Why Tom Brady Wouldn’t Hire Your ‘Top Performer’
I learned this lesson early in my management career and have lived it every day since: a great team will always outperform a group of individual stars, no matter how talented those individuals are. A real team isn't just people doing their jobs—it's a system where everyone is aligned on the same goal, willing to collaborate, share best practices, sacrifice their own time, and do whatever it takes to help the team win. In this episode, I break down why teams outperform individuals and share a powerful two-minute clip from Tom Brady about the difference between champions and stars. Brady says it perfectly: "Champions do what stars aren't willing to do." I've seen this firsthand—we had a "no prima donnas" rule on my team, and for ten years straight, we never missed a single goal. If you're hiring or building a team, stop looking for the best players and start looking for the best people. That mindset shift will change everything.
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Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
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Transcript
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I learned this lesson really early in my management career, and I have lived it and breathed it every day since then. For the past 20 some odd years. And it's that
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a great team is always going to outperform a group of individual players, no matter how good those individual players may be.
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this is true whether you're talking about
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a sales team, an executive team, a football team.
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And I've actually I've got a clip of Tom Brady. Imma let you listen to in a second.
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It's the same outcome,
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A great team. And what I mean is you've got a group of people who are operating with one goal in mind, like they're actually aligned on what the goal is.
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they are committed to helping the team achieve that goal.
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of course, they have their own individual goals that they want to hit. They have their own targets. They have their own reasons for wanting to achieve that team goal.
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when you've got a group of people who are aligned on doing whatever they need to do to help the team achieve a specific goal, and they're willing to collaborate.
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They're willing to share the best practices. They're willing to sacrifice some of their own time or some of their own energy, or, you know, tell people what's what's actually working, and they're willing to give the extra effort. They're willing to train that newbie. They're willing to hop on that extra call. They're willing to make all of those things.
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When you've got that actually operating, you will always outperform
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machine where you've got individual seats being filled based on their individual merit.
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and again, that's that's true no matter how great the individuals may be.
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And it's because
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a team
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is more than the sum of its part. A team is is is a system.
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It's a and a system is basically a bunch of individual components that are working together to create an output that's greater than the individual parts. That is,
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by definition, what a team is, but it's working really well when it's working the way that it's supposed to.
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if you've experienced it, then you will know exactly what I'm talking about.
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You will hear this and you will go, yep, like zeroed out in my mind. And if you haven't, there's a pretty good chance that you go energy like you. That's bullshit. You can't get no, you can't build a sales team like a true sales team. You can't build a true executive team. Like people are going to be too selfish, and they're going to be, you know, out for themselves and they're never going to really give more shits about the collective output of the team of the unit than they will themselves.
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Like, you just can't build it that way. And
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I'm telling you, you absolutely can't. Like, you don't have to be on a football field or wear a specific jersey in order to, to experience this.
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And once you do, though, once you are a part of a really good team, you don't want to play the game any other way, whether you're playing football or
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business like you, once you've been part of that and you have felt the momentum, you've felt the energy, and you know what it's like to have healthy competition and people supporting each other and challenging each other and putting up wins on the board and winning together
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and losing the other. Or once you've actually experienced it, you're like, dude, I don't want to do this any other way. Like there's like going to a half ass team or going to a shitty culture or going to some place where it's like, hey, just sit in the corner and in your cubicle and do the thing that you were individually supposed to do and, you know, shut up and, and plow forward.
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You get there. You're like, yeah. Like, even if you're making more money, even if you've got a bigger title, even if there's, you know, more status markers that are around it, you're going to say, now, I've been part of something greater than this. And I have felt this way from day one in management, my my first management promotion into taking over a sales team.
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You know, I walked in and I was like, and I was and I was selling on the team prior and I was like, we're going to rebuild the culture. And, you know, we'd we fired half the team. We put in place core values. We, you know, started hiring according to those values. We, you know, made the collective mission like the output, the number one thing that we had to do.
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Obviously, there were incentive plans and things that were aligned to make sure every everybody individually got compensated fairly, more than fairly all that stuff.
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we did that and it was it took a minute.
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once we built that culture and that organization and that team, I swear I was like, this will change the trajectory of my career forever because I don't want to play on another unit that's not a team.
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And I and I have it right. Like what I, what I get into that environment, I'm like, yeah,
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this isn't nearly as much fun. This isn't nearly as good a use of my time. Like the quality of work living goes down for like significantly. And it's relative to what you've experienced. And so I caught this clip.
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There's a two minute clip here from, from Brady that I heard that just like reinforced this and framed it in such a good way, like in terms of champions and stars
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I, I can't think of a way more credible to speak of what it takes to, to be part of a championship team. So let me share this with you.
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Real quick.
