3
BUILD A TEAM EGO
In March of 1999 Bill Russell, one of the greatest basketball players in the history of the sport, and a man who once led the Celtics to eleven NBA championships in thirteen years, came to a Celtic game in the FleetCenter in Boston. Russell has been called the most successful team athlete in sports’ history, so I asked him if he would speak to the team before the game. This was only minutes before the team had to go out on the floor to prepare for the game and Russell didn’t have time to prepare. He just walked into the locker room and spoke off the cuff for twenty minutes.
The first thing he told the players was he was the most egotistical son of a bitch in the room. I was surprised. I always had seen Bill Russell as a very humble man. But then he added the qualifier, the addendum that made all the difference:
“But my ego always was a team ego,” he said. “My ego was totally linked with the success of my team. It wasn’t linked to personal achievement. It was linked to team achievement. And the greatest disappointment I had as a player was the year I was hurt and we didn’t win a twelfth title.”
You could see the players’ reaction. Here was this man who is one of the greatest players in the history of the sport and he was telling them that the only thing that mattered to him was how his team did. That, to this day, his greatest professional regret were those two years the Celtics didn’t win. Not his personal stats. Not how much money he made. Not how many endorsements he had, how many titles his team won. I knew then why Russell had been a great leader as well as a great player.
Great leaders inflate the people around them. Poor leaders deflate the people around them.
Everything you do as a leader should be geared to building “a team ego.” It has to be right there in your mission statement, an integral part of your dreams and goals, a major part of your vision. Building team ego is essential, for team ego is the difference between being mediocre and being something special. You can be productive. You can be successful. You can be many positive things. But I don’t think you truly can be great without team ego.
Russell also spoke to us about what it had meant to him be the Celtics’ captain. “You don’t understand how important that was for me,” he said. “To me, I was a part of history.”
But being there that day I knew that the players in that room didn’t have the same feeling about the Celtics jersey that Russell had. They didn’t have that strong sense of team ego.
I had prepped Russell on two things before he spoke. I told him that the players tended to think shot before pass, and offense before defense; that they invariably were too consumed with personal statistics and thinking about their next contract. I also told him that we essentially had a young team, one that had been crippled by its youth and inexperience.
He also knew who our young captain was—Antoine Walker. At the time Antoine was going through a difficult stretch, to the point that he was getting booed at home in the FleetCenter, often for taking what the fans perceived to be bad shots.
At one point, Russell pointed to Antoine and told the rest of the team, “This young man shoots all the time. I know people like that. He’s not changing. It’s up to you guys to get him good shots, so he doesn’t shoot a poor percentage. It’s up to you to do what you can do to help him. I always looked at how I could help my teammates be better. That’s the difference between team ego and individual ego. My ego was centered around my team’s accomplishments, not my accomplishments. That’s the difference. Right now, your egos are individual and that is a problem to a team.”
Russell was right on target. Individual ego is the poison pill and it’s all around us in our culture. In sports, the measure of success is how much money you make, what stats you achieve, how many endorsements you get, how many individual accomplishments you can compile. In business, success is status. It’s what kind of car you drive. What country club you belong to. How big your house is. Where your kids go to school. How much of a raise you’ve received. All of the accoutrements of contemporary life. And it’s so pervasive that it’s very difficult to fight against it.
A case in point:
Russell’s speech to the team that night was very powerful. He is a charismatic man, with a definite presence, and there’s no way a player could listen to his message that night and then go out and essentially play selfish basketball, thinking shot before pass, offense before defense, and the other ills that cripple a basketball team. That night we played unselfishly and there’s no question that was the legacy of Russell’s speech that night.
So this turned our season around, right? The players took Russell’s message, made it an article of their collective faith, and played appreciably differently the rest of the season, right?
Well, not quite.
We soon reverted back to our old tricks, like someone with no sense of memory. Again, most of the players were back to thinking offense before defense, shot before pass, seeing the game in individual terms. In a sense, it was like Russell had never come into the locker room, had never given such a powerful speech.
Why? I think there are a couple of reasons.
