The NBA's Miami Heat had lofty expectations for success at the start of the 2010 season. During the off-season, the team added superstar players LeBron James and Chris Bosh to join the superstar they already had in Dywane Wade. The three superstars were introduced with great fanfare (including fireworks) at a press conference attended by literally thousands of fans. A journalist asked James how many NBA titles the team was going to win, and he famously replied, "Not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven..." The crowd loved it. Unfortunately, the reality was very different. With James, Bosh, and Wade leading the way, the Heat ended up winning only two titles (2012 and 2013) in their so-called "Big Three Era" from 2010-2014, losing twice in the NBA Finals at the end of the 2011 and 2014 seasons. Following the 2014 season, LeBron James opted out of the final year of his contract and returned to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers, breaking up the "Big Three" for good.
Why did the "Big Three" fail to meet expectations? Can you really say that a team "underperformed" if they won their conference four years in a row and played in four consecutive NBA Finals? Perhaps not, but when you consider LeBron's own prediction of multiple (he didn't stop after saying "seven titles") titles, the team clearly didn't even meet their own expectations for success. The team famously struggled during their first season together, and while they won their conference, they eventually lost to the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals. During the off-season following that first "disappointing" year, the Heat added another key component that helped them find success the next two seasons. Did they go out and sign another superstar free agent? Not really.
As Adam Grant tells the story in his podcast "The Problem with All-Stars", the Heat went out and signed a solid player who was primarily known as a role player. As I mentioned in a previous post ("I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven"), most, if not all successful championship caliber teams have a mix of highly talented players and at least one role player. As one coach put it, "The role player shuns the glory of attention, praise, and impressive statistics for the sake of the team. In doing this, the role player revels in another kind of glory." The role player's "glory" is the team's success.
We've often heard the term, "glue guy" (or "glue gal") to describe these role players. These are the individuals who never put up big stats, and the highest number in their box score is usually "minutes played". They are the quintessential "team players". The Miami Heat signed Shane Battier that off-season, and Battier played that important role as a "role player" during the next two seasons when the Heat won back-to-back NBA titles. Of course, Battier was named the "NBA Teammate of the Year" after the 2013-2014 season. Michael Lewis wrote a feature on Battier that appeared in The New York Times Magazine that perfectly encapsulates the sentiment here, "The No-Stats All-Star". The tagline for the article is even better, "His greatness is not marked in box scores or at slam-dunk contests, but on the court Shane Battier makes his team better, often much better, and his opponents worse, often much worse."
As it turns out, the evidence from a number of studies and/or anecdotal experiences in a variety of settings is very conclusive - teams composed principally of superstars almost always fail to meet expectations. It's often called the "Too Much Talent Effect" and has been observed both in sports and business. In fact, there's a curvilinear relationship between the number of superstars on a team and performance. For example, investment firms on Wall Street typically perform better as the number of talented individuals on the team increases, but only up to a point (see "Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth"). Up to that point the marginal benefit of adding more superstars to the mix actually decreases and then performance falls abruptly. Similar results have been found both in basketball and football (soccer) - see the graphs below from Adam Grant's blog:
So, what is the "secret sauce" for role players ("glue guys" and "glue gals")? Again, these individuals understand that their role, whatever it is, is just as important to the overall success of the team, even if it by assuming that role they sacrifice some (or all) of their own personal success. More simply stated, the "secret sauce" is humility. As Adam Grant suggests, "Humility isn't having a low opinion of yourself. One of its Latin roots means "from the earth." It's about being grounded. So humility doesn't require you to only do the grunt work. It's about realizing you're not above doing whatever the team needs."
One of Battier's coaches once called him "the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he has ever seen…helping the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his own personal interests." Players like Shane Battier also make everyone else better through a characteristic that psychologists now call moral elevation. Moral elevation is a positive emotion experienced when witnessing a an act or behavior that improves the welfare and/or wellbeing of others. On the basketball court, whenever his teammates watched Battier play unselfishly by passing the ball to an open player rather than taking the shot himself, they would model his behavior and play just as unselfishly. Moral elevation, just like humility, is contagious!
If you don't have at least one Shane Battier type on your team, then you are missing out. How do you identify these kinds of individuals? Sara Eshelman, writing for Medium, says that these individuals are, by definition, hard to identify. However, as a group these individuals are more likely to:
1. Have atypically long tenures
2. Tend to work with and move around with people they know (and who know their value)
3. Have a strikingly positive outlook
4. Hold job descriptions that may seem vague and unremarkable on the surface, but references sing their praises
5. "Just make work better" for everyone around them
6. Have a track record of doing work that is both way above and way below their pay grade, from re-ordering coffee pods to exploring new business opportunities; They just somehow figure it out.
I will end with one of my favorite quotes (which has appeared on this blog before actually). Legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne once said, "The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. As a coach, I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven." Rockne undoubtedly had his share of superstars on his team, but most importantly, he had his "glue guys" too.
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