For seven years, Christie Rampone had captained the U.S. women’s national soccer team, serving as the tireless, selfless nucleus of the defense. She’d won two Olympic gold medals and the 2015 World Cup, assembling a record nearly as impressive as Carla Overbeck’s. She was forty. The moment had come to let the next generation run things.
To take her place, Jill Ellis, the U.S. coach, appointed a duo of captains: midfielder Carli Lloyd, the breakout star of the World Cup; and the team’s most solid defender, Becky Sauerbrunn. “They are two extremely professional players in both game and training environments and they embody the DNA of this program,” Ellis said.
When U.S. Soccer posted the news on Twitter in January 2016, the responses came pouring in. Most of the comments were expressions of support and congratulations to the team’s new leaders. Down the list, however, I noticed that someone had put forth a different view.
“Captains? What is this, high school?”
At roughly the same time I began writing this book, the sports world’s perceptions of captains took a dark turn. The first sign of trouble came in 2007 when the NFL convened a committee to set some leaguewide guidelines for team leadership. The committee decided that the designated captains of each team should be allowed to wear a C on their jerseys and that all teams be required to choose captains before playoff games. But it also decided that teams should have the right to avoid naming any captains during the regular season. Sure enough, five years later, the NFL’s New York Jets took them up on it. Matt Slauson, one of the team’s veteran linemen, said the absence of captains “kind of forces guys to step up and take ownership.” After posting an 8–8 record the season before, the Jets dropped to 6–10.
Two years later, in 2014, the NBA’s Boston Celtics—Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics—not only traded away their captain, they decided to leave the post vacant. Three months after that, when Derek Jeter retired, the New York Yankees suggested they might retire the captaincy altogether. “We have a number of different people that are very strong leaders and high-quality individuals,” said the team’s general manager, Brian Cashman. “That doesn’t mean you have to put a C on it.”
By 2016, the tradition was in full retreat. At the start of the NHL season that fall, four teams hadn’t bothered to select captains, even though the league’s rules expressly required them to do so. “Today’s game is led by core groups of players,” explained Brooks Laich, a veteran center who’d played for the suddenly leaderless Toronto Maple Leafs. “It’s not done by one individual.”
Even in England, where the captaincy has long been seen as a vital tradition, the same kind of thinking crept in. When Chelsea initially declined to renew longtime captain John Terry’s contract after the 2016 season, The Guardian declared it “a potentially defining moment for the entire Captain, Leader, Legend species, whose very existence appears under threat.” The column went on to declare that the value of captains in soccer was “debatable.”
During this period I noticed another troubling development. Many teams began naming captains for reasons that had nothing to do with their leadership ability.
In 2011, after his team finished fourth in the English Premier League, Cesc Fàbregas, the captain of Arsenal, decided to leave the team for Barcelona. Faced with naming a new leader, Arsenal’s manager, Arsène Wenger, made a curious move. At the time, the team’s most prolific scorer, the striker Robin van Persie, was only signed through the following season. Wenger knew there would be many offers for van Persie’s services and was desperate to keep him on the roster. He believed that his best hope was to try to shore up van Persie’s allegiance to the team—so he named him captain.
Arsenal did not prosper under van Persie’s command. They finished third in the league table, bowed out in the early rounds of the Champions League, and failed to win any trophies. Despite being given the armband, van Persie not only left Arsenal the following season, he decamped to a rival, Manchester United.
Despite this debacle, Wenger’s opportunistic (some would say cynical) view of the captaincy not only survived, it started popping up in unlikely places. In 2014, after Brazil imploded spectacularly at the World Cup, the national soccer team’s new coach decided to strip the captaincy from the center back Thiago Silva and bestow it upon the country’s latest young impresario, the twenty-two-year-old goal-scoring prodigy Neymar da Silva Santos, Jr., whose confidence had been shaken by his team’s poor showing at the World Cup. Giving the armband to the brightest young star, rather than a water carrier, ran counter to everything Brazil had learned in those years when Pelé had avoided the role. “I confess I did not understand the choice,” said the former Brazil captain Carlos Alberto Torres. “Maybe someday Neymar will be ready to be a good captain, but not now.”