The most obvious is that significant behavioral change is very difficult, something that takes more than one locker room speech to begin altering, no matter how powerful that speech is. As we discussed earlier, messages must be constantly repeated in a variety of ways. To expect my team to instantly shed all their bad habits and find maturity after one locker room speech by Bill Russell—even if it was a great one—would have been foolish. The second reason is that it illustrates just how powerful the forces of “me first” thinking are in the culture.
GROUNDING YOUR TEAM IN A GROUP CULTURE
How do you build “team ego”? First, you have to understand that this might just be the toughest job you have to do as a leader.
It’s one thing to get an individual to perform better. You can appeal to that person’s ego, her ambitions, her dreams. You can give her salary incentives. You can try to make her realize how fulfilling it ultimately will be for her to utilize her full potential. You can tell her how her life can be better in so many ways. But it’s another to get individuals to see their ego in terms of the group, to get as much fulfillment from the group’s success as they do from their own. Especially in an era that genuflects to the cult of individualism.
Building a team ego is what I’m trying to do with the Celtics and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my career. I am trying to change attitudes, many of which have been all but chiseled in stone, and that kind of change takes time.
One of our problems is that we don’t have a leader right now. Our veteran players are quiet, laid-back guys whose nature is not to be leaders, while our young players are leaders only when they are playing well. That’s not leadership. Anyone can lead the league in high fives when things are going well. But during adversity, those times when things are not going well, is when you need leaders in your group. And young people—in a losing environment—tend not to be leaders. Instead, they tend to think in terms of self. So this is when you need positive people more than ever, because they inflate the attitude of a deflated team.
This was not so vital when I was coaching in college, because in college the basketball coach is the unquestioned leader, his influence all-pervasive. In the pros, however, players need peer pressure, too. Groups that have strong leadership within have a decided advantage. That’s why I’m such a fan of Kevin Garnett, the great young player of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Even though he didn’t go to college, and is still very young, he has emerged as the undisputed leader of that team, someone who gets everyone around him to play hard.
If you look at the great NBA teams of the past fifteen years, one of the common threads is they all had great veteran leaders within the group: Larry Bird with the Celtics; Magic Johnson with the Lakers; Isiah Thomas, Rick Mahorn, and Bill Laimbeer with the Pistons; Michael Jordan with the Bulls. Each one had his own style, but they all demanded excellence from the people around them. Not just once in a while, not just when things were going good for them, but all the time.
You can find differences in their respective styles. There’s the famous story about how Bird called his teammates “sissies” in a press conference after a playoff loss. This was a “no no” when it came to Celtic tradition and there was some speculation that it would backfire. It didn’t. In fact, it was just the opposite. It worked. Bird’s teammates responded and the Celtics won the next game.
As a leader, these are the kind of qualities that you always have to be looking for in the people you hire or pick for your organization, these leadership traits that often are just as important as talent:
• Who are the people who put the group first?
• Who will subordinate their own individual interests for the common good?
• Who will sacrifice?
• What is a person’s emotional intelligence?
In the long run, this might be just as important as their IQ. When you hire a person it’s almost as if you are marrying them. You must know as much about them as possible. How are they going to react in times of adversity? How committed to the success of the group are they? These questions are just as important as how talented a person is. If you continually hire people who don’t have these traits you eventually will pay the price.
You need people around you who share the same values you do, people who are going to be your messengers. Because it can’t just be you all the time. So you need the manager, the department head, the supervisor, those people who are going to spread your message. For, more and more, people tend to think of themselves as free agents, always looking for the best deal, especially in a business climate that’s often about downsizing and change. Once upon a time it was common for people to work for the same company all their working life—along with the loyalty that’s implied there—but now that’s changed. As a leader, you must give loyalty. But you can’t expect it back.
Take Ron Mercer, for example:
There were people who said to me that because I once had recruited Ron to come to Kentucky, and that the Celtics had been his first team in the NBA, he might take less money to stay with the Celtics when his contract was up. Not true. Not in today’s climate. And this is not intended as a knock on Ron. It’s simply the way it is: In most cases, people’s primary allegiance is to themselves and what they believe is the best deal they can get for themselves. This is not exactly the best climate for building team ego, but as a leader in professional basketball the window of opportunity is very small.
