Great Teams (and Those That Aren't)
Last week I had the chance to collaborate on six Executive Education sessions at Stanford with John Donahoe, the former CEO of Nike, ServiceNow, eBay and Bain. I’ve had the good fortune of knowing John for over 35 years; we met when he was a rising star at Bain and I was a 21-year-old new hire who recently graduated from UC Berkeley.
In 2024 John visited my Systems Leadership class, where we explored the complex ecosystems and challenges he was confronting at Nike. It was a difficult time for John — after delivering three strong years right after he joined the company, Nike was struggling when he came to our course. And as comes with the job of being CEO, he was taking a lot of heat.
I didn’t help matters in the classroom.
In my self-anointed role as a principled provocateur, I pushed John on his channel strategy, Nike’s relationship with China, and the company’s positions on social issues. In a very memorable session, John handled himself with unparalleled grace and dignity, never once getting defensive when I bantered, and he displayed a unique self-awareness of what had worked and what hadn’t in his career.
A few months after he left Nike, John and I reconnected and began discussing what he might do in his next professional phase and how I could support him in his journey. We explored ways to turn his business learnings into something that could be of substance in the classroom; where his knowledge would provide unique insights and ways to think about both business and leadership.
As our conversations evolved, we began discussing the role of high-performing teams in business, and what we might be able to learn from athletic teams and how that could translate to the business world.
They Call Me Coach
In some ways, teams are the ultimate system — a group of individuals bound together that will succeed or fail depending on the skills and culture that is developed and nurtured both by the participants (athletes) and leaders (coaches).
Last week John and I went into the classroom and taught about high performing teams and the role of leaders in shaping those teams and the systems in which they operate. We asked our students to think about how and why teams do (and don’t) deliver excellence, the role of skills and motivations of individual team members, and the inner and outer journeys that team members go through.
John also discussed what happens when as a leader you must balance talent and attitude with your team members — and what happens when some members of a team focus more (deep down) only on their own success vs. the team’s success. Team chemistry and commitment to each other and the collective result matter.
One lesson I learned when I served in operating leadership roles was that my ability to scale and perform was most directly impacted by the quality of my direct reports. When I had men and women on my team who were great at their functions, I performed better as their leader. I often thought that my role was more akin to that of a General Manager on a sports team — finding the right athletes with complementary talents, and my job was to do what I could to get them to work well together as a group.
As part of our teaching plan, John discussed the role of athletic coaches, and how their roles in the sports realm can be translated into developing high performing teams in business contexts. How does a coach construct a team that can win across multiple seasons and years when things change? In a world of constant crisis and increasingly rapid change, what happens in business when technology and competitors rise and fall, and how do teams respond? How do business leaders develop hard and soft skills, and how do leaders evolve over time?
In The Systems Leader I shared a story about Nick Saban, the successful American college football coach who won seven national championships at the University of Alabama and LSU. In Chapter 3 of the book, I wrote:
Even the famously tough and confrontational Nick Saban, former head football coach of the University of Alabama, adjusted his leadership style in the last few years of his iconic career. He learned to resist the temptation to boss his players around from a top-down perspective, with the unspoken subtext that “You need to do X because I told you to” or even “Do X because it’s in the best interests of the team.” Instead, Saban began to take extra time to explain why X would support a player’s own best interests. As one football analyst observed, “Saban’s evolution wasn’t born out of compassion, but of self-interest. Today’s players are different, no longer willing to do what they’re told simply because it’s what they were told. They want to know why.”
Perhaps the most iconic athletic coach who shaped my thinking on business leadership was John Wooden, the storied former basketball coach at UCLA. His teams won 10 national championships in 12 years and had a run of success that will likely never again be equaled. I had the chance to meet Coach Wooden at his home a few years before he died. My parents, wife, and I won an auction at the local elementary school fundraiser, which allowed us to spend an afternoon with the Coach.
We talked about so much on that day. Yet, what I remember most was not the stories of his championship teams, but rather the man and his style. I recall his quoting poetry and talking about the influences of Abraham Lincoln and Mother Teresa on his world view. One of his books is titled, They Call Me Coach. Sure, he coached basketball teams, but he was really a teacher for so many with whom he came in contact. His Pyramid of Success is about life — not basketball.
Teams Win Championships — Not Individuals
Every day the most successful athletes get out of bed to be great, and they rise with an almost insatiable desire to win. I believe this attitude applies to most people who are great at what they do — in work, sports, teaching, etc.
It’s a mindset that mirrors what George Will wrote about in his 1990 book, “Men at Work.” Will’s tome explored “The Craft of Baseball” through various roles. One that I recall vividly was when he studied Los Angeles Dodger pitcher Orel Hershiser. The goal Hershiser aspired to deliver was the execution of “the future perfect tense” — no matter what happened on the last pitch or the last batter, his goal was to be at his best with the next pitch, and again with the one after that.
He strove to do it right every time. And when things inevitably didn’t go his way, his job was to put the past behind him and move forward with the intention to seek greatness — even perfection — with the very next pitch.
Coaches and leaders play a unique role on teams — they are not on the playing field and doing the work themselves, but their purpose is to get a team to perform at the very best that it can as a group. The goal is to motivate/inspire/drive people to greatness that leads to a team victory — and ongoing success.
In their heyday, the New England Patriots had a saying, “Do Your Job.” It wasn’t meant to encourage people to “stay in their lanes,” but rather to understand that if everyone on the team executed to their role, the team would achieve success. In many ways, this is the role of the coach — to get everyone to do his/her job so that the team can win.
The Teams on Which I Played…
If we think about our careers, if we were lucky, we might have been a part of one or two truly great teams. Most likely, all of us have seen or been a part of teams that muddled along by delivering and performing at mediocre levels.
The sessions with John made me think about the teams in my professional career on which I have been a participant:
The young team with top (but unvarnished) talent that got beaten in the market by a more disciplined and higher-performing team. Leadership missed the bigger picture of what was happening outside our building.
The juggernaut at the top of its game that dominated an industry and was instrumental in creating the personal computer revolution. This was leadership at its finest.
The team of young rookies on a small boat in a big ocean that could not survive a once-in-a-lifetime gale. No amount of leadership could have helped weather that storm — except to have never left the port in the first place. That’s on the captain.
The startup that was ready to punch through and achieve success, but leadership dysfunction got in its own way.
The toxic locker-room where the team thought the enemy was inside of the building and not outside — and leadership fed that narrative.
The team who shared a name on the front of the jersey, but whose culture drove individuals to play for the name on the back of the jersey. Hardly a team at all.
The most talented team on which I have ever played, where the system is designed for those in power to act and behave as independent contractors and where there is no benefit for any individual to promote team success. A place where the desire for greatness is only rewarded individually, and it is almost impossible to tell how any person doing his/her job contributes directly to a team victory. Any member who pushes for team success in this context can only be driven to that goal by an intrinsic desire for the team — there is no extrinsic reward to promote the team.
As I think about higher education and the challenges facing today’s universities, I wonder how the next generation of academic leaders will guide teams to break out of the isolation confronting today’s citadels of higher education.
A simple Google search on the phrase “ivory tower” yields the following result:
A state of privileged seclusion or separation from the facts and practicalities of the real world.
"The ivory tower of academia"
I don’t know the answer on how to build a great team in education, but if I fall back on the notion that “teams win championships and not individuals,” I know that university leadership has their work cut out for themselves.
Only teamwork will get these institutions through their current challenges and create the opportunity to exploit the myriads of possibilities that present themselves.