Coaching the championship team
Dan Murphy, August 6 2023
Don't forget to enjoy the ride
You’ve likely heard the two most common caricatures of a business: “This business is a family.” and “This business is a championship team.”
Who knows, maybe your business is a championship team and a family!
Hopefully you already know why a business is not a family. You don’t fire people from your family. Your company doesn’t love you. You (usually) don’t choose who is in your family.
On the other hand, thinking of a business as a championship team does resonate with me, although perhaps not for the reasons that are often discussed when this comparison is made.
Perhaps the original proponent of the championship team metaphor is the CEO of ZoomInfo, Henry Shuck. To hear the metaphor firsthand you can listen to Henry describe the email he sent to his employees after the company went public (skip to four minutes into the interview).
Here are a few quotes that should give you a sense of how he thinks about running his team:
Not everybody is cut out for a championship team.
Every year they (the team with low expectations and standards) show up and they play the game and they’re never in the hunt for a championship title. And they never show up expecting to be in the hunt for the championship title.
And then there are other teams … who every year, year in and year out, are focused on building a championship team. And those teams just operate differently.
And someone can be really successful on the Pirates (team with low expectations and standards) and they’re never gonna make it on the Boston Red Sox¹ (team with high expectations and standards).
If you feel like it’s hard and … you don’t want to give the discretionary effort … there are lots of Pittsburgh Pirates out there that you could go and have a really comfortable existence at and not feel this every day drive to be the best, to win a championship. And Pittsburgh Pirates are good people!
Do you want the pressure and the performance management that comes along with winning a championship?
There is an expectation for perfection or near-perfection.
Netflix is another high profile example of this kind of culture, where CEO Reed Hastings said “adequate performance gets a generous severance package”. Translation: only the best of the best are kept onboard here.
Race to the bottom
For the most part I agree with these sentiments.
Coming to a team with impeccably high standards from anything else is inspiring. You see the amazing people around you, the great work being done, and you want to be a part of that. You want to contribute at the highest level you can.
On the other hand, when the standards and expectations are low there is a race to the bottom mentality.
The prevailing sentiment is something like how little can I do and still get by? How little effort can I put into what I’m working on? Person X puts in the bare minimum, why can’t I?
Obviously this isn’t good for the company, and may lead to its eventual failure.
And at the individual level the consequence of this ethos is that there will be people who genuinely want to do their best work, who want to be surrounded by great people and high standards, and they will eventually leave the proverbial Pittsburgh Pirates in order to escape the race to the bottom.
If you want to be your best it feels stifling.
Race to misery
But if you’re not careful the high standards and expectations of the championship team mindset can also feel stifling.
The problem is when the narrative of being part of a championship team casts things in a Spartan kind of light, where the focus is on the difficulty of meeting high standards and how painful the process is.
There is much mention of how hard things are and how high the bar is, but scant effort to actually bond a team of people together in a way that is invigorating for those involved.
As a contrast, listen to some of the great championship coaches of the modern era: Gregg Popovich, Steve Kerr, Pete Carroll, Phil Jackson.
They all lead with an awareness of the fact that things like fun, happiness, kindness, friendship, and humility can be powerful drivers of a culture with high standards, high expectations, and a strong work ethic.
It’s not that I think leaders like Henry Shuck don’t value things like fun, happiness, kindness and humility. It’s that they don’t emphasize those things in their message alongside all of the painful stuff, which ends up detracting from the very ethos they’re trying to create.
Don’t get me wrong, professional sports are not reflective of the typical work environment. People are literally playing a game for a living. And so perhaps something like having fun is naturally more a point of emphasis in that environment.
But even so, consider how Steve Kerr, one of the most successful and competitive figures in NBA history talks about leading his team. He has repeatedly stated that his four core values as a person, coach and player are joy, mindfulness, compassion, and competition.
Consider how he responded when asked what was important to him as a leader in the interviews linked above:
The coaching staff having compassion for the players, knowing how hard their job is.
It’s important for the players to know that we don’t think their job is easy.
It’s also really important for the team to have compassion for each other.
Every player is different. MJ is so much better than the rest of the team, he may not see the game the way that I did as the 8th man on the Bulls back in the day. And I can’t imagine the pressure he is under as the superstar asked to carry the team. Compassion between team members is critical, acknowledging that everyone has different pressures on them.
Mindfulness and gratitude: It makes coming to work every day more fun.
Joy … is really critical. No matter what age you are or what level. I always thought I played better if I was enjoying it. If the team was having a good time and enjoying the process those also tended to be the best teams I was on.
Authenticity - you have to be yourself.
All the while, he’s not deluding himself about being in a competitive situation:
We’re in the business to try to win. I had to win. If you’re not competitive it’s going to be really hard to be successful.
We do everything we can to maintain competition.
Even in practice - someone’s going to win and someone’s going to lose.
I was really hard on myself as an athlete, as a player.
Getting traded, getting cut. You could develop these beautiful relationships with players and the next second they’re gone. You understand that, it’s important to acknowledge that right away.
Contrasting styles
Comparing Shuck and Kerr you see two very different attitudes and points of emphasis in confronting similar operational realities. Both are in highly competitive environments. Both need to set extremely high standards for performance. Both need to remove people from the team when they’re not contributing in the way needed.
But who do you want to play for? Who would you give more effort for?
To state the obvious, I’m being quite unfair to Henry Shuck. I’ve never met the guy. He very well may be a joy to work with. But if I’m going off of only what he says, only how he communicates his vision… it’s all so grim!
Organizations that emphasize only the high standards without an equally strong focus on bringing people together in an enjoyable way do themselves a disservice.
Much like the Pittsburgh Pirates culture, it feels stifling, although for a different reason: you expend the time and effort necessary to produce exceptional results, but never feel much of a personal connection to the people or organization.
Eventually you don’t want to be a part of the team, championship caliber standards be damned.
The great tragedy is that such a culture takes what could be an enriching life experience - having fun being a part of a close knit and high performing team - and turns it into some kind of masochistic badge of honor.
We spend a lot of our lives at work. Enjoying that time is important, and while enjoyment alone is no guarantee of success it does help to keep everyone bought into doing their best.
When you hear Steve Kerr speak it’s obvious he cares about the people in his organization. It’s obvious he enjoys what he does. And it’s no accident those things stand out as obvious. Kerr intentionally brings those values front and center when he leads, even during difficult times².
That’s how you coach the championship team.
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Footnotes
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Ironically, one of the most famous championship teams in the history of sports, the 2004 Red Sox (those same Boston Red Sox touted by Henry Shuck), was famed for its carefree, fun-loving culture.
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When discussing his coaching during a 9 game losing streak in the middle of a disastrous season Kerr doubles down: “It’s almost more important through the losing to continue to do these things. Because now they know it’s real, it’s not just a reward for winning. It’s genuinely who we are. We want them to feel good about coming to work every day.”