The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

by Sam Walker

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

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.”

“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.”

THE SEVEN TRAITS OF ELITE CAPTAINS 1. Extreme doggedness and focus in competition. 2. Aggressive play that tests the limits of the rules. 3. A willingness to do thankless jobs in the shadows. 4. A low-key, practical, and democratic communication style. 5. Motivates others with passionate nonverbal displays. 6. Strong convictions and the courage to stand apart. 7. Ironclad emotional control.

While common sense suggests that a person’s natural ability should inspire self-confidence, Dweck’s research showed that in most cases, ability has very little to do with it. A person’s reaction to failure is everything.

The less identifiable one person’s effort is, the less effort they put in.

There are two activities in polite society in which it’s okay to do harmful things to other people in the pursuit of victory. The first is war. The second is sports.

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.

Leadership = P × M × D.

Potential x motivation x development

As a writer, the best analogy I can think of is that captains are like the verb in a sentence. The verb may not be as memorable as the nouns, as evocative as the adjectives, or as expressive as the punctuation. But it’s the verb that does the yeoman’s work—unifying the disparate parts and creating the forward momentum.

“We gain status more readily, and more reliably, by acting just a little less deserving than we actually are.”