Still, this must be your goal.
One of the things I did with the Celtics during the 1998–’99 season was to get my players to listen to Bob Cousy and Tom Heinsohn talk about the old days on their telecasts, reminiscences about when the Celtics were the best team in basketball. They are both former Celtic greats and they both broadcast our games on the road: Heinsohn all the time, Cousy once in a while. The more Heinsohn and Cousy are around our players, the more they talk about what winning meant to them, what it still means to them even after so many years. All this is vitally important to the maturation of a young team. Cousy and Heinsohn are living examples of the mind-set we want our players to reach, the belief that everything is subordinate to winning. Like the time Heinsohn told a great story about Bill Russell. Seems the Celtics were losing and Russell—who was playing the best of anyone—came into the huddle and asked, “What can I do better to help us win this game? How can I best help?”
These kind of stories are invaluable. To learn from people who have come before is essential and leaders must constantly be stressing that to the people they’re leading.
This is a lesson I learned as a kid. In high school and college I spent several summers at the Five Star basketball camp in Pennsylvania where, at an impressionable age, I was exposed to many coaches, most of whom gave talks to the campers. I saw how some were very good, and some weren’t so good, and it really had little to do with what they were talking about. It was their style. Jim Lynam, who went on to coach the Washington Bullets, was very good at doing the individual drills about which he was always speaking. He could still play and he used his basketball ability to his advantage. Marv Kessler was very funny. Hubie Brown, who later went on to coach both the Atlanta Hawks and the New York Knicks and is now a commentator on TNT, had an amazing presence. He used his voice and his presentation to command respect, injecting everything with a big dose of passion. If he sensed he was losing the kids’ attention he would stop and make them all stand up and stretch. He simply refused not to have people listen to him.
I saw how they all used these motivational strengths. So when my turn came to give a lecture I tried to use some of these same techniques, to incorporate them into my approach.
I had a basic fear of failure, so I would look at others who weren’t so successful. Why had they failed? What had they done wrong? Why did the kids seem to turn them off?
I also saw how willing all of the coaches at Five Star were to pass on their expertise, as if each one had a gift that they were happy to pass on. As though they all wanted the kids at the camp to both excel and to become part of the culture of basketball. It was as though somehow, some way, the camp had developed its own team ego, one that benefited everyone that came into contact with it.
That is the climate I’m trying to create around the Celtics, this feeling that the players can learn from those who made the journey before them. It’s the one lesson all great teams have to tell us. If you read about great teams, and the people who played for them, the two themes that connect all of them is 1) the team eventually became bigger than all the individuals who played for it, and 2) the players ultimately realized that playing for a great team was the best experience in their professional lives.
The 1998 New York Yankees are an example of that.
That was the great Yankee team that won an astounding 114 games during the regular season, culminating in a World Series title. But who was the star of that team? Was it Derek Jeter, the shortstop? Was it Bernie Williams, the center fielder? Was it pitchers David Wells and David Cone? Was it Paul O’Neill? Tino Martinez? Was it Scott Brosius, who had such a great World Series? Was manager Joe Torre the true star, somehow able to blend all these great talents into a cohesive unit, doing this in the toughest city to manage, in the unrelenting eye of the New York media? Who was the real star?
The answer?
None of them. Not really. A case can be made that none of them were even the best at their position in the American League that particular year. Yet they were integral parts of a great group, their individual talents blending together to form something so much greater than what they ever could have done individually.
That’s the lesson I’m trying to impart to my young Celtics team and it’s more difficult than you might think.
Why? Because I am just one voice.
One voice in a cacophony of voices, all of which essentially give out a different message. Think about it for a second. From advertising to popular culture, from families to friends, people are constantly being told to look out for themselves. This is difficult to battle against, for in a sense you always are swimming against the tide. Anything you can do to try and battle this onslaught is good.
