessness, which is consistent with research showing that angry people tend to engage in risky decision-making,” they said.

The problem with these flawed captains is that they have distorted the picture of what enlightened leadership looks like. They have set a standard that is not only impossible to meet but does not produce the best results. The danger is that people who are charged with choosing leaders will end up promoting people who have the wrong characteristics.

I started to suspect that the real reason we can’t agree on the formula for elite team leadership is that we’ve overcomplicated things. We’ve been so busy scanning the horizon for transformational knights in shining armor that we’ve ignored the likelier truth: there are hundreds upon thousands of potentially transformative leaders right in our midst. We just lack the ability to recognize them.

After conducting interviews with dozens of soldiers, they formulated a simple equation to explain their findings: Leadership = P × M × D. Gal told me that the first variable—the P—stood for potential, which he defined as a person’s God-given leadership ability. This was a natural gift that couldn’t be taught, he said, and would start to become evident in a person’s behavior as early as kindergarten. But it also wasn’t excessively rare; many members of an army unit might have these skills. To become a leader, however, a person with potential also needed to possess the next variable: M. “The prerequisite to be effective is motivation,” he said. These two variables were something of a twin set. People who had leadership potential often had the motivation to fulfill the role. But it was the third variable in Gal’s equation that caught my attention: D for development. Here, Gal believed, biology played no role. Any leadership candidate, no matter how gifted, had to make an effort to learn the ropes and to prove that they had the right qualities. “You have to earn your leadership over time, to prove that your charisma is used the right way and that it flows in a positive group-oriented direction.” Leaders must learn how to become a “prism” through which the group’s perceptions are filtered and to learn how to manipulate these emotions in a way that lifts others, rather than unsettling them by confirming their fears.

“Take three guys and put them in exactly the same situation,” Gal said. “One of them will view it as desperate and hopeless. One will appraise it as stressful but challenging. But the third one will view it as a fascinating opportunity for excitement.” Gal believed that the ability to frame these kinds of situations in a positive light was partly a reflection of a leader’s personality but also a function of experience.

I do think it’s fair to say that by studying the leadership behavior of these captains it’s within anyone’s power to improve, and that the number of people who can become exceptional team leaders is larger than we realize. “Leaders are made, they are not born,” as Vince Lombardi famously said. “They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.”

Richard Hackman, the late Harvard social and organizational psychologist, who spent decades observing teams of all kinds as they worked. While their goals were as different as landing a plane is from performing a piece of classical music, Hackman focused his attention on comparing how their preparations and processes affected their outcomes. By doing so, he pieced together the outlines of a theory on the nature of effective team stewardship, or as he put it, the “personal qualities that appear to distinguish excellent team leaders from those for whom leadership is a struggle.”

Hackman’s theory consisted of four principles: 1. Effective leaders know some things. The best team leaders seemed to have a solid understanding of the conditions that needed to be present inside a team in order for its members to thrive. In other words, they developed a vision for the way things ought to be. 2. Effective leaders know how to do some things. In “performance” situations, Hackman noticed that the most skillful leaders seemed to always sound the right notes. They understood the “themes” that were most important in whatever situation the team was in, and knew how to close the gap between the team’s current state of being and the one it needed to reach in order to succeed. 3. Effective leaders should be emotionally mature. Hackman understood that leading a team could be “an emotionally challenging undertaking.” Great captains have to manage their own anxieties while coping with the feelings of others. The most mature leaders didn’t run away from anxiety or try to paper it over. Rather, they would pour into it with an eye toward learning about it—and by doing so find the right way to defuse it. 4. Effective leaders need a measure of personal courage. The basic work of a leader, Hackman believed, was to move a group away from its entrenched system and into a better, more prosperous one. In other words, a leader’s job is to help a team make the turn toward greatness. To do this, he believed, a leader—by definition—had to “operate at the margins of what members pres...