Co-CEO of Dimensional Fund Advisors Dave Butler
Some years ago, when Dave Butler played with Steve Kerr on the US Men’s National Basketball Team, the two players were talking about Kerr’s college team, the University of Arizona, and Butler confided in Kerr that he had always considered Arizona to be a team that comprised not only great athletes and talented players but also good people.
How did such a team come to be gathered there, all in one place, wondered Butler, who starred at the University of California-Berkeley?
Kerr had an answer—a very specific one. “Our coach Lute Olson would invite a guy in for the weekend,” Olson told Kerr. “This would be a top player in the country, and we’d introduce him to all of the guys, and then everybody would all go out and get to know each other a little. Then, on Monday evening, Coach would rally the team members in the locker room and ask them one simple question: Do you want to play with this guy? And if the answer wasn’t a unanimous ‘Yes!’, he'd stop recruiting that player, even if he was the top player in the country.”
Both Butler’s and Kerr’s playing days are behind them. Kerr is still involved with the game as the coach of the Golden State Warriors and Men’s National Team, but Butler has moved to financial services, serving as the Co-CEO of Dimensional Fund Advisors, a firm that has grown from $10 billion in assets under management to more than $700 billion in the 25 years since Butler joined the team.
And he still remembers the lesson of that conversation with Kerr. No, the lesson wasn’t mainly about the importance of team chemistry, although that is very important. The deeper lesson was about the importance of including team members in the decision-making process. That, said Butler in a recent interview, was the real genius behind Coach Olson’s method.
“I’m a big believer in trying to get people to buy into the new member joining the team at Dimensional,” explained Butler. “And we begin with the most junior person. We ask them, ‘What do you think?’ There’s no reason to start with me because then everyone will just agree. I think leaders have to try to figure out how to get people to actually voice their opinion without being fearful that it will go against the grain or be seen as negative.”
Successful team building, Butler noted, is about seeing the concept of “fit” in a new light, one that seeks not to hire a “group of homogeneous people”—think about a basketball team with five shooting guards or five centers!—but to identify and recruit “characters with character.”
How can other leaders seeking to deepen their pool of talent and character do it? Butler offers several powerful ideas, including these:
- Keep it simple: The bigger your organization gets and the greater number of “characters with character” you hire, the greater becomes your mandate to simplify your message. When Butler played basketball at Cal, his coach, Lou Campanelli, used to say, “My teams do three things. We play defense, we play hard, and we play together. That's it.” Create a culture that is easy to understand and rally around.
- Make it real: Once you’ve put these big, broad, simplistic statements in place that people can understand and rally around, you also need to deploy the tactics underneath that are going to support those statements and culture. Otherwise, the statements become empty. Campanelli used a scoring system that awarded extra points to players who played great defense.
- Mix it up: Once you’ve created a simple yet powerfully coherent set of cultural norms, feel free to mix it up when it comes to the kinds of people you bring on to the team. “You don’t just want people with different skill sets,” explained Butler, “you want people who think differently from each other. You want the funny guy. You want the intellectual. You want the calm, cool, and collected person who thrives under pressure. You want the organizer. All of them should be able to find a place in your culture.”
The trick to building a culture filled with characters with character, avers Butler, is first to “get out of your own way” by not trying to have the answer to everything. And second, to reassure your team that they too should get out of their own ways by accepting the idea they don’t have to be selfish or self-obsessed to be a valuable and valued contributor. “I always tell my teammates, ‘Don't worry about yourself. Worry about somebody else, and you're gonna feel much better about everything.’”
