The Problem with All-Stars

Shane: I can't really ever remember a time when I didn't have some sort of ball in my hand.

This is Shane Battier. Growing up, he was a standout athlete.

Shane: My first love growing up was baseball. I thought I was going to be a Major League pitcher, and a funny thing happened. When I was in sixth grade, I was six feet tall and in seventh grade I was six foot four, and in eighth grade, I was six foot eight, so that's when I switched and became a basketball guy first.

Shane was the National Basketball Player of the Year in high school and again in college. He was so good that he was drafted into the NBA. But when he got to the pros, he quickly discovered that it was a whole new league. Everyone around him was way more talented. At that level, he didn't have the raw physical ability to be a star. He heard coaches and players dismissing him.

Shane: And people looked at my limitations and said, "Well Battier's not athletic and he doesn't run pick-and-roll and he can't really dribble.

We've all been in that position, where our teammates have more talent than we do. But Shane found a way to overcome it. He became a key contributor to two NBA championship teams and I want to know how that happens. How do you make your team better when you're not the biggest star?

I'm Adam Grant and this is WorkLife, my podcast with TED. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck and in this show, I take you to some truly unusual places where they've mastered something I wish everyone knew about work. Thanks to JPMorgan Chase & Co. for sponsoring this episode.

(This is the transcript of episode 3, with sources linked. If you’re thinking about gathering a podcast club—it’s like a book club, only for podcasts—you can find discussion questions at the bottom.)

Today: humility, a hidden ingredient in great teams.

When it's time to put together a team, most people look for the best talent. I hear it in every industry. “We don't take B players, only A players.” But what actually happens when you have a whole team of stars?

The evidence is pretty clear: no matter where you work, having an entire team of superstars can be a total disaster. It turns out that if you have a team of 10 people, you're better off with six stars than eight. You see it on Wall Street: teams with mostly top analysts make worse financial recommendations than teams that have a mix of stars and average performers. The same is true in soccer: national teams with too many top players are less likely to win World Cup qualifying matches.

And in a study of NBA basketball over a decade, teams with only three star players won more games than teams with four or five. The star-studded teams had fewer assists, missed more of their shots and grabbed fewer rebounds. The players struggled to coordinate. They all wanted to be the alpha dog.

Michael: I think what's going on is how we define star is largely a function of the statistics that are used to measure performance on the court and that a lot of what a star does is maximize those stats.

That's Michael Lewis. You might be familiar with his books, like Moneyball and The Blind Side. He's spent a lot of his career writing about why we get talent so wrong.

Michael: Some of the things the stars do are maybe not as valuable as we think. If you see a volume shooter, a guy who scores a lot of points, but he might be scoring the points and so he gets classified as a star, but he might be scoring those points in a way that actually kind of hurts the team, taking lots of bad shots, not making a high percentage of his shots. Each time you're on a court, only one person can take the shot. If what the star is is a scoring machine, it's kind of inefficient to have five of them on the court who are focused on that when there are other things that need to be done.

This was a problem for the Miami Heat. In 2010, they tried to build a dream team by bringing in two free agent stars, LeBron James and Chris Bosh. But they already had a star, Dwyane Wade. Their first press conference was a wild affair with fireworks and a crowd of thousands. LeBron predicted they would be winning championships for years.

LeBron: It's going to be easy. I mean --

Announcer: But we also know you three kings came down here to win championships. LeBron, tell us about that.

LeBron: Not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven.

But they struggled to even win close games in the regular seasons. They had three players who were all used to taking the game-winning shot.

Michael: There are other things basketball players do that are very valuable that don't get the same amount of attention and that may be beneath the dignity of a star to perform and you need other kinds of people to do those things.

Lots of stars means lots of egos—and lots of egos means infighting. To overcome that problem, you need humility. Humility is having the self-awareness to know what you're good at and what you're not good at. Studies show that when you have humility in a team, people are more likely to play to their strengths. Instead of going for the spotlight, they take on the roles where they can help the team win.

Michael: The stars are overrated and the role players are underrated. The role players, the people we think of not as stars, might be doing sometimes things that are extremely valuable, but that don't get the attention that the stars do.

