One of the most important keys to success as a leader is teamwork.  Having been a competitive soccer and basketball player for most of my life, I can really attest to this, so our lecture this past week from Tom Homloe, BYU’s Athletic Director, hit home for me.  He actually played football for BYU and later in the NFL, as well as coached, so he had some interesting stories to share with us.  He told us that there are two kinds of people: firelighters and firefighters.  Firelighters make a visible effort to help you “keep your fire hot”, while firefighters will put out your fire with discouragement and negative ideas.  Behind every successful person is a firelighter.  He also shared with us a very remarkable study: The Encouragement Experiment.  It proved that an average person can tolerate pain for twice as much time when someone is by their side encouraging them.  Being a leader means being that encouragement, it means being a firelighter.

      Last year, my basketball team was filled with talent and potential.  Some of my best friends my senior year were from the team, and I had a really great year.  However, from the get-go, there was something missing from our team.  We never reached our full potential, and game after game we ended up disappointed and discouraged.  I’ve never really been able to pinpoint what exactly went wrong on our team until now.  In talking about teamwork this past week, we learned of the 5 dysfunctions of a team:

      I actually don’t think we had an issue with the first dysfunction, inattention to results.  We set very specific goals for each game, and ran plenty of sets of lines to pay it when we didn’t reach our goals.  Our coach helped us reevaluate our strategy and work ethic in response to our performance, and so we did pay a lot of attention to our results.

      Avoidance of accountability, however, was a definite problem on our team last year.  Some of the girls who got plenty of playing time thought that they didn’t have work as hard in practice, and didn’t take the blame when something went wrong in a game.  Likewise, the girls who only played a few minutes (if any) didn’t feel accountable either because they knew they wouldn’t be playing in the games anyways.  Nobody stepped up as a leader, and we never stepped up as a team; unfortunately, we stayed at mediocre.

      Next comes lack of commitment, which I think was another one of our problems.  We all committed a huge chunk of our time and energy, but mentally, we were not 100% committed to the team.  In basketball, commitment means diving on the floor after a loose ball.  It means when you do a set of lines, you actually touch the line.  You give it everything you have, and you show up to every practice with the intention of making yourself and your teammates better.  I’m not saying that I did this perfectly, but our team as a whole wasn’t always committed to getting better.

      The next level of the triangle is fear of conflict; I really don’t think we had a huge issue with this.  We had an awesome coach who confronted conflict head-on, and we consistently had team meetings to address our problems.  We would sit for hours trying to come up with ways to make our team better and to get everyone on board, and we would usually emerge from meetings reenergized and refocused.  However, it never lasted very long before we sunk back into our old ways.

      At the base of the triangle is absence of trust.  While I hate to talk down about my teammates, I know that this was the basis of our problems as well.  Right at the beginning of the season, we had issues with rumors and gossip, and I think it set the season off on a bad course.  While we all got along on a superficial level and had fun together, there were cliques and with the large amount of time we spent together, we got tired of each other.  I actually think that our avoidance of accountability and lack of commitment were a direct result of our absence of trust.

      While I obviously can’t go back and fix my basketball season, it’s beneficial to reflect on what went wrong because I now know how to recognize these dysfunctions in the future.  As a leader, I need to be a firelighter, encourage others to be firelighters as well, and most importantly, remember that the basis of a successful team is trust.