Building Blocks of Great Teams

Which is better... To be great? Or, to be part of something much greater than anything you can achieve by yourself?

Which gives you more joy... To be the best player on a poor or mediocre team? Or, to be one of the members of a GREAT team?

Do you want to know something that I find to be particularly odd? There is no greater feeling in the world than when your team wins the BIG ONE... the championship. And the higher the stakes, the greater the feeling. It's a tremendous rush of exhilaration. A feeling that you have been part of something really great, something that will be remembered by generations of people for years to come.

But here's the odd thing... for the majority of players, most of their pursuits are for individual success, often even at the expense of team success. For example, in game situations the majority of players tend to focus more on individual achievement than on helping the team. Individuality (particularly in the game of baseball) seems to always outweigh TEAM. Unfortunately, so much of this game has been built around individualism. Don't believe me? In the past month, which have you looked at, thought about, and talked about more: individual batting averages and other individual stats, accomplishments, or errors... OR... various ways the team was assisted by your contributions (i.e. getting on base, hitting a sac fly or laying down a sac bunt; or perhaps doing things like being an active base runner that throws the pitcher off his game a little and causes your teammate at the plate to get a better pitch to hit)?

There are SO many ways to help your team in the game of baseball. But unfortunately, many of those don't show up in the stat line. And because so many people make judgments in this game based on numbers, particularly your individual numbers, then most of our focus during every game, unfortunately, becomes directed on ME, MY stats, MY performance, MY playing time, MY at-bats, MY errors, MY strikeouts, MY outs, MY base hits... etc.

Oh, to have a team filled with players who ALWAYS think about the TEAM all the time! What would that look like?

To have a team filled with players who get it... and what I mean by "get it" is that they understand that there are SO MANY WAYS to help the team succeed and be great, and many of these ways will never show up in the stat lines. Many of these things are what you might consider to be intangibles – qualities and possessions that cannot be quantified, but contribute to success all the same.

The building blocks of a great team are not just great players, but great TEAMMATES. And there is a significant difference.

A collection of tremendously skilled individual players (perhaps many of which are prima donnas, mostly concerned about themselves, their playing time, their stats, their performance, and their success and failures) are rarely ever written about in the newspapers late in the postseason, because they are rarely ever playing that long. So many teams have been “awesome” on paper, at the top of the preseason polls, but then underachieve in the long run, while other teams “get hot” late in the season and make a run.

Why do some teams seem to get hot? What does it take to "peak at the right time"? We've all seen it. It seems to happen every year. I've had the great pleasure of experiencing it first-hand. A team gets hot and you hear people talk about how they are peaking at the right time. What causes that to happen? What is the difference maker?

I have a theory. It’s called BEING A GREAT TEAMMATE.

When you have an entire group of players who are team-first players, who are more concerned about the success of the team than literally anything else, who trust the coach’s judgment of their talent and their role on the team but continue to practice and prepare just as hard as they possibly can every day, just to be ready in case their name is called, maybe just for one at-bat... those are the building blocks of a great and successful team. And those are the teams that tend to "get hot" at just the right time.

There's nothing magical about it. It's not a supernatural thing that occurs outside of our control. It's actually very much in our control. It's within the control of every individual player on every team, all the time.

It is always within every player's control to LOVE his team more than he loves his own accomplishments. It is always within every player's control to CARE about his team more than he cares about his personal success and failures on the field. It is always within every player's control to constantly be thinking about how he can help his team every minute of every game.

Rarely, though, do we see a core majority of players on a team who think this way and act this way. Most teams have one, or perhaps even a few, that do. A team that has none who think and act this way is a miserable experience all the way around. But if you can somehow get every player on the team to think with a true TEAM-FIRST mindset and act with true TEAM-FIRST behavior, then congratulations, you have the building blocks of a truly great team. Don't be surprised if you win a championship or two with that group.

Also, I can guarantee this, those players and that team will have more fun and make more lasting memories regardless of what hardware they collect at the end of the season.

Before I conclude this thought, I will offer some practical points that will hopefully be transferrable immediately into your dugouts and benches. If you want to be a great teammate and you want to try to develop this kind of culture (I will even call it an uncommon culture), then put these elements into practice in your own game and on your own team:

• Desire to play different roles on the team. Be not only okay with playing different roles, but desire it. Want to do it. When you are called upon to sit the bench one game and be a "courtesy runner," think about all the ways you can help your teammates succeed while you are on the bases and base paths. There are so many roles to play on a team, and when we get locked in to a one-role mindset, we actually limit ourselves (and our team). Flexibility and learning new things is a virtue in this sport.

• THINK baseball. Not just baseball as it relates to you and what you are doing, but the broader picture of the game itself. Always keep in the forefront of your mind the notion that the game is MUCH bigger than you, which means that it is so arrogant to assume that your strikeout, or your error, or your pop-out, or your one or two plays that you made are enough to win or lose the game by itself. Translation... get over yourself. For most people, the first step in learning how to think better baseball is to simply get over yourself. If all we are doing during a game is thinking about ourself, our failures and our successes, then we cannot be thinking about the team at the same time. Focus on self removes focus on team.

• Trust. When you are a great teammate you automatically create something in other players regarding you, and that thing is trust. It is so much easier to trust a team-first teammate than it is to trust a selfish player who happens to be on your team. All championship teams (I'm going out on a limb in saying ALL championship teams) have this quality among their players. They know that each one of them has the same goals in mind as they do. Which means they are never alone in their pursuit of wanting to be a great team.

• Love. Yes... love. The strongest element to any great team is love. They love the game. They love playing the game. And they love each other. When you truly love the people you are working with to accomplish a goal... WATCH OUT. Great things are going to happen! Take that to the bank. Love is the most powerful resource in the world. And it's no different in the sports world. It's why you see hugs and tears along with HUGE smiles during so many post-championship game interviews. Because people who love one another just accomplished something awesome together, and a big part of the reason why they were able to accomplish such an awesome thing is because love, created trust, which creates a new mindset of how to think about the game, which creates a desire to play any role they are given, which is the makeup of a GREAT team.

Don Mattingly, former New York Yankee great and current manager of the Miami Marlins, said this about being a great teammate:

Team sports are really difficult things. Sometimes your team wins because of you, sometimes in spite of you and sometimes it's like you’re not even there. That’s the reality of the team game. Then at one point in my career, something wonderful happened. I don’t know why or how . . . but I came to understand what “team” meant.

It meant that although I didn’t get a hit or make a great defensive play, I could impact the team in an incredible and consistent way. I learned I could impact my team by caring first and foremost about the team’s success and not my own. I don’t mean by rooting for us like a typical fan. Fans are fickle. I mean CARE, really care about the team . . . about “US.”

I became less selfish, less lazy, less sensitive to negative comments. When I gave up me, I became more. I became a captain, a leader, a better person and I came to understand that life is a team game. And you know what? I’ve found most people aren’t team players. They don’t realize that life is the only game in town. Someone should tell them. It has made all the difference in the world to me.