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Sports have always played a big part in my life, and while I enjoy many sports, I’ve always been a basketball guy.
The NBA tipped off on October 22nd, and professional basketball is a sport where success often rises and falls with the superstars.
If you have Lebron James, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, or Nikola Jokić (or insert your favorite NBA superstar), you have a solid chance of winning the championship. Most teams without a top-tier superstar are at the bottom of the standings. It wasn’t always this way. The league has evolved over the years, becoming a player’s league where teams ride the supernatural talent of their superstars to win championships.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in Cleveland. The Cleveland Cavs were a force to be reckoned with when they had Lebron James. However, without Lebron James (who left not once but twice), the team struggled to find consistent success.
In a superstar approach to winning basketball games, success ebbs and flows with the players. What if there was another approach to achieve consistent success? Well, there is.
This other approach is why the San Antonio Spurs have had such great success for over three decades. Led by Gregg Popovich as their coach since 1996, they have ascribed to what some call a systems approach. Popovich is the winningest coach in NBA history and a 5x NBA Champion with the Spurs. Sure, you could argue they’ve had their fair share of superstar players, but by and large, their systems approach has maintained their consistent success in winning games over the years despite their starting five players. You can’t say the same thing about the Cleveland Cavaliers.
In leading our organizations, it’s easy to default to the superstar approach—if we just get the right person, if we can just hire better talent, if we can just get a superstar performance from our managers this month, this quarter, this year. That approach relies upon individual heroics. Success ebbs and flows with the personality, talent, and performance of individuals. That’s a lot of pressure. It can be exhausting, frustrating, and stressful for everyone.
A better way is with a systems approach, where our systems are designed to work together to achieve our purpose, and our “players” are aligned with that purpose, working within the systems to achieve success.
Managing a systems approach as the means (the “how to”) to organize people, skills, activities, resources, labor, etc., that work in the system efficiently, effectively, and optimally to produce the KORs and, thus, fulfill its purpose is far more successful than the individual heroic efforts of superstar employees.
So, when it comes to a systems or superstar approach, which does your organization have? |
