The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership - By Sam Walker
Date read: 2018-07-21How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
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From the founding editor of the WSJ sports section, this book looks at the top tier sports teams and the one common denominator that made them great, their captains. Surprising findings on how these captains behaved versus our previous notions on how captains should perform. For example, many were not the star player on the team or the most outspoken. Great book to share with leaders or future leaders who feel they don't measure up to what a leader is supposed to be.
Contents:
My Notes
The 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:
- They lacked superstar talent.
- They weren’t fond of the spotlight.
- They didn’t “lead” in the traditional sense - 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 had disregarded the orders of coaches, defied team rules and strategies, and given candid interviews in which they’d spoken out against everyone from fans, teammates, and coaches to the overlords of the sport.
- They weren’t the usual suspects.
- Nobody had ever mentioned this theory - None of them had ever singled out the captain as a team’s driving force.
- The captain isn’t the primary leader.
The collective talent level, and the ability to work democratically, turned out to be far more valuable than the isolated skill of one supreme achiever.
The only way to become a Tier One coach is to identify the perfect person to lead the players.
- Extreme doggedness and focus in competition.
- Aggressive play that tests the limits of the rules.
- A willingness to do thankless jobs in the shadows.
- A low-key, practical, and democratic communication style.
- Motivates others with passionate nonverbal displays.
- Strong convictions and the courage to stand apart.
- Ironclad emotional control.
On the seventeen greatest teams in history, however, the captains were not immune to pushing the rules to the breaking point. In fact, they often did so intentionally.
The difference between a captain who upholds the principles of sportsmanship at all times and a captain who bends it to its edges is that the latter captain is more concerned with winning than with how the public perceives them.
while the television cameras tend to focus on the players at the front, the hard work of leadership is often conducted from the rear.
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.
The great captains lowered themselves in relation to the group whenever possible in order to earn the moral authority to drive them forward in tough moments. The person at the back, feeding the ball to others, may look like a servant — but that person is actually creating dependency. The easiest way to lead, it turns out, is to serve.
Whether a team was packed with talented, intelligent, and highly motivated individuals, or whether it had achieved solid results in the past, its communication style on any given day was still the best indicator of its performance.
Teams that talked intently among themselves in the break room were more likely to achieve superior results at work.
On the best teams, speaking time was doled out equitably — no single person ever hogged the floor, while nobody shrank from the conversation, either.
Natural leaders circulate actively, engaging people in short, high-energy conversations.
They are democratic with their time—communicating with everyone equally and making sure all team members get a chance to contribute. They’re not necessarily extroverts, although they feel comfortable approaching other people. They listen as much as or more than they talk and are usually very engaged with whomever they’re listening to. We call it ‘energized but focused listening.'
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.
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.
Teams that get quick, concrete feedback on their work, as they do in sports, got better results when they battled over the details.
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.
These captains not only continued playing through setbacks—they excelled. They walled off these destructive emotions in order to serve the interests of the team.
They displayed and, in one case, developed a kill switch for negative emotions.
- Effective leaders know some things - They developed a vision for the way things ought to be.
- Effective leaders know how to do some things - They knew how to close the gap between the team’s current state of being and the one it needed to reach in order to succeed.
- Effective leaders should be emotionally mature.
- Effective leaders need a measure of personal courage - To push a team forward, a leader must disrupt its routines and challenge its definition of what is normal. Because this kind of thing produces resistance, even anger, leaders have to have the courage to stand apart—even if they end up paying a substantial personal toll for doing so.