How Your Relationship to the Scoreboard Impacts Your Relationship to Success

“I’m good at basketball, but I prefer not to play hand sports.”

Despite his stated preference “not to play hand sports,” my 10-year-old jumped at the chance to join the basketball team at school this year. He is, as he observed last fall, “good at basketball.” Now several games into his first season, he has proven to be a good passer and strong defensive player, but he has yet to score in any of the games he's played thus far.

This week, my son’s team had a 34-4 rout of the opposing team (which had a number of my son’s friends on their team), and my 10-year-old contributed to the win with a couple of assists and his consistently tenacious defensive presence. However, when he came home, his only thoughts about the game were wrapped up in the disappointment that he hadn’t scored.

Whether in basketball or in leadership, do we have a scoreboard problem? Do we find ourselves placing the greatest value on being in the spotlight or on having the greatest impact on the success of the team? It's easy to forget that the scoreboard is only one measure of success, and it certainly doesn't measure everything that contributes to the team's success.

Finding themselves down by three points to an opponent that would finish the season at the bottom of the standings, the defending champions called for a timeout. It was becoming more and more important for the team to change its course and to devise a new strategy for success. If not, they risked losing to an inferior opponent, which could decimate the team’s hopes for playing for a championship at the end of the season.

As the players on the court approached the bench, the coach handed his clipboard to one of the players and walked away.

Can you imagine the reactions of the players and assistant coaches in that moment? What would cause the coach to give up his clipboard and walk away in such a critical moment?

As it turns out, the answer is: Trust. Absolute, complete, and total trust-the foundation of any good team.

In a February 12, 2018 game against the Phoenix Suns, Steve Kerr, Coach of the Golden State Warriors, demonstrated that the team belongs to the whole team, not to the team’s positional leader.

“It's the players' team,” Kerr said after the game. “It's their team and they have to take ownership of it. As coaches, our job is to nudge them in the right direction, guide them. We don't control them. They determine their own fate.”

It was not an in-the-moment, knee-jerk reaction, as Kerr also prepared the players for that moment. The night before the game, Kerr and the players developed a plan, which included one player orchestrating the morning’s shootaround, a second player organizing the team’s daily film session, and two others designing plays and running the team’s huddle during timeouts.

“It had to do with me trying to reach my team and I have not reached them the last month,” Kerr said. “They're tired of my voice. I'm tired of my voice. I wasn't reaching them so we figured this was a good night to pull something out of the hat.”

As a player, Kerr won five championships as a point guard with the Chicago Bulls (1996, 1997, and 1998) and two with the San Antonio Spurs (1999 and 2003). Although those teams featured prolific scorers, such as Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Tim Duncan, and David Robinson, they also featured role players like Kerr, who contributed in many ways beyond the points on the scoreboard.

As a coach, Kerr knew the team's path to success, not just in that one contest against the Suns, but for the season as a whole, asked him to take a step back for the good of the team. Although Coach Kerr could have seen the situation as a threat to his ego or as an indictment of his leadership, Kerr kept his focus not on himself and his own individual success, but rather on the success of the team.

The truth is that there always are contributions or roles that receive more time in the spotlight than others, but they certainly are not the only ones that lead to teams' successes. If we focus only on the things that propel ourselves into the spotlight, we may find ourselves inhibiting, rather than igniting, our teams' greatest levels of success.