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Unpopular
Truly effective leaders are more concerned with being consistent than being popular.
Effective leadership is hard. I find that great leaders are uncommon. It’s not for everyone. And it’s not as simple as yelling “Let’s go!” and bringing energy to your team. There are so many layers to an effective leadership approach.
One thing that makes effective leadership such a challenge is it can make you unpopular. And it can make you unpopular with people you are very close with. Whether you are a teammate or a coach, tough decisions have to be made and not everyone is going to like them. Holding people accountable for small details isn’t always well-received, and as a leader it might be more comfortable to just let it go. Being okay with unpopular decisions is a big part of effective leadership.
It’s easy to say you are going to hold everyone accountable to a high standard all of the time. In practice, it’s a little different. We all want to be liked, whether by our players or our teammates. It’s natural. If one of your players isn’t touching the line on a sprint at the end of a great practice, are you calling them out on it? Is it worth it to create tension and negativity at the end of a good day? It’s easy to just let something like that go. Calling them out certianly won’t be the popular decision.
Ultimately your teammates or players will come to respect the fact that you are relentless about the things that matter. And the fact that you are consistent in your approach. If you are worried about being popular, your ability to lead is going to suffer. Effective leadership is hard.
Truly effective leaders are more concerned with being consistent than being popular.
“Kids Haven’t Changed…”
I’ve always despised the “Kids these days…” narrative. I think we use it as an excuse as coaches.
Bruce Pearl with his thoughts on what has really changed.
I’ve always despised the “Kids these days…” narrative. I think we use it as an excuse as coaches.
The Last Lesson
The last lesson my father ever taught me.
Sixteen years ago, on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2008, I was getting ready to head down to practice at RIC when my cell phone rang. At RIC my office was in the Recreation Center, across campus from the Murray Center where we practiced and played, so we had to actually get into our cars and drive down to the Murray Center for practice. As I walked out of the Rec Center towards my car, I looked at my phone. It was my Dad calling.It was odd that my Dad would call at that time, because he knew we practiced late in the afternoon. I had a lot going on getting ready for practice, so I let the call go. I’d give him a call back after practice. I got in my car and started driving down the Rec Center, and my phone rang again. It was my Dad calling again. I figured maybe he just had to ask me a question about something so I picked it up.
It’s hard to describe the feeling you get when your caller ID says “Dad” yet the voice you hear when you say hello is one you don’t recognize. My insides felt hollow. I was sitting at a stop sign waiting to make a right turn when I heard “Detective with the Tampa Police department.” My father had recently bought his retirement home in Tampa. “I’m very sorry to inform you…” My father had been found by his cleaning lady, dead of a heart attack. He was 63 years old.
I was too stunned to know how to feel. I drove down to the Murray Center, parked in the parking lot, and called my brother. I got his wife, who said he was not feeling well and was sleeping. I told her he had to wake him up. When he came to the phone I just said “I just got a call from the Tampa Police department. Dad’s dead.” They had picked up my Dad’s cell phone and looked at his text messages. I had texted him the day before to let him know Providence College was in Anaheim in a tournament, and their game was on TV if he wanted to watch it. He never got the text. The Tampa Police did.
I went inside the Murray Center, totally stunned, and told my AD. I went into the gym and gathered my players who were warming up before practice, and told them. It seemed weird that I told my team before I told anyone else in my family, but I had to let them know I wasn’t going to be at practice. I called my girlfriend – now my wife – and can still hear the shock in her voice.I went home and called my brother again, and we started calling family and close friends. The feeling is hard to describe, it’s like being in a daze. I was shocked, stunned, empty, yet there was a lot of work to do. We had to let people know, to start thinking about arrangements.
Throughout all of it, as bad as I felt, I had this one overriding feeling: Lucky. It's still hard to explain how I felt that way in that moment. I had a great relationship with my father, and I just felt lucky to have had the relationship I did with him for 36 years. I still feel that way to this day. As stunned as I was, I just kept thinking about how lucky I was, and I guess that helped me get through that day somehow. My father was very successful. He grew up in Parkchester in the Bronx and had to work hard to get to college. He attended Iona College just North of the City, joining the Marine Reserves to help pay for school, and started a career in business upon graduation. He took a job out of school with KPMG, one of the big accounting firms in New York City, and ended up spending 38 years with the company. By the time he retired he was a senior partner with a big office on Park Avenue. He was very actively involved at Iona College, his alma mater, as the President of their Goal Club, as well as their Alumni Association. He joined a golf club in Westchester and served a stint as the President there. He served on a number of different Board of Directors for different organizations.My father’s wake was a few days later on Castle Hill Avenue in the Bronx, the neighborhood where he grew up. He was still a working class kid from the Bronx, but he had worked his way into being very well off and connecting with some very successful people.
