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Know Your Personnel
Knowing the personalities of your players is essential to coaching them the right way. Understand who they are as people and figure out the best way to get the most out of them. But there is a difference between making them better and trying to fix their flaws.
Understanding that difference will make you a better coach.
From Admired Leaders:
People are shaped by a unique blend of biology, experiences, and environment.
Some things about them are highly malleable, while other features are more permanent.
In other words, some personal attributes can be changed while other qualities can’t. Understanding this distinction is crucial for leadership success.
A leader’s role is to change how people act, engage, and respond to make them more effective while at the same time accepting that many of their flaws and failings can’t be influenced or modified.
Qualities steeped in personality and biology are highly resistant to change, and good leaders know what to focus on and what to ignore or accept.
For instance, a team member who is naturally introverted may learn to become more comfortable in social situations over time with the right guidance, but their core preference for independence remains.
Personality traits, like introversion, are relatively stable throughout adulthood. While people do grow and evolve as they mature, these changes occur at the margins rather than in dramatic leaps.
Leaders who attempt to “fix” qualities rooted in biology and personality are doomed to fail and make the target of their repairs feel scrutinized and disfavored.
The better path is to avoid fixing people and attempt to change behavior instead.
While some may contend that behavior emanates from personality, the actions, habits, and routines that make people more effective do not.
For example, anyone can learn how to give a more compelling and persuasive presentation by incorporating best practices regardless of their personality traits and biological tendencies.
Showing others a more effective strategy or tactic is fundamentally different than trying to fix their personality flaws and gremlins. Too many well-intentioned leaders spend way too much of their time trying to fix people instead of attempting to change their behavior.
This is not to say that all personality characteristics must be overlooked or accepted. Some of the qualities people bring to the table may eliminate them from ever being highly effective.
Team members with high anxiety, emotional instability, low self-discipline, and the need to dominate, among other traits, likely render themselves incapable of performing on a team.
Such uncorrectable weaknesses must be discovered during the selection process and not addressed by leaders in the business of performance.
Leaders can’t fix people and nor should they try. Leadership is not about repairing issues rooted deeply in a person’s DNA. It’s about coaching and guiding people to incorporate new behaviors and best practices that will make them better at what they do.
Are you a fixer? Do you have a strong need or desire to repair the dysfunctional personality traits of your team members? You’re likely doing damage to your relationship when you do. And with nothing to gain.
It’s time to change your approach. Stop trying to fix people. Coach them up instead.
Steve Kerr/Pete Carroll
Steve Kerr’s four core values:
Competitiveness
Mindfulness
Passion
Joy
Some great stuff from Steve Kerr and what he learned from visiting Pete Carroll with the Seahawks.
Steve Kerr’s four core values:
Competitiveness
Mindfulness
Passion
Joy
One of his team rules: “Protect the team.”
Making People Feel Good…
“If you keep doing things that make people feel good, you’re not going to be doing this job very long.”
“I do think at times in this job you have the choice between doing things one way — making the decision you think is best — and making people feel good,” he says. “That is a constant dynamic in this job. If you keep doing things that make people feel good, you’re not going to be doing this job very long.” - Vikings GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah
Valuing Input
You know how that story ended—bottom of the ninth, Game 4 of the ALCS. Roberts steals second, scores the tying run, and we complete the greatest comeback in baseball history. That trade happened because Theo had created an environment where everyone’s input was valued.
Zack Scott, a former MLB GM and the founder of Four Rings talks about when the Red Sox traded for Dave Roberts in 2004, a move that ended up changing the course of history in Major League Baseball. He uses this as a great example of the importance of valuing input from everyone on your team.
Not every great trade comes from sophisticated analysis. Sometimes it’s about delegating and setting others up to succeed.
The Dave Roberts trade almost didn’t happen. And if it hadn’t, the 2004 Red Sox probably wouldn’t have become the first team in history to come back from down 3-0.
