The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

by Sam Walker

My ego demands—for myself—the success of my team. —BILL RUSSELL

we practice hard, we play for each other, we never quit, we have a great coach, we always come through in the clutch. More than anything, I was struck by the businesslike sameness of these groups and by how nonchalantly their members spoke about winning. It was as if they were part of a machine in which every cog and sprocket was functioning precisely as intended. “You do your job so everyone around you can do their job,” Tom Brady once said. “There’s no big secret to it.”

It’s the notion that the most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it.

Before Hungary, soccer teams were thought to be collections of individuals with specific orders to do distinct things. A left-winger was supposed to patrol the left-hand touchline, for instance, while a striker’s job was to play forward at all times with an eye on the goal—no more, no less.

The Hungarian Golden Team destroyed this notion. It didn’t respect rigidity. It was fluid. Players switched positions and dispositions all the time, depending on the circumstances.

What distinguished them was a style of play that erased specialization, forced players to subordinate their egos, and coaxed superior performances out of unlikely characters.

At the time there were two romantic explanations for Hungary’s brilliance. The country’s Communist leadership viewed it as a testament to how a centralized command-and-control system that deemphasized the individual could conquer the world—a Marxist propaganda coup.

Opponents of the regime, meanwhile, took it as a sign of the irrepressible creativity of the Hungarian people peeking out from the blanket of oppression.

As I examined Hungary’s six-year winning streak, however, it was such an outlier among its peer group, such a freak, that it inhabited a category of its own.

To set some parameters for my research and filter this group down to a more manageable number, I set out to answer three fundamental questions.

What constitutes a team in the first place?

It’s defined as any group that works together on a task.

To settle the matter, I decided that a group of athletes can only be considered a team in the fullest sense of the word if it meets the following three criteria: A. It has five or more members.

B. Its members interact with the opponent.

Its members work together.

How do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

The team played a “major” sport.

It played against the world’s top competition.

Its dominance stretched over many years.

Elo rating system, which was first adapted to sports in 1997

NFL to cricket. Though far from perfect (it requires the compiler to make some subjective judgments about the importance of matches), it was the metric I decided to lean on, in a few cases, as a tiebreaker.

Claim 1: It had sufficient opportunity to prove itself.

Claim 2: Its record stands alone.

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There was no evidence that Auerbach had suddenly become a tactical genius—the Tier One Celtics ran a basic offense, and he gave the players the freedom to improvise on the court. The biggest knock on Auerbach’s influence came in 1966, when he retired from coaching the team to become its general manager. The Celtics went on to win two more titles without him.

All of this was confusing. If the Celtics’ burst of greatness wasn’t a function of statistical dominance, superstar talent, an aggregation of players with unusual ability, or the product of consistent and excellent coaching and management, then what was it?

The only explanation that made sense to me was that this team, like the Hungarians of the 1950s, was somehow better than the sum of its parts.

The phrase “team chemistry” has been tossed around so often that it has earned a prominent spot in the Hall of Fame of sports clichés. But for the life of me, I had no idea what the term represented. Was it a function of how long a group of athletes had been playing together, and how well they could anticipate their teammates’ next moves? Was it a measure of how well their strengths offset their weaknesses? Or was it a reflection of how much everybody on the team liked one another and how splendidly they got along?

The basic idea behind chemistry is that a team’s interpersonal dynamics will have an impact on its performance. On teams with good chemistry, the thinking goes, the members see themselves as a family and enjoy a heightened sense of personal loyalty that pays dividends in competition. The legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi, who led the Green Bay Packers to five NFL titles in the 1960s, was a proponent of this idea. “Individual commitment to a group effort,” he once said, “that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”

When scientists have examined teams in other contexts, such as business or the military, they’ve noticed that the more cohesive and positive a group perceives itself to be, the better it will perform in many respects—from meeting sales goals to sharing information to fostering individual acts of battlefield bravery. But where does this cohesiveness come from? And beyond that, is cohesiveness the thing that causes a team like the Celtics to become successful, or is it a by-product of success?

Before Russell arrived in 1956, Boston had never won an NBA title. In his rookie year—the one in which he blocked Jack Coleman’s layup in Game 7 of the Finals—that changed. Then, twelve years later, after winning championship number eleven, Russell retired from basketball and left his team to cope on its own. The Celtics promptly collapsed, posting their first losing record in twenty years. The timing of these events was so uncanny that I started to entertain a radical idea. I wondered if Russell, himself, had been the catalyst.

The crucial component of the job is interpersonal. The captain is the figure who holds sway over the dressing room by speaking to teammates as a peer, counseling them on and off the field, motivating them, challenging them, protecting them, resolving disputes, enforcing standards, inspiring fear when necessary, and above all setting a tone with words and deeds.

“He was a guy you could walk over broken glass for, because he just had that manner about him.”

“The single most important ingredient after you get the talent is internal leadership. It’s not the coaches as much as one single person or people on the team who set higher standards than that team would normally set for itself.”

“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

I knew there was no empirical way to measure a captain’s influence. In order to hang the success of these Tier One teams on “captain theory,” I knew I would have to identify a bundle of traits that these men and women had in common, no matter what sports they played. The theory would hold only if their temperaments, personality quirks, and modi operandi fell into some discernible pattern.

If you knew you were heading into the toughest fight of your life, whom would you choose to lead you?

1. They lacked superstar talent.

They weren’t fond of the spotlight.

They didn’t “lead” in the traditional sense. I had always believed that, on a team, the mark of a leader was the ability to take over the game in critical moments. But most Tier One captains played subservient roles on their teams, deferred to star players, and relied heavily on the talent around them to carry the scoring burden.

They were not angels.

They did potentially divisive things.

They weren’t the usual suspects.

Nobody had ever mentioned this theory.

The captain isn’t the primary leader.

The men and women who led these seventeen Tier One teams were not what I expected. Although their careers neatly bracketed their teams’ winning streaks, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that I’d really discovered something else—that the most dominant teams in history had succeeded without traditional leaders.

Most of us have developed a model of what leaders of superior teams ought to be. We believe they should possess some combination of skills and personality traits that are universally considered to be superior. We don’t believe they should be difficult to spot in a crowd. We expect their leadership ability to be obvious. The leaders in Tier One did not match the profile.

Most of the theories I’d rounded up over the years about the nature of team greatness, such as “discipline” and “work ethic,” had the same fundamental problem. They were so abstruse I couldn’t think of any way to quantify them. Hiding in my notebooks, however, were five frequently cited qualities of superior teams that seemed at once both plausible and researchable. They are: the presence of an otherworldly superstar, a high level of overall talent, deep financial resources, a winning culture maintained by effective management, and, finally, the most widely accepted explanation of all—superior coaching. I set out to kick the tires on each of them.

Astonishingly, only three of the GOAT candidates on the seventeen Tier One teams also captained them. In every other case, the most dominant teams in history had hierarchies in which the leader of the players was not the go-to superstar. So even though these teams had GOATs, they hadn’t tapped them to lead. This suggested that a team is more likely to become elite if it has a captain that leads from the shadows.

Theory 2: It’s a matter of overall talent.