It was overwhelming to see so many people show up to pay their respects. Whenever you're in the situation where someone close to you has a death in the family and you feel like you're not sure what to do, just show up. That’s what you do. You show up. It really helped my brother and I to see so many people who cared about and had been impacted by our father.The wake was a who’s who of powerful people. College President’s, executive VPs, high-powered attorneys, wall street millionaires. It made my brother and I feel very good to see so many of my Dad’s friends and associates. The line was long and it took a couple of hours to see everyone.
Towards the end of the night a man walked in who looked a little out of place. He was wearing a baseball cap and a pair of khakis with a golf shirt and a rumpled jacket. He had a work ID badge hanging around his neck, looking very blue collar in a white collar crowd. I noticed him as soon as he walked in, and I didn’t recognize him. He didn’t talk to anyone, he just waited on line and made his way up to our family to pay respects. He shook my hand and simply said “I’m so sorry for your loss. Your father was a great friend to me.”
I said thank you, but didn't ask him who he was. After he got through the line, he went and sat in the back in a chair by himself. I noticed he said a few words to a few of the people from my Dad’s office. Then he got up slowly, put his cap back on, and started to walk out.I wanted to talk to him before he left, but I hesitated because I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable. I didn’t want him to think that I was stopping him because I didn’t know who he was. I watched him walk out the door of the funeral home and head back down Castle Hill Avenue – past a number of car service Town Cars ready to take some of the attendees back into Manhattan. He put his cap on and walked back towards the 6 train.
This man was on my mind all night. Before everyone left, I asked one of my father’s work associates if they knew who he was. I thought I had seen him talking briefly with some of the people from my Dad’s office. It turns out he did work in my Dad’s office – in the mailroom. He delivered the mail to my Dad’s floor of his Park Avenue office building, and my Dad had asked him what his name was, befriended him, developed a relationship with him. He asked him about his family. He found out he had two young kids in catholic school. He'd buy them Christmas gifts so they had nice toys under the tree. At different times when things were a struggle, my Dad had helped out by paying the tuition for his kids so they could stay in the Catholic grammar school in their neighborhood.
When I learned about this, I couldn’t hold back the tears. This man had gotten on the 6 train in Midtown Manhattan and taken a one hour subway ride to Castle Hill, then walked the six blocks to pay his respects, to say “I’m sorry for your loss” to two sons he had never met. He didn't know us, and hardly knew anyone at the wake. He certainly looked a little bit out of place.I think about this man all of the time. I can still see him putting his hat back on and slowly walking up Castle Hill Avenue to the Subway station. He spent at least two hours on the subway and waited at least 30 minutes in line just to pay his respects. I didn't even know who he was, nor did my brother. We would have had no idea if he didn't show up. But he made the trip anyway.
I am very lucky to have had the relationship I did with my father, to spend the time with him that I did. I’m also very proud of the way my Dad lived his life. He made a lot of money and traveled in circles of very successful people. But he was always the same person, the kid who had worked his way out of the Bronx. He had no sense of entitlement about him. I learned so much from him, simply from the way he lived his life and how he acted towards others, even those he didn't know. He treated everyone with dignity and respect and went out of his way to help people in need.
That night, that moment, that man who showed up to pay his respects for my father made me think about how I live my own life. Do I treat everyone with the same respect? Am I courteous and genuine to everyone I meet, regardless of their circumstances and what they can do for me? Do I give people the benefit of the doubt if they are struggling with something, not knowing what might be going on in their life? Do I show the right amount of gratitude in my daily routine?
How do I treat the people in my "mail room?" We all have people in the mail room in our life. How do we interact with those people? Do we treat them with respect and go out of our way to make sure they are comfortable? Do we think about what we can do to help them? Or others who might not come from the same background that we do?
