Extreme Dreams Depend on Teams by Pat Williams

Title:  Extreme Dreams Depend on Teams
Author: Pat Williams
Publisher: Center Street
Genre: Business; Motivational
Language: English
Purchase at Amazon

Teamwork has been one of the great themes of my life for as long as I can remember. As a boy and as a man, as a team player or a team-builder, I’ve spent the vast majority of my years living by the principles of teamwork.

My dad gave me my first baseball glove when I was three and took me to my first major-league baseball game when I was seven. Dad, my sister Carol, and I sat in the stands at Philadelphia’s historic Shibe Park, scarfing hot dogs and cheering our throats raw during a Philadelphia Athletics–Cleveland Indians doubleheader. It was a glorious day, and I was hooked for life on the joyous mystique of teamwork.

When I was twelve, I played on my first baseball team. I loved the sense of comradeship, the giving and receiving of encouragement, the joy of victory, the shared consolation of defeat, the sense of belonging, and the pride of realizing, We’re a team! I’ve been involved with team sports nearly every day of my life since then. That’s more than half a century of teamwork experience, from elementary school to junior high to high school to college to the pros.

I’ve learned that every important accomplishment in life involves teamwork. The same principles that apply to team sports also apply in the corporate environment, government, the military, the religious world, and in families. As a dad, I helped raise four birth kids and fourteen kids by international adoption, so I was putting teams together every single day to keep our busy household functioning smoothly.

Teamwork is essential to our security and national defense. In Creating a Culture of Success, Charles Dygert and Richard Jacobs observe:

The United States military, in conjunction with its coalition forces throughout the world, emphasizes the importance of teamwork among its various branches. As we watched daily television war briefings by General Brooks on the war in Iraq in 2003, we noticed that he always attributed successes to the “people,” not to the technology. He acknowledged that the technology was the best in the world, but emphasized that it was people working together that made the technology effective.1

The medical staff of a hospital is also a team. The principles of teamwork are essential to a high-performing, effective lifesaving operation. Business writer William A. Cohen, PhD, offers this insight in Secrets of Special Ops Leadership:

Peter Drucker found an interesting phenomenon in investigating the procedures in a well-run hospital. Doctors, nurses, x-ray technicians, pharmacologists, pathologists, and other health care practitioners all worked together to accomplish a single object. Frequently he saw several working on the same patient under emergency conditions. Seconds counted. Even a minor slip could prove fatal. Yet, with a minimum amount of conscious command or control by any one individual, these medical teams worked together toward a common end and followed a common plan of action under the overall direction of a doctor.2

A business is a team—or should be. This is true whether the business is Microsoft or General Electric or Kelly’s Korner Koffeeshop. I have given thousands of speeches to corporate meetings and business conventions, and the number one subject I’m asked to speak on is teamwork. Whenever people come together to achieve a vision, their first priority must be to function as a team.

We Were Made for Teamwork

Why do teams exist? Answer: teams exist to enable people to work together and achieve high goals that would be out of reach for individuals working separately. Teamwork multiplies abilities and strengths. Teamwork enables individuals to complement one another and compensate for one other’s lacks and weaknesses. In the first Rocky film (1976), boxer Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) has a conversation with Paulie, the brother of Rocky’s girlfriend, Adrian.

“You like her?” asks Paulie.

“Sure, I like her,” Rocky says.

“What’s the attraction?”

“I dunno. She fills gaps.”

“What’s ‘gaps’?”

Rocky says, “She’s got gaps, I got gaps. Together we fill gaps.”3

That’s why we have teams. Teamwork fills gaps.

Phil Jackson, head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, is known for his mystical approach to basketball. Before leading a team into the playoffs, he gathers his players and reads from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Law of the Jungle”:

Now this is the Law of the Jungle—
as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk
the Law runneth forward and back—
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.4

As a forward for the U.S. women’s national soccer team, Mia Hamm scored more international-competition goals than any other player, male or female, in the history of the game. She helped win a Women’s World Cup championship in 1999 and was named Women’s World Player of the Year in 2001 and 2002 by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Her teamwork philosophy is simple:

Soccer is not an individual sport. I don’t score all the goals, and the ones I do score are usually the product of a team effort. I don’t keep the ball out of the back of the net on the other end of the field. I don’t plan our game tactics. I don’t wash our training gear (okay, sometimes I do), and I don’t make our airline reservations. I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team. I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.5

Aren’t there sports involving solo achievements—one person competing for individual glory without a team? What about racing cyclist Lance Armstrong? It’s true that Armstrong’s seven consecutive Tour de France victories (1999 to 2005) constitute a stunning personal achievement. But few people realize that Armstrong’s extreme accomplishment is truly a team accomplishment. While Armstrong is the star of the show, he could not achieve victory without his team.

Armstrong was coached by elite cyclist Chris Carmichael, Italian cycling coach Michele Ferrari, and Belgian cycling pro Johan Bruyneel. He has an aerodynamicist who tests his equipment and advises him on the best gear to wear during time trials. A radio headset in his helmet keeps him in contact with his team manager. In every race, he uses three different bikes—for time trials, for racing on the flats, and for mountain racing. His personal mechanic keeps all three precisely tuned to his preferences.