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We're drafting people before we're drafting players, which means they're thinking about the intangible traits of these players more so than just the skill set. And I think that's why I'm a big believer that I won Super Bowls with a lot of sixth round picks, a lot of undrafted free agents that worked, that worked hard. They put the team first.
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They were committed to one another. They were committed to try to do the right thing on every play. They showed up every day with a good attitude to be successful. They weren't selfish. You know, you had receivers that were going to go in and crack safeties. You had running backs. So we're going to step up and pass protection and take on blitzing linebackers.
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You know, you were gonna have a quarterback stand in the pocket and take a hit when someone's bearing down on their face mask. You know, you had defensive linemen that were taking up two offensive linemen so a linebacker could scrape over the top and make a tackle. So that is team football. And those are good processes for winning and for championship level type of commitment.
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And you don't get that all the time you know. So I think the challenge in these in this day is we're getting a lot of athletes that are very concerned about individual success, very concerned about their individual statistics and it's fine. You'll probably make a lot of money that way. But I don't think you're going to be a champion in the same way, because champions do what the stars aren't always willing to do.
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And I would prefer to be on a team full of champions over stars and even in this broadcasting role, Chris. That's what I look for all the time. When a quarterback throws a touchdown pass, I actually watch to see who he goes and celebrates with because what did I do? I looked for my offensive lineman every time I went down and celebrated in the end zone with my teammates.
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Every time I wanted everyone to feel like they were part of the success. I told the linemen, we're all run into the end zone and we're celebrating as a team because I think that's way more intimidating than a quarterback doing his six shooter guns and pulling up in the crowd and doing all that other bullshit. That's very self-promotional.
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But it's not about winning. And I think winning in football is about a team. Always a team attitude first.
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And you know what? It's not just football. And I get that there's like a lot of people are tired of sports analogies and pistons. But this is it's not just in football. Like this is just psychology. Like people when you're operating as a team is a completely different experience. And what I, what I love about this is like we're we're looking for people, not players.
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And I can't tell you from a sales team standpoint how many times I've taken a shot on somebody who didn't have quite the the experience or,
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the proven talent, like from from somewhere else that somebody else did and like, you know what? You would just operate better here. Like you're just a better fit for the culture.
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You're, you're you're coachable, you're hungry. You came in like overly prepared, you know,
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when we sent you the email, you read the piece about the culture, you you got excited about it. You're like, you're like, that's that's completely different. And
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the quote
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champions do what stars want and that's at the end of the day in in business you're not going to win a Super Bowl at the level that a Tom Brady or the Patriots did.
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But you you will win the Super Bowl in your in your little ecosystem. And the the people that you'd want on your team are the people that are willing to do what is necessary like that are committed to that, that aren't selfish, that are going to help you
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get to the goal that you need. If you're in the leadership role.
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Right. And that starts with getting the right people, not just the right players. Like we actually had a role,
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back when I was I was running this team for the chamber. The first one,
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and it was like, no prima donnas. I didn't give a shit about your numbers. I didn't give a shit about your I mean, I obviously I did, but that was not enough to like to have immunity and be an asshole.
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And what I found was a lot in sales. People tend to to do really well as individuals. And they think that that, you know, entitles them to do whatever the fuck they want or to act however they want. And too many organizations allow it. They tolerate, they say, yeah, okay, well, we need to hit the goal. So we need that individual in that seat.
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when you build the team the right way is no individual player is more important than the the unit as a whole. Right. So we like we would know prima donnas like if you even if you were the number one person, you were expected to maintain the culture and the values and the winning attitude and the team mindset that we had.
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And there's a reason for ten years in a row, we didn't miss a single. We didn't miss a goal one time. Not a strategic goal, not a revenue goal. And the goals kept getting,
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increased every single year. We went through like crazy, like political headwinds, economic trouble. We would we would crush the number. It's because they're not getting the number was not an option.
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And everybody was committed to helping us do it. And, you know, we were we were playing a team sport.
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I would say, you know, he says, you know, you're if you don't think so, you're not going to you're not going to be a champion. I and Tom's quote, what I would say is like, not only you're not going to be champion, you're not going to be as fulfilled in your career, in your role.
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The thing that you're doing 8 to 10 hours a day or more, if you're not part of a team, they and you may think you are, but I swear to you, if if you have the opportunity to join an actual legitimate team that is that is aligned, it will change your and the entire paradigm.
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think about that the next time you're going to hire your next person in general, hire your next salesperson, hire your next VP, hire your next even your next admin.
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Like, is this person going to contribute to the collective team man mindset and mentality that I want to build and, make your decisions based on that. And if you make decisions based on that, instead of just resumes experience of what you think are going to be the talent, then you end up with, with a lot more W's on the board.