What am I doing every day to make sure, when it’s my time, that the guy in my mail room is going to show up for me?
That was the last lesson my father ever taught me.
Chris Beard - Connecting
Chris Beard talks about how he makes sure to connect with each one of his players every day.
Chris Beard talks about how he makes sure to connect with each one of his players every day.
Running Plays
Grizzlies Coach Taylor Jenkins on the difference between running plays and playing through principles.
https://x.com/GrizzliesFilm/status/1847482858723524992
Grizzlies Coach Taylor Jenkins on the difference between running plays and playing through principles.
What Traits Are Not Coachable?
What is on your list of uncoachable qualities? Decide before you invest the time to push an immovable rock uphill in a storm.
Do you think about what qualities in your players are coachable, and which ones are not? It’s probably worth your time to figure out… what is worth your time.
From @AdmiredLeaders:
Can someone with low self-awareness become highly self-aware with the right coaching?
How about judgment? Can a team member with poor judgment learn to make consistently good predictions and decisions with the right counsel?
Exactly what is coachable, and what is uncoachable? While there are no definitive answers to these questions, the consensus among leadership experts is that most skills, traits, and aptitudes are coachable. However, there is a short list of competencies and qualities that are not.
What talents are on that list? This is hotly debated largely because, over long periods of time, people can make small strides in even the hardest-to-change skills.
But that doesn’t mean it is a good use of time for leaders to coach others while hoping for change regarding a quality that is unlikely, if not impossible, to improve.
Here's what we all agree on. Good leaders coach others to success. They work hard to advance the skills and elevate the thinking of team members with the goal of helping them reach their true potential.
Through conversations, assignments, feedback, practice drills, skill assessments, and role-playing, leaders facilitate learning and enhance the critical competencies of those on the team.
The best coaches seek to amplify existing strengths as well as address glaring weaknesses. In the hands of a great leader and coach, team members can make big strides in their personal growth and development.
Great leaders recognize the transformative power of coaching while also accepting that some skills and traits are uncoachable. The list of uncoachable skills is small. But these areas that are nearly impossible to change, at least through coaching, are often critical to success.
Accepting what can and can’t be changed in people through the coaching process is critical for all leaders to grasp. The failure to do so equates to an enormous waste of time and energy and almost always results in frustration for both parties.
While leaders can provide support and guidance to develop various aspects of these skills and traits, the ability to make big gains is severely limited. The best leaders focus their attention on other areas and try not to run a river that can’t be navigated.
Those with extensive coaching experience offer the following traits and skills as largely uncoachable: Self-awareness, Intrinsic Motivation, Creativity, Resilience, Judgment, and Performance Anxiety.
Over the life course, people do make small gains and advancements in these areas, but not typically as a direct result of coaching.
Every leader must decide for themselves what skills and traits they believe are uncoachable and invest their time accordingly. The shortlist above is neither exhaustive nor conclusive. The key is for leaders to ponder the question of what talents are uncoachable before they attempt to lead others to success.
Spending more time on coachable qualities will likely promote more team member growth and development while accepting what can’t be markedly changed will result in less disappointment and friction.
What is on your list of uncoachable qualities? Decide before you invest the time to push an immovable rock uphill in a storm.
Doc Rivers
“What is culture? It’s how you act, interact and respond.”
“What is culture? It’s how you act, interact and respond.”
Stephen Vogt
“Learn the lesson, leave the event.”
“Learn the lesson, leave the event.”
Good stuff from Guardians first-year manager Stephen Vogt.
Confidence to Change
“He gave us the confidence to change our whole mentality,”
“He gave us the confidence to change our whole mentality,” Miami pitcher Sandy Alcantara said about his former manager Skip Schumacher.
Such a simple way to explain the impact a coach can have on his players and his team.
Four Stages of Winning
4 STAGES OF WINNING:
1. UNDERSTAND what it takes
2. DO what it takes
3. LEAD OTHERS to do what it takes
4. HOLD PEOPLE ACCOUNTABLE to do what it takes
- Jeff Janssen
Is It Easy To Tell You The Truth?
As a coach, do you make it easy for people to tell you the truth?
Terrific stuff here from Brian Kight.
