The Captain Class Quotes

“THE SEVEN TRAITS OF ELITE CAPTAINS 1. Extreme doggedness and focus in competition. 2. Aggressive play that tests the limits of the rules. 3. A willingness to do thankless jobs in the shadows. 4. A low-key, practical, and democratic communication style. 5. Motivates others with passionate nonverbal displays. 6. Strong convictions and the courage to stand apart. 7. Ironclad emotional control.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

“People often attain and hold power within an organization by downplaying their qualifications. “We gain status more readily, and more reliably, by acting just a little less deserving than we actually are.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“the most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

“The easiest way to lead, it turns out, is to serve.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

“group of individuals who were unremarkable alone, but together— potent, magical.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him,” he wrote. “Fail to honor others and they will fail to honor you.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

“On the Tier One Teams I studied, the typical pecking order put the coach at the top, the talent on the bottom, and a water-carrying captain in the middle who served as an independent mediator between them. In this new order, where power and popularity went hand in hand, the middle manager’s role had been squeezed out. Unless the captain was the superstar, the captain was a bystander.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“Most of us carry a faded old picture in our heads of what a great captain looks like. It’s usually an attractive person who possesses an abundance of strength, skill, wisdom, charisma, diplomacy, and unflappable calm. These people are not supposed to be difficult to spot. In our imaginations they’re talkative and articulate, charismatic but firm, tough but gracious, and respectful of authority. We expect leaders, especially in sports, to pursue their goals with gusto but to never wander from the principles of sportsmanship and fair play. We believe, as the Stanford social psychologist Deborah Gruenfeld put it, that power is reserved for the kind of person “who possesses some combination of superior charm and ruthless ambition that the rest of us don’t.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“I thought, out of respect to her, she should have been captain. We all saw her as our leader.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“The captains in Tier One were not poseurs. They didn’t make speeches, didn’t seek attention or acclaim, and were not comfortable wearing the cloak of power. Most of them took subservient roles and carried water for their teammates. In other words, they behaved precisely the way Gruenfeld describes. They won status by doing everything in their power to suggest they didn’t deserve it.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“If there is a pathway into the minds of human beings that bypasses consciousness and absorbs the emotions of others; and if this pathway can be activated by the sight of a bloody uniform, a hair-raising tribal dance, or just a deep stare; and if these displays can propel a team to run faster, jump higher, hit
harder, and push through pain and exhaustion, then these captains must have been masters of the art.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“The less identifiable one person’s effort is, the less effort they put in.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

“The antidote is the knowledge that someone else in the group is leaving nothing in reserve.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

“What I realized about this glorious experience, years later, is that it had forever modified my expectations. The Bombers gave me a taste of what it was like to play on an excellent team.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“They are democratic with their time—communicating with everyone equally and making sure all team members get a chance to contribute.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“The same unceasing drive was something displayed by Russell, Puyol, Berra, Richard, and every other captain in Tier One. Early struggles culminated in a defining moment, a
breakthrough that left no doubt about their desire to win at any cost. And in each case, after they had established this fact, their teams began to turn the corner. The pattern was so consistent that it suggested their doggedness might, in fact, have been contagious.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“On a team, he said, “you can’t only have architects. You also need bricklayers.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force Behind the World’s Greatest Teams

“One of the great paradoxes of management is that the people who pursue leadership positions most ardently are often the wrong people for the job. They're motivated by the prestige the role conveys rather than a desire to promote the goals and values of the organization.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“I started to suspect that the real reason we can't agree on a formula for elite team leadership is that we've overcomplicated things. We've been so busy scanning the horizon for transformational knights in shining armor that we've ignored the likelier truth: there are hundreds upon thousands of potentially transformative leaders right in our midst. We just lack the ability to recognize them.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“To see if “cluster theory” explained the success of the teams in Tier One, I turned to baseball. In this sport, as I noted earlier, teammate interaction plays a limited role while the performance of individual players has a larger impact.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“Davidson had become a strong believer in the concept of neuroplasticity, the idea that people’s brains will physically change over time and that those changes can depend on their life experiences.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“What I realized about this glorious experience, years later, is that it had forever modified my expectations. The Bombers gave me a taste of what it was like to play on an excellent team, and this had rewired my brain to believe it was my God-given right to experience the same sensation many times over.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“There was no question that the captains who made a habit of testing the boundaries of the rules would never be revered by the public the way Derek Jeter was. But this theory suggested that calling their behavior thuggish was an oversimplification. These were aggressive acts that pushed the limits of what’s acceptable, but they were also instrumental.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him,” he wrote. “Fail to honor others and they will fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his
work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, ‘we did this ourselves.’ ”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“Studies have shown that a team leader who is in a positive mood can increase a group’s enthusiasm, help it to channel anger more constructively, and even coax it to perform better on specific tasks.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“The captain is the figure who holds sway over the dressing room by speaking to teammates as a peer, counseling them on and off the field, motivating them, challenging them, protecting them, resolving disputes, enforcing standards, inspiring fear when necessary, and above all setting a tone with words and deeds.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams

“The key, Deschamps said, is to maintain self-control and to know when it’s okay to foul and when you are “too far up the referee’s nose” to get away with it. “It’s something you feel. It’s a feeling. It’s a form of intelligence.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force Behind the World’s Greatest Teams

“The single most important ingredient after you get the talent is internal leadership. It’s not the coaches as much as one single person or people on the team who set higher standards than that team would normally set for itself.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force Behind the World’s Greatest Teams

“It’s the notion that the most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

“Some of the same forces have come to bear in the business world, where many companies in thriving talent-dependent industries embraced a new workplace ethos in which hierarchies were softened and office floor plans were reengineered to break down the walls that once kept management and talent separated. One emerging school of thought, popular among technology companies in Silicon Valley, is that organizations should adopt “flat” structures, in which management layers are thin or even nonexistent. Star employees are more productive, the theory goes, and more likely to stay, when they are given autonomy and offered a voice in decision-making. Some start-ups have done away with job titles entirely, organizing workers into leaderless “self-managing teams” that report directly to top executives. Proponents of flatness say it increases the speed of the feedback loop between the people at the top of the pyramid and the people who do the frontline work, allowing for a faster, more agile culture of continuous improvement. Whether that’s true or not, it has certainly cleared the way for top executives to communicate directly with star employees without having to muddle through an extra layer of management. As I watched all this happen, I started to wonder if I was really writing a eulogy. Just as I was building a case for the crucial value of quiet, unglamorous, team-oriented, workmanlike captains who inhabit the middle strata of a team, most of the world’s richest sports organizations, and even some of its most forward-thinking companies, seemed to be sprinting headlong in the opposite direction.”
― Sam Walker, The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership