The Magic of Teamwork

Pat Williams

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781418559458
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

"In his motivational and easy-to-read style, Pat Williams once again articulates the universal lessons to be learned from the world of sports. As an 'old QB, ' I was reminded of my won experiences and the valuable lessons on the 'fields of friendly strife.' Anyone committed to being a part of a team or building a team must read The Magic of Teamwork." Jack Kemp, Vice President Candidate 1996 and Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Principle 1
Acquire Top Talent

We called our team the Orlando Magic. But what happened to us in the early years of our franchise was more than magic. It was a miracle.

There’s a verse in Proverbs in The Living Bible: “We toss the coin, but it is the Lord who controls its decision.”¹ Boy, was He smiling on us in 1992 and ’93! After we had painstakingly assembled our organization, we entered the NBA draft lottery— and with God’s miraculous superblessing, we won two lotteries back-to-back!

The first year, 1992, was the year Shaquille O’Neal declared he’d come out early from Louisiana State University. It was the easiest draft choice anybody ever had. The minute the lottery was over, everyone knew that the first draft pick would be the Big Man himself. All eleven teams had Shaquille O’Neal jerseys made up, sitting under their chairs, ready to pull out. But only one team would have the honor of actually placing its Shaq jersey in Shaq’s big hands.

We did no player interviews, no player workouts that year. Prior to the draft, both Shaq and his agent, Leonard Armato, kept the whole world guessing, never committing publicly to Orlando. We finally got Shaq in for a visit right before the draft, and I think he was impressed by what he saw. Still, he never made any public statement about his plans—call it an excellent negotiating posture. Two days after the draft, we brought Orlando’s community leaders to the Expo Center for a big celebration and luncheon, with more than three hundred of Orlando’s leading citizens there.

At the appropriate time, Shaq got up to make his speech. It was the briefest speech I ever heard—and one of the most powerful. The big guy had the entire room in the palm of his hand. “I’m very excited about starting my NBA career . . . ” He paused for what seemed like an eternity, maybe an eternity and a half. Then he concluded, “. . . right here in Orlando.”

The crowd jumped to its collective feet and applauded uproariously.

That was the first time he had said he would come to Orlando. Man, we had a player!

PENNY POWER

If the ’92 draft was a slam-dunk, the ’93 draft was exactly the opposite. It was gut-wrenching and nerve-wracking. In the end, we were extremely fortunate again to bring some high-level talent to Orlando. But compared with the ease and good fortune we had acquiring Shaquille O’Neal, our acquisition of Penny Hardaway was a nail-biter and a hair-raiser all the way.

In the ’93 draft, there were four top college players who had earned a very high place in the NBA draft. The most visible was Chris Webber, who had just finished two very successful years at Michigan. We had a great need for a power forward, and Chris was about as powerful as they get. From the time we won the ’93 lottery, everyone—the fans, the press, and the Magic organization— just assumed that we would take Webber. In my own mind, I had a utopian dream of Shaq and Chris Webber playing together for the next ten years, becoming basketball’s Dynamic Duo of the ’90s.

Sure, we brought the other players in for interviews and workouts, including a pleasant young man from Memphis State named Anfernee Hardaway. But there was no question in anyone’s mind: Chris Webber was our man. We were all agreed—all, that is, except John Gabriel, our basketball operations director. For some reason he could not get Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway off his mind. (He’s been “Penny,” by the way, ever since he was a baby and his grandmother said he was as pretty as a shiny new penny.)

Added to this, events were taking place in far-off Hollywood, U.S.A., that would also affect the shape of the Orlando Magic basketball team: Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway were making a movie together. Every day on the set of the hoops movie Blue Chips, Shaq and Penny were talking together, going before the cameras together, and playing basketball together. And Shaq called us regularly in Orlando and said, “Hey, Penny is our man! We can’t pass this guy up! He’s gonna be a superstar!”

At the same time, Penny and his agent kept calling and saying, “Penny wants to be in Orlando, and Orlando needs Penny Hardaway.” Finally, one day before the draft, John Gabriel couldn’t take it anymore and said, “All right, Penny, you’re coming back for another workout.” Now, you have to understand that this is practically unheard of! On the eve of the draft, NBA draft prospects don’t fly off to franchise facilities for more tryouts. They don’t want to see anybody. They go hide out somewhere and wait for their name to be called. But here was young Penny Hardaway, flying into Orlando for a full-scale workout. John told him, “Penny, just tell me what you need for this tryout, and I’ll do it.” Boy, that was a first.

