Learning to 'Give Parts of You' to Win
Your talent and skills only seem like that they are enough to succeed
Michael Jordan is one of the most revered athletes of our time for his showmanship, high-level productivity, consistency, competitiveness and winning: especially the winning.
It is his legacy. He was a dominant force in sports, culture and business, having worked and strategized himself into becoming a billionaire.
Despite winning in college, Jordan had to struggle to learn that what he could do as an individual, as magnificent as it was, was alone, insufficient for team success. Jordan had to discover what it took to be collectively successful.
The understanding didn’t come quickly or easily.
He said in an interview that early in his career, he was all about the focus and intensity of working on his craft, improving his skills and building new ones, getting better constantly and moving towards becoming individually great.
Jordan clearly separated himself from the rest of his peers in that regard, to the point where older men, old men even, women too, speak of him with respect and awe.
He certainly worked that plan to perfection and reached the mountaintop of his profession and then stayed there, above everyone, as an individual and eventually as a leader.
Jordan came to the understanding that he had to sacrifice some time and focus on his personal greatness to be more as a person and teammate to achieve what he yearned for and was pursuing: collective success and then, collective greatness.
"But to win,” Jordan discovered, “you have to give parts of yourself to other people and look at people in a different manner."
This is not to say that he was always professional and respectful in his drive. The stories told have made many people cringe, even if they remain admirers of him.
The lesson learned was, you can’t achieve the ultimate by yourself in a team dynamic. You have to become more invested in other people, regardless of what seems natural — being passionate about your own development and success. He had to be less self indulgent and selfish.
“When winning is the goal of a team, everything that gets in the way of this objective, pulls the team apart,” says Margaret Ricci, the founder and CEO at Cultural Strategies, which assists organizations in creating and developing healthy, resilient teams that value each other and deliver productivity and innovation.
“It’s no lie that Michael was hard to take, in whatever he was involved in — playing a game, in a scrimmage, in the locker room or whatever else he was doing with his teammates.
“It’s also hard to imagine him being any other way — because his solitary focus in every part of his life, was in playing his utmost to win — every game, any game.”
Jordan’s approach was sharp edged and intimidating to many even when they knew he was committed to lifting the whole for everyone’s benefit.
“He could be relentless in his needling of his teammates,” Ricci says, “but they knew that behind the relentlessness was the heart of a warrior and the single-mindedness of their collective pursuit. He was theirs, and they were his. I believe it is this thought that underlies his comment.”
She speaks of the “how.”
“We can only become this committed to our teammates when we learn enough about what makes them tick and when we can share enough about ourselves with them to know they will not abandon us when the going — or working with us — gets extremely tough,” Ricci explains.
To connect, she asserts, people have to be willing and courageous, to some varying degree, to get uncomfortable.
“Sharing ourselves with others means we must be vulnerable with them,” Ricci says. “MJ’s hyper-competitiveness, was both his strength and his weakness. This was his vulnerable side. Pushing his teammates to be better was his super power and his kryptonite.”
It can be surprising to come to grasp with a reality that surprises us and maybe hurts.
“Our weaknesses are always a part of our top strengths,” Ricci says. “It is the flipside of the strength.”
Leadership may be frustrating when the people with which we work are not meeting our vision for them or our commands. Breakthrough however can develop.
“Because someone doesn’t live up to our expectation of excellence doesn’t mean we cannot help propel them upward to a higher level of their own excellence once we are involved with them,” Ricci says.
“The trick is to understand the nature of humanity, our own place in this world, and theirs,” she suggests. “The amalgamation of all of this is how we bring each other into our greatest collective power.”
Ricci elaborates:
“As we learn more about each person on our teams, we find out where their strengths impact our outcomes and what we can count on them to provide, day in and day out,” she points out. “That realization becomes fixed once we start acting together to accomplish our goals.”
What we find out is valuable.
“The strength of the entire unit, the heights we can achieve together, where we might get into trouble and who can help us get out of different kinds of trouble,” Ricci states.
“We understand that the team's strength is never one person’s contribution. It is about passing the ball to others who are more adept at what we need at this moment than keeping the ball to ourselves.”
Even in the pursuit of winning, Ricci says, it is not necessary to grind people down, emotionally and psychologically as Jordan was known to do.
“It’s about not taking personal aim at someone to make them falter or smaller and us winners. It’s about the development of our senses to know when to give others the lead and to know when we must close ourselves down,” she says.
Determining our spaces of competence and where our skills don’t fit can help us make sounder decisions in our professions and careers.
“Michael (Jordan) was born to play basketball but he wasn’t born to coach it. He admits to this: he doesn’t have the patience for it,” Ricci says. “He was born to inspire others to go further because he knew they could, just as he had himself.
“It was this single-mindedness of their combined potential that others didn’t understand until later. He brought them all up to play at a higher level than what they thought they were capable of. He trusted them with a higher level of the game because he had given his teammates part of his essence.
“And he wanted to understand and harness theirs.”
Once settling into this type of mindset, we can best understand ourselves and those with whom we collaborate.
“Only in this realm can we see and understand the dual sides of our strengths and learn better how to exact the best from each other in our teams,” Ricci says.
“Neither basketball or any other kind of teamwork are singular sports,” she adds. “We are meant to live in collective unity where every person’s strength contributes to the team’s success.”
To advertise, sponsor a section of the newsletter or discuss your affiliate marketing program, contact CI.
Recent Articles
Knowing Your Leadership Non-Negotiables
‘Prickly Egos’ and Your Response
Instead of Pointing the Finger, We Can…
The Smart, Brave ‘Idiot’ in Meetings
Successful Leaders’ Stage Fright — And Overcoming It
Recognizing More of Your Abilities
Benefits and Safety of CEO Media Training