The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

by Sam Walker

Baseball managers, when asked about the secrets of team cohesion, like to use the word “glue.”

Leaders, Hackman believed, were more effective when they worked like jazz musicians, freely improvising with the flow of things, and less like orchestra players, who follow a written score under the direction of a conductor.

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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.

A captain has to be worried all the time, to be focused on solving problems, talking to the coach, seeking the best way for the team to play, and being an intermediary between the team officials and the players.

The reason these teams were so dominant is that the stars knew they could never be effective captains, and the captains, like Bellini, Mauro, and Torres, knew they could never be stars. In Brazil, the only role available to a leader was to carry water.

On the seventeen teams in Tier One, however, the captains were rarely stars, nor did they act like it. They shunned attention. They gravitated to functional roles. They carried water.

Once, when the Pittsburgh sportswriter Jim O’Brien arrived to interview Jack Lambert, the Steelers’ captain greeted him at his door holding a shotgun. “He had been cleaning it,” O’Brien remembers, “but he held it just to throw me off guard or to make me nervous.”

Having a captain who was publicly reserved but privately voluble helped to create an inclusive dynamic.

How much time every member of the group spent talking also proved to be crucial. On the best teams, speaking time was doled out equitably—no single person ever hogged the floor, while nobody shrank from the conversation, either.

Lambert loathed the press. He was openly contemptuous of reporters and didn’t like being the center of attention.

There was a strong circumstantial case to be made that the moment Vasiliev attacked his coach was the moment his team made its turn toward greatness.

Vince Lombardi once said that a captain’s leadership should be based on “truth” and that superior captains identify with the group and support it at all times, “even at the risk of displeasing superiors.”

There was a difference, she believed, between teams that squabbled because the members didn’t like one another and teams that fought over their different views of how to solve a problem they were working on.

the presence of task conflict wasn’t neutral at all. It made their performances about 40 percent better than the average. “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.

All of this suggests that in any high-pressure team environment, even beyond sports, dissent is a priceless commodity. A leader who isn’t afraid to take on the boss, or the boss’s boss, or just stand up in the middle of a team meeting and say, “Here’s what we’re doing wrong,” is an essential component of excellence.

In any game, on any day, some participant will be coping with a painful personal distraction.

A possible answer to this question came in the form of a paper written in 2000 by a trio of researchers at Case Western Reserve University. These

Rather than leading from the front, they avoided speeches, shunned the spotlight, and performed difficult and thankless jobs in the shadows. They weren’t always steadfast exemplars of virtue, either.

The verb may not be as memorable as the nouns, as evocative as the adjectives, or as expressive as the punctuation.

In real life, she says, people often attain and hold power within an organization by downplaying their qualifications. “We gain status more readily, and more reliably, by acting just a little less deserving than we actually are.”

The captains in Tier One were not poseurs. They didn’t make speeches, didn’t seek attention or acclaim, and were not comfortable wearing the cloak of power. Most of them took subservient roles and carried water for their teammates. In other words, they behaved precisely the way Gruenfeld describes. They won status by doing everything in their power to suggest they didn’t deserve it.

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him,” he wrote. “Fail to honor others and they will fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, ‘we did this ourselves.’ ”

Collingwood Magpies (Australian rules football), 1927–30 New York Yankees (Major League Baseball), 1949–53 Hungary (men’s soccer), 1950–55 Montreal Canadiens (National Hockey League), 1955–60 Boston Celtics (National Basketball Association), 1956–69 Brazil (men’s soccer), 1958–62 Pittsburgh Steelers (National Football League), 1974–80 Soviet Union (men’s ice hockey), 1980–84 New Zealand All Blacks (rugby union), 1986–90 Cuba (women’s volleyball), 1991–2000 Australia (women’s field hockey), 1993–2000 United States (women’s soccer), 1996–99 San Antonio Spurs (NBA), 1997–2016 New England Patriots (NFL), 2001–18 Barcelona (professional soccer), 2008–13 France (men’s handball), 2008–15 New Zealand All Blacks (rugby union), 2011–15 The “Double”