Theo Epstein asked an intern to research available outfielders. The initial list was terrible, but instead of dismissing it, he challenged the young staffer to think differently. That’s when the intern heard the Dodgers were trying to acquire Steve Finley. Since they already had plenty of outfield talent, maybe they’d be willing to trade away Dave Roberts. The intern rushed to Theo’s office with the idea. Within hours, we’d made the trade.
You know how that story ended—bottom of the ninth, Game 4 of the ALCS. Roberts steals second, scores the tying run, and we complete the greatest comeback in baseball history. That trade happened because Theo had created an environment where everyone’s input was valued.
Motivation - Daniel Pink
To engage deeply with work, Dan Pink explains that we need three key elements that are examples of intrinsic motivation.
To engage deeply with work, Dan Pink explains that we need three key elements that are examples of intrinsic motivation::
Autonomy – the chance to do things our own way, follow our instincts and feel like we matter
Mastery – a sense of growing confidence and competence, informed by rapid feedback that lets us understand whether what we’re doing is ‘working’
Purpose – the feeling that our work is having a genuine impact, and contributing meaningfully to something bigger, and part of a greater good, whether that’s for our colleagues, clients, or society at large
When all three come together, the depth of our motivation can inspire us to overcome all sorts of challenges, helping us navigate times of change and respond to setbacks with determination and resilience.
Pete Carroll - Leadership
“They teach them how to think.”
“They teach them how to think.”
As a leader do you tell your team what to do? Or do you teach them how to solve problems?
Michael Lewis - Luck
Spend the 15 minutes to listen to Michael Lewis’ speech to Princeton graduates from 2012. Terrific.
Spend the 15 minutes to listen to Michael Lewis’ speech to Princeton graduates from 2012. Terrific.
“Motivation Comes and Goes”
“I’m not motivated, I’m disciplined. Motivation comes and goes.”
- Francisco Lindor
Scottie Scheffler
I’ve learned this to be true over the years - the best players I have ever coached usually have one thing in common: Perspective. They get it. They don’t take themselves to seriously. They aren’t big ego guys who are full of themselves.
I’ve learned this to be true over the years - the best players I have ever coached usually have one thing in common: Perspective. They get it. They don’t take themselves to seriously. They aren’t big ego guys who are full of themselves.
Scottie Scheffler raised some eyebrows with his quotes about this week about how winning golf tournaments doesn’t fulfill him. Great perspective.
Brendan Quinn from The Athletic with a great look inside his head.
PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — This here was going to be about Scottie Scheffler trying to find his way. His way around the fifth Open Championship appearance of his career. His way around the links at Royal Portrush. His way, perhaps, to the three-quarter mile marker in golf’s career Grand Slam.
A golf story.
Except then Scheffler started talking, and the room started shifting, and his management started squirming. Who cares about pot bunkers when this happens? Out of nowhere, the honest-to-goodness best golfer in the world, perhaps the most unexplored mega-star in all professional sports, decided to let everyone inside.
“Is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf?” Scheffler responded Tuesday morning, answering the final question of his pre-tournament press conference. “Yeah, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about it, because I’ve literally worked my entire life to be good at this sport.”
All well and good. But Scheffler kept pulling on the thread.
“To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers,” he continued, raising eyes away from notebooks and iPhones. “I’m not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world because what’s the point? This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.”
Maybe it’s the Irish air. Maybe it’s getting one year closer to 30. Whatever it is, Scheffler, an athlete often capable of saying a lot and revealing little, poured forth an answer that is likely to stay with him for a long time.
Now pens were moving.
“There’s a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life, and you get there, you get to No. 1 in the world, and they’re like, what’s the point?” Scheffler said. “I really do believe that. Because what is the point? Why do I want to win this tournament so bad? That’s something that I wrestle with on a daily basis.”
This version of Scheffler — Nihilist Scottie — has shown face before. Last summer, before the Paris Olympics, he was asked about the possible significance of winning a gold medal and carving a place in the pantheon of sports. He responded by shrugging and giving the least-Olympic answer imaginable: “I don’t focus much on legacy. I don’t look too far into the future. Ultimately, we’ll be forgotten.”
