Finding the Winning Edge - Teamwork

Last time we covered the first section of Finding the Winning Edge, leadership. We talked about having a set of beliefs as a leader, which principles a leader should embody, and the dangers of not having any of those qualities.

As a follow up to last time, I posted a poll on LinkedIn recently asking which leadership quality would be most detrimental to be missing for the leader of a team. There were 4 options: flexibility, positivity, authenticity, and accountability. Last time I made the case as to why authenticity may be the most critical to have, but this poll doesn’t have one right answer. It’s not a coincidence though that I was listening to Gronk’s third appearance on Julian Edelman’s podcast, and he talked about Tom Brady highlighting that he embodied Coach Belichick’s philosophy of learning how not to lose a game, and that came with making the fewest critical mistakes. This discussion on leadership qualities can be framed the same way, if there are dozens of principles that we’d all like to exhibit as leaders, which are the one or ones that we need to ensure at a minimum we’re embodying.

So, with a thorough picture now painted of the role of a leader, now we can talk about two things, what a team can accomplish, and why the goal is to overcome adversity. 

There are many listed in the book, but below is an examples of what a team can accomplish that were inspirational stories to Coach Walsh:

“When Admiral Jim Stockdale was shot down in 1965 after flying fifty missions in Vietnam. Subsequently, he was beaten and tortured by his captors, chained and held in isolation for two years, and not allowed to speak to another American. Stockdale retained his indomitable spirit and his sense of personal discipline to survive his ordeal and become the dominant leader of the American POWs for eight years.”

Before we dive into the rest of the section on competition, there are a few outside resources that are helpful in framing the discussion. First is an article from Axios called “All stars: Is a great team more than the sum of its players? Complexity science reveals the role of strategy, synergy, swarming and more.”

Basically it’s a few thousand words on why the best teams are far better than the sum of their parts, with some scientific terminology. Here’s an excerpt from the article on swarming:

“How individuals synchronize in time can have implications for how they coordinate in space or ‘swarm’. Swarming broadly refers to the coordinated movement of individuals – think of wildebeest stampeding across the Serengeti or fish forming a tightly aligned school to escape a predator. Likewise, players moving across the soccer field or basketball court can be conceived of as a swarm. How do teammates coordinate their movement to increase the likelihood that a behind-the-back pass is caught by a teammate rather than stolen? More generally, does coordination in space interact with synchronicity to produce a more effective team on which the players anticipate one another’s actions because they’re ‘in sync’? In The Last Dance documentary, Kerr remarks that Pippen provided essential rhythm on the court, suggesting that some players function as swarm harmonisers, perhaps making dynamic spatial strategies such as the triangle offense more effective.”

That’s just one example of the benefits of acting as a team. 

There’s another paper called Leadership in Complex Organizations that tackles the same subject but outside of sports. From the conclusion of the paper: 

“Complexity theory suggests that leaders must deal with the conditions of organizational activities more than their local manifestations. It suggests that we create transformational environments, or the conditions necessary for innovation, rather than creating the innovation itself. Complex leaders drop seeds of innovation rather than mandating innovation plans; they create opportunities to interact rather than creating isolated and controlled work cubicles; they tend networks; they catalyze more than they control. Complex leaders are tags, symbols, rather than brave ship captains guiding their vessels to port. Leaders are part of a dynamic rather than being the dynamic itself. Leaders are one element of an interactive network that is far bigger than they. Complex leaders can perceive those networks; they can help enable useful behaviors, including the expansion and complexification of the networks. They cannot, however, control those networks.”

The leader isn’t doing the work, like in the last episode how we talked about the head coach not being the person to handle every issue. Instead they’re figuring out how the team will solve each issue. From this conclusion we just read, leaders are supposed to build processes and systems that enable success. They’re not the ones doing the innovating. They’re setting up the systems for everyone else in the organization to perform their role. “Complexity theory focuses leadership efforts on behaviors that enable organizational effectiveness, as opposed to determining or guiding effectiveness”

From another aspect, there’s a quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt where he says “People acting together as a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could ever hope to bring about.” 

Now we can tie all this into Finding the Winning Edge. Here’s what Bill Walsh wrote about true competition and overcoming adversity. He has a section of inspirational events including the story about Admiral Stockdale. He then writes the following about how leaders can put their teammates in the best position to overcome adversity and design the best systems. 

Overcoming Adversity

In each of the aforementioned, inspirational events, distinct elements exist that are the essence of "total" competition or confrontation (e.g., dealing with a deadly adversary; fighting for survival; competing when virtually no one else knows or cares; locking horns against an opponent when no one is there to "bail you out"; etc.).

The very nature of the game of American football exemplifies the extreme demands and sacrifices that are attendant to a situation where you're fighting or competing for your very existence. A total commitment on your part, a complete mobilization of your efforts and an unwavering level of concentration and focus are essential, not only to successfully compete, but to simply be competitive as you participate.

To deal with and overcome adversity, several personal attributes are required. By degree, you must possess all of the following elements:

• An inner confidence that has been tested. You must have a level of self assurance that has been molded by defeat, has overcome obstacles, has been shaken, has absorbed punishment and has engendered a sober, steel­like toughness that results in a hardened sense of independence that will take on anything, yet survive and win.