For instance, the New Jersey Nets brought Anthony Robbins, a renowned motivational speaker, to speak to the Nets players. I found this to be very curious. How will the majority of today’s NBA players relate to Anthony Robbins? Cousy and Heinsohn, on the other hand, both were great players. They played on championship Celtic teams. They achieved what our players still hope to one day achieve. So even though they’re older and of a different generation, our players would be foolish not to listen to them, to learn from them.
That’s important.
Because I can’t be the only voice they ever hear. Eventually, people will simply get tired of listening to you and your voice will become little more than some whine they always hear in their sleep, some noise to be turned down. Eventually, people will tune you out. Especially young people, many of whom don’t listen very well anyway. Again, your gratification cannot come from having people hang on your every word. It comes from winning, from being successful, and especially from knowing you were able to help a group of people work together to achieve their best.
VEST PEOPLE IN THE PROCESS
One of the ways I built team ego at Providence College in the mid eighties was to convince the players that they were the hardest-working team in college basketball and to take tremendous pride in that.
I was inheriting a team with a poor record, a college program that had known little success since the Big East Conference had started six years earlier. Naturally, the players had a very low collective self-esteem. So it would have been ridiculous for me to come in with a little pep talk and tell them that things were fine, that all they had to do was maintain the status quo. That would surely have been a prelude to disaster. Nor could I tell them that we were going to rely on our natural ability, because by any standard of measure Providence was one of the least talented teams in the Big East.
My approach instead was to give them something they could cling to, something that could make them begin to feel good about themselves. That something was our work ethic. We were going to work harder than any other college basketball team in the country and that was going to be the badge we showed to the rest of the basketball world. We were going to ride our work ethic as far as it could possibly take us.
We did that. Now were we the hardest-working college basketball team in the country? Who knows. There are a lot of hard- working teams.
The point is we believed we were. That became our team ego. That became our source of pride and it totally changed our collective self-esteem. That team ego continued to grow as the season went on, was the reason we overachieved to the point that we eventually went to the Final Four, a complete turnaround from two years earlier.
At Kentucky, we had a different problem. The year we won the national championship we probably had too many talented players. The challenge then was not only to try to get them all playing time, but to convince the players that all of them would benefit by the team winning the national championship.
One of the ways we did this was to constantly praise—both publicly and privately—players for subordinating their individual interest for the sake of the team. Any time someone did this it was immediately recognized and reinforced. As a coaching staff, we never allowed this to take place without notice. Just the opposite. If I thought Antoine Walker, a sophomore at the time, had played unselfishly, even if he hadn’t scored a lot of points, I would publicly point this out and commend him. As a coaching staff, we constantly praised people who were sacrificing their individual goals for the collective goal of the group. And as we started to win, the momentum growing, this became easier.
Doing this in the workplace where you don’t have the potential of a winning headline for motivation is obviously more difficult. People have their own lives, their own families, and work is just part of their lives. Yet people spend a large part of their day in the workplace. They want to be successful. They want to be happy in the workplace. They want to feel fulfilled, that they are utilizing their full potential. They want to believe that all the hours they spend at work are worth it. They want to feel that they’re an important part of something great. It’s your job to help them get there.
Leaders must also show generosity. You can’t be frugal. You must find some way to share the wealth. For instance, when a CEO gets a five-million-dollar bonus he should immediately take one million of that and give it to the people who also should be rewarded for their contribution to the result that led to the bonus.
This does two things: It reinforces the notion that everyone benefits when the organization does well and it further develops team ego.
One of the things I did in the summer of 1998 was to get several members of my staff to lose weight as part of a physical fitness kick. We were coming out of the “lockout year,” a year in which our players had not reported to training camp in the best of shape and I wanted this year to be different. So by having our staff involved in physical fitness I figured not only would this raise their self-esteem, but also send a message to everyone that we, as an organization, were very concerned about fitness.
When they came back in September, ten of them had lost between twenty and thirty pounds, and I told them to keep it off until Christmas. At Christmas, I gave them them a hundred dollars for every pound they had lost. Nine of them collected.
