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EAGLES AND MULES TOGETHER

Remember where we left off last time:
Any eagle wants to fly, and any superstar wants to shine. But those who remain superstars do so by cooperating with the team.  Ironically, they protect their own elevated status by appearing to downplay it. It's not charity that impels the court eagle to pass. It's a matter of collective, and therefore personal, survival.

This is something that few American workers are trained to understand, and as a result they often perform in a way that harms the team effort they should be helping. In other  words, they behave like amateurs, not professionals. I can illustrate the difference with a story from amateur sports.

In his 1980 book Competing, psychologist Harvey Rubea tells the story of a childhood playmate named Toby who, in volleyball games, had no interest in setting up the combination returns on which successful volleyball depends: instead of passing off and setting up spikes, he simply smacked every ball hit to him directly back over the net, going for a winner every time. Although he was,  according to Ruben, "the best all-round athlete I had ever encountered," Toby very soon became a liability to the team because the Opposition came to understand that whenever the ball went to Toby, it would be returned from the same position. Ruben describes the outcome:

They soon learned to "use" Toby as their own best player. . . . They
simply ganged up on him: all six of their players made all of their
returns directly to him, and it wasn't long before he began to tire
and make mistakes. We couldn't make him see that he was blowing
the game for every body. And we finally simply refused to play with
him.

On a professional team, the situation would never even have gotten that far. With their own jobs and a great deal of money at stake, pro coaches get rid of hotdoggers like Toby before they even get on to the field. I sometimes think you could save a lot of grief in business if you hired some kind of corporate "coach" who would be free of hierarchical turmoil and whose sole job would be to point out to company employees - labor and management alike - that they were either hotdogging or sandbagging, and therefore hurting the team.

Realizing that you have to be a team player to survive is the first factor that undercuts interplayer rivalry in big-time sports.  The other factor is related: it's that it simply feels good to be part of a winning organization - so good, in fact, that the feeling typically transcends all other potential feelings of personality clashes and "eagle-phobia." To achieve that feeling of well-being, accomplishment, and gratification that comes from having contributed to a winning effort, good players will sacrifice the "limelight" readily - for the very good reason that, by doing so, they ultimately gain more recognition, not less. It's a little like the Biblical proverb: He who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.

I believe that the "exalted" feeling that comes from participating in a winning collective effort is a principal motivating factor in all group endeavors. It doesn't matter really whether the group under consideration is a basketball team, a manage-merit study group, or a family. Across the board, the groups that function best - that are eventually the most successful - understand a simple fact: every member of a winning team is just as important as every other member. Unless everybody pulls together and does the job assigned to him to the best of his ability, the team is not going to go anywhere. Every professional understands that. In fact, understanding it is what makes them professionals. They know they're only going to feel good if they do their best, and they know that the only way for anybody on a team to do his best is to subordinate his personal need to stand out to the general objective of winning.

There's an important corollary here, which relates to altering the Consequences of Behaviors. It's that, when you assess how your team has performed in a given situation, you've got to make the distinction between those who have actually contributed to the joint effort and those who've just gone along for the ride.

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