The moment made for some easy quips.
Tuesday, though, went further.
And wit wasn’t necessary.
This Scheffler is worth understanding.
He kept going …
“We work so hard for such little moments,” Scheffler said. “I’m kind of sicko; I love putting in the work. I love getting to practice. I love getting to live out my dreams. But at the end of the day, sometimes I just don’t understand the point.”
The room laughed, both in agreement and amazement.
“I don’t know if I’m making any sense or not,” Scheffler said to longtime Associated Press golf reporter Doug Ferguson, the one who uncorked all this. “Am I not?”
He was, but the faces looking back at Scheffler couldn’t quite believe what they were hearing.
“(Golf) is one of the greatest joys of my life, but does it fill the deepest wants and desires of my heart?” Scheffler said, before answering a question that wasn’t asked. “Absolutely not.”
Scheffler’s stream of consciousness was worth hearing because it was free of intention. This wasn’t planned. His team didn’t craft this. Nor was it a self-serious, esoteric illumination. No. This was real and honest and open — as if Scheffler was trying to figure it out as he went along. At 29, he has now sat atop the world rankings for 148 of the last 173 weeks, won two Masters and emerged as one of the faces of the PGA Tour. Winning more than $130 million on the golf course doesn’t mean he doesn’t question his day-to-day existence just like the rest of us.
He kept going …
“Every day when I wake up early to go put in the work, my wife thanks me for going out and working so hard,” Scheffler said. “When I get home, I try and thank her every day for taking care of our son. I’m blessed to be able to come out here and play golf, but if my golf ever started affecting my home life or it ever affected the relationship I have with my wife or my son, that’s going to be the last day that I play out here for a living.
“This is not the be-all, end-all. This is not the most important thing in my life. That’s why I wrestle with, why is this so important to me?”
Scheffler, right, is joined by his wife, Meredith, and son, Bennett, after winning the PGA Championship in May. (Andrew Redington / Getty Images)
The questions Scheffler is asking himself are likely different from what many would assume. A certain staid version of Scottie Scheffler was fairly cemented long ago. The guy who aw-shucks his way to win after win. The wholesome family man. The devout Christian.
Not exactly Nietzsche.
But Scheffler’s ability to avoid tying his identity to being the world’s best golfer is actually a helluva explanation for why he’s the world’s best golfer.
Raymond Prior, a performance psychologist who’s worked with several major champions, explained in a conversation with The Athletic this past spring the difference between those who care about the big picture and those who question what that picture reveals.
“What the research tells us is the more you’re trying to smother your inner experience, the more f—ed you are, pardon my language,” Prior said. “I can have whatever thoughts and feelings without necessarily needing to do anything with them. I can shift my focus to, what if I just did the thing in front of me, which is technically the only thing that I actually have to do. I don’t need to manage other people’s opinions. I don’t need to ensure my legacy. I don’t need to save myself from my past. The only thing I need to do is get this golf ball started and see how it plays out.”
Going further, the emptiness Scheffler feels between who he is and the game he plays does, in fact, have a place in his faith. Take a look at Ecclesiastes. Or just leave it to an Irish poet to sum things up.
As W.B. Yeats put it: “Where there is nothing, there is God.”
Scheffler wrapped up his Tuesday press conference by making it clear he maintains “a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation” for his accomplishments and his place in the game. At the same time, one more time, he wanted you to understand — life is larger than a golf ball.
“I love being able to come out here and compete,” he said, “but at the end of the day, it’s not what satisfies me, if that makes sense.”
It does.
What Do Your Players Wish You Knew About Them?
Good leaders who spend the time to ask and listen to what others are facing generally gain a different perspective on how to value, validate, motivate, and push people to reach their potential.
How well do you get to know your players? The ability to adapt your leadership style to meet your players demands is an integral part of success.