Armstrong’s racing team consists of nine cyclists. The other eight cyclists support Lance’s strategy and control the tempo of the race. They work much like an offensive line in football, blocking and protecting the quarterback so he can make plays. In It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, Armstrong observed,

Cycling is an intricate, highly politicized sport, and it’s far more of a team sport than the spectator realizes. . . . On any team, each rider has a job, and is responsible for a specific part of the race. The slower riders are called domestiques—servants—because they do the less glamorous work of “pulling” up hills (“pulling” is cycling lingo for blocking the wind for the other riders) and protecting their team leader through the various perils of a stage race. The team leader is the principal cyclist, the rider most capable of sprinting to a finish with 150 miles in his legs.6

Armstrong says there is a subtle form of teamwork that takes place even between opposing cyclists in the pack (which, in bike-racing terms, is called the peloton):

To the spectator [the peloton] seems like a radiant blur, humming as it goes by, but that colorful blur is rife with contact, the clashing of handlebars, elbows, and knees, and it’s full of international intrigues and deals. The speed of the peloton varies. Sometimes it moves at 20 miles an hour, the riders pedaling slow and chatting. Other times, the group is spanned out across the road and we’re going 40 miles an hour. Within the peloton, there are constant negotiations between competing riders: pull me today, and I’ll pull you tomorrow. Give an inch, make a friend. You don’t make deals that compromise yourself or your team, of course, but you help other riders if you can, so they might return the favor.7

Human beings are designed for teamwork. We have a deep need to achieve extreme dreams through people. Coach Mike Krzyzewski has led his Duke Blue Devils basketball team to three NCAA Championships, ten Final Fours, and ten ACC Championships. “People want to be on a team,” Coach K once said. “They want to be part of something bigger than themselves. They want to be in a situation where they feel that they are doing something for the greater good.”8

As head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, Pat Riley won back-to-back NBA Championships (1987 and 1988). In 1990, he briefly retired and became a TV sports commentator for NBC. The following year, he took a coaching position with the New York Knicks. In an interview with Dave Anderson of the New York Times, Riley explained why he couldn’t stay at NBC—and why he couldn’t stay away from coaching.

“After the studio show each week,” Riley said, “I’d walk out of NBC alone. I’d get in a cab alone. I’d take a flight back to California alone, then the next weekend I’d get on a flight to New York and come back alone. After you’ve been around a team for thirty years, it’s hard being alone like that.” Anderson concluded, “Happiness for Pat Riley is coaching an NBA team again.”9 What’s true for Pat Riley is true for us all: we were designed to be part of a team, and we are not happy living and working alone.

Even in as highly individual a sport as tennis, people long to be part of a team. Czech-born Martina Navratilova is the former number one women’s tennis player in the world. “I like playing on a team,” she once said. “That’s why I like playing doubles because I like to talk to my teammate, to my partner. I hate being all alone on the court, because when you talk to yourself it’s kind of strange. But I love being on a team. It’s fun to get that support from your teammates and also to give it, try to figure out what they can and cannot do, and yelling on the sideline.”10

Debbie Miller-Palmore is an Olympic athlete, a former women’s pro basketball player, and the founder of Top of the Key, an organization devoted to developing the athletic, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of athletes and coaches through basketball camps, clinics, and seminars. “Even when you’ve played the game of your life,” she once said, “it’s the feeling of teamwork that you’ll remember. You’ll forget the plays, the shots, and the scores, but you’ll never forget your teammates.”11

When I was the general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers, I thought that if I could only earn an NBA Championship ring, I’d be riding on a cloud for the rest of my life. When it happened, it was truly as thrilling as I thought it would be—for a while. But the thrill of victory soon wore off. I have a championship ring—but I never wear it. I put that ring in a drawer a long time ago and haven’t looked at it in years.

So what do I think about when I remember that championship season? I remember the team experiences, the complex challenge of assembling a team like pieces on a chessboard, the joy of watching everything click, the games, the screaming fans, the camaraderie with the players in the locker room. I remember all of it like it was yesterday. I remember it vividly because I was a team-builder—
And I was a part of a team.

When Is a Team a Team?

Extreme dreams come true when the right combination of talent, character, attitude, discipline, and hard work coalesce into a genuine team. A great team is an ever-changing puzzle assembled out of moving parts that function together in complex, unpredictable ways. Team-building requires an enormous depth of insight, skill, patience, and a fortunate break or two.

At the heart of teamwork is a concept everybody talks about but few understand. That concept is called synergy. The word comes from the Greek sunergos, meaning “working together,” from sun (“together”) and ergon (“work”). Synergy could be defined as the interaction between two or more individuals in such a way that their combined effectiveness exceeds the sum of their individual abilities and strengths. In The Winner Within, Pat Riley writes about synergistic power of teamwork:

Teamwork is the essence of life.

If there’s one thing on which I am an authority, it’s how to blend the talents and strengths of individuals into a force that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. My driving belief is this: great teamwork is the only way to reach our ultimate moments, to create breakthroughs that define our careers, to fulfill our lives with a sense of lasting significance. . . .

