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The Meaning of Team. Stories of Grace. And Two Invitations.
The Meaning of Team
Seth Wickersham has worked as a sportswriter for ESPN for 18 years, mostly covering the NFL.
Football is a sport he loved all his life. He told this story about trying his hand at it when he was young.
"When I played quarterback, I had this one chance to lead a game-winning drive.
We moved to midfield and I moved left and I dropped back, I started going left and I had one receiver there and he was pretty well covered. My coach even came to the sideline and he was waving at me to throw him the ball out of bounds. A pass that needed to be low and outside was high and inside, and was intercepted. I was just distraught.
You become a quarterback in some ways because you want to stand out. In that moment I just wanted to blend in and disappear. I remember my center was next to me and he put his hand on my helmet when I had my head down.
[NB: Wickersham never played QB after HS and went on to earn a journalism degree, writing deep exposes about the NFL and most recently American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback.]
"I met up with that center later in life. I've been to countless Springsteen concerts and I understand the irony but I had to go there to the Glory Days. Out of nowhere i blurted out, "Why do you think I didn't make it?
He said, "Because we couldn't block for you."
That.
If you had to give a speech and were only allowed one story to convey the meaning of team, that one would be near the top of the list.
It illustrates a couple important points: 1) Overall success, but, importantly, even the apparent individual success of members of a team, requires everyone to do their part at a high level. 2) On high-functioning teams, even when the outputs are not where they need to be, people take accountability for their part of the problem, rather than look for someone else to blame.
But Wickersham went on, and the continuation of his story illustrates the deeper possibility of a high functioning team carries: being seen and being part of something, win or lose, beyond Self.
Grace
"Whether my center said to me was true or not, it just meant so much.
As you know, you beat yourself up quite a bit because even though you can intellectually understand that this is a team game and that there are other factors at play, you're constantly wondering what you could have done differently.
His answer allowed me to forgive that 16-year-old boy who I just couldn't forgive himself ."
The redemptive power of being seen and part of larger mission is not limited to sports.
In the podcast, Ravi Gupta, former COO and CFO at Instacart, added his own story about teams and grace.
"Doug Leone used to run Sequoia and was known to be a very tough leader. Sequoia tried to start some different businesses at different points early on. Some people were there involved in those efforts didn't deliver. Doug was the one who'd asked them to leave.
Many years later, he just decided to go and see a couple of them... on his own. He said, "I just want to let you know that wasn't your fault. We didn't really know what we wanted, and we weren't ready to do what we tried to do. So, I just wanted you to know that the lack of success...it wasn't you."
Now, keep in mind, this was decades later and these were real business leaders who had gone on to do other great things with their careers.
They cried when he told them it wasn't their fault.
They couldn't let go of the thought, "Oh, I failed at this thing." Someone who was there, the leader, saying, "No, there wasn't something you could have done" was something that allowed them to let that go."
An Invitation
Is there anyone in your life who you could do that for?
Is there someone that worked for you or that you were on a team with that might be carrying a failure story that you could help them release?
Is the potential to release a burden someone might be carrying worth the effort to look them up and reach out?
Metta Practice
A very slight digression...
Metta, or loving-kindness, is a fundamental practice in Buddhism that promotes unconditional love, compassion, and goodwill toward all beings.
At its core, it is just extending well-wishes to others...wishes for well-being, freedom from suffering, happiness.
There are many ways to do this and you can find many guided meditations online. Here is one from a teacher of mine, Jack Kornfield.
It is often suggested you proceed in stages. Start with someone you love or already hold in high regard. Then, proceed to someone neutral. Then when you are ready, try to extend the same well-wishes to someone whom you have more difficulties with.
Finally, when you are really ready, extend those same well-wishes to yourself.
I say "finally" and "when you are really ready" because believe it or not, this is often the hardest phase of the practice. The Inner Critic is so strong in many of us that the simple act of extending kindness is difficult.
And of course all the phases are interconnected: as you extend well-being to others it is easier to extend it to yourself and as you extend it to yourself, it is easier to extend it to others.
This metta practice tangent is relevant here.
Once you have thought about people who you were on teams with and considered reaching out to to tell them the failure was not their fault, could the time be right to release some of your own failure stories?
Yes, it is so much more powerful when it comes from someone else, who was there and witnessed what happened. When the full, complicated, interconnected truth about the moment of failure is finally seen...when you are finally seen...real healing and forgiveness accelerates.
But we don't know if they will show up.
And letting go rarely happens at once.
Even a little bit helps.
As you reach out to others to tell them it was not their fault, as with the metta practice, my second invitation is to also tell yourself.
Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is an executive coach, organization consultant, and designer of The First 100 Days and Beyond, a consulting service for individuals and organizations who can't afford faulty starts on mission critical assignments.
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