Lessons From The Oklahoma City Thunder

I admit with some embarrassment that I am a total, absolute, over-the-top OKC Thunder fan.  My family and friends are pretty incredulous about this—I’ve never shown any interest in sports that weren’t related to my children.  Ever.  Nevertheless, my move to Oklahoma City closely correlated with the arrival of the new Oklahoma City Thunder (transferred and renamed from Seattle).  The team was young and was definitely an underdog in those days and I quickly became a fan.  They were so energized and persistent.  Some of their members were enthusiastic (at least to our face) about being in Oklahoma City and I embraced them along with the rest of the fans in Oklahoma City.

I don’t know how different the Oklahoma City Thunder is from other teams, since I never was interested enough about other basketball teams to pay attention.  It is likely, therefore, that the lessons I lay out here are true for other sports teams.  I just don’t see and hear the same things about them.

Leadership

Successful teams have several leaders and have people who aren’t traditionally leaders step up into those roles when needed.  Sure Scott Brooks is a great coach/leader, and Kevin Durant is a leader.  But so are Russell Westbrook and Derrick Fisher (the old guy) and Serge Ibaka and Thabo Sefolosha.  When the situation calls for it, someone steps up.  They aren’t lost without ‘the’ leader.

Constant, Persistent Hard Work

They REALLY work.  They take their work seriously.  They practice, practice, practice, practice.  Malcolm Gladwell says in Outliers that REALLY good people practice more than the rest of us (in fact he says the number is 10,000 hours—which has been disputed by some).  We know this in our heads.  Most of us don’t want to be great enough to put the work in.  The Thunder is an example of what happens when you do.  (At the moment they have the best record in the West and the second best in the East).  They have risen to Playoff level very quickly for such a young team.  They wouldn’t be there without the hard work.

How many of us approach our work that way?  Or how many of us put in “enough” hours and go home?  How many of us are considered the ‘best’ at what we do?

Teamwork—Support Each Other

They talk a good story about team.  They say all the right things.  When you watch them, you can actually see that they aren’t lying.  In the recent game against the Miami Heat, Kendrick Perkins had only five minutes playing time (his lowest amount of time since 2006).  If you don’t know Perk, he tends to be a bit grumpy (looking, anyway).  So there was discussion among the press of what his reaction would be.  We only had to wait a day.  He tweeted,

“What’s good my peeps? Great teams win. Whatever it takes. Sacrificing is what good teams do. When my name is called I’ll be ready. 9 in a row”

Kevin Durant, the leading scorer on the team, ALWAYS talks about team.  Coach Scott Brooks ALWAYS talks about team.

Teams support each other.  Teams work together.  Teams use each member’s strengths to achieve the team goals.

Do you even talk the “team” talk?  That’s a place to start, especially if you are the leader.  Do you walk the “team” walk?  That’s what it takes for people to believe it.  Teams get better results.  Do you believe that?  Do you see it?  Thunder makes it obvious.

One Day At A Time

As Kevin gets better and better (currently he is the leading scorer in the NBA by quite a margin), and as the Thunder’s record grows, the pressure is mounting to continue the performance.  Can they?  Will they?  These are the questions that get asked of Brooks and Durant and the other players.  Their answer is always the same.  We focus on the next game.  We are thinking about today’s game.  They refuse to engage in the discussion of anything but the very next obstacle ahead of them.

Do you do that?  Or are you thinking about the next three things?  Or are you consumed by the 3,000 things that must get done before the project is done?  Yes, you have to be aware of the things ahead.  Your focus, however, should be on the NEXT thing.  FOCUS on what is next.  Get it done.  Then do it again.

It seems to work for the Thunder.

Roll With The Punches, Figure It Out, Keep Going

Related to taking it one day at a time, when things go wrong—lose a game, lose a player—start again with the next practice, game, emergency.  Get it out of your head.  Get on with what is next.  This is an extremely helpful (and hard to do) tactic.  If you let the loss go, and FOCUS on what is next, you are starting fresh.  You have a much better chance of changing the future with this tactic.

Don’t Freak Out

It is not unusual for the Thunder to be behind by twenty points.  How, you might ask, can they be a great team if they are behind by that much?  They just don’t freak out.  They just keep plugging away.  They keep trying.  They keep playing.  And usually, they catch up and get ahead.  They don’t freak out when they are behind.  They don’t rest and relax when they are ahead.  They keep playing HARD.

