The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

by Sam Walker

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.”

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.

subdued. Charisma was not some universal, repeatable, or even easily recognizable quality in a person. There was no “correct” set of mannerisms that increased one’s odds of making a favorable impression. The most effective communicators had styles that were as distinct as their fingerprints. “Judges can identify whether a person is being warm or not,” the researchers wrote, “although they might not be able to isolate the specific cues driving those perceptions.”

CHAPTER EIGHT TAKEAWAYS • If faced with the task of trying to stiffen a team’s resolve in the face of a grueling test, most of us will respond by finding a mirror and rehearsing a speech. Conventional wisdom tells us that the right words, delivered in the perfect moment, are the key to motivation. The captains in Tier One didn’t simply fail to prove this idea—they suggested that it’s patently false. They did not give speeches. They were often lousy interviews, too, or were considered to be quiet or even inarticulate. They led without fanfare. • 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.

Since the discovery of mirror neurons, scientists have learned a great deal more about the nature of emotional “transfers” and just how quickly they can overtake us. In 2004, Science published an article based on the work of the University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Paul Whalen and his colleagues, who discovered that when it comes to looking at images that convey powerful emotions like fear, the human brain registers them and begins to buzz with activity in just seventeen milliseconds. Before we’re even aware that we’ve seen a fearful image, our brains are already processing it. Scientists still don’t know what happens inside the body after these triggers are pulled or whether there might be a connection to the way people perform physically. Yet dozens of experiments done under the umbrella of “emotional intelligence” have made one thing clear: Many effective leaders can—and do—use this subconscious system to manipulate the emotions of their followers. Daniel Goleman and another psychologist, Richard Boyatzis, writing on this subject in 2008, said they believe that great leaders are the ones “whose behavior powerfully leverages this system of brain interconnectedness.” One method for doing this is something scientists call surface acting. This occurs when a person puts on an expression, or takes some subtle action, to try to influence the people around them. Another method, described as deep acting, occurs when a person doesn’t pretend to feel something but alters their a...

CHAPTER NINE TAKEAWAYS • 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. • Time and again, I found examples of Tier One captains who had done dramatic, bizarre, and sometimes frightening things during or right before an important competition. These incidents had two things in common: First, they did not involve words; second, they were intentional. None of the captains in Tier One had read up on the science of emotional contagion. Yet they all seemed to understand that there were times when practical communication wasn’t enough.

In the business world, this kind of institutionalized dissent is becoming fashionable. Rather than discouraging gadflies, some companies have given them exalted status. 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.

This is hearsay. Walker is using an article or something to report on something he hasn't experienced. No specific examples

Richard Hackman, the Harvard organizational psychologist who studied performance teams and extolled the virtues of functional leadership, had also observed the role leaders play in helping groups navigate conflict. All of his research supported one strong conclusion—all great leaders will find themselves right in the middle of it. In order to be effective, Hackman wrote, a team leader “must operate at the margins of what members presently like and want rather than at the center of the collective consensus.” Hackman believed that dissenting wasn’t just a crucial function of a leader but a form of courage. Leaders who disrupted a team’s established norms and routines often paid a substantial personal toll for doing so—a phenomenon that later researchers would describe as “the pain of independence.”

Hackman’s research left little doubt that teams need some internal push and pull in order to achieve great things. But it still didn’t offer any explanation for my earlier question—the difference between positive dissent and the negative, destructive variety. To explore that, I turned to the research of one of the foremost authorities on group conflict, the management professor Karen Jehn.

In 2012, Jehn and two colleagues published a meta-analysis of sixteen different experiments based on 8,880 teams. The paper’s goal was to test a theory Jehn had developed about the nature of group conflict. Jehn believed that “conflict” needed to be better defined. She believed that dissent inside teams took several different forms. One was something she called personal or relationship conflict, which is defined as the manifestation of some personality clash—an interpersonal ego-driven showdown between a team’s members. This kind of dispute was distinct from another form, task conflict, which is defined as any disagreement that isn’t personal but arises from, and is focused on, the actual execution of the work at hand. 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.

There was one exception, however: teams that operated in highly pressurized environments. These teams were different from the others in that their work yielded immediate, quantifiable results—such as financial performance—that left no mystery about how successful their efforts had been. On teams like this, which received instant feedback through some system of scorekeeping, 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.

tranquillity isn’t more important than truth—

“plays angry.” In 2016, a Rutgers sports psychologist named Mitch Abrams, who had worked with professional sports teams, decided to survey all of the research he could find about violence and aggression in sports and tie it all together in a position paper that, he hoped, would clarify the state of thinking on this issue. Abrams began by citing a number of studies that suggested that athletes who play angry do reap some benefits. “Anger can be an emotion of action as the physiological surge of the sympathetic nervous system can lend itself to an increase in strength, stamina, speed and a decrease in perception of pain,” he wrote.

CHAPTER TWELVE TAKEAWAYS • The general opinion among sports fans is that leaders of spectacular teams should operate at a fiery temperature. In recent decades, this logical bias has gone in search of bodies, and it has found them in the person of two men: Roy Keane and Michael Jordan. Both of these captains are considered leadership icons. But a close examination shows that the traits they’re most widely renowned for, and that are most often identified as the key factors that made them outstanding leaders, did not fit the profile of the captains in Tier One. • 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. But it also increases the chances that after they fail, they will start looking for ways to eliminate the role of a captain entirely.

We don't need to look at sports for this. Businesses routinely promote people who are the top individual contributors, not those who see leadership as a kind of work, not a reward

popular among technology companies in Silicon Valley, is that organizations should adopt “flat” structures, in which management layers are thin or even nonexistent. Star employees are more productive, the theory goes, and more likely to stay, when they are given autonomy and offered a voice in decision-making. Some start-ups have done away with job titles entirely, organizing workers into leaderless “self-managing teams” that report directly to top executives.

This is ignorant. Walker may have read a couple of articles and drawn this conclusion. It ignores the fact that the dominant companies and models in Silicon Valley are quite hierarchical. Google tried doing away with management and it didn't work, so they turned to studying what did, with excellent results we can use.

The gap between what I was learning about leadership and what was transpiring in the world led me back to a question I’d first considered at the beginning of the process. After all this time, and all the energy we’ve spent studying team leadership, why haven’t we figured it out? Why are we still tinkering with the formula?

Walker has written a great book about captaincy leadership in a limited sample of sports teams. Some things may apply in other domains, but he doesn't help you figure out what it is.

Burns concluded that there were two distinct types of leadership—one that was “transactional” and another that was “transformational.” Transactional leadership occurred when the person in charge cared most about making sure their underlings followed orders and that the hierarchical lines of an organization were strictly maintained. There were no appeals to higher ideals, just a series of orders given and carried out. The more desirable model, transformational leadership, only came to pass when leaders focused on the values, beliefs, and needs of their followers, and engaged them in a charismatic way that inspired them to reach higher levels of motivation, morality, and achievement. The secret of transformational leadership, Burns wrote, is that “people can be lifted into their better selves.”

This summary of Burns' book makes me wonder if Walker actually read it.

“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.

2. Effective leaders know how to do some things.

Effective leaders should be emotionally mature.

4. Effective leaders need a measure of personal courage.