I really liked this from Admired Leaders:
Several years ago, elementary school teacher Kyle Schwartz wrote “I wish my teacher knew _______” on the board and asked her 3rd-grade students to complete the sentence.
They responded with honesty, comedy, and vulnerability. What she learned changed her as a teacher.
She found that her students desperately wanted her to know more about them. They wrote about their favorite sports, who meant the most to them, and their hopes for the future.
But many of the students particularly wanted her to know of their hidden struggles. The revelations altered her entire approach to how she wanted to teach.
One student said he wished his teacher knew that other kids didn’t like him. Another student shared that she wished her teacher knew she was always nervous. Yet another student wanted her to know she didn’t have pencils at home to do the class assignments.
Challenges of poverty, hunger, family challenges, and loneliness offered Schwartz and her colleagues a window into the hardships children face that they weren’t aware of.
They learned that school children will share their realities with teachers if they are given the invitation. And teachers could listen to them and understand how to create a learning environment that took their challenges into account.
Adults aren’t much different.
Every team member has a unique set of challenges and hardships they must stare down and face before showing up for work.
Some have learning disabilities, while others are going through a trying time within their families. In addition to their challenges, they all have aspirations, concerns, ideas, and hopes.
If given the invitation to share with a leader who cares about them, most will gladly disclose some of their uniqueness.
Good leaders who spend the time to ask and listen to what others are facing generally gain a different perspective on how to value, validate, motivate, and push people to reach their potential.
Knowing what team members confront in their lives away from the workplace isn’t about compromising on work quality or making excuses for people. Having a more complete context simply allows leaders to adapt their style and timing to fit the person.
What do your team members wish you knew about them?
You don’t need them to conduct a complete-the-sentence exercise to learn about what they want you to know. All you have to do is ask them without prying. A multitude of questions can solicit real insights.
Start by sharing your own backstory and asking them for theirs. What you learn might change how you lead.
The Right to Lead
WHAT GIVES A MAN OR WOMAN THE RIGHT TO LEAD?
It certainly isn't gained by election or appointment. Having position, title, rank, or degrees doesn't qualify anyone to lead other people.
WHAT GIVES A MAN OR WOMAN THE RIGHT TO LEAD?
It certainly isn't gained by election or appointment. Having position, title, rank, or degrees doesn't qualify anyone to lead other people. And the ability doesn't come automatically from age or experience either. No, it would be accurate to say that no one can be given the right to lead. The right to lead can only be earned. And that takes time.
You can pick captains but you can’t pick leaders.
Leadership emerges.
John Maxwell
Psychological Safety
Psychological safety arises from the commitment leaders and peers have to learning from each other and finding shared understanding and meaning through dialogue.
Really good stuff on psychological safety from Admired Leaders:
Psychological safety is no management fad.
Its role in improving performance is so critical that it has superpower status on the best teams.
The bottom line is this: When people believe they are protected from embarrassment, ridicule, and humiliation for what they say and do, they operate more openly and learn more actively.
A team environment that is psychologically safe encourages people to share their honest thoughts without worrying about harsh judgment or repercussions. Without the fear of rejection, people take interpersonal risks to admit their mistakes and share their concerns.
The end result is higher-quality conversations, decisions, and performance.
But creating psychological safety is not easy, and practicing it correctlyrequires leaders to distinguish between safety and comfort.
Contrary to popular misconception, a psychologically safe environment is not always a comfortable or agreeable domain. While it is always respectful, a psychologically safe discussion does not avoid disagreement, candidness, or passionate expression.
In fact, the most psychologically safe discussions occur when everyone feels they have the group’s permission to speak their mind, including the leaders.
This does not always look like a kind, caring, or comfortable conversation for a reason. It’s not.
What makes an environment or discussion psychologically safe is the freedom to be open and honest without the fear of negative evaluation or judgment. That doesn’t mean people will agree or hold themselves back from passionately expressing their views.