• Sound fundamentals and skills that have been firmly entrenched by weeks, months and years of training, practice, rehearsal and direct competition. In order for these to be the appropriate tools for you to handle the situation, they must be an extension of your unique talents.

Your fundamentals and skills must relate—one to the other—to form a complete inventory of useful capabilities at your disposal. Each of these areas must be continually refined and adapted as needed.

• A functional intellect for the activity. While a high IQ is not essential, you must possess the intuitive instincts that seem to thrive on the activity and that provide you with a sense of resourcefulness when frustration or paralyzing fear could otherwise consume an individual.

As a rule, the individuals at the two extremes of the intelligence continuum (i.e., most intelligent and least intelligent) are often unable to maintain an appropriate level of focus. As a result, these individuals are more likely to panic and to prematurely look for alternatives.

• A belief—a conviction—that is able to effectively control your urge to ''quit and run." Within the confines of the activity, theoretically speaking, you must be willing to possibly perish before conceding. In the football arena, the issue does not involve mortal terms, but rather competing to your last ounce of energy or until the final whistle blows.

• A willingness to sacrifice for others. Situations may arise when it will be necessary for you to subordinate your own personal interests to the greater common good of the team or your teammates.

• A refined sense of communication that enables you to have a realistic sense of what your teammates are thinking and how they will react and respond to a given situation. When competition is in its most critical stages, you must have both a level of verbiage and points of reference that collectively provide you with a means of communicating concisely and precisely.

• Trust in yourself and in your teammates. This trust must have been nurtured through months and years of practicing, playing and sacrificing for a common goal.

Coincidentally these two, communication and trust were mentioned back to back. There’s a story I’ve told on this podcast a couple of times from my first days as a student manager for the UVA football team. National Championship winning and college football hall of fame head coach Mack Brown was on the sideline for a practice when I was maybe a month into the job. I worked up the nerve to talk to him after practice. I go up to him, introduce myself, and ask how he was able to lead an organization of well over a hundred people when you include the players, coaches, and support staff. He said it came down to three things, first was communication, from there came trust, then came respect, and once you had all 3 you could have a common purpose. 

• A philosophy, a scheme, and a system that has evolved, matured and become established. This system must be a complete entity that can function in every possible circumstance and that can account for unexpected circumstances.

• Flexibility and adaptability that enable you to effectively deal with change. Your approach to the game must evolve and transform itself when you meet new and different challenges. You must be able to recognize and adapt to markedly different styles, strategies and tactics.

I’ll mention again here the quote from Dwight Eisenhower that “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

• A qualified support staff and system. Your staff and system must provide you with the necessary tools, equipment, services and logistics for you to do your job. Both your staff and your system must reflect a high level of intensity and a comparable level of willingness to make critical sacrifices. Both elements must be well­-organized and well ­led.

• Leadership. Driven leadership that is decisive,thoughtful and calculating is critical. Such leadership ability should be developed through study, extensive preparation and a variety of experiences.

Such leadership should be proactive and should exhibit an ability to effectively assess, analyze, and respond to circumstances as they occur. Your leadership should draw from the strengths and buttress the weaknesses of those who surround you.

• A plan, a goal and a dominating thought process that motivates and inspires.

• A knowledge and understanding of your opponent—his strategies, tactics, system, personnel, attitudes and goals.

• A system of replacing and acquiring new players and staff members.

From all this, I’m taking away that leaders use systems to create leverage and enable success. These actions aren’t tangible individual actions but frameworks that allow for creative, individual actions to be made. Let’s go over a few examples, you’re the founder of a startup. Initially you’re interviewing candidates for every position, but once you scale your team there comes a point where you stop conducting every interview. At that point you’d design an interview process. Maybe you specify that the hiring team outlines the role that the candidate will carry out for the organization. You have them determine what qualities a successful candidate would have to have, would they need to be self-starters? Creative? Detail-oriented? At this point you’re not doing this work yourself but trusting people in your organization to leverage your framework. 

Here’s another example, I heard the acronym EPOC (Every Point of Contact), where for companies working in the service industry, they made sure to demonstrate excellence in every point of contact they had with a customer or potential customer. Here’s a personal example of creating leverage that I learned recently. I'm part of a small team doing the same outsourced work for a number of clients. Those clients on any given day can interact with anyone on my team, and nearly all communication is by email. If a client were to email with me today, someone else tomorrow, and a third person next week, the client should be receiving a consistent, excellence experience. One thing I noticed was that, although everyone on our team and in our company received a standardized email signature image, the way people incorporated that image into their emails was different. Google lets people choose between a small/medium/large picture size, some people scaled the image to custom dimensions, and the end result is a client seeing the same email signature come through in all different shapes and sizes depending on who they interact with. Creating leverage is not mandating exactly which option everyone chooses, but setting the expectation that there should be uniformity, and having people come together to best implement that uniformity.

We need to work in teams because teams can achieve greater success than any individual. And the way to put a team in the best position to succeed is by leadership. We’ve covered in the last episode the qualities a leader should embody, and now we’ve covered how a leader should foster a spirit of overcoming adversity within their team, define roles, create systems, and utilize leverage.

We also initially mentioned a core principle of viewing coaching as teaching. Through that lens, in the next episode we’ll talk about how coaches or leaders should approach teaching.