As a player, is it easy to tell you the truth?
As a coach, do you make it easy for people to tell you the truth? It’s a great question for you to think about.
Empathy is a critical component of effective leadership.
The Problem Child
You may not treat everyone the same, but everyone has to be held to the same standards, or your culture will suffer. Some players may not respond well to being yelled at while others may need the volume up to get the point. I get that. But holding players accountable to a different standard is a really great way to lose your credibility with your team.
I’ve always heard a lot of coaches say it - “You don’t treat everybody the same. Everybody is different.” I understand the sentiment. Everyone on your team has a different personality, different triggers and a different background. You have to understand them as individuals to coach them properly. But saying “you can’t treat everybody the same” always felt a little bit like a cop-out to me, sounding more like “I’m going to treat my star players differently to keep them happy.”
You may not treat everyone the same, but everyone has to be held to the same standards, or your culture will suffer. Some players may not respond well to being yelled at while others may need the volume up to get the point. I get that. But holding players accountable to a different standard is a really great way to lose your credibility with your team.
We’ve all had to deal with a problem child at some point or another. I’m talking about a talented player, a good kid, but someone who lacks maturity to handle himself properly when things don’t go his way. He reacts emotionally when he feels pressure or failure, and any emotion you bring to the situation only makes it worse. He can snap at times, and get very angry over something very minor. Ninety percent of the time he’s a good kid and teammate, but ten percent of the time he goes off the rails. He’s got talent, though, and everyone in the gym recognizes his importance to the team.
Treating him differently is fine - he’s a guy you don’t want to yell at because he won’t respond well - but you can’t fall into the trap of holding him to a different standard. I’ve made that mistake, where I had one talented player who was a hothead and would snap when things didn’t go his way. Rather than going after him, I would just take him out of practice and let him calm down. I thought I was doing the right thing by not adding more emotion to the situation, where I figured his anger would only get worse. When he settled back down, I’d bring him back into practice.
What I didn’t realize is that the rest of the team felt like he was getting away with something. I thought I was keeping practice going and diffusing the situation, but they thought he was being held to a different standard. I didn’t realize this until after the season, when I sat down with may players and they told me how they felt. They knew that if someone else had blown up in practice the way their teammate did, the consequences would have been different. And they said it definitely hurt our team. We were inconsistent all year, but luckily our guys were talented and tough enough to stay together and win a championship that season.
Every situation you deal with as a coach is different and you have to take all the personalities into account. But don’t fall into the trap of having a different standard for different players. It’s a very fine line. But If your players feel there are two sets of standards, you will lose credibility quickly.
Dick Bennett - Intangibles
The 5 intangible concepts of Dick Bennett’s program:
Humility….. know who we are
Passion….. do not be lukewarm
Unity….. do not divide our house
Servanthood….. make teammates better
Thankfulness….. learn from each circumstance
The 5 intangible concepts of Dick Bennett’s program:
Humility….. know who we are
Passion….. do not be lukewarm
Unity….. do not divide our house
Servanthood….. make teammates better
Thankfulness….. learn from each circumstance
“I concluded some time ago that a major part of success of a team, or of an individual, has a great deal to do with the intangible qualities possessed.
The real key is how a person sees himself (humility),
How he feels about what he does (passion),
How he works with others (unity), how he makes others better (servanthood),
and how he deals with frustration and success, truly learning from each situation (thankfulness).
I believe those concepts are the essence of a good player, team, coach, or individual in any capacity in life.
I have learned from experience, as I analyze any situation, that it is inevitably a result of the presence or absence of these qualities.
In victories you see a passion to win, the unity of the team, the players helping each other, and the team learning from previous defeats or mistakes.
In losses, however, you see arrogance, or selfishness, a lack of commitment, and finger pointing.
It always comes down to these concepts.
Assuming we can get kids that are adequately skilled, the battle is to get them to accept the intangibles.
… They have to know that these intangibles are important to our program. Therefore, I present them daily, but I do not lecture. These intangibles are used every day. They are the foundations of everything I do, and I point it out to them in a subtle fashion. Sometimes, I am not so subtle.”