Again, this is a small example of building team ego. It shows those members of my staff that I care about them as people, not just employees. It’s a subtle message to the players that we, as an organization, are committed to physical fitness; that we, as a group, are going to be in great shape. It contributes to team ego.
A leader must be generous with her wealth, with her time, with her listening, with her problem solving, with everything. To be a truly great leader you must give of yourself. You can’t be selfish. You must convey a vision of partnership, that you not only care about the people who work for you, but that it’s important they’re successful, too.
This concept of partnership can’t be stressed enough. It can’t just be about you, your career, your success. The people you are leading must know that they have a vested interest in the organization, that their careers are important, too; that they also will be rewarded for their hard work. I am very proud of the fact that eleven of my former assistant coaches went on to become head coaches. That was my vision for them.
Leaders must understand that they are being watched and evaluated by their employees, too. How you, as a leader, respond to your boss will often determine how your employees deal with you. How you take orders from your boss often will determine how people will take orders from you.
Case in point:
I take orders from Paul Gaston, the principle owner of the Celtics. He is my boss. Now if I bitch and moan and complain about Paul, the people I’m leading invariably will do the same thing with me. They invariably will follow my lead. If I take orders in a professional way, the odds are so will they. Jim O’Brien, one of my assistant coaches with the Celtics, sets an excellent example. He takes orders in a very positive way and this sets the tone for everyone else on the staff.
The people you’re leading will take their cues from you. If you are organized, they will tend to be organized. If you have a great work ethic, so will they. If you are positive and upbeat, those traits will be more prevalent in your workplace. You set the tone.
The mistake many executive make is that they believe that money solves all ills. If they pay their employees good salaries, they feel that’s enough and that everyone should be satisfied.
Not so.
In his book 1001 Ways to Reward Employees, Bob Nelson explains that money isn’t everything to employees; that few management concepts are as solidly rooted as the one that says positive reinforcement—rewarding behavior you want repeated—works. In fact, in today’s business climate, rewards and recognition are more important than ever.
“Studies indicate that employees find personal recognition more motivational than money,” Nelson writes. There are many ways to do this, certainly, but one rule is standard: These programs should be highly public, whether it’s giving out rewards or something as easy as writing a thank-you memo.
I long ago learned that publicly acknowledging the people who don’t get a lot of the limelight does wonders for team morale. You must make these people know you not only are aware of their efforts, you appreciate them. No team can be successful without the people who come and work hard every day in practice, yet don’t get much playing time in the games. No group can be successful without the input from the myriad number of behind-the-scenes people, the support staff that often makes organizations work. These people must be publicly recognized and rewarded for their efforts in front of their peers. You can do this at meetings or at business functions by simply stating their names and contributions and a heartfelt thank you. The action is simple, but the employees’ gratitude will be profound.
These awards, Nelson contends, should be both informal and formal. He also says that simply asking for employee input is a motivational tool. He makes four references to companies who go out of their way to single out outstanding employees, whether it was employees at Apple Computer who worked on the first Macintosh who had their names listed on the inside of the computer; to the city of Philadelphia, which used an electronic message board on the side of a city skyscraper to honor the head of the local school system; to Mary Kay Cosmetics, which gives flowers to all secretaries during Secretaries’ Week. Nelson also writes about the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, which, polling its employees, discovered that 68 percent of the respondents said it was important to realize their work was appreciated by others.
You can’t overlook this. You must always be trying to reaffirm the belief that the group is significant. For if it’s perceived not to be, then why should someone have any real allegiance to it?
One thing we do at the Celtics is show a video before all our home games as part of our pregame introductions. It’s a quick, capsule summary of the franchise’s great history, a montage of images flashed before the crowd in a darkened arena. And, sure, it’s for our fans, a brief reminder of the Celtics’ great history, as are the championship banners that hang in the rafters, the tradition we want our fans to hook up to as soon as they enter the FleetCenter. It’s also for our players, too, a nightly reminder that they’re part of something important, something that transcends them as individuals. And though it’s safe to say that many of our current players couldn’t tell you much about the specifics of the Celtics’ history, the inherent message is: You’re not just playing for any NBA franchise; you’re playing for one of the greatest franchises in the history of sports.