Building up a player’s loyalty, or giving him a vote of confidence, was one thing. But in many cases, teams made a more fundamental mistake. They convinced themselves that the captaincy was the natural right of the player with the highest market value.
Take, for instance, baseball’s New York Mets. After signing their star third baseman David Wright to a $138 million multiyear deal in 2012 and making him captain at the same time, the team left no mystery about its rationale. “I think the decision was made when we gave him the contract,” said the team’s co-owner Jeff Wilpon. “When you commit that kind of money and resources to a guy like this, you want to make sure he’s the leader.”
If I had to give out a prize for the most baffling captaincy logic, it would go to the NHL’s hapless Edmonton Oilers, who in 2016 decided to bestow their captaincy on a center named Connor McDavid. It’s not that McDavid lacked talent or didn’t have the potential to develop into a fine leader. What’s disturbing is that on the day he accepted the job, he’d only been alive for nineteen years and 266 days. He became the youngest team leader in NHL history.
To Arsenal, Brazil, the Mets, the Oilers, and a host of other teams, the captaincy had come down to which superstar’s ego needed stroking, or which player cost the team the most money, or which promising teenager they hoped to build around. It had ceased to be a matter of which player was the most fit to lead.
This radical shift in philosophy coincided with an era in which broadcast, cable, and satellite television companies all over the world had started bidding enormous sums for the rights to carry live sporting events. The piles of revenue this generated had made teams, leagues, and international sports federations wealthy beyond their wildest imaginings—in 2016, the sports industry took in an estimated ninety billion dollars, a sum not too far behind the global market for cancer treatments.
The amount of cash pouring in was so substantial that it changed the underlying motives of the business. From the earliest days of organized team sports, the surest path to financial success was to win. In the new economy, the chief goal was to turn your games into appointment television.
The primary beneficiaries of this new order were the rarest commodity in sports—the kind of bankable superstar players and coaches that people will tune in to watch. By 2016, the average salary for an NFL coach had ballooned to nearly five million dollars, while the highest-paid NFL player earned more than thirty million—both about five times what their equivalents had been in the 1990s. In the English Premier League, the spending accelerated even more rapidly. The sixteen-million-dollar annual salary Manchester City reportedly agreed to pay Pep Guardiola in 2016 was nine times what Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson earned in 2000. Over the same period, the Premier League’s highest-paid players saw their incomes rise by a factor of more than six.
As they became richer, more sought after, and more essential to putting on a good show, these celebrity coaches and athletes started throwing their weight around. On many teams, two opposing power centers found themselves vying for control. Basic decisions about how a team competed, and even whom it signed, became a game of tug-of-war between an indispensable star player and a marquee coach. Under this new paradigm, the old hierarchy of a team fell away.
On the Tier One Teams I studied, the typical pecking order put the coach at the top, the talent on the bottom, and a water-carrying captain in the middle who served as an independent mediator between them. In this new order, where power and popularity went hand in hand, the middle manager’s role had been squeezed out. Unless the captain was the superstar, the captain was a bystander.
Some of the same forces have come to bear in the business world, where many companies in thriving talent-dependent industries embraced a new workplace ethos in which hierarchies were softened and office floor plans were reengineered to break down the walls that once kept management and talent separated. One emerging school of thought, popular among technology companies in Silicon Valley, is that organizations should adopt “flat” structures, in which management layers are thin or even nonexistent. Star employees are more productive, the theory goes, and more likely to stay, when they are given autonomy and offered a voice in decision-making. Some start-ups have done away with job titles entirely, organizing workers into leaderless “self-managing teams” that report directly to top executives.
