Education and debate

Teams: lessons from the world of sport

Michael Brearley, psychoanalyst, former captain of Middlesex and England cricket teams. 

20 Provost Road, London NW3 4ST

brearley{at}globalnet.co.uk

"There's no I in team." But there is and needs to be, and cricket reveals this more sharply than other team games. For cricket, like baseball, could be described, crudely, as a series of individual contests within a team context. When on the many occasions Michael Atherton faced Curtley Ambrose for the first ball of a test match between England and the West Indies, surrounded as the opening batsman is by a ring of rebarbative faces, he will always have been fully aware of the loneliness of his situation. He knew that he had the moral support of his partner 20 yards away, and the implicit, even fervent backing of the other nine members of the team in the dressing roomespecially of the next batsman in. It is a team game. But he also had no illusions about the fact that what would happen next was up to him, alone, plus of course the beanpole figure of Curtley Ambrose silhouetted against and above the sight screen 50 yards away.

So cricket is an individual game par excellence, in which the nation gets an instant view of a player's personal failure, backed up by a written account of it over breakfast the next morning. Yetagainthe character and outcome of these little individual dramas will be influenced by the balance of confidence and morale between the two teams as a whole.

	Individuals in complex interaction

Without vivid and unique "I's" a team is flat, uniform, stereotyped. It is a repressed, grey team, a team without desires, passions, jealousies. A small example: when Middlesex played Northants in a limited overs match in 1971, we, Middlesex, were all out for the very low score of 76. During the interval between innings, while our opponents' opening batsman was putting on his pads, he asked his team mates why they all looked so miserable. After a silence, someone said, gloomily, "Who's going to get these runs for us then?" They proceeded to be all out for 41, managing to lose the match by a large margin. This was a team whose flatness had degenerated into depression and self-created pessimism.

Seen from a distance, a successful team may look well organised and cohesive; get closer up and you see, in my experience, the vigour and rivalries of a group of strong personalities. It is like a lively argumentative family. Creativity requires both conflicting ideas and passions. "Without contrariety there is no progression," William Blake wrote. And Joseph Conrad, in the introduction to Chance, replying to criticisms that the tale could have been told in half the length, said, "No doubt by selecting a certain method and taking great pains the whole story might have been written out on a cigarette paper. For that matter the whole history of mankind could be written thus if only approached with sufficient detachment. The history of men on this earth since the beginning of ages may be resumed in one phrase of infinite poignancy: They were born, they suffered, they died. . . . But in the infinitely minute stories about men and women it is my lot on earth to narrate I am not capable of such detachment."

Taking my cue from Conrad, I am asserting that it is only from such a position of detachment that teams look serenely coherent. Viewed close up there are "infinitely minute stories to be told," the stories of vivid selves, I's in rich and complex interaction.

	Don't remove individuality, harness it

Even the self may be thought of as a team. As D H Lawrence in his polemic against Benjamin Franklin and the American's theory of the perfectibility of man demanded to know: "Which of the various me's do you propose to educate, and which do you therefore propose to suppress?" For we are, as Freud has made more clear, but as emotionally insightful people have long known, creatures of variability, with depths unknown even to ourselves.

The healthy individual does not see himself as uniform or lacking in conflict but can give houseroom to his full range of characteristics (both those that he is well acquainted with, and those that feel more foreign), without losing too catastrophically or permanently a manageable degree of cohesion. Similarly, the aim of a team is not to remove individuality but to harness it in the interests of the whole. Middlesex, the team I captained for 12 years, was a team of players who differed in many waysin skills, character, style, race, and classyet at their best their potential for destructive sarcasm and selfishness was outweighed by mutual respect and humour.

None of this removes the need for players, team members, to identify with the team as a whole. When a team works well all its members share aims. Selfishness is modified when our ends and identifications broaden. If I have a bad game as a batsman, but the team does well, my disappointment may either become embittered with envy or moderated by my pleasure in the joint outcome.

	Examples of leadership

In most cases teams need leaders. The good leader gives weight to both forces, the needs of the individual and those of the team. He or she will foster an atmosphere in which members of the group feel free enough to have their heads, without slipping over into selfishness. It can be a fine line. As captain of England Graham Gooch demanded a high level of group identity. He insisted on everyone doing the same training and practice, expected people to look smart, and could not tolerate laxity or flippancy. David Gower, an ex-captain of England and one of the best batsmen in the side at the time, was capable of being both lax and flippant. Naturally fit, he hated training. His method of preparing himself for a big innings, of relaxing his tension, would include a few beers and bed at midnight. Gooch bridled more and more at Gower's way of being. The antagonism between these two decent, likeable, and superb batsmen led to a situation in which Gower lost form and was left out. Neither was able to give a bit, and the loss was to the team as a whole.

