Sam Walker spent years figuring out what the most dominant teams in sports history shared. After a rigorous winnowing of all of sports history down to 16 "Tier 1" teams, the answer surprised him: it wasn't a superstar, a coach, or a budget. It was the character of the captain who led each team, and these captains rarely fit the hero mold. They led from the back.
Bryant Wolf recommended this book to me, and his four takeaways are:
- It's not the most talented people who win. Stacking a room with stars often underperforms, and being "better on paper" helps less than you think.
- Carry water. Do the unglamorous things (the logistics, the fundamentals) that earn you the right to do the glamorous ones.
- Be the one who tries a little harder. Effort is contagious; people pull harder when they see someone giving it everything.
- The best players rarely make the best leaders, and that's fine. Let the stars focus on their game and let others lead.
The Seven Traits
Walker's elite captains shared seven traits: relentlessness, aggressive play that tests limits, "carrying water" (servant leadership), low-key practical communication, motivating through nonverbal cues, conviction with the courage to stand apart, and emotional control.
Two formulas I keep coming back to from all this:
- Leadership = Potential x Motivation x Development.
- Performance = Attitude x Effort x Skill.
Your attitude is a choice, your effort is in your control, and effort compounds into skill over time.
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Get the book: The Captain Class by Sam Walker on Amazon.
What to look for in your next hire
If the captain who wins is rarely the loudest star, the lesson for CEOs is to stop hiring for the highlight reel. The most impressive resume in the room is often not the person who will hold your team together. When you bring on a leader, fractional or full-time, look for the carry-water traits: do they do the unglamorous work, do they make the people around them try harder, do they keep their composure when a launch slips or a quarter comes up short.
Those signals are harder to read in an interview than a list of logos, but they tell you far more about how a team will perform once the pressure is real. It is the same thing we look for when we match a CEO with a fractional executive.
Track record matters, but temperament under load matters more. Ask a candidate to walk you through a time the plan fell apart, and listen for whether they reached for blame or for the next move. The captains in Walker’s research almost always reached for the next move.
It's the clearest case for the leadership we believe in: humble, relentless, and in service of the team, the kind of leader who holds a company together.
Learn more about Leadership Coaching | The Coaching Habit's 7 Questions