Proponents of flatness say it increases the speed of the feedback loop between the people at the top of the pyramid and the people who do the frontline work, allowing for a faster, more agile culture of continuous improvement. Whether that’s true or not, it has certainly cleared the way for top executives to communicate directly with star employees without having to muddle through an extra layer of management.
As I watched all this happen, I started to wonder if I was really writing a eulogy. Just as I was building a case for the crucial value of quiet, unglamorous, team-oriented, workmanlike captains who inhabit the middle strata of a team, most of the world’s richest sports organizations, and even some of its most forward-thinking companies, seemed to be sprinting headlong in the opposite direction.
The gap between what I was learning about leadership and what was transpiring in the world led me back to a question I’d first considered at the beginning of the process. After all this time, and all the energy we’ve spent studying team leadership, why haven’t we figured it out? Why are we still tinkering with the formula?
One of the first scholars who attempted to build a composite model for enlightened leadership was the historian James MacGregor Burns. In his 1978 book, Leadership, Burns used the stories of figures like Moses, Machiavelli, Napoleon, Mao, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to figure out what linked them together.
Burns concluded that there were two distinct types of leadership—one that was “transactional” and another that was “transformational.” Transactional leadership occurred when the person in charge cared most about making sure their underlings followed orders and that the hierarchical lines of an organization were strictly maintained. There were no appeals to higher ideals, just a series of orders given and carried out. The more desirable model, transformational leadership, only came to pass when leaders focused on the values, beliefs, and needs of their followers, and engaged them in a charismatic way that inspired them to reach higher levels of motivation, morality, and achievement. The secret of transformational leadership, Burns wrote, is that “people can be lifted into their better selves.”
Management experts have since embraced transformational leadership and expanded its definition to include a longer list of attributes. Great leaders, the canon says, show a talent for navigating complexities, promoting freedom of choice, practicing what they preach, appealing to reason, nurturing followers through coaching and mentorship, inspiring cooperation and harmony by showing genuine concern for others, and using “authentic, consistent means” to rally people to their point of view.
The captains in Tier One displayed many of these traits. They were conscientious, principled, and inspirational, and connected with their teammates in ways that elevated their performances. Yet there were things about the way they led their teams that didn’t square with the definition Burns put forward. These men and women were often lacking in talent and charisma. Rather than leading from the front, they avoided speeches, shunned the spotlight, and performed difficult and thankless jobs in the shadows. They weren’t always steadfast exemplars of virtue, either.
Truth be told, transformational leadership seemed like a grab bag into which every imaginable positive trait had been thrown. It presented an idealized view of leadership, one that was less attainable than aspirational. Of course, maybe that’s the whole point: Leaders cut from the same cloth as Moses, Gandhi, and Napoleon come along so infrequently that no rational person should expect to meet one. The best we can do is to try to understand them, and to help the inferior leaders we settled for make incremental improvements.
The trouble with setting the bar so impossibly high is that we risk doing damage to the entire concept of leadership. After a while, people get tired of waiting for a unicorn to wander into the building, so they start looking for new ways to construct teams that don’t require unicorns at all.
The captains in Tier One, as a whole, did not convey the idea that they were born to lead. They didn’t have extreme talents that were readily apparent to everyone. Beyond the way they led, they had little in common. They lived at different times in different countries and did not share a common gender, language, culture, religion, or skin tone. They could be tall, beautiful, short, or homely, immensely skilled at their craft—or not. There is nothing about them that suggests they were one-in-a-billion natural leaders whose greatness was genetically predetermined.
I started to suspect that the real reason we can’t agree on the formula for elite team leadership is that we’ve overcomplicated things. We’ve been so busy scanning the horizon for transformational knights in shining armor that we’ve ignored the likelier truth: there are hundreds upon thousands of potentially transformative leaders right in our midst. We just lack the ability to recognize them.