And Penny said, “All I want is one hour of pickup ball. Everything you need to know about me, you’ll see.”

So for one hour in a church gym, in an old-fashioned shirts-and-skins game, up and down the floor they went. Let me tell you, Penny did everything on that court but change the light-bulbs and sweep the floor. I’ll never forget how that scrimmage ended: Penny hit a three-pointer from long range to win that particular game—and I mean it must have been a thirty-five- footer. Then he nonchalantly walked off the floor, looking up at us as if to say, “Anything else I can do for you? Seen enough?”

Well, we had seen enough. Penny walked out of that church gym, got in a cab, and took off for the airport to fly to Detroit, where the draft would be held. John Gabriel, team president Bob Vander Weide, and I just stood on the court, looking at each other and shaking our heads. “John,” I said, “you have really messed things up now.” We knew we had a very tough decision to make.

Another onion in this whole stew was coach Don Nelson of the Golden State Warriors. Don had been calling me almost daily since we won the lottery. We had first pick, while Don’s Warriors had drawn third. His team desperately needed a big guy and he wanted Chris Webber. He kept saying he would give up a hefty package of draft picks if we would help him get Webber. “If you take Webber on your first pick and give him to us,” he said, “we’ll take Hardaway on our third pick and give him to you, plus three future draft picks.” He had been offering variations on this deal for days, even before we decided to take a look at Hardaway, and for days I had been telling him, “No, no, no! Webber’s the guy we want, not Hardaway.” But suddenly, Penny Hardaway had captured our hearts—and Don Nelson’s offer began to look very attractive.

One of the biggest headaches we faced was the enormous media and fan expectations surrounding Chris Webber. Everyone assumed Webber was Orlando-bound. Chris Webber, the number one college player in the country, was a highly visible player who had done a lot of TV and had become a household name among NCAA fans, and everyone knew we sorely needed to fill the position Webber played. It would be insanity not to take the guy.

Penny, on the other hand, was not a marquee guy, he was just not all that visible—despite the fact that he was twice named Great Midwest Conference Player of the Year and was named to the all-American first team in 1993. The public and the press had not seen that shirts-and-skins game in the church gym, they had not been part of the discussions we had, the chemistry we saw, the interaction between Shaq and Penny out in California. If we took Penny instead of Chris Webber, we knew it would create such an explosion among our fans that the Big Bang would seem like a cap pistol in comparison.

Two hours before the draft, we were all still in mental agony about what to do. So I sat down with John Gabriel, looked right at him, and said, “John, forget the public, forget the media, forget your coaches, forget everybody. What does your heart tell you? Down inside your stomach, what do you want to do?”

“I want Hardaway. We have a better chance of winning championships with Shaq and Hardaway than with Shaq and Webber.”

“John, let’s do it.”

We pulled the whole group together from the Magic front office, including Bob Vander Weide. At the meeting, John expressed his feelings. We all agreed. Penny was our man; we were dealing Webber to the Warriors. So I called Don Nelson and closed the deal for the three future firsts, and we had done it. Only one problem: We hadn’t told the public.

The draft unfolded and, according to NBA rules, we took Webber. As you can imagine, our fans went wild—all ten thousand of them who were sitting at the draft party. Twenty minutes later, it was announced that we had traded Chris Webber. It was my job to walk out and explain our decision. As I was walking out of our room, I saw a life-size cardboard cutout of Penny that he had sent us as a promotional aid. I picked that up and carried it out with me to the stage to help lead the cheers.

Except there were no cheers.

Instead, there were ten thousand extremely unhappy people who demanded to know which idiot was responsible for trading Chris Webber away. One look across that sea of hostility and I knew that this was the same mob that had chased Boris Karloff into the burning windmill in the old Universal movie, Frankenstein (the pitchforks and burning torches were a dead giveaway)! I realized I was in a no-win (and possibly a no-escape) situation. I couldn’t outshout them. All I could do was raise that Penny Hardaway cutout (partly as a shield) and shout into the microphone, “You’re booing tonight, folks, but Penny Hardaway will turn your jeers into cheers.”

And I walked off the platform (actually, it was more of a dignified scramble). Those words were the only thing I could think to say in order to get out of there before the bottles started flying. But you know what? Those words were prophetic. Absolutely prophetic.

