Bill Russell tells a great story in his second of three memoirs, Second Wind, abou how living upt up to your talents by being willing to take on responsibility is critical to leaderhip.
For those of you too young to remember him, Sam Jones replaced Bill Sharman as the shooting guard on the Boston Celtics during their run of 11 NBA championships in 13 years. He partnered with point guard K.C. Jones and was probably the third best guard in the league in the early sixties, after Oscar Robertson and Jerry West. Jones was an incredible scorer who could shoot from outside, drive to the basket and make his own shot.
Jones was totally capable of taking over a game the way Kobe Bryant or Paul Pierce can do today. He could and did score buckets of points in key games. And he always elevated his play in the playoffs.
His lifetime average was 17 points a game. But between 65 and 67 he averaged about 22 points a game and over 25 in 1965.
But despite all these achievement, Russell thought he could be even better. When Russell became the player-coach of the Celtics in the 1968 he tried to make that happen. After a game that Jones had just dominated, Russell sat down with him and asked him why he didn’t play that way all the time. He told Jones how much he could help the team. And Russell also pointed that “it would be worth a lot of money” to Jones.
Jones’ response was telling. He said, “I don’t have the authority to do that.”
Russell said to him, “Sam, I’m the coach. I’m giving you the authority.”
But Jones just repeated, “I don’t have the authority.”
Russell finally got it and said, “No, Sam, I guess you don’t.”
What Sam Jones was telling Russell was that he didn’t want the responsibility to play up to the way he could every night. He was happy to take over a game once in a while. But he didn’t want his teammates to expect that of him on a regular basis.
What Sam Jones showed Russell, I’ve seen throughout my career in both academia and politics. I’ve seen lots of talented people who did good, sometimes great, work on occasion but who didn’t produce that way all the time.
Partly, I suppose, they just didn’t want to work that hard. But that wasn’t the main thing that held them back. The people I’m thinking of were usually willing to do the work assigned them. And they often were creative and contributed their ideas and energy to our projects. But they didn’t want the responsibility and expectations that that came with always rising to the occasion and leading. Perhaps they didn’t want the worry and stress of taking on this responsibility. Or maybe they didn’t want to risk failure. And it wasn’t just a personal failure that was at stake. They might have been concerned about becoming so deeply involved with the project that their own sense of self would be vulnerable to the success or failure of something over which they did not have complete control.
Whatever it was, they just didn’t want to have our projects on their back.
The result was that while these people were valuable teachers and colleagues of mine at Temple and good political organizers on the various campaigns I’ve been on, they could have been even better. They never really lived up to their own talents.
I don’t begrudge them their unwillingness to do so. Like Russell with Sam Jones, I’m appreciative of the work these people did and am happy and honored to be working with them. In addition, the limits they put on their own commitment and involvement in our projects may have enabled them to contribute in ways that wouldn’t have been possible if they were more consistently engaged at the highest levels. By not taking responsibility for everything we did, they were able to keep some critical distance and suggest some useful improvements to our projects once they were launched. Or they had the distance to help us understand what worked and what didn’t after the fact.
So my point is not to criticize but to understand and help you understand what work at the highest levels, the kind the involves real leadership, looks like.
If you look at the way Paul Pierce and Kobe Bryant are playing in the Celtic-Lakers playoff series going on now, you will see two people who are willing to take responsibility for a whole team. They are willing to say what one of my favorite Celtics, Cedric Maxwell, said before game seven of the Celtics-Lakers NBA Finals in 1984, “climb on my back, boys.”
It’s that willingness accept authority or responsibility for collective success or failure that is at the heart of the kind of commitment that makes leadership possible.
PS Second Wind, unlike Russell’s first and third memoirs is a great book and I highly recommend it. Over the years, I’ve found much in it that has influenced the way I live and think about my life.