Embracing Followership

Not everyone can be a leader. We need good followers, people who know how to support and act.

I listened with interest to Shane Battier, a retired NBA champion basketball player, talk about the importance of being a top teammate. Here are some excerpts from his December, 2024 TED talk:

“What if I could tell you that the biggest impact that you can make happens outside the spotlight? Not by sitting at the head of the table or leading the parade. What if I told you that you could influence an entire symphony without ever picking up the conductor’s wand? Or, in my case, what if I told you could have the most powerful change in a basketball game, not when the ball is in your hands but by what you do when it’s not?”

“Do you know how many hours I practiced? Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of hours. I’d make Malcolm Gladwell blush with all the practice I had with the basketball. I spent 1,000 hours dribbling the basketball, passing the basketball, shooting the basketball. I wanted to become one with that pumpkin. But, you know, when I played as a starter with LeBron James and Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh, Ray Allen, all Hall of Famers, do you know how often I actually touched the ball? Two percent of the time. Two. So it begs the question, what did I do in the other 98 percent of the time, when I didn’t have the ball to justify starting on the best team in the world, playing at the highest level on the planet Earth? That’s a crazy question. What did I do?”

Battier goes on to talk about how he was an outside as a young man. He had a black dad and a white mom. His family wasn’t well of financially, so Battier went to school with patches on his jeans, and his family’s roof leaked when it rained. He had to carry a birth certificate with him to every Little League baseball game, since he was so tall no one believed he was the age he said he was. He grew up mixed, poor, and tall.

He saw sports and other activities as opportunities to belong.

“…And that’s when I learned the most powerful lesson in my life, the power of ‘we’ over ‘me.’ And I realized, during these games, when I helped my friends win, I wasn’t the mixed kid. I wasn’t the poor kid, and I wasn’t the freakishly tall kid. I was just a teammate. I belonged. And so I became obsessed with: ‘How can I help my friends win? How can I help my friends look good?’ For love, I was seeking love. When’s the last time…you had to win in the name of being loved?”

Battier’s selflessness paid off, both for him and the teams he played on.

“…I impacted winning at such a high level that when I retired, I saw a stat about my career. And on the teams that I played for in my career, when I was on the floor, we consistently outscored the opponent by five points a game versus when I was on the bench. OK, that puts me, in the last three decades, the last 30 years, in the top 97^th percentile of every player that played in the NBA…”

“You see, it’s all about the unseen…the immeasurable, the intangible that matters. See today we are driven by so many what I call ‘spotlight metrics.’ We’re always chasing grade point average and salary, and, you know, we’re concerned about the cost of the purse that we carry or the car that we drive. We’re concerned about the likes, mentions, follows, reposts…. Yes, we’re all guilty. Well those are all what I call ‘spotlight metrics.’ They happen when the light’s on us. But those factors, those figures, they miss the most important thing. How do we elevate others?”

Battier summarizes his talk by asking his audience,

“’What am I doing in my 98 percent outside the spotlight? How am I spending my time, my energy, my talents…to elevate others?’ Because if you do that, you will realize it is not about being the star, but the value is in being the glue guy, the glue girl, the glue person that makes it all work, and you win together. And it’s an amazing feeling.”

“Spotlight metrics” are alive and well in our K-12 school system. Honor rolls, class rank, most outstanding student, and most valuable players carry the day in traditional schools.

The average kid, to large degree, gets ignored.

But when individual learners have the opportunity to personalize their learning activities, “average” disappears since everyone has strengths to share.

Til tomorrow. SVB