John McCain – Win Win

Overburdened by greatness lately?  How teams can lose their way.

It is doubtful if there has ever been a happier hunting ground for lessons about human behaviours and team dynamics than present-day US politics.  Aside from President Trump and his immediate coterie in the White House, the other figure carving out a space on the stage recently has been Senator John McCain with his speeches and dramatic votes.

Already well known, McCain’s diagnosis with cancer would have made the news anyway, but his speech to the Senate on 25th July caught the attention (and mixed reviews) of much of the US media.  My interest lies in the first half of the speech in which he analysed the Senate’s inability to get things done – not in the politics of the moment.

McCain never explicitly uses the word ‘team’ to describe the Senate – that would be a step too far I suspect – but he talks extensively about one of the characteristics of an effective team: a common understanding of its role.  He does not try to define what that is for the Senate, but hints at it in several different phrases including ‘how best to serve the national interest’ and ‘provide workable solutions to problems Americans are struggling with’.

Those two phrases, with a few words substituted, might sum up the role of most senior leadership teams.  McCain’s analysis of why the Senate is failing to fulfil its role and ‘getting nothing done’, is equally applicable to other teams.  For my money, his key point revolves around collaboration and can be broken into a few important ideas:

 Few of us will ever work in a team that is as important (or probably as fractious) as the US Senate but we have all talked about, or been lucky to be part of ‘great’ teams.  We would do well to remind ourselves, as individuals and as teams, of how it is possible for our behaviour not to leave us ‘overburdened by greatness’.


Stay in touch and subscribe to de-cooded, our regular digest of business insights from the perspective of leadership and culture.

Coode Associates supports and advises companies on leadership and organisational effectiveness and alignment, identifying Purpose and Values and on culture-shaping more generally. If you’d like to speak with us, we’d love to hear from you: info@coodeasssociates.com.

© 2023 Coode® is a registered trade mark of Coode Associates. Back to Insights