Psychological safety arises from the commitment leaders and peers have to learning from each other and finding shared understanding and meaning through dialogue.
Safety is demonstrated and created with each group interaction that is free of disrespect, evaluation, and contempt. People who take interpersonal risks to speak up are rewarded for their honesty by being heard, included, and respected.
When asking questions, admitting mistakes, expressing agreement and disagreement, and sharing hard truths are met with inquiry and curiosity, rather than dismay and judgment, then safety exists.
A climate of safety elevates openness, learning, and quality decision-making because it rewards candidness, not because it constrains it.
As good leaders know, psychological safety has nothing to do with job security, the acceptance of unpopular decisions, or holding people accountable. It has everything to do with people knowing that speaking up is expected but free of negative consequences.
Psychologically safe environments are candid places where comfort is replaced with a permission to express ideas freely and where every viewpoint is valued for its honesty.
Too many leaders believe that kindness, support, and niceness create psychologically safe environments. Instead, they often get in the way of learning together.
I research organizations and culture. Here’s a lesson the Knicks should heed
You want to make dead sure that the next person you hire is not a system leader but a learning leader. It’s a coach who should say: “I want to learn from the players on what made this team successful, and then I’m going to focus on expanding and maximizing the toolkit.”
By Spencer Harrison for The Athletic
June 7, 2025
Editor’s note: This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering leadership, personal development and success through the lens of sports. Follow Peak here.
Spencer Harrison is a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and an expert on culture. He is also an NBA fan who grew up in Salt Lake City during the John Stockton-Karl Malone era of the Utah Jazz.
In March, a story about the New York Knicks caught my attention. Mikal Bridges, one of the team’s starters, said he had gone to his coach, Tom Thibodeau, and asked him to ease the heavy minutes Bridges was playing.
“Sometimes it’s not fun on the body,” Bridges said.
What interested me is what happened next. Bridges said that he and Thibodeau had spoken about his workload. But Thibodeau told reporters the two “never had a conversation about it.”
As someone who studies the cultures of businesses and organizations, I found Thibodeau’s response telling. To me, it suggested a stubbornness and unwillingness to consider other options, as if the conversation wasn’t even worth having. And it reminded me of leadership and organizational issues we see in the business world.
Thibodeau is well known for playing his starters heavy minutes during the season while limiting his bench players (four of the top 10 players in total minutes played this season were Knicks). One of the criticisms leveled against him is that while his players usually play hard and he often wins during the regular season, his teams can burn out in the playoffs, and he doesn’t develop a reliable bench for the postseason.
We know that Thibodeau is really passionate about basketball and a really good defensive coach who has won doing things his way. But the question with him has always been: Can he be more flexible within his system? Can he use people with different skillsets in different ways?
I thought about Thibodeau’s response again this week after the Knicks fired Thibodeau, the franchise’s most successful coach in years, following the team’s exit from the Eastern Conference Finals. It reminded me of interesting research on how leaders can get the most out of groups and could point the way forward for the Knicks.
One of my colleagues, Pier Vittorio Mannucci, a professor at Bocconi University in Milan, did a study of the creative teams on films in the animation industry — creative teams at Pixar and Dreamworks, for example. For each film, directors had teams of animators with varying levels of expertise and experience. Some animators might know how to work with many different technologies; others might specialize in one.
The question Mannucci wanted to answer was: What makes the most creative team? Is it the unit where you just have experts? Or is it the team with more generalists?
What Mannucci found, in his words, was that you want a team that has a bigger expertise toolkit, or people who have been exposed to different ways of doing their job. It allows them to adapt as they’re working on projects, and they’re better able to come up with creative solutions to problems.
The study showed that the most creative teams are able to look at the full toolkit and then utilize it, so that when you get to a point where you need an innovative new strategy, you have the capacity to develop it.
It’s an easy metaphor for an NBA team. We know that sometimes you have basketball players who are specialists. There are players who are great on defense. There are sixth-man microwave scorers. And then you have other players who are hybrids; they do a lot of little things.