So . . . Go For It!  And Watch The Oklahoma City Thunder😉

Why Is It So Hard to Build A Team?

 

Teams Are Easy, Right?

In theory it should be easy to create a team.  Each stakeholder part of the organization sends their best and brightest, outside expertise is brought in, the goal is explained and the “team” gets to work.  The reality is almost always different.

The reality is that each stakeholder part of the organization has a different agenda.  Some parts of the organization really want the goal to happen.  Some kind of want it to happen, as long as it doesn’t disrupt other things.  Some parts of the organization emphatically don’t want it to happen.  In fact those parts of the organization and their leadership will work hard to keep the goals from happening.  Leadership in some parts of the organization may feel that the project goals have been inflicted upon them.  When they select team members, they may choose people who aren’t the best and brightest.  Or they may instruct their team members to protect the suborbanization’s interest at all costs.

Frequently the people who are chosen to join the team are not relieved of their day jobs.  The people in their home organizations don’t have a real appreciation of the team demands being placed on the team member and just see a diminishment in performance.  They don’t see the massive increase in responsibility and demand being created by team responsibilities.  This creates a tension for the team member that is painful.  It actually puts the team member’s career at risk.

Ideally the outside expert resources are there with the best interests of the organization at heart.  Frequently, however, they are the “them” to the organization’s “us.”  There are rules about how these outside resources can be treated by the organization–there are barriers to keep them from being identified as employees for tax and regulation purposes.  These differences just enforce the ‘outsider’ aspect.  It is hard to create a team when you’ve got the them and us dichotomy.

According to Wikipedia, a dichotomy is “any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts, meaning it is a procedure in which a whole is divided into two parts.

It is a partition of a whole into two parts that are:

• jointly exhaustive: everything must belong to one part or the other, and
• mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts”

How do you create a ‘whole’–a TEAM–when you start out with the split between the outsiders and the insiders? How do you build a team when each member comes from an organization, led by a leader in control of the team member’s career, with a different agenda?

Start with the Goals

• The goals must serve the ORGANIZATION.  The goals may serve one part of the organization more, but the WHOLE organization must benefit from project.
• The team members–all of them, from every part of the organization, from the inside and the outside–must be able to see the benefit to the whole organization.  This may be a process.  Every team member comes to the team with his/her own organization’s perspective.  Changing that perspective to see and want what is best for the whole organization is a process, it takes time.  It must start, however, with goals that DO benefit the whole organization.  Without this, creating a ‘team’ is a non-starter.

Build Relationships

People will work to benefit their friends.  I’m not saying that all team members have to be friends, but there have to be cordial, complex, willing relationships among team members.  That transformation from us to “US” must take place.  This is what organizations are trying to create and support when they bring in “team building” activities.  These help.  They are not enough, though, especially when the team is dipped briefly in the team building and then goes back to whatever business as usual that happened before.

Things that help build relationships:

• Proximity–teams that work together and live together (in a work sense) form relationships and are forced to work through problems among themselves.  In a virtual world, you have to figure out how to do this.  Things like Lync and Skype help with this enormously, but creating opportunities to really get to know each other are essential.
• Eating–human beings feel better about people when they break bread together.  Why is that?  Who knows–it probably goes back to the cave days.  At any rate, eating together helps build relationships.
• Playing–it helps to see each other in different roles and places.  Outside the work context.  When you play together you start to see each other differently.  You develop inside jokes, fun memories, even trust.
• Talking–encourage people on the team to talk about things beyond just the tasks of the project.  It is NOT a waste of time.
• Solving hard problems–let the team, rather than their leadership, solve the hard problems.  At first they will resist that.  At first they will delegate up.  If they start working together to solve the problems, they will form different, more integrated relationships.
• Celebrating–all kinds of celebrations create and cement relationships.  When people feel happy and proud, they feel connected. They associate with positive celebratory feelings help cement the relationships.

Discipline and Execution

Get the project done.  Enforce deadlines–for everyone.  The chief complaint for people on teams is that some people do all the work and everyone gets all the credit.  If there is a system that assigns tasks and enforces delivery on those tasks; if team members see steady progress and see that everyone is working; if leadership sees things moving along and meeting expectations, then the team works better.

Bottom Line: Do What It Takes

Building teams is work.  Don’t take the team creation be the end.  Keep trying things until your done.  A great team delivers a project.  It’s worth it.