On the Miami Heat, after the big three failed to win a championship their first year, they didn't add yet another star. They picked up Shane Battier. Michael wrote a huge profile of Shane in the New York Times Magazine. He called Shane the "no-stats all-star," because Shane didn't score a lot of points or grab that many rebounds, but when he was on the court, every one of his teams was statistically more likely to win.

Michael: Shane had broadly two big effects. On his own teammates, he made everybody more efficient. When he was on the court, the shot the team took tended to be a better shot than it was when he wasn't on the court. And on the defensive end, he made the other team slightly less efficient.

Shane: I tried to make my coaches sweat every single second that I was off the court, saying, "How are we going to win this game with Shane on the bench? And "I need to find a way to play him more." And you do that by doing all the things that no one else wants to do. For me, that was the exciting plays like diving for loose balls, taking charges, running back on defense, being the most enthusiastic, being the most communicative, being a great teammate. Really the things that just take awareness and energy, I try to be the absolute best, because I wasn't the most athletic, I wasn't always the best player, but those were the things that I could control to keep me on the playing floor.

Shane filled a bunch of gaps in the team and the roles shifted and gelled. LeBron became the team's clear leader on the court. Wade and Bosh took on supporting roles and the Heat won back-to-back titles. Shane didn't need to be the best player on his team or even the third best to add real value.

Michael: So he wasn't athletic enough to stop Kobe Bryant from getting his shot up. He didn't smother him as a defender. But he was smart enough and kind of canny enough on the floor to force Kobe Bryant to places on the floor where he was a less efficient shooter. And so Kobe Bryant might get his points, but he had to take a lot more shots to get his points. So he was doing all these things that are very subtle and very valuable that no star would bother to do, and none of that really got measured conventionally.

Shane: You have to have an understanding of what everyone's role is and the teams that win in basketball are the teams where everyone fulfills a very specific role to the best of their ability. And so my job is not to be the best small forward in the league. My job as the small forward is to be the best small forward for this team.

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. Think about someone whose humility you've admired: a teammate, a leader, a role model. How do they show it? We know from research that humility is revealed through three key actions and you can see all of them in Shane. One, recognize your own shortcomings and limitations.

Michael: If Shane did not acknowledge his own weaknesses and adapt to them, he probably wouldn't have had a very long NBA career, and no doubt there are all kinds of players who get washed out because they don't do it. There's no question it's not an easy trait to acquire, acknowledging your own weaknesses and sort of not just acknowledging them, but behaving differently in response to what you've acknowledged.

Two, appreciate others' strengths, give credit where it's due and highlight the team's success over your individual achievements.

Shane: No one's ever come up to me on the street and said, "Hey Shane, how many points did you score in your career?" Or, "Shane, what's your career high in blocked shots?" The question that I get time and time again, two questions: "Where do you keep your championship rings?" and "How do you decide which one you want to wear?" Isn't that a poetically awesome question to be asked every single time? When you win, no one cares what your title is, no one cares what your role was. All they know is wow, you were part of that team.

Three, show openness to learning from others. Shane's passion for learning rubbed off on his teammates.

Shane: We were playing Kevin Durant one time and I said, "Hey LeBron, do me a favor. When Kevin Durant catches it in the post on the left block, make him shoot the ball over his left shoulder." So LeBron's like, "OK, I will. I will." LeBron made Kevin Durant go over his left shoulder and he missed all three shots. And so after the game -- we win the game, and LeBron's like, "Man, Shane, yeah, you were right, make Kevin Durant go over his left shoulder." I didn't have the heart to tell him that it was only three shots, but that was the right statistical play. And after that, every now and then, he'd say, "Hey Batman, whatcha got on this guy?" There's not much you can teach LeBron James, the best player in the world today, but I like to think I made him a little bit better with some arcane math.

You can start to see how Shane elevated each of his teams. He made the players around him better, not just better basketball players, but better teammates too. I think part of what's happening in this kind of situation has to do with an emotion. It's called moral elevation. You might not have heard of it, but social scientists are pretty excited about it.

Sara: Moral elevation is a feeling that you get when you see somebody else's moral goodness.

