I’ve been on a lot of teams in my forty years. I have played team sports all my life, from soccer, basketball and tennis while growing up, to all levels of sailing teams over the years. I coach professional teams on communication skills as president of The Latimer Group. I worked with the 2008 Olympic Sailing Team in China as the Team Leader, and I’ve spent the last six years as Chairman of the US Olympic and Paralympic Sailing Program, which is basically one big, long team-building exercise. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of good teams and teammates – and a few terrible ones, too.

As part of the process of examining teams in The Beacon, I have kept notes on the best and worst teams I have been on, and what made them so. And one team stands out as, without question, the worst team I have ever been a part of. I’ll leave out some of the details to protect those involved, but I will say that it was a sports team I played on in high school. Here’s what you need to know to get value from the example:

• We returned nearly every member of the prior year’s team, which had been decent, and we added several new players to the mix as well. Overall, the team had tons of talent.
• We were a winter sport, so by the time the season began everyone knew each other well,
  even the new guys.
• We had an experienced coach and coaching staff.
• We finished the season with roughly the same record we’d had the year before, falling
  dramatically short of our pre-season expectations. What happened? Well, this team made
  a few of the classic mistakes.

First, we had a lot of guys who felt they deserved playing time, and there was an obvious competitive dynamic brewing even before the season started. A little competition within a team can be a great thing, as long as it is channeled in a positive way. But our “team” seemed to keep forgetting that we were, actually, a team that should have worked together rather than against each other. Once individual playing-time issues get worked out, a good team comes together to work for the common goal of winning games. That didn’t happen here. Worse, we had team members on the bench seemingly rooting against those playing, hoping that their poor play would create an opportunity for themselves.

Second, there were multiple teams within the team. There were two distinct cliques: One group that had been teammates in a fall sport, and another group that would be teammates in a spring sport. So when things started to fall apart, the team dissolved into sub-groups with no consensus on how to turn around a quickly-eroding season. Everyone retreated into their respective cliques, and any hope of a constructive team fabric vanished.

Finally, we had leadership (coaches and one or two leading players) who saw all of this happening and
did nothing about it.

It’s interesting to me that more than twenty years later, I still think about that team and the opportunities lost. The problems we had were the result of some simple, solvable team-building issues. But no one took the lead to repair the team fabric. I’ve traveled a lot of miles since then, but that team still bothers me. I suppose therein lies the power of the underperforming team: The season might end, but the frustration over lost opportunity can last a long, long time.

Dean M. Brenner
Wallingford, CT (February 15, 2010)

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