The best teams have this secret weapon Adam Grant

in 2010 the Miami Heat tried to build a

dream team around LeBron James and two

other stars and LeBron promised that

they would win some championship what’s

wrong tell us about that but they

struggled to even win close games in the

regular season so the next year instead

of picking up another star

they added Shane Battier and Shane told

me people were not impressed and people

looked him on limitations and say oh bad

he is not athletic and he doesn’t run

pick-and-roll and you can’t really

dribble but here’s the weird thing when

Shane was on the court every one of his

teams was statistically more likely to

win he ended up becoming a key

contributor to the heats back-to-back

championships so I asked Michael Lewis

the author of Moneyball to explain it

so he wasn’t athletic enough to to stop

Kobe Bryant but he was smart enough and

kind of canny enough to force Kobe

Bryant two places on the floor where he

was a less efficient shooter so he’s

doing all these things that are very

valuable that no star would bother to do

lots of stars means lots of egos and

lots of egos means infighting in a team

you could actually have too much talent

look at the evidence from soccer teams

with a mix of stars and role players

actually win more games in World Cup

qualifying matches we see the same

pattern in NBA basketball you are

actually better off with two stars on

the court than four and the same is true

in wall street teams the secret

ingredient that role players bring is

humility but we’ve all been in

situations where we might be worried

about being too humble like in a job

interview

we also council leaders not to be too

humble but what is it data actually show

let’s compare humble leaders with

narcissistic leaders we’ve done this in

American and Chinese companies and lo

and behold it turns out that humble

leaders are significantly more effective

their employees are more productive and

more innovative but there’s a third kind

of leader that gets even better results

and that would be called a humble

narcissist how can you be humble and

narcissistic they sound like opposites

but they’re not because narcissism is

about believing that you’re special and

humility is about recognizing that you

are fallible now for the narcissist in

the room and your spouse’s know who you

are this is not an excuse my point is

just that humility and confidence can

actually go hand-in-hand you can have

both because one of the Latin roots of

humility is actually about being

grounded it means from the earth and

that kind of sensibility is what shane

battier I brought to the Miami Heat

you’ve recognized his limitations he

looked for ways to improve his game like

studying stats and opposing players and

one day he turned to LeBron and he said

hey when you guard Kevin Durant make him

shoot over his left shoulder and after

that every now and then he’d say hey

Batman you know what what you got on

this guy there’s not much you can teach

LeBron James the best player in the

world today I like to think I I made him

a little bit better with some loose some

arcane math humility is underrated it

gets a bad rap it sounds like a sign of

weakness but in the best teams with the

best leaders is actually a source of

strength it keeps us from best-of from

resting on our laurels because we know

that excellence is not about believing

that you’re the best

it’s actually about always striving to

get better thank you

you