That's Sara Algoe, one of the first psychologists to study moral elevation.

Sara: Usually elevation happens in moments when you don't really expect it, so it's these kind of surprising moments. The big picture things might be those really exemplary things that everybody thinks about in terms of heroes. So this person saved somebody from a burning building. But it's the everyday stuff that people do.

It's the colleague who stays late to help out the team, the boss who shows up to fix a broken copy machine, the client who opens up her personal network to help you find leads for a new job.

Sara: For many people that can trigger this little moment of, "Hey! That's really amazing." And even though it's a small little gesture, it can still be really moving. A lot of people say that they experience warm feelings in their chest, and so in our data, what we see is that people who experience moral elevation from seeing other people's virtuous acts actually want to be virtuous themselves.

There's evidence that in teams, humility can be contagious.

Sigal: The definition of emotional contagion is when we are literally infected with other people's emotions.

That's my colleague Sigal Barsade. She's a leading expert on contagion and culture.

Sigal: Emotional contagion is something that I became interested in many, many years ago when I was working with a colleague, "Meg" as a pseudonym, and I wasn't even reporting to her, she was just working in my environment. I knew she was negative but I didn't think much of it. And then one week Meg went on vacation. And it was amazing. Like suddenly the team, me, everybody -- our shoulders lowered, we were more relaxed and happy. And then she came back and everything went back to the way it was and I was like, "Oh my gosh, how amazing that this person, who I didn't even report to could have such a tremendous influence on not only my mood, but the mood of everybody else.

All kinds of emotions can be contagious. That can shape the team's culture and even affect performance.

Sigal: Contagion is positive, it's negative and the way it operates is that first, there's behavioral mimicry, and all that means is that we literally mimic the nonverbal and the facial expressions of the people around us. It has to do with attention. It's who we're looking at.

And who we're looking at most often on a team is the leader. It's not all about being positive, though. There's a time and a place for negative emotions. In one study, when basketball coaches gave angry halftime speeches, teams were more likely to win the game, but there's a catch. It only helped if the coach wasn't too angry and wasn't an angry person in general. If you're in a constant state of rage, the team starts to lose respect for you and tune you out.

Sigal: There is something very insidious about emotional contagion, and that is that in almost all of our studies, what we have found is that people don't realize it's happening.

Great leaders do realize it's happening and there's a coach I admire who has a powerful way of spreading humility in a team. We'll hear from him after the break.

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So if you want humility in a team, it helps to have a leader who lives it. Leaders play a big role in shaping cultures and there's a leader I've been watching for a while who is all about humility.

Brad: I was an Indiana kid and now I'm a 40-year-old husband, father and I guess I coach on the side.

That's Brad Stevens. I first saw him on TV in 2010 during March Madness, college basketball's crazy tournament. He was coaching Butler University, a small school in Indiana with a tiny recruiting budget. Somehow, they made it all the way to the NCAA Championship Game.

Announcer: Back of the rim, rebound, Hayward! And Butler wins it! Butler's going on to the national championship game!

And I couldn't believe it. They did it again the next season too. They're the smallest school ever to make the finals two years in a row. Brad set NCAA records. He's the youngest coach to make two Final Fours and he won more games in his first four years than anybody in history. And then, at just 36 years old, he became the head coach of the Boston Celtics. And Brad believes that a major part of the team's success is having humility.

Brad: It's easy to get caught up in yourself. It's easy to believe at 14 or 15 that you're the greatest thing since sliced bread, and as crippling as adversity can be, humility -- if you don't have humility, you know, success can be just as crippling.

The Butler program has emphasized humility for a long time. It's at the heart of their value system. They call it the Butler Way.

Brad: It's really a commitment to something bigger than yourself.

The Butler Way dates back to the 1920s. It's a set of principles coaches and players are expected to live by every day: humility, passion, unity, servanthood and thankfulness. The goal is to make sure that players don't try to become individual stars at the expense of the team.

Brad: When you're driven by bigger things than just you, I think there's a better chance for success and it's hard to put into words, but you can feel it.