From the book:
A Season With Coach Dick Bennett
Tom Brady: Leading Teammates
Let me give you some examples. During the middle part of my career at the Patriots, I played with two wide receivers, Julian Edelman and Randy Moss. If you wanted Julian, who had incredible mental toughness, to play his best, the way to do it was to tick him off. I would say something like “Jules, wow, you look really sluggish today.” He’d glare at me and be so angry, but I knew he’d channel that energy to prove me wrong and go out and play great. Randy, who’s a Hall of Fame receiver, responded better to validation: “Man, Randy, you look amazing out there.” Even in practice, if I went too long without throwing the ball to him, I’d go over and say how much I valued him and remind him that I was always looking for him on every play. I wanted to make sure he never slowed down.
Some in-depth thoughts from Tom Brady on leading his teammates.
https://hbr.org/2024/09/tom-brady-on-the-art-of-leading-teammates
Create Space
Year after year, you should examine ways you can give up control and create more ownership. Your team will be much better for it.
Creating space for your players to take ownership is one of the toughest challenges for a coach. But it unlocks the potential to finding elite, sustained success.
It’s a great challenge, because when we think of coaching and leadership, we think about being in control. Telling people what to do. But the art of elite leadership is giving your team enough space to figure it out with their teammates, while providing the guidelines and structure that will help lead them down the right path.
Your leadership is much more powerful and effective when you give up control. Give your team the room to make some mistakes, to ask questions and to challenge the approach you take. When they discover the autonomy involved in their path to success, that’s when they will really buy in to everything you are doing.
The hardest part for you is giving them the freedom they need to take ownership. Year after year, you should examine ways you can give up control and create more ownership. Your team will be much better for it.
Getting Better As A Coach
I learned over time that I don’t want to give commands. I want to give intent.
In what ways are you a better coach now then you were back then?
Somebody asked me that question recently in a conversation about coaching. After 13 years as a head coach, where we experienced both sustained, elite success and some awful losing seasons, how will I be better the next time I’m a head coach?
It’s a great question to think about, whether you are an assistant coach or a head coach. Every day you spend as a coach is an opportunity to get better, so now matter how long you’ve been doing it you should be better at it tomorrow than you are today.
One way I feel strongly that I have gotten better is in my approach to teaching and leadership. As a young head coach you are convinced that you are the person in charge, you have to set the tone and you tell the players what to do and they do it. But eventually I learned that leadership isn’t about you, it’s about them. Telling them what you want them to do and having them follow orders isn’t the best way to get the most out of your team.
I learned over time that I don’t want to give commands. I want to give intent. I don’t want to tell them what to do. I want to show them what we are trying to accomplish and teach them how to solve the problems to get us there. I don’t want to teach them how to jump through hoops. I want to develop problem solvers.
When I first started as a head coach I was telling the players what to do. Now I’m trying to teach them how to figure out what to do on the court.
Who Is Challenging You?
Who makes sure the head coach is at his best every day as he is demanding of everyone around him?
As a head coach, I wanted to challenge my team to be great every day. Our practices were intense, efficient and fun - if you were a true competitor. I instilled the idea that practice was the most important thing we did as a team, and hammered our guys constantly about being mentally prepared - for practice. You could no longer just show up and be the best player like you did in high school. To compete at an elite level every day, you had to be mentally prepared.
I knew to challenge my guys I had to be at my best. They needed to see consistency from me in the way I was prepared, the energy I brought and the message they heard. If you do this, you tend to attract the players who are great competitors and who are hungry to get better. I’ve always said I’ll put the way we practiced at RIC and (eventually) at Maine up against any practices at any level in the country.
Everyone has off days - even the head coach. You may have heard the statement that there are 3 people who can never have an off day - your best player, your point guard and the head coach. While I love the thought, it’s not practical. Everybody has a day here and there where they just aren’t feeling great or didn’t bring the same energy.
What’s important as a head coach is to make sure you have somebody who is challenging you. Too many teams (and organizations) are built with a top-down leadership model, where the head coach dictates how things are going to go, and the message is then enforced by the assistant coaches, the captains and the veteran players. There are a few issues I have with this model, but one of them is the question of who holds the guy at the top accountable? Who makes sure the head coach is at his best every day as he is demanding of everyone around him?