Facing Curtley Ambrose: the loneliness of the opening batsman

Ray Illingworth's treatment of his prime fast bowler, John Snow, when England toured Australia in 1971-2 offers a helpful contrast. Snow could be awkwardly headstrong. In county matches he had been known to take the field shod in the 1970s equivalent of trainers when he felt the conditions should not require him to bowl. Like Gower, he hated an ethos that emphasised the group and was impatient with what he saw as unnecessary training routines. Illingworth's solution was to require of Snow that he play his full part in all the team training and practice up to the first test match. After that, he told Snow, he could prepare himself in his own way, provided crucially that he was ready to bowl at least 20 overs a day at full speed in each of the five tests. The other players could see the sense in this special treatment, and the outcome was a victory in which Snow played a leading part. Illingworth recognised, I think, that in running a team fairness is not the same as equality. His solution was more fine tuned to the players' personalities than was Gooch's. Each player requires individual treatment, provided that this can be squared with the interests of the team as a whole.

This point applies in all groups, and in society as a whole. Leaders and parties can lose their bearings either in the direction of too much selfishness and individuality, or on the side of too passive and flaccid a conformity. When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and took on the unions, there was just such a contrast. Thatcher's narrow emphasis on the survival of the fittest, on rampant individualism, clearly leaves out the less easily measurable factors of responsibility and social cohesion. But some of the unions had a tyrannical grip on workersor perhaps the workers colluded in such a unionthat precluded enterprise and even hard work, and this grip was suffocating.

	The leader's task

These tensionsself interest versus group interest, freedom versus equality, conflict versus cohesionappear in all teams. Both elements in the contrast need attention, and a sensitive leader helps the balance to veer in relation to the prevailing wind, keeping the boat on course. The leader's task requires flexibility. He or she needs to be firm and capable of strong, decisive action but also has to listen, consult, and give people their heads. At Headingley in 1981, when I was recalled to captain England after Ian Botham resigned, I reacted to his bowling by confrontation. When he complained because I took him off after a short spell of bowling, "I can't bowl in three over spells," I retorted, "and I can't have you bowling medium paced half volleys." When it came to his batting, by contrast, I gave him licence to attack, reasoning that on this difficult pitch that was his, and therefore our, best chance of success.

Another area of flexibility lies between delegation and taking decisions (and responsibility) oneself. In the ordinary running of a team the confident leader can allow, from moment to moment, different individuals to be in charge, provided always that he or she can when necessary reassume control. As a psychoanalyst I could not say who was the leader of the activity, me or my patient. What is clear is that we each have our roles, and prominence alternates.

Whatever medical team doctors are members ofpractice teams, hospital teams, multidisciplinary or administrative teams, or whether they are concerned primarily with that central team of doctor and patientdoctors know that their knowledge is partial. Sometimes they will be clearly in charge, the experts; sometimes they listen to others and follow their leads.

	A healthy team

Thus one task of all managers and teams is diagnosing the team's health. Is the team, for example, infected with a surfeit of selfishness, individuality, and pushiness, a team in which the over heated ambience favours dangerous and unnecessary narcissistic adventures? Or is it, by contrast, one laid low with debilitating passivity, working to rule, and overcompliance?

In benign phases what is required may be conservative treatment, or facilitationallowing people to continue on their creative and efficient path, refraining from unnecessary interference and change. There are, however, always tendencies within a group to go against the task of the team, and at such times the leader's responsibility is not only to listen and facilitate, but also to persuade, enlist, and confront. At such times a leader needs courage and a willingness to fight the source of infection, as well as tact and freedom of mind.

Another requirement is to have the capacity to free oneself from the prevailing emotional valencies. In this the job is not unlike that of the psychoanalyst, who has to recognise the pulls into collusion, sadomasochism, or mutual adoration with the patient. All such pulls, many of them unconscious, are deployed to disrupt the proper aim of the workthat is, for the patient to come to acknowledge and own his own unconscious wishes and fantasies. Team leaders need, as Freud said of members of his profession, courage.

One power that a team leader in sport often has is lacking to the doctor: the power to drop a player from the team. The result is that the need to make the most of the existing team members is even more absolute.

To sum up. Good teams, in whatever sphere of life, require a wide range of qualities that are in creative tension with each other. The Greek historian Xenophon, writing about the situation in 504 BC when the Greek city states were faced with threats of invasion from Persia, listed the personal requirements for an elected general: "ingenious, energetic, careful, full of stamina and presence of mind . . . loving and tough, straightforward and crafty, ready to gamble everything and wishing to have everything, generous and greedy, trusting and suspicious." The situation has not changed much since 504 BC.

	Acknowledgments

This is an edited version of a presentation at the Millennium Festival of Medicine in London, 6-10 November 2000.