So I went to Indianapolis to see the Butler Way in action. It's a Thursday, beginning of October, first week of the season. I'm at 6am practice with the team. Players are walking around with t-shirts that say "Team Above Self." The Butler Way is emblazoned on the wall. The team huddles up and the new coach, former Butler player LaVall Jordan, joins the team in a chant.

LaVall: Bring it in, here we go. One, two, three, forever, we fight together, we will be champions.

Before becoming the coach, LaVall played for Butler, but it wasn't the first place he was taught to keep his ego in check.

LaVall: My grandfather used to always tell me the whole world doesn't revolve around the LaVall Jordan. My dad would tell me I wasn't that good yet. My great-grandma Totsy always said, "Hey, you're not better than anyone, but you're just as good as everyone, too.

LaVall and Brad Stevens were assistant coaches at Butler together. They both talk about how building a culture of humility starts with recruiting. It's not that talent doesn't matter, it's that talent alone isn't enough. And I wonder how far they're willing to go to keep big egos off the team. The basic idea that I think is kind of crazy here is that you all seem to believe that character and culture can substitute for talent at some level.

LaVall: Yeah.

Adam: Is that a fair statement?

LaVall: I think you have to have enough talent, right?

Adam: So I couldn't make it.

LaVall: Yeah, yeah. You've got a bunch of good guys that can't play, I don't know if that will… 

Adam: Wait a minute, you haven't seen me on a court, come on.

LaVall: I didn't say you can't play, but -- So you know, you have to have talent and you have to have culture. Now, you're never going to sacrifice the culture for the talent is the thing.

Adam: Let me push you on that for a second. Let's say you spot the next LeBron James, but they're, like, not a Butler guy. What do you do?

LaVall: Find the next guy that is as talented as you can get, but is a Butler guy.

Adam: Really?

LaVall: We would do as much Intel as we could to find out, you know -- if you're hearing that from someone, but try to find out on your own, because if there's red flags, yeah, you move on.

I was curious about how Butler screens for character. Look, nobody wants to reveal their trade secrets, but while watching practice, I heard about one of their favorite recruiting questions. Butler scouts like to ask high school players, would you rather be in a situation where your team wins but you only score 5 points, or one where you score 20 points but your team loses? When I met the Butler basketball players, it was pretty clear which situation they preferred.

Kelan: I'm Kelan Martin. I'm a senior on Butler men's basketball team.

Kelan is a star. He's an NBA prospect.

Kelan: I always put the team before myself, because without them, there's no me.

Jerald: I can vouch for that. He's a great teammate.

This is Jerald Butler. He's a freshman.

Jerald: I'm just here trying to find my role, learning from Kelan and other seniors. And I'm just praying that I could come in and make an impact to help us win the national championship.

Creating a culture of humility isn't just about bringing in a bunch of humble players. You need to make humility a core part of your practices, roles and routines. When Brad Stevens became the head coach at Butler, he saw an opportunity to build humility into the structure of the team. It started one day when five returning seniors came into his office.

Brad: You know, my biggest, most daunting task was how do you choose captain. Because all five of these guys are who you want to be around every day and it started kind of my thought about captains and why do we tier people within a team anyways, which I don't do anymore because I think that ultimately everybody should have ownership and responsibility, but that first year, I brought them all in and I just said, We've got 12 guys on the team but all five of you are captains."

Adam: You had five captains?

Brad: 40 percent of our team were captains. You know the one thing I didn't want to do? I didn't want to disempower one of them.

The next year, Brad didn't even bother to name captains. He told the players they were all captains. That's still the tradition today. So I can't resist asking the current players about it. Is it weird to not have captains?

Jerald: Everybody's a captain on our team.

Adam: What does that mean?

Jerald: That's the Butler Way. Everybody got to be leaders.

Kelan: Everybody has to lead, not just the seniors. They expected everyone to communicate and talk.

Being part of a team where everyone takes ownership of their role sounds great if you're winning, but where you really see character is how people behave when the chips are down. When you're losing, it's tempting to point fingers at your teammates. Part of humility is taking personal responsibility and leaders reinforce that humility by modeling it. When you see your boss admit fault instead of blaming others, you feel a little more comfortable owning up to your mistakes. Jerald told me how Butler comes together after a loss.