You see this all the time in sports.
The Purple People Eaters of the old Minnesota Vikings, the Steel Curtain of the old Pittsburgh Steelers, the Dallas Cowboys and their America’s Team image; these nicknames ultimately began to take on a life of their own, an identity, and the players were obviously taking great pride in them. These are all examples of team ego, the particular group being more significant than the individual players.
So many of the great sports teams have this, whether it’s the storied college basketball programs of North Carolina, UCLA, Duke, and Kentucky or other sports legends like the New York Yankees and Montreal Canadiens; this feeling that the players come and go, but the organization lives on forever, greater than all the individuals can ever be. It’s what all the great organizations have, from Coca-Cola and IBM to Disney.
And while it obviously takes years to acquire this kind of status, there are little things you can do to help speed up the process. It can be the uniforms. It can be the locker room. It can be the training table. It can be how well lit the parking lot is. How the quality of the food in the cafeteria is. How clean the restrooms are. It can be ergonomic furniture. It can be the presence of new technology on every desk. It can be a good rug on the floor instead of a cheap carpet. It can be anything that shows people that the workplace is first class, designed to make their work lives better.
All these things send out messages to the people you are leading, even if some of them are subtle. Not only must the workplace be some place people want to come to, but everything also must be geared to creating an environment that’s the essence of professionalism, a place where success can flourish.
That’s what the Celtics had in the era in which Bill Russell played, the very real sense that the players were a part of something far greater than themselves, part of a wonderful history that was documented in all those championship banners hanging from the rafters. That was the essence of Russell’s speech to my team back in the winter of 1999, the key ingredient in what the Celtics had been able to accomplish during those glory days.
CREATE AN UNSELFISH TEAM
I was once brought into a Wall Street firm to speak to a select group of their employees, fourteen in all. These fourteen people were all achievers, the best salespeople in the firm. They all made big money for the firm. But there was a problem:
They all, in their own ways, belittled other people in the firm. They either put them down or showed in other ways that they didn’t respect them, to the point that it had become a problem to the firm, extremely disruptive and counterproductive.
The first thing I did was ask them two questions:
Are you ever cynical?
Are you ever moody?
And you know what the response was? All fourteen of them said no. Not only did they fail to admit their behavior, they didn’t even think they were exhibiting these negative qualities.
This is not surprising. Many people, when told that their attitude in the workplace is destructive, will not believe it, especially if they’re achievers. They don’t see any connection between the two.
I had one Celtic employee who was infamous for treating people poorly. Everyone had difficulties with him, yet when I confronted him with this he was flabbergasted. He even countered by saying that dealing with people was one of his strengths.
You must understand, therefore, that not only will some people refuse to admit their weaknesses, often they don’t even know they have them.
After the Wall Street guys had said that, in their minds, they weren’t cynical and they didn’t belittle people, I asked them two more questions:
What are you doing to make the people around you better?
What are you doing to make your team better?
None of them had any answers.
“That’s your biggest weakness,” I told them. “You don’t recognize team potential. You think that as long as you’re doing great, you’re producing, things are fine. You are the equivalent of the basketball player who feels good about himself when he scores twenty-five points, even if the team loses.”
It’s my constant message to my team: The true mark of greatness is making the people around you better, elevating them.
Those are the people in sports that we remember as greats. It’s not the ones with the great individual achievements as much as those who were able to lead their teams to great victories. According to countless magazine articles and several books, both Bird and Jordan did it through the fear factor. They both worked so hard and wanted to win so much that they had no tolerance for others they perceived not to want to win badly enough. They would ridicule teammates in practice who they didn’t feel were working hard enough, producing enough. They would attack them publicly, as well as privately, until those teammates changed. You couldn’t be selfish around Bird or Jordan. Nor could you coast. They simply wouldn’t let you.
Russell did it a different way.
