Let’s talk about something that I’m sure that all leaders are interested in. How do you develop a world championship, high-performing team?
You know, it’s spring time and when spring time comes around, the first thing I’m thinking about is baseball season, which is about to get underway as teams go to spring training. In this particular year, it’s interesting to hark back on the fact that in the fall of 2017, the Houston Astros won the World Series and two years ago, the Philadelphia Eagles, not far from where I live, won the Super Bowl. Oddly, these two high-performing teams would not have been picked by many sportscasters at the onset of the season to be the teams that were going to be winning championships or winning Super Bowls.
Back in the day, Yogi Berra, a very baseball player, had become the manager of the New York Yankees. The one season he was the manager, he led the Yankees to win the American League title and went onto the World Series. A sportswriter interviewed Berra at a press conference, and said to Yogi,
“How do you build world championship teams?”
And Berra, known for his very pithy, very succinct statements, looked at the sportswriter very intently. He said, “Hire world championship players, then you gotta good chance.” And that seem to be the essence. Well that sounds very easy, but we know that is quite difficult.
First off, all leaders have got to be concerned about what we do everyday. A guy I used to work for used to say, We do two things everyday. 1)— we accomplish our mission. For a baseball player, they need to win the game they’re playing today. But at the same time, 2)— we need to spend some energy thinking about how am I growing leaders? How am I growing this team in the future? Those two things have to happen everyday. As far as growing that team, I always used to argue that leaders need to think about:
How do I recruit, develop, and retain the best and the brightest for my organization?
Joe Maddon, who I admire a great deal, former manager of the Chicago Cubs, used to say that his job was first of all, a managing job. He did that using a lot of data about how fast the pitcher was throwing, how fast the batter could run, how far the outfielder could run, how hard the guy hit the ball, etc. … lots of data that he could use to manage the team.
“But at the same time, in recruiting, we’re worried about the heartbeat. We have to think about the human factor. We interview ball players a great deal. We also interview their families, we interview their girlfriends. Heck, I even try to interview their ex-wives, if they got one. Because what I want to know, is not only does this guy have the statistics, the data, that managerial part that I want for my team, but does he have the heartbeat that will fit into my team.”
That’s crucial when it comes to recruiting. In terms of developing and retaining people, I think we need to think about four things:
Are we investing in people’s development?
Too often, when an organization hits a budget crunch, the first thing they do is cut professional development. But many studies will tell you: if you have one dollar left to spend on your organization, the result will be far greater if you spend that on developing the workforce, as opposed spending that dollar buying a new capital item. But unfortunately, most organizations don’t do that. High-performing ball players want to know that this team is going to invest in me. They want to see me grow.
Who gets the credit?
When things go very well, does the boss rush out and immediately to take the credit or is credit shared across the team? One CEO said, “My job is to deflect credit upon the team.” Bear Bryant, a very famous coach at the University of Alabama, used to say, “If anything goes wrong, I did it. If anything goes well, they did it. That’s how I want things to be looked at as far as the football games that we play.”
Is there space to grow?
Are people encouraged to innovate? Are they encouraged to to show initiative? To take risks? To try new things? Can they grow professionally and personally in the organization?
How do we react when things go bad?
There’s an old saying, Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, at the worst possible moment.” I often times quote a corollary to Murphy's Law, that Murphy was an optimist! So we know things will occasionally go wrong, but how the leaders react immediately? Does he or she throw somebody under the bus? Or do they say it’s my team.
A terrible incident happened after one of my trips to Hawaii in 2018. The incident involved a a false report saying that a missile was heading for the Hawaiian Islands. Well, turned out it was a false alarm, someone at the Hawaiian Emergency Management System had made an error. There was an awful lots of news coverage of this. Sadly to me, what the news did not cover is the guy who was overall in charge of the Hawaiian Emergency Management System, Vern Miyagi. As soon as this occurred, a few days later, he resigned. Because from the onset, he publicly said: “It’s my responsibility. I wasn’t physically there on site when this worker pushed the button falsely, but that was my team. I trained them. I have responsibility for them.” And I think that’s how a leader should react when thing goes bad.
If you think back again to the Houston Astros and the Philadelphia Eagles, think about the interviews after the World Series or the Super Bowl. Did any of those players say…
“Boy, didn’t I play a great game?” “Boy, wasn’t I terrific?”
No. What do they talk about? They talked about their teammates. They talked about the length of the season. They talked about how they went through adversity together.
In one season, a very famous Philadelphia baseball pitcher by name of Doc Halladay, would throw a perfect game and then later in the playoffs he would throw a shutout. 27 up, 27 down, no runs scored at all. Unbelievable.
In the interviews after both of those events, people pressed him to talk about what it was like to do these two phenomenal things in sports. Halladay kept talking about the catcher, kept talking about the outfielders, kept talking about the infielders, how well they’d done and fielding the ball. He never once took credit. And after the season was over, the Phillies won the World Series, Doc Halladay went out and bought a Rolex watch for every members of the team. Not only the ball players, but the manager, the coaches, the batboy, the front office, the secretary. Each one of those watches, Doc Halladay had inscribed: “We did it together. Thanks, Doc.”
And that’s what it takes, I think, to build a world championship team.
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