Jerald: The coach will call me and they'll take accountability on themselves, like, "Aw man, we just made some bad coaching errors right here", so just acknowledging those mistakes, I really like that. Most coaches are like, "The players didn't come in to play hard," while they were just like, "We made some mistakes all together, not just the players." So I really respected that coming in.

Accountability is something Brad Stevens added to the Butler Way.

Brad: You can't improve without accountability. You know, if you can't look in the mirror and say, "I've got things to work on," it's hard to get better. It's not just being a great teammate. It's not just being selfless in the pursuit of a championship. It's, "I have to do my job well for the team," and that's a unique trait that usually, I think, is reserved for teams that maximize themselves.

Humility is a virtue, but if you're not careful, it can undermine your credibility. That's usually not an issue in basketball. You can talk a humble game and still shine on the court, because everyone can see how talented you are. But this is probably a lot more complicated in your job. Your skills might not be as visible, a lot of your effort happens behind the scenes when no one is watching. There are no basketball cards for everyone to track your performance stats.

So many people see confidence as a sign of competence. If you're always talking about your shortcomings and giving credit to others, you run the risk of leaving people questioning how good you are. I've watched people get passed over for jobs because they were too self-deprecating. But there's a way to be humble and confident. I made that point one day when I was giving a talk at a company and I met someone in the audience who nailed it.

Michele: So a couple of years ago, I was applying for a position and I really wanted to work there, it was a great company, but it seemed like a very high hurdle.

This is Michele Hansen.

Michele: And as I was going through the application, there were these questions asking me, "Are you a financial planner? Are you a member of our services?" and all these things, and I kept having to answer, "No." And I was like, "My chances of getting this job are really going down. I need a Hail Mary at this point. I really need to show them that I can do this." And so instead of going the traditional cover letter approach where you outline all of your qualifications and how they're a perfect fit for it, I ended up writing my cover letter for it about how I wasn't the person they were envisioning for the position. And so I instead just led with honesty.

Imagine that you're applying for a job and you're asked, "What's your greatest weakness?" If your instinct is to answer with a strength in disguise, "I work too hard," "I'm too nice," think again. Studies suggest that recruiters are significantly more interested in hiring you if you acknowledge a legitimate shortcoming, like, "I procrastinate" or "I overreact to situations." And that's the approach Michele took.

Michele: And it worked out well! And I ended up working there for almost three years, absolutely loved my time at the company.

Of course, you can't get a job if you only focus on your inadequacies. You still have to project confidence and Michele projected a different kind of confidence, confidence in herself as a learner.

Michele: And I actually have it in front of me if you want me to read it. So here is what I wrote. "To whom it may concern, I'm probably not the candidate you've been envisioning for the Supernova Product Manager position. I don't have a decade of experience as a product manager, nor am I a certified financial planner. But what I do have are skills that can't be taught. I take ownership of projects far beyond my pay grade and what is in my defined scope of responsibilities. I'm entrepreneurial, I get things done and I know I would make an excellent right hand for the cofounder leading this project. I love breaking new ground and starting with a blank slate, and all of my previous bosses would be able to attest to those traits."

Of course, there's a wrong way to express humility. It's called a humblebrag. It sounds like this:

"I work so fast that I'm bored the rest of the day."

"I'm so tired of people mistaking me for a model."

"That's cool, I got my dream internship and got funding to travel to Paris. It's so hard to decide which one to choose!"

When you're the one talking, this can feel like an effective way to show humility, but when you're listening to someone else do it, it doesn't go over so well. There's evidence that humblebragging causes people to like you less and see you as less competent. You're actually better off just plain bragging, although if you were really that great, you wouldn't need to boast about your greatness.

People are especially annoyed by bragging in a team. When you're working closely with others, showing humility signals that you're here to do what's best for the group, not to impress the group. Acknowledging weaknesses can gain the respect of your teammates. It can also help your team stay great. The more you achieve, the easier it gets for success to go to your head. In the NBA, the very things that help teams excel can eventually cause their downfall. It's a competency trap. Winning can cause them to get too comfortable with their plays and routines, which makes them more predictable to other teams.

