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Every time I watched some group of euphoric athletes collecting its trophy, I had an intense personal reaction that surprised me. I felt jealous.
Just deciding how to define a “team” turned out to be a major undertaking requiring several weeks of spadework.
In the end, I was shocked to discover that the world’s most extraordinary sports teams didn’t have many propulsive traits in common, they had exactly one. And it was something I hadn’t anticipated.
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.
According to English bookmakers, Hungary’s 500-to-1 upset of England remains one of the longest-odds sports bets ever to pay out.
This hadn’t been football at all, really, but a demonstration of advanced strategic ops.
A few months later in Budapest, the English were given a chance to redeem themselves. This time, Hungary trounced them 7–1.
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.
“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.”
Russell’s defensive mindset didn’t stop on the court, however. It permeated the way he interacted with the public. Time and again, Russell drew fire for comments made in brusque and sometimes defiant interviews. “I owe them nothing,” he once said of the fans. Russell was so appalled by the racism he experienced at home that he once said, “I play for the Celtics, not Boston.”
he refused to participate in the ceremony unless the team held it in private with only his teammates in attendance. “I never played for the fans,” he explained. “I played for myself and for my team.”
Many people suspected Russell’s refusal was an act of protest in support of all the talented black players who had not been enshrined, although he hadn’t chosen to say that. Boston’s sportswriters didn’t care one way or the other. While they acknowledged that he was a special basketball player, they suggested that he was a selfish, arrogant, ungrateful, and petty person.
‘Man, he’s the nastiest guy in the world.’”
I made a list of all of the reasons these men and women didn’t fit the profile of exemplary leaders and why it seemed unlikely that captains were the secret ingredients of great teams. There were eight of them:
performances belong to a category of one. In sports lingo, athletes like these are often described as the GOAT, the greatest of all time.
They usually consisted of one high-achieving academic “superstar” surrounded by students with average to low grades. “The greater the superstar status, as compared with the rest of the group, the lower is the achievement of the overall team,” the researchers wrote.
But
In fact, more Tier One teams seemed to have hit their strides during periods of relative poverty.
When it came to freakish success, lavish spending seemed to have little to do with it.
else—the kind of hunger that comes from being counted out.
He looked like a fire hydrant dressed for a job interview.
coaches was his knack for oratory.
the quality at the center of Lombardi’s character was an overwhelming desperation to prove his value.
One of the first lessons we learn as children is to respect authority. We imbue our parents, and our teachers, with special powers. We believe it’s up to them to mold us.
The knowledge that a teammate was giving it their all was enough to prompt people to give more themselves.
The Fordham study seemed to confirm my suspicions about Tier One captains: Their displays of tenacity could have positively influenced the way their teams performed.
The list of elite leaders who have done ugly and unkind things to other people in order to push their units forward is, of course, not restricted to sports. Examples can be found in every other competitive realm, including—and in particular—business.
Walter Isaacson cited an incident in which Jobs raged at his engineers when he learned that the new iMac had a CD tray rather than a slot. Jobs once called the employees of a chipmaker “fucking dickless assholes” for failing to deliver a shipment on time.
Once, when a reporter asked Pelé how his fame compared to Jesus’s, Pelé replied, “There are parts
of the world where Jesus Christ is not so well known.”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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 words barely mattered.
In reality, Lambert was an introverted, cerebral player who overcame his lack of size by poring over game film and honing his techniques.
A group of neuroscientists at the University of Parma discovered, quite by accident, a class of cells inside the brains of monkeys that would fire up when the monkeys were watching other people perform various tasks, such as eating an ice cream cone. The researchers went on to identify neurons in the brains of these primates that mimicked, or mirrored, what others do. The discovery of these reactive cells, or mirror neurons, as the scientists called them, offered the first physical evidence that the phenomenon of brain interconnectedness that researchers had observed in groups might be the
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more about the nature of emotional “transfers”
“If you want to compete with Barcelona, Chelsea, and Manchester United, then you need a playing philosophy,” he said. Top European clubs like these chose a system, then went out and found the right personnel to implement it. “One cannot simply buy players because they are good.”
Lahm’s act of insubordination might have been more divisive than Vasiliev’s, but the effect was the same. It made his team better.
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.”
The worst outcomes came when groups engaged in thoughtless agreements. Nevertheless, hundreds of experiments by other researchers had concluded that conflict was harmful to a group’s performance.
Lahm’s example suggested that tranquillity isn’t more important than truth—
Hockeyroos, all based on the advice of a psychologist who had told him about the phenomenon of “social loafing” that the French scientist Maximilien Ringelmann first observed.
When it came to effective team leadership, Charlesworth told me, he didn’t believe that one person could ever possess all of the necessary qualities. “Some people do inspirational things on the field, some people set a tone at training, some people are very emotionally aware and gregarious off the field,” he said. “All of that stuff is leadership, but not everybody does it all.” Hawkes, he said, was “a bit superficial and scattery,” and wasn’t socially adept enough, or intellectually engaged enough, to be the team’s “permanent” leader.
“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.”
“exhibited something that we have identified as one very important constituent of well-being, which is the ability to rapidly recover from adversity.”
“reframe adversity”
of his teammates was suspended for
