Building a great team in 2021
By: Wil Moushey
Tags: Operations, Blog, Team Building, Management

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

Most of us have been a part of both good and bad teams.

The great ones are a joy. You show up every day excited, performance increases, and you head home at the end of each day generally satisfied. Being on a bad team is the opposite. You dread waking up in the morning, your performance suffers, and you cannot wait to finish each day.

Building better teams might be the best way to increase morale, productivity, and collaboration for pretty much any endeavor. With the present challenges of the COVID crisis, this is more important now than ever before.

This question has been an obsession of psychologists, coaches, and commentators for years, but we are still far from a conclusive answer. Human interaction is one of the most complicated forces in the world and quite difficult to measure. While there is no ‘one size fits all strategy’ for building a great team, looking at some of the greatest sports teams in history helps us identify a few key components that seem to help drive a winning culture: Talent, Leadership, and Glue.

Talent

Many believe the most important component of a great team is talent.

If you have the best players, then you win the game. Full stop.

Talent clearly matters, but why do some of the most talented teams not always end up on top?

It is easy to point to championship teams like the Los Angeles Lakers, the USWNT, and the Canadian Olympic Men’s Hockey team to confirm this point. Each had the best players and it ultimately led to massive success. But there are also examples of teams with great talent who ultimately failed.

Think about the Miami Heat basketball teams from a few years ago. They had three of the top players in the league: LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh. Each member of this ‘big three’ was in the prime of their careers and they were widely considered to be the most talented team in the NBA for the four years they played together; however, the Heat only won the championship in half of those seasons. To be clear, a 50% championship ratio is pretty good. But if talent was all that mattered shouldn’t it be 100%?

Let us consider another example, the most successful modern sports dynasty, the New England Patriots. Sure, they have won a ton of championships over the past 20 years, but with all of the winning, they actually lost the Super Bowl with their most talented team. The Patriots 2007 team is thought of by many to be one of the most talented football teams in NFL history, yet they lost to a scrappy New York Giants team in the Super Bowl.

Great teams surely have talent, but it seems like there are other components that are essential to winning championships.

Leadership

When thinking about great teams, another common factor is leadership.

The results delivered by some of the greats like Phil Jackson, Nick Saban, and Bill Belichick seem to confirm this belief. Their leadership clearly had a positive impact, but for each championship won, they all have failed as well.

Phil Jackson, who led dynasties in the NBA stretching multiple decades in both Chicago and Los Angeles, was a miserable General Manager in New York. Nick Saban has won multiple championships at LSU and Alabama, but in between college stints could not get the Miami Dolphins to the playoffs. More recently his Alabama team was embarrassed by Clemson in the 2019 National Championship. Bill Belichick was fired by the Cleveland Browns after only a few seasons before joining the Patriots and is currently having his worst season in decades.

It is not like these guys forget how to lead in these instances of failure.

Leadership matters, but great leadership doesn’t necessarily mean a guaranteed championship.

In his bestseller ‘Good to Great’ Jim Collins sheds light on the common components of successful organizations. One of the three critical components in his research framework is called ‘Disciplined People’ or more simply put, ‘the team.’ Within the Disciplined People component, Collins writes that a specific kind of leadership is common among the most successful organizations he has studied, he refers to it as ‘Level 5 Leadership.’

Level 5 leaders display a powerful mixture of personal humility and indomitable will. They’re ambitious, but their ambition is first and foremost for the cause, for the organization and its purpose, not themselves. While Level 5 leaders can come in many personality packages, they are often self-effacing, quiet, reserved, and even shy. Every good-to-great transition in our research began with a Level 5 leader who motivated the enterprise more with inspired standards than inspiring personality.

While Collins clearly highlights the importance of Level 5 Leadership in great organizations, it only tells part of the story. Another is having the ‘right people in the right role.’ Or as Collins puts it:

We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats — and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage ‘people are your most important asset’ turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.

There are many components involved with great leadership. You must get talented people to buy-in to a common goal, you must help them improve, you must keep morale high when times get difficult, and like Collins says, you must put the right people in the right seat. This does not necessarily mean putting the most talented player in every seat. As we saw before, this does not always work. There are many different types of roles that need to be filled on championship teams, one that is most critical is glue.

Glue

In his book ‘The Captain Class’ Sam Walker explores the commonalities of the greatest sports teams of all time. A key theme across each of these teams is the presence of a strong captain. The most interesting part of Walker’s research described the style these captains used to lead. They did not exemplify what most of us would traditionally define as leadership. For the most part, these captains were not even the best player on the team. They could be reserved, intense, and anti-social.

But one thing they all shared was the ability to spark performance from teammates in difficult times.

These captains were people like the Boston Celtics Bill Russell, Barcelona’s Carlos Puyol, and the New York Yankees Yogi Berra. Walker highlights seven key traits that these types of captains share:

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.

After reading through these characteristics, a concept that sports journalist Bill Simmons has talked about for years jumps to mind. To Simmons, most championship teams have a ‘glue guy.’ These are the people that keep the team together. They are liked and respected, have high empathy, and are not afraid to sacrifice themselves for the broader cause. They might not be the leading scorer, most popular with fans, or even in a position of leadership, but they keep the team focused, disciplined, and come up big when needed.

Think about some of the great teams of the past decade. Sure, the Golden State Warriors had Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and Klay Thompson. But they also had guys like Sean Livingston and Andre Iguodala. Guys that kept the team together; that raised the level in big moments and that set the tone. What about the Miami Heat championship teams? Udonis Haslem is the prototypical glue guy. Not nearly as talented as LeBron James, but none-the-less critical for keeping the team focused. This type of person is found on nearly every championship team. They bind great talent and leadership together and allow them to flourish.

Bringing it all together

A great example of the intersection of talent, leadership, and glue may be best seen in the recent success of the Pittsburgh Penguin.

When the Penguins won the NHL Stanley Cup in 2009, they had great talent, including star centers Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. They had a young coach Dan Bylsma, and grizzled veteran players like Bill Guerin and Sergei Gonchar, who provided leadership and guidance, and also had one of the greatest ‘glue guys’ of all time, Max Talbot.

Talbot did the less celebrated work. He blocked shots, participated in momentum changing fights, and made off-handed comments to the media that rallied the team and kept them together. Ironically, Talbot went on to score both goals, including the series clincher, that led the Penguins to winning the Stanley Cup.

There is also clear evidence of leadership, talent, and glue on the Penguins more recent Stanley Cup winning teams from 2016 and 2017. The coach Mike Sullivan, along with captain Sidney, provided strong leadership. The talent still existed with Crosby and Malkin along with some others, and guys like Chris Kunitz, Matt Cullen, Nick Bonino, and Marc-Andre Fleury glued the team together.

So, what does that mean for us trying to build great teams?

Within this framework, there are already some good ways to measure talent and leadership. Many consulting companies, thought leaders, and other resources focus on these two. But the concept of ‘glue’ is less quantitative. There is less discussion about it.

Understanding how teams are ‘glued together’ could be the most important component in the quest for building a successful organizational culture, and we believe it is worth pondering as organizations redefine ways of working coming out of the COVID crisis.