In 1982, Reuven Gal, a former Israeli army colonel, was allowed to review the personnel files for 283 Israeli soldiers who had won medals for gallantry on the battlefield during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. He set out to see what qualities they shared.
Gal noticed that the medal-winning soldiers had received higher marks for physical fitness, intelligence, motivation, devotion, decisiveness, and perseverance under stress than the members of a control group. He also noticed that a surprising number (64 percent) were officers, suggesting a possible link between a person’s leadership qualities and their motivation to do brave, selfless things under fire.
Gal’s most surprising finding about the medal winners, however, was how much they did not have in common. Some were old, some young. Some were professional soldiers, others reservists. While many were officers, some came from lower ranks. Psychological tests showed that their personalities were all over the grid. “The heroes of the Israeli Defense Force do not form any unusual or deviant group,” Gal wrote. “They are certainly not a group of ‘supermen.’…They are not born heroes, either; they become heroes.”
Gal and his research partners were surprised by these results, but they were also encouraged. Heroism clearly wasn’t coded into a person’s genes, but it did seem to be closely correlated with leadership. By developing better leaders, they reasoned, it should be possible to create an army that does more heroic things.
After conducting interviews with dozens of soldiers, they formulated a simple equation to explain their findings: Leadership = P × M × D.
Gal told me that the first variable—the P—stood for potential, which he defined as a person’s God-given leadership ability. This was a natural gift that couldn’t be taught, he said, and would start to become evident in a person’s behavior as early as kindergarten. But it also wasn’t excessively rare; many members of an army unit might have these skills.
To become a leader, however, a person with potential also needed to possess the next variable: M. “The prerequisite to be effective is motivation,” he said. These two variables were something of a twin set. People who had leadership potential often had the motivation to fulfill the role. But it was the third variable in Gal’s equation that caught my attention: D for development.
Here, Gal believed, biology played no role. Any leadership candidate, no matter how gifted, had to make an effort to learn the ropes and to prove that they had the right qualities. “You have to earn your leadership over time, to prove that your charisma is used the right way and that it flows in a positive group-oriented direction.” Leaders must learn how to become a “prism” through which the group’s perceptions are filtered and to learn how to manipulate these emotions in a way that lifts others, rather than unsettling them by confirming their fears. “Take three guys and put them in exactly the same situation,” Gal said. “One of them will view it as desperate and hopeless. One will appraise it as stressful but challenging. But the third one will view it as a fascinating opportunity for excitement.” Gal believed that the ability to frame these kinds of situations in a positive light was partly a reflection of a leader’s personality but also a function of experience.
It might sound trite to compare the profiles of sports captains to those of combat heroes. Obviously, the threat of mortal injury will provoke a stronger response in most people than the prospect of losing a volleyball game. Yet Gal’s view of development did not seem out of line with the stories of the captains in Tier One.
In Part II of this book, we saw how Yogi Berra dedicated himself to becoming a better catcher and, in doing so, learned how to manage and lead a pitching staff. We saw how Maurice Richard developed a kill switch to keep his temper in check, how Carla Overbeck built respect among her teammates by carrying their bags, how Valeri Vasiliev won the loyalty of his teammates by standing up to his coach, how Tim Duncan circulated among his teammates offering a constant flow of practical communication, and how Buck Shelford and Jack Lambert used nonverbal displays to transmit passion.
While these acts might have been intuitive to these men and women, there is nothing about them that required skill. They were functions of behavior.
More important, none of these Tier One captains were given the leadership role on their teams the day they arrived. In every case, some time had elapsed. They’d been given a chance to listen and observe and audition for the part. In other words, they’d developed.
None of this should suggest that it’s easy to become an elite captain or that this stratum of leadership is within everybody’s reach. As we also saw in Part II, these men and women did things in competition that most of us wouldn’t consider. But I do think it’s fair to say that by studying the leadership behavior of these captains it’s within anyone’s power to improve, and that the number of people who can become exceptional team leaders is larger than we realize. “Leaders are made, they are not born,” as Vince Lombardi famously said. “They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.”