He was so team-oriented it rubbed off on everyone around him. Here was the most dominant player in the game, but he was clearly oblivious to personal statistics. There’s a great story about the famous playoff game against Philadelphia in the sixties, the one in which John Havlicek stole the in-bounds pass in the game’s dying seconds to preserve the Celtics’ victory, one of the prized moments in Celtics history. What’s largely been forgotten is that Russell’s in-bounds pass had hit one of the guide wires right before that, giving Philadelphia the ball back.
As the story goes, Russell came back to the huddle after the ill-fated pass and said to his teammates, “If you guys don’t bail me out, I’m going to be the goat of this game. You guys have to bail me out.”
He understood they were all in it together, that they needed one another.
Another great Russell story is the time he bet Wilt Chamberlain that he was going to average twenty points in the upcoming season, a bet that started when Chamberlain chided him that averaging twenty points was the barometer. Russell countered by saying he could average anything he wanted.
But a funny thing happened. When training camp started, Russell realized that, sure, he could average twenty points for the year and win the bet, but to do so would make the Celtics a worse team. He realized the Celtics had enough scorers, and if he tried to score more it would only upset the team’s chemistry. So Russell went the other way that year. He scored less and the Celtics won another NBA championship.
However they did it, though, Bird, Jordan, and Russell all understood team ego.
My Kentucky team understood this in 1996, the year we won the national championship.
But it took a while for them to learn it.
That was an incredibly talented college team, one I feel that, defensively, was one of the best in college basketball in the past twenty-five years. Eight players on that team eventually went on to play in the NBA. The problem for me, then, was how to keep them all happy in an age when so many young players are so stats-conscious, so individually driven? How do you get people to subordinate their individual agendas when they all had big goals and dreams?
In the middle of the year, even though we were winning, I could sense the problems starting. Whether it was the body language after the games or the attitude in practice, I knew there were too many guys getting down because of their poor individual stats or thinking they were playing too few minutes. So we had a meeting.
“I can’t, in any way, satisfy your egos,” I told them. “I don’t have enough basketballs. I don’t have enough minutes. I don’t have enough stats. I don’t have enough of the things that make you happy. I can’t satisfy your egos, but I can satisfy your dreams. Whether that’s to play in the NBA or win a national championship. And if you win the national championship you will get your individual reputations. In the end you will be judged by winning.”
At that point Antoine Walker got up to speak. He was a sophomore at the time.
“Everyone knows I’m the most selfish guy on this team,” he said. “But I don’t want this to go the other way. I will do anything to make this team win.”
After that meeting, our common goal was simple: We would say things to help one another. We would do things to help one another.
That was the day we found team ego, as we left that meeting one step closer to the national championship.
And without team ego you cannot win.
This is the message I’m forever giving to my Celtics team, the same one I gave to those fourteen Wall Street hotshots: You all have the money, so now what? What do you do next?
The answer is to strive for greatness.
I point out to them that no one really remembers the great basketball players of the past that did not win championships. No one talks about Elvin Hayes and Bob McAdoo, who certainly were great players. They talk about the people who won.
In the 1999 season my Celtics team was the antithesis of team ego. We were governed by individual ego, so when we had adversity we resorted to the things individuals do when they have little invested in the group. The players blamed one another. They complained that not enough plays were being run for them. We had guy who complained about the kind of warm-up drills we ran.
Groups with strong group ego don’t do that.
Which is why they have a chance to win.
One of the things I did this past year was to get pictures of former NBA greats to put on the walls of the locker room. Not pictures of these players in their prime, but as they are now. The message to my players? These guys are you in twenty-five or thirty years. They are remembered because they won. That’s their slice of immortality. Not how much money they made as individuals, not how many points they scored, but that they won.
For in the end you are judged by winning.
Nothing more.
Your job as a leader is to constantly reinforce that.
KEY CHAPTER POINTS
• Grounding Your Team in a Group Culture This is the toughest job you have to do as a leader, especially in this age of rampant individualism. But this is what all the great organizations have accomplished.
• Vest People in the Process People have to know that they are an integral part of the group and that their success and the group’s success is one and the same.
• Create an Unselfish Team People must be made to understand that true greatness is not only being productive yourself, but elevating the people around you, making them better.