Building a high performance team is never easy. It requires the WILL to do so. What I’d like to talk about today is where that WILL comes from. The question I have for all of us is simple. What makes us GREAT? What makes the teams you lead GREAT? What, in fact makes this nation, GREAT? I suppose we should start by talking about what it means to BE great. Greatness, I think, is the state of being the best of what we are capable. It is not defined against a standard, necessarily, or against the others around us. It is defined against our hope for ourselves and those we lead in the context of the best of what we expect from ourselves as a species, as members of the human race.
Why is this important? Because in learning how to create, maintain, and lead a high performance team, we must know that for which we strive. A high performance team is all ABOUT greatness. It is all about reaching for “the stars”. To be a high performance team means to be a team inhabited by champions. And champions yearn for greatness. Why? Because within each of us is the need to be valued, to be special. That is why Secret number two in the Eight Secrets of Inspirational leadership is the key to every high performance team. Everyone WANTS, in fact, NEEDS to be valued.
Many years after the Battle of Waterloo, an older Lord Arthur Wellsley, Duke of Wellington was asked how the outnumbered British, Prussian, and allied armies won the great contest against the most successful general of all time, Napoleon Bonaparte. The gruff and direct old Duke looked at his inquisitor with a glint in his eyes and said simply, “The battle of Waterloo was won upon the playing fields of Eton.” To contemporaries of the old commander, the meaning was clear. To others, looking back through the haze of history, maybe a little less so.
When the smoke of battle swirled around the beleaguered English troops standing atop the long sloping ridges of Waterloo, the lines held, despite shot and shell that screamed overhead or ploughed through the massed ranks of the famous British squares. It held despite the repeated cavalry charges lapping around the edges of the bristling formations. It held throughout the long day in the terror and heat of conflict. Men fell, were decapitated, sprayed with their comrades blood, witnessed the most horrible sights imaginable, but still fought on. Why?
Studies done in the last thirty years or so have overwhelmingly demonstrated that despite all, people will undergo the most traumatic experiences to avoid being cast from the tribe, to stand up for their brothers or sisters in arms, to prove the nobility of community. That is true, and well documented. Having said that, there have been communities and communal experiences that have resulted in the most terrible crimes imaginable. On the battlefield, communal solidarity is noble and uplifting, in times of social unrest, communal solidarity can sometimes become mob violence. So, whereas the nobility of community explains the result, where do the agents that bond the community together, those that make the community great, where do they come from?
Ultimately, those ties come from the values a community shares. When the New England settlers sailed the Mayflower to the shores of America, they shared religious values that emphasized the pursuit of human perfection. The fervent desire to be a “city on a hill”, a light to all nations, was the tie that bound all of them together. In fact, those ties made each and every settler feel special, valued, part of something bigger, elite, noble and apart from all others. That, in essence, is the defining aspect of greatness.
When those settlers came to become teeming colonies who came together to fight and win a revolution, they decided to put on paper an explanation of what made them special. Not only in the Declaration of Independence, but also in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, our founding fathers tied us all together and said to the whole world, ‘we represent something unique and special. We are, in fact, ourselves, unique and special.’ We have accepted the CHALLENGE of pursuing the best that is within each one of us, the best of our very HUMAN nature, the best of ourselves. What a powerful belief! That belief led to the sense of manifest destiny, the jingoism of the Spanish American war, the patriotism of the first and second World Wars, the belief in the economic power of the nation that led to the breathtaking explosion in prosperity of the last 60 years. It was, and has been, a belief in our essential uniqueness, our willingness to accept the challenge of being better than we are.
The British officers who stood erect even as cannonballs blew great gaps in the line, or in themselves, did so because they too, were tied together with certain values, the values of the English public school, the values that were drummed into them ‘upon the playing fields of Eton’. They would not show fear, even in the most fearful circumstances. For the community that they valued, which was the community of their peers, they would rather die than be humiliated. Courage was the price of social acceptance, the tie that bound them together, and the rules of the game they learned in their youth, when they threw the ball around according to ‘the rules’.
Sometimes we forget ourselves and how important it is to adhere to values that define us. It is not just social convention, it is the very WILL to succeed, to be GREAT, that is at stake. When we embrace the CHALLENGE of rising above the ordinary, we provide the will that makes greatness. When we drift away, individual by individual and we forget, our will to win recedes like the falling tide on a lonely shore and we become ordinary, losing our history, our tradition, our place in the world, and eventually, ourselves.
The lessons of nation and team are as true today as they ever were, and as hard to execute. More than ever, we need to remember the values that created who we are in this country and in our teams. Now is certainly the time for leadership, and, for greatness.
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