To this point, The Captain Class has focused most of its attention on how captains led their teams. There is, of course, another important constituency—the executives, managers, and coaches whose job it is to assemble these units.
Most of us think of team dynamics in the same way we might ponder the vastness of space—it’s something mysterious and unknowable. We can design a team intelligently, putting all of the pieces meticulously into place until there doesn’t seem to be a competitive weakness. But at the end of the day, what happens in the room, or on the field, is beyond our control. The unit will either pop, or fizzle.
The first thing the sixteen teams in Tier One teach us is that leadership matters. It’s not that having a captain of a certain kind was a bonus—it was the only common denominator. As a writer, the best analogy I can think of is that captains are like the verb in a sentence. The verb may not be as memorable as the nouns, as evocative as the adjectives, or as expressive as the punctuation. But it’s the verb that does the yeoman’s work—unifying the disparate parts and creating the forward momentum. In the closed unit of a great sentence, it’s the only essential component.
It’s true that many sports teams have soured on this idea. Captains have become unfashionable—like pleated slacks, Rollerblades, and gluten. People who build sports teams have started conflating talent, or market value, with leadership. They have eliminated hierarchies that allow team leaders to exist in a robust middle layer of management. They are afraid to choose leaders that defy conventional wisdom or whose penchant for creating friction inside the team works against their economic priorities. The simplest bit of advice I could give to team executives in sports and beyond would be to stop doing these things immediately.
The larger question, of course, is how to choose the right leader. In sports, the seven traits I’ve outlined in Part II should serve as an excellent guide. In the world beyond sports, where the parameters of competition are different and where teams do an infinite variety of things from building software to selling Toyotas, the prescription isn’t so obvious.
The best set of instructions I have come across—the one that most closely matches my own observations about Tier One captains—was compiled by Richard Hackman, the late Harvard social and organizational psychologist, who spent decades observing teams of all kinds as they worked. While their goals were as different as landing a plane is from performing a piece of classical music, Hackman focused his attention on comparing how their preparations and processes affected their outcomes. By doing so, he pieced together the outlines of a theory on the nature of effective team stewardship, or as he put it, the “personal qualities that appear to distinguish excellent team leaders from those for whom leadership is a struggle.”
Hackman’s theory consisted of four principles:
1. Effective leaders know some things.
The best team leaders seemed to have a solid understanding of the conditions that needed to be present inside a team in order for its members to thrive. In other words, they developed a vision for the way things ought to be.
2. Effective leaders know how to do some things.
In “performance” situations, Hackman noticed that the most skillful leaders seemed to always sound the right notes. They understood the “themes” that were most important in whatever situation the team was in, and 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.
3. Effective leaders should be emotionally mature.
Hackman understood that leading a team could be “an emotionally challenging undertaking.” Great captains have to manage their own anxieties while coping with the feelings of others. The most mature leaders didn’t run away from anxiety or try to paper it over. Rather, they would pour into it with an eye toward learning about it—and by doing so find the right way to defuse it.
4. Effective leaders need a measure of personal courage.
The basic work of a leader, Hackman believed, was to move a group away from its entrenched system and into a better, more prosperous one. In other words, a leader’s job is to help a team make the turn toward greatness. To do this, he believed, a leader—by definition—had to “operate at the margins of what members presently like and want rather than at the center of the collective consensus.” 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.
The “strange” thing about Hackman’s four rules, as he put it, was what they didn’t include. There was nothing in there about a person’s personality, or values, or charisma. There was no mention whatsoever of their talent. Leading a team effectively wasn’t a matter of skill and magnetism, it was all tied up in the quotidian business of leadership. To Hackman, the chief trait of superior leaders wasn’t what they were like but what they did on a daily basis.
The trouble with this idea is that it makes the job of identifying a worthy leader considerably more difficult. You could interview someone for hours and never know whether they have this kind of ability until they start doing the job.