When our teams excel, we win. Our best efforts, combined with those of our teammates, grow into something far greater and far more satisfying than anything we could have achieved on our own. Teams make us part of something that matters.12

Pat Riley is talking about that mystical conjunction called synergy.

I’ve seen situations (and you’ve seen them too) where a manager or professor or pastor puts people in a room, assigns them a task, and says, “You’re a team.” Of course, they are not a team—not yet. They may be a committee, but they lack the magical synergistic something that makes them a true team.

Many organizations claim to believe in teamwork. Few have actually learned what a team is or how to assemble one. You can go to Pep Boys, buy fifty thousand dollars’ worth of car parts, take them home, and dump them out in your driveway. But that’s not a car. That’s just a collection of parts. To be a car, those parts have to be the right parts, they have to complement one another, and they have to be properly assembled.

The same is true of a team.

When you truly have a team and not just a committee, you know it. Why? Because of synergy. When your team is functioning as a team, it will achieve greater things than all your individual team-members could achieve separately. Your team will function cohesively, think creatively, and exceed all expectations.

The Invisible Hand

You can start any great enterprise with a team of two. In 1986, the organization we know today as the Orlando Magic consisted of just two people: Jimmy Hewitt and Pat Williams. We had an extreme dream of an NBA franchise in central Florida. We were passionate about that dream, and we quickly recruited others to join our team. Today, the Magic is an enterprise employing hundreds of people, contributing millions of dollars to the central Florida economy. Don’t be afraid to start small and dream big. Start with the most basic unit of teamwork: two. Put two people together, apply the lessons and principles of teamwork in this book—and when you need to grow your team, recruit more players.
In 1958, educator Leonard E. Read published an essay entitled “I, Pencil.” The essay is written from the first-person perspective of a pencil. The essay begins:

I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write. . . .

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe. . . . I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.13

You might think, Is that true? No person on earth knows how to make a pencil? Then how are pencils produced by the billions every year? Answer: the “simple” pencil is constructed of so many different components: wood, graphite, glue, lacquer, metal, and more—that it can be made only by teamwork.

You probably didn’t know that the metal ring that holds the eraser is called the ferrule. It’s made of brass (an alloy of copper and zinc), usually accented with rings of black nickel. How is the brass ferrule formed? How is the black nickel applied? How is the ferrule secured to the end of the pencil? These are all areas of individual expertise.

And what about the eraser? What is it made of? You’d probably say, “Rubber.” Well, the rubber in an eraser is merely a binding agent; rubber does not have erasing properties of its own. The actual erasing agent is an ingredient called factice, which is made by a process of reacting canola oil with sulfur chloride.

The components of a pencil come from all over the world and require thousands of people with many specialized skills to bring those components together to form a pencil. The straight-grain cedar comes from northern California and Oregon. It is harvested by loggers, cut by mill workers, and shipped by railroad workers. The wood is cut into small pencil-length slats, kiln-dried, and tinted. It is grooved and sandwiched with graphite that was mined in Ceylon and mixed with clay from Mississippi and candelilla wax from Mexico. And the story of the pencil goes on and on in fascinating detail.

No one, not even the president of the pencil company, understands all the processes required to make one simple pencil. Somehow, all of these thousands of people contribute something irreplaceable to the process. The pencil is fashioned by teamwork.

The author of the essay, Leonard Read, adds that that there is no “master mind” directing the process. No one forces any of the people in the process to do his or her job. “Instead,” he says, “we find the Invisible Hand at work.” What is that Invisible Hand? It is the mysterious power of synergy.14

Without teamwork, there is no pencil.

And without synergy, there is no teamwork.

No Dream Is Too Extreme

In Walt Disney’s 1940 motion picture Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Cliff Edwards) sang these words: “If your heart is in your dream / No request is too extreme.”15 No dream of the future is too extreme to reach for, work for, and build for. What about a dream of a world beyond war and racism and hate? An extreme dream—but not too extreme. Why not dream it, assemble a team, and make it happen?

What about a dream of a world beyond cancer, AIDS, and other diseases? Or a dream of solving our energy and environmental problems? Or a dream of making the world safe for children—where no child in the world would ever go to bed hungry, or homeless, or physically or sexually abused? Dream it, my friend, then assemble a team and do it!

Or what about a dream of colonizing Mars, mining the asteroids, and moving out to the stars? Why shouldn’t we? Aim high, dream far! Then make it so!

Teamwork is the ideal environment for solving human problems. Super Bowl champion and college football coach Bill Curry talks about a teamwork phenomenon he calls “the miracle of the huddle,” which transcends all differences, erases all distinctions, and bonds people together in a tightly knit brotherhood or sisterhood of teamwork. Curry describes it this way: “The most important thing about sports is the miracle of the huddle. Players of all races, nationalities, religions, backgrounds, and creeds come together as one to accomplish a common goal as a team.”16

And because teamwork transcends all our petty differences and teaches us to work together for the benefit of all, teamwork is the ideal means of solving all the problems that plague our race and our planet. Individually, we can accomplish next to nothing. But working as a team, there’s nothing we can’t achieve—
And no dream is too extreme.