LeBron James recently made headlines when he said he has three very good friends in the NBA and that the rest are teammates. This quote has spurred a number of discussions about James and his new teammate with the Cleveland Cavaliers, Kevin Love. Love is having a sub-par year, and many are attributing this to the fact that he and James don’t like each other and aren’t getting along.
I’m a big believer in the idea that you don’t always have to like everyone, whether it’s a work or personal situation. In my experience, we may not always have a choice or a say in who we work with, but we do need to find a way to get along.
I’m a huge sports fan and feel like you can learn a lot of life and business lessons from sports. My favorite sport has always been basketball, especially the NBA. One of my all-time favorite players is Larry Bird. I loved the way he played and how hard he worked to make the most of his abilities. During the ’80s, I always rooted for Bird’s Celtics as they seemed to face the Los Angeles Lakers every year for the NBA championship.
I was young at the time but felt the Lakers always had the better talent but that Bird and his Celtics played better as a team, which enabled them to win three championships in the ’80s. Little did I know that Bird and Kevin McHale didn’t like each other very much. Bird was driven, highly competitive and practiced his craft relentlessly. McHale was laid back, working hard during the season but rarely touching a basketball during the offseason.
The differences in personalities caused some friction and tension in the locker room, but in Peter May’s book titled "The Big Three," the author quotes McHale after one of many disagreements with Bird as saying, “I’ve only developed a few tight, long-lasting relationships in basketball with people I’ve played with, and I don’t know why that is. Danny (Ainge), Jerry (Sichting), Bill (Walton). And there were guys I loved playing with. You work in the office with people, but does that mean you have to invite them over every weekend? But one of the things I can say about Larry and Robert is that we never had an argument that lasted. And if we ever yelled at one another, it was all over the next day. Nothing ever lasted.”
Over the course of my career, I’ve worked in a lot of offices and with a lot of people. For the most part, I’ve been lucky and liked most of the people I’ve worked with. However, similar to Bird and McHale, I never felt like I had to like everybody I work with. The key for me has always been to look past personal feelings, respect the person and focus on getting the job done.
The third member of Boston’s Big Three, center Robert Parrish, had a similar approach. Parrish managed to stay fairly neutral in the Bird-McHale rift. His only concern was winning. Indeed all three were focused on winning despite their personal feelings for each other.
Individually they all enjoyed success. Bird was the biggest star of the three, averaging 24.3 points and 10 rebounds a game over his career. He was a rookie of the year, three-time NBA MVP, scored more than 21,000 points, was a 10-time NBA All-Star, a member of the first Olympic Dream Team and gold medal winner and a 1998 Hall of Fame inductee.
McHale averaged more than 17 points and seven rebounds a game over 12 NBA seasons. He was a seven-time NBA All-Star and a 1999 Hall of Fame inductee.
Parrish played 20 NBA seasons, averaging more than 14 points and nine rebounds a game. He was a nine-time NBA All-Star and a 2003 Hall of Fame inductee.
All very impressive, however, despite not getting along personally, the three were able to put their differences aside while on the court, and combined won three NBA championships, made 42 playoff appearances and scored more than 62,000 points.
Think what your teams could accomplish if they could follow this example and put differences aside. Too often people focus on personal problems and allow those issues to cloud and get in the way off achieving ultimate success. If you take the approach that just because you work together doesn’t mean you have to like each other and focus on taking care of business, you’ll find that you can achieve great things regardless of personal feelings for one another.
Jeremy Kartchner has more than 18 years experience in both technology and sports PR. He’s a sports fan, golfer, father of three and husband.