Sure, Penny had to earn the public’s respect. His first few weeks with the Magic were not easy for him. Some of the early comments from the fans and the press were unkind not only to the Magic organization but to Penny himself. But as soon as he started showing his stuff on the court—his speed, his agility, his slammin’ and jammin’ and no-look wraparound passes—it became hard to find a single person in Orlando who would admit to ever having doubted us.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A TEAM PLAYER

The acquisition of top talent like Shaq and Penny—as well as outstanding players like Horace Grant, Nick Anderson, Dennis Scott, Brian Shaw, Jeff Turner, Donald Royal, Scott Skiles, and Anthony Bowie—contributed to the early emergence of the Magic from expansion-team obscurity to NBA powerhouse. “How you select people is more important than how you manage them once they’re on the job,” said Red Auerbach, a guy who really ought to know. As coach of the Boston Celtics, he held the record for most regular season wins in the NBA (938), a record that stood from 1966 until it was broken in ’95 by Lenny Wilkens. Auerbach went on to say, “If you start with the right people, you won’t have problems later on. If you hire the wrong people, for whatever reason, you’re in serious trouble and all the management techniques in the world won’t bail you out.”

You want to build a winning team in sports, business, government, or ministry? You’ve gotta start with the right people. Not necessarily the most flashy people. Not necessarily the highest-priced people. I’m talking about the right people, the best mix, blend, and balance of people for the job you have to do. But how do you accomplish that? How do you know who the right people are as you assemble your team?

In a very real sense, I have been collecting the insights and principles that make up this book over a thirty-six-year career in sports management. During the past year as I approached the writing, I have also been intensely gathering the thoughts and experiences of team-building experts. Here are the steps to acquiring top talent, as I have learned them (often through painful trial and error) and as I have gleaned them from the top team-builders across the country:

Step 1: Assess Ability

Choose team players well, according to how well their strengths and skills fit the goals and tasks of your organization. This step seems obvious, yet it is an easy step to overlook. I know. I overlooked it.

As I was sharing an early outline of this book with various sports colleagues to get their feedback and advice, Dr. Jack Ramsay—a longtime NBA coach, a Hall of Famer, a broadcaster, and a man I greatly respect—called me and said, “Pat, you’ve forgotten the most important thing in building a team: How do you get the talent? You can have all these principles in place—the right leadership, the vision, the commitment, the passion, the team attitude, the character, and all the rest—but if you don’t have the right people with the right skills to do the job, you’re dead in the water. Assessing the talent of your players is the first step in building a sports organization, a business organization, or any other kind of team.”

I said, “Good point, Dr. Jack. That’s why you have a Ph.D.”

When asked what he looked for in recruiting players, UCLA’s legendary former basketball coach John Wooden used to say, “Talent, talent, talent.”

Skill assessment in sports is a fairly simple matter, compared with other businesses and team enterprises. In the sports world, you have a record to look at, including stats, scouting reports, newspaper clippings, and video clips. And the job interview? Hey, the way you interview a ballplayer is the way we interviewed Penny—take the guy out on the court and have him show you his stuff.

But when you’re interviewing a potential team player for your business, your organization, or your church—whether it’s a kid to work in the mailroom or a corporate CEO or a church pastor—skill assessment becomes a little more complex. You have to ask yourself, “Why does this person want the job? Ambition, a love for this kind of work, a sense of calling, an eagerness to succeed in our organization? Or has this person simply failed in three or four previous jobs?”

Fact is, making a mistake in acquiring talent can be very costly for your team or organization. Hal Eskenazi, president of Profiles Worldwide, Inc., estimates the cost of hiring the wrong team player in a corporate environment at between $5,700 and $50,000—including wasted recruiting costs, the cost of the interview process, training costs, break-in time, wasted supervisor and coworker time, and lost productivity and business. Obviously, it’s absolutely crucial, in dollars-and-cents terms, to assess accurately the ability and suitability of every person you put on your team.

In a real sense, the Orlando Magic “team” is much more than a bunch of guys who play basketball. It takes a lot of people to make our season happen—people the public never sees but who are just as much a part of the Orlando Magic as Penny Hardaway or Nick Anderson. For the on-court part of our team, we use a number of evaluative tools, including the same kinds of psychological evaluation questionnaires used by many businesses, organizations, and churches. The particular tool we use— the Meyers-Briggs psychological profile—is a very effective indicator of an individual’s emotional stability and mental makeup, as well as that person’s ability to function in a team environment. For the “front office” and “behind-the-scenes” parts of our team, we also rely on the usual assessment tools, such as résumés, references, and interviews.

Frankly, I’m a little leery of the usual “human resources” approach to acquiring skilled talent. For one thing, I’ve never been fond of that term human resources. A “resource” is an asset, a supply of something, a thing that you exploit in order to pro...