What does leadership really mean?

And why the best player in the team is not always the best leader

In 2010, Darren Sammy of the island of St Lucia was named captain of the West Indies cricket team.

Even when he was appointed captain though, there were murmurs. No one doubted his talent: He was a gifted allrounder, more a bowler than a batter. But he never would have been the first player on the team sheet if he was not captain. And yet, he had to be included in that team, and had to lead it.

Why?

Because leading the West Indies is not a simple job.

The West Indies cricket team is a peculiar thing. The cricketers that play under the banner all come from different islands and different cultures. Guyana is in South America, it’s not an island at all. Jamaica is different from Trinidad and Tobago, as Antigua is different from Barbados. These are literally different countries.

So to get players from these different places to play together has always required a balancing act of significant effort. But the great West Indies cricket teams of the past, under Clive Lloyd (Guyana), Sir Vivian Richards (Antigua), Brian Lara (Trinidad and Tobago), had white hegemony to battle, a history of colonialism and slavery to position Carribean cricket against.

And they used that past as a rallying point, to incredible success.

That West Indies cricket team is considered one of the greatest teams in any organised sport, rivaled only by dynasties like the Chicago Bulls. They dominated the cricket world for a decade and a half, a kingdom that began its end only when another once-subjugated country, written off as mere participants, came riding on the genius of their captain to win the 1983 World Cup final against them: Kapil Dev’s India.

Darren Sammy’s leadership

This was not the team that Darren Sammy took over in 2010. The 2010 side was one of stars that couldn’t play together, fought frequently with their board, and had other cricketing avenues like the IPL to concentrate on. They only sometimes put up spirited fights, like in the 2004 Champions Trophy, when they stunned England in the final. But even that was in the past. Make no mistake, these were tremendous players, individual powerhouses: Chris Gayle, Pollard, the Bravo brothers, Andre Russell, Dwayne Smith, and more. They were really big buys on the T20 circuit, but they hadn’t come together for the West Indies yet.

This was the team that Sammy took over, and he was chosen for a specific reason: His job was to lead them.

As Carribean scholar Dr David Hinds wrote in 2014, "..Sammy was not appointed captain because of his cricketing skills, but rather because he was perceived to have the leadership qualities that were needed to meet the larger challenges of the moment."

And Sammy did exactly that. Emerging from a difficult period in his first year as captain, he led his team to a World T20 win in Sri Lanka. Even as he did that, he was doubted and criticised by many for not carrying his weight in the team. But Sammy didn’t stop. He took the team to India in 2016, and won the World T20 again.

Later in the year, the national cricket ground in his home country of St Lucia was renamed the Darren Sammy international cricket stadium. He retired as the only international captain to have won two T20 World Cups, and in 2017, was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

Leadership as a specialised skill

This is a story I love, and not just because I’m fascinated by the game and by leadership, and not only because this story lies exactly at the intersection of these two things.

In business, as in cricket, leaders are important. They take a lot of critical decisions, are expected to handle and perform under pressure, and take the glory and humiliation of victory or defeat. To do this well is difficult, and requires more than a functioning knowledge of a lot of moving parts. And all this is why leadership is a specialised skill.

This is not how we normally think about leadership. We see someone looking good in one role, and promote them, not understanding that the best performer at something may not be the best leader of everything. As Darren Sammy himself put it, "The best player is not always the best captain."

Let’s take another example. This is a story I had saved from Ankesh Kothari’s newsletter, which I read unfailingly. I have added some details here for narrative.

Steve Nash and the Phoenix Suns

The Phoenix Suns, in 2004, had won 29 basketball games and lost 53. Then they got a player called Steve Nash on their team. The next year, they won 62 games and lost just 20! And while they lost the conference finals, Nash was deemed the MVP!

South Africa-born Nash has one of the best 3 point shooting averages the game has ever seen. He plunks in over 42% of the three pointers. But it wasn’t his shooting skills that had made his team win so much.

It was what Nash did to people around him. Nash was magic. His numbers were prolific, but people who play with him improve by a whole standard deviation.

His teammate Amar'e Stoudemire, who used to average 13.5 points per game, suddenly started averaging 26 points! He scored an insane 50 points in a game too! And that's not an anomaly. Seven of Nash’s team mates attained career highs in their season’s scoring.

Nash improved the game of everyone around him. But how?

Because everyone loved playing with Nash. Because he made them feel confident and secure. He made shooting safer for them. People shared the ball more. Plus Nash himself passed the ball with extreme efficiency. The ball went back and forth until it was in the hands of the person who had the best opportunity to score.

Just looking at Nash’s numbers, which is how we usually measure performance, this impact will never be visible. And yet his impact is at the centre of a champion team. Is this not leadership? How do you quantify it?

Similarly, how will Sammy’s contribution to West Indies cricket be quantified? As a player, he was nowhere near the greats of the game. As captain, he is among the most successful. What then is his value?

Thinking differently about leadership

This is a question we must ask ourselves in the business world as well, as well as in startups. I have seen this happen often, when leaders are judged wrongly, with different metrics than the ones they actually contribute in. This is equivalent to looking at Sammy’s runs/wickets and concluding that he was an average player.

The modern business world has so many moving parts already that it is widely acknowledged that CEOs and leaders necessarily have to be all-rounders, generalists, polymaths. I have myself seen how powerful this is. I now work for a polymath too.

But such thinking is plainly absent from other functions. And that’s a pity.

Because we are overlooking the connectors, the elevators, the orchestrators. We are not seeing them as leaders because of our long-held obsession with individual excellence.

Their causes, and ours, might be better served by a new definition of leadership, at least in our heads, by how much others grow and thrive under a leader’s guidance, how effectively diverse talents come together, and how sustainable that success becomes. Perhaps that’s what leadership actually means: the talent, ability, and vision to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

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