But do you have a leader, a coach, who can use the whole toolkit?
Using the whole toolkit is a very common problem in business. People sometimes engage in what we call “mythological learning.” The idea is simple: I’ve become successful, and as I begin to get promoted, I assume that my success is based on all the choices that I have made, rather than realizing that some of the choices I made might have led me to success in part by luck.
As a result, some of the lessons that you’ve intuited from your success might be the wrong lessons.
The problem is that what got you there is not necessarily going to get you over the hump in the next role. And if you’re not willing to second-guess or expand your learning, to actually have the conversations to explore what other ideas are available, then it’s hard to see your own blind spots. This might have been a key issue for the Knicks with Thibodeau.
Even so, in moving on from Thibodeau, the Knicks are taking a huge risk. Thibodeau was their most successful coach in decades, and their track record prior to this recent era indicates that they have struggled to find a coach capable of maximizing the toolkit of talent that’s available to them. Thibodeau was able to do that, to a certain level.
To use another business example, there was a study that showed how changing leaders can go wrong. 3M was always well-known as an extremely innovative, creative organization. Prior to the 2000s, 3M always promoted CEOs from within, because the feeling was that a leader needed to understand the culture to make the organization perform well. But then 3M had a couple of years of down performance, so company leaders thought: Maybe what we need is an outsider to shake things up and get us to the next level.
They hired James McNerney, who had been groomed to possibly succeed Jack Welch at General Electric. GE is all about efficiency, cutting waste, rewarding high performance — a totally different culture than 3M. McNerney came into 3M and tried to make an innovative company more efficient, implementing all the toolkits he had learned from GE. It didn’t work. After five years and minimal gains, McNerney left and 3M largely reverted to the culture it had before.
This is the trick for all organizations going through this kind of change, including the Knicks: How do we leverage the value of the gritty, hard-working culture that Thibodeau built with a new coach who’s going to want to implement new things?
In business and in life, we often overvalue and trust specialists vs. generalists. But there’s a key way to succeed with this kind of change.
You want to make dead sure that the next person you hire is not a system leader but a learning leader. It’s a coach who should say: “I want to learn from the players on what made this team successful, and then I’m going to focus on expanding and maximizing the toolkit.”
The Other Side of I Don’t Feel Like It
“Can you be committed to the process… without being emotionally attached to the results?”
“Can you be committed to the process… without being emotionally attached to the results?”
“Champions are built on the other side of I don’t feel like it.”
What You Think They Are
“Your players tend to become what they believe you think they are.”
Wilber Braithwaite
“Learning Takes Place Through Discovery”
“Learning takes place through discovery, not when you’re told something, but when you figure it out for yourself. “
“The greatest teacher makes a few simple points. The powerful teacher leaves one or two fundamental truths. And the memorable makes the point not by telling, but by helping the students discover on their own. Learning takes place through discovery, not when you’re told something, but when you figure it out for yourself. All a really fine teacher does is to make suggestions, point out problems, above all, ask questions, and more questions and more questions…teaching encourages not only discovery, but initiative.” - William Safire
Podcast - How Are You Wired?
Enjoyed this discussion I had with Billy and, two great high school coaches who are invested in getting better and making other coaches better.
Enjoyed this discussion I had with Billy and Joe, two great high school coaches who are invested in getting better and making other coaches better.
The Assistant - Podcast
A good conversation with a former Hamilton College classmate of mine, Damian Digiulian, who is the head hockey coach at St. Michael’s in Vermont. He has a great podcast focused on young coaches, leadership approach and navigating the business.
A good conversation with a former Hamilton College classmate of mine, Damian Digiulian, who is the head hockey coach at St. Michael’s in Vermont. He has a great podcast focused on young coaches, leadership approach and navigating the business.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-assistant/id1767730336?i=1000709188736
Coached Hard
“When your best player can be coached hard, that is going to be good for your franchise.”
“When your best player can be coached hard, that is going to be good for your franchise.”