The second challenge in choosing a leader—one that is no less vital—is knowing what kind of people to avoid.
Deborah Gruenfeld, a social psychologist at Stanford’s business school, has spent most of her career studying the roles of individuals inside organizations. She is one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of power.
The conventional view, Gruenfeld says, is that people’s achievements alone are rarely enough to allow them to acquire power. Most of us believe there are emotional and promotional components to being a leader that don’t come through on a résumé. As a result, many people wrongly believe they can claim status inside an organization by “tricking” others into thinking they’re entitled to it even if they might not be. It’s an outgrowth of the old adage “fake it till you make it.”
According to Gruenfeld, the research suggests that the opposite is true. In real life, she says, people often attain and hold power within an organization by downplaying their qualifications. “We gain status more readily, and more reliably, by acting just a little less deserving than we actually are.”
The captains in Tier One were not poseurs. They didn’t make speeches, didn’t seek attention or acclaim, and were not comfortable wearing the cloak of power. Most of them took subservient roles and carried water for their teammates. In other words, they behaved precisely the way Gruenfeld describes. They won status by doing everything in their power to suggest they didn’t deserve it.
In 2016, Bret Stephens wrote a column in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal in which he described a conversation he’d had with his eleven-year-old son. The subject was the difference between fame and heroism. His son’s point of view on the subject was that famous people depend on what other people think of them to be who they are. Heroes just care about whether they do everything right.
Stephens went on to describe a modern phenomenon, fed by all forms of traditional and social media, in which people devote considerable energy to boasting about their talents and pretending to be great, even when they’re not. He called this “posture culture.”
When I read this, I realized that this is exactly the kind of mindset that has become tangled up with our views about captains. All too often, the people who propose themselves for positions of power are quick to trumpet their abilities. And those of us who make these decisions are often swayed by the force of their personality.
The truth is that leadership is a ceaseless burden. It’s not something people should do for the self-reflected glory, or even because they have oodles of charisma or surpassing talent. It’s something they should do because they have the humility and fortitude to set aside the credit, and their own gratification and well-being, for the team—not just in pressure-packed moments but in every minute of every day.
This instinct shouldn’t be confused with the desire to make others happy. Scientists have shown that a team’s perceptions of its work and of the efficacy of its leader often have no bearing on how well it performs. A great leader is dedicated to doing whatever it takes to make success more likely, even if it’s unpopular, or controversial, or outrageous, or completely invisible to others. A leader has to be committed, above all else, to getting it right.
In about 600 B.C., the Chinese philosopher Laozi must have had a lot on his mind. It was a period of growing political independence throughout China as new leaders emerged and the old feudal system broke down. It was also a time of civil wars and bloodshed. In the middle of the upheaval, Laozi made a few observations about leadership that struck me as a fine note to end on.
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him,” he wrote. “Fail to honor others and they will fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, ‘we did this ourselves.’ ”
• Captains have fallen out of favor in sports. In some cases, teams have opted to use the title as a tool to build loyalty. In others, they have simply bestowed it on the player who has the highest salary. Some teams have eliminated the role altogether. This trend mirrors an idea that has taken hold in business, where some companies are experimenting with ways of eliminating middle management to bring top executives closer to star talent. These ideas are practical responses to changing attitudes and economics, but there is no indication that they help create elite teams.
• Scholars who study leadership have done a fine job of identifying positive traits that all leaders aspire to, but they have set a prohibitively high bar. The captains profiled in this book did not always clear it. They were not abundantly talented or charismatic. Most of the things they did to help their teams become dynasties were functions of behavior and experience—of the skills they developed and the choices they made on the job. Great leaders do not need to be glamorous. They only need a knowledge of what a successful effort looks like and a plan to get there. They do not need to remind people how great they are. If anything, they should give the impression that they don’t believe they’re worthy of leading at all.