Everything I need to know about building a high-performing team, I learned on the fifth-grade playground. Back when it was my turn to pick the kids for dodgeball. The pressure was on. You know the protocol. Recruiting is everything. Selection is king. The trick is to pick winners. And what does a fifth-grade general manager think a winner looks like? The biggest boys. The fastest kids. The ones who look like they were born with a rubber ball in their hand. We create these homogenous teams that reinforce homogenous decisions because, let’s be real, it’s comfortable. Birds of a feather flock together, and we think that’s the path of least resistance to victory. But what if the path of least resistance just leads to a dead end?
The Case of Yvonne the Arm
One day, after following the standard protocol—picking all the big kids, even trying to recruit boys from other games just to avoid the girls left in the lineup—I was stuck. I leaned over to my trusted advisor, Zach, and he insisted I do the unthinkable. He told me to pick scrawny Yvonne Lewis. Come on, dude, just do it. In protest, desperate to win, I did it. And what happened next? We went on a five-week winning streak, led by our new team MVP, a legend who became affectionately known as “Yvonne the arm.” That was the moment the light went on for me, a lesson more powerful than any business school lecture: sometimes you have to step outside of what you’ve always done in order to find who you’ve always had.
From Peanut Butter to Chipotle
This is the disruptive power of diversity. Too often, we hire for comfort. We build another chocolate and peanut butter team. It’s awesome, it’s reliable, and you’ll be happy and completely comfortable. But you’ll never be wowed. The most inspirational growth, the kind of creative combustion that leaves you speaking in Shakespearean like, “Hark! What flavors stuff they wrapped this on thy tongue?”—that comes from collision. It comes from being bold enough to pass on building the next banana pancake team and go build the pulled pork and grilled plantain panini team instead. It’s when you, Chocolate, have the guts to have a meeting not with Peanut Butter, but with Sage, or Parmesan, or Chipotle, and become the chocolate-chipotle of industry change. This is the essence of my work as a spoken word artist; using spoken word poetry to find the surprising connections that create the biggest impact.
That playground epiphany is a North Star in my work as a Grammy Nominated Spoken Word Artist Sekou Andrews. High-performance energy doesn’t come from comfort; it comes from that beautiful, messy, and delicious collision of perspectives. Attracting people based on a sameness of purpose and values creates a foundation strong enough to withstand the turbulence of diversity. It creates a safe space for that “Yvonne the arm” kind of magic to happen. The best leaders, the top innovators, they aren’t just building teams; they are pairing flavors. They know that your next world’s best MVP might not look like the last one. As a Vanguard Artist and motivational poet, I’ve seen that the greatest strength of any team is its willingness to be disrupted by a new idea, a different perspective, a scrawny kid with a cannon for an arm. Because as far as I’m concerned, it takes a winner to know a winner. And it takes diversity to know true victory.