Humility stops us from resting on our laurels. It prevents us from getting complacent. It keeps us focused on learning. Of course, it helps if the stars on your team are humble too, so I went back to Michael Lewis to find out what that takes.

Adam: You spend a tremendous amount of time around highly successful people, not just in sports but on Wall Street and in other worlds of high achievers. What do you think it takes to maintain humility in those kinds of worlds?

Michael: Even though I may spend time around a lot of successful people, I don't spend a lot of time around humility. I mean, they're successful, but they aren't necessarily humble. And a lot of humility is strategic humility. I mean, there's a lot of phony humility. Everybody who's not an idiot knows that it's more attractive to seem humble than to seem arrogant, so even people who are deeply arrogant can manufacture some humility for you on the surface. And I see a lot of that. To actually maintain real humility? The simple answer to that to me is keeping people in your life who knew you when. If I had to identify the trait that the people I know who are really successful have that kind of keeps them grounded is they have friends from when they were 10 years old, people who know them outside of their professional lives who can remind them that in many ways they're normal human beings. What happens to people is when they get swept up in arenas of ambition and they succeed in those arenas, it's very, very tempting to let that arena tell you who you are. You're a superstar. So the trick is live outside the arena and recognize you're visiting the arena for professional purposes.

I've always seen humility as a virtue we should display after success. You might think of it that way too, which is why people love to give advice on how to appear humble. But I've started thinking differently about humility. It's something we should cultivate before success. Humility affects how close we come to our potential and how long we stay on top. In the best teams, humility isn't a weakness, it's a source of status and a sign of strength.

WorkLife is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media and Pineapple Street Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Dan O’Donnell, Angela Cheng and Janet Lee. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Lewis. Our show is mixed by David Herman with help from Dan Dzula. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu.

Special thanks to our sponsors: JPMorgan Chase & Co., Accenture, Bonobos, AND Warby Parker.

Next time on WorkLife: how to understand your personality—and maybe even change it.

Susan Cain: I'm an introvert. Hard to talk about at dinner parties.

Adam: Well, it also makes it hard to go to dinner parties.

That's next time on WorkLife. Thanks for listening, and if you like what you hear, we would all really appreciate it if you could rate and review the show. It helps other people find us. See you next week.

WORKLIFE SEASON 1

1.    How to love criticism. February 28, 2018. Transcript

2.    The Daily Show’s secret to creativity. March 7, 2018. Transcript

3.    The problem with all-stars. March 14, 2018. Transcript

4.    Your hidden personality. March 21, 2018. Transcript

5.    How to trust people you don’t like. March 28, 2018. Transcript

6.    Faking your emotions at work. April 4, 2018.

7.    A world without bosses. April 11, 2018.

8.    When work takes over your life. April 18, 2018.

9.    #MeToo with Ashley Judd, Ronan Farrow, and Tarana Burke. Bonus: April 25, 2018.

10.   A debate with Malcolm Gladwell. Bonus: May 10, 2018. 

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. Who are the “no-stats all-stars” in your workplace? How do they elevate the team—and how can you make sure their contributions are recognized and valued?

2. Where have you seen the costs of having too many “A players”? How can you hold stars accountable for doing tasks that they might see as beneath them?

3. Part of humility is a commitment to keep learning and improving. How can you strengthen that dimension of your culture?

4. How has emotional contagion affected your team, for better and worse?

5. The Butler Way is about putting team above self. Where have you seen that dynamic, and what convinces people to buy into it?

6. When Brad Stevens named all his players captains, he encouraged them to take on shared leadership of the team. What would happen if you designated multiple leaders in a team?

7. In your experience, what are the key differences between strategic humility and genuine humility?

8. When applicants express humility in job interviews, people sometimes see it as a sign of low confidence. Taking a page out of Michele Hansen’s playbook, how can you express confident humility?

9. Michael Lewis talks about maintaining humility by staying in touch with childhood friends. What other steps prevent success from going to someone’s head?

10. Why is humility such a seemingly rare virtue, and what can we do to change that?