Naturally it should first come from your assistants. But that dynamic is challenging, unless you play close attention to it when you hire assistants, as well as when your organize the responsibility and approach of the staff. You have to allow them and encourage them to challenge you. If not, they’ll just fall in line as loyal soldiers. Because that’s what they think they are supposed to do. Make sure they feel comfortable and empowered to evaluate and criticize your performance as the head coach. You need them to have the guts to speak up when things are going well and you may not be at your best.
Are you comfortable doing that as the head coach? If you aren’t you won’t be consistently at your best, and neither will your team.
Just as important, and oftentimes even more effective, is allowing your players to challenge you. If you set the tone and are clear with the standards and the culture of the organization, eventually your players should start to take ownership of it. When they start to do this you have unlocked the key to sustained elite performance. When they own the approach every day, and they hold one another to that standard, it flows naturally that they can do the same for you. I’ve had many a player over the years check me as far as my approach, my tone and my messaging when things seemed a little off.
It made me a much better coach. There were plenty of times when I was preparing for a practice and maybe feeling a little sluggish that I thought about my captain, or a group of seniors, or someone else on my team who I knew would notice if I wasn’t at my best. By taking ownership and demanding the best out of each other, they were doing the same to me. There was a right way to do it, and it was always done with respect - a private conversation, a quick check-in during a water break - and those moments had a huge impact on me.
As the head coach you should always challenge your team to be great every day. But you also need to play attention to who is going to challenge you. Don’t carry yourself above the rest of the team. Walk beside them. Make sure the people surrounding you are challenging you to be great in the same way.
Team USA Coaching Staff
Really cool look at how the four coaches on the Team USA coaching staff approach their time together in the olympics. The best of the best don’t take themselves too seriously and are lifelong learners.
Profile and Purdue Recruiting
As Painter is bitching, Chad Brown is listening. Brown, a fellow Purdue grad and former football coach, doesn’t know Painter that well — he earned the card game invite via his college roommate, former basketball player, Brian Cardinal — but eventually, he has to speak up. “Man, I don’t mean to push this on you,’’ Brown tells Painter. “But I think I can help you.’’
Profile is a company that does personality assessments for coaching staffs, players and recruits to give you better insight into who is a good fit for your team and how to better connect with your players. Their website is worth checking out.
This is a good story on Matt Painter and Purdue from a few years back about how it impacted his recruiting and coaching from The Athletic.
The secret behind Purdue's turnaround is a simple test Matt Painter gives recruits
Sep 5, 2018
Kicking back with his buddies over a few beers and a friendly game of cards, Matt Painter is complaining. Complaining a lot actually, and though he kinda can’t stand himself for bringing down the conversation, he also can’t help himself. He needs to vent. This is 2014, not long after the season has ended, and the source of Painter’s frustration is his Purdue basketball team — or more accurately his handling of the Purdue basketball team. The Boilermakers finished 15-17 and, combined with the 16-18 finish a year before, Painter is crushed that his alma mater has slipped so far under his stewardship. Even more galling, he can’t figure out how to fix it.
As Painter is bitching, Chad Brown is listening. Brown, a fellow Purdue grad and former football coach, doesn’t know Painter that well — he earned the card game invite via his college roommate, former basketball player, Brian Cardinal — but eventually, he has to speak up. “Man, I don’t mean to push this on you,’’ Brown tells Painter. “But I think I can help you.’’
Since that conversation Purdue is 104-27, and Painter has reconfigured his entire recruiting strategy, searching for guys who are productive as well as talented, who are more dominant and stable in their personality rather than extroverted influencers who merely want to be the life of the party. How did he figure it out? How did he identify the players who fit? Simple. He took Brown’s advice and had them take a test.
Eleven years ago, Brown was Painter — a fed up coach. He spent 10 years on the sidelines, crisscrossing the country as an assistant and recruiting coordinator. He loved the game but couldn’t stand the uncertainty, always hoping a recruit would fit his team’s style and staff’s personality.
His frustration led to, as he calls it, an “identity crisis,’’ and in 2007 he left Northern Colorado for a job in the corporate world, signing on with a sports tech company. As part of the hiring process, Brown took something called the DiSC Assessment test. Developed by William Moulton Marston, who also helped with the first polygraph test, DiSC has been around forever, used frequently by companies in the hiring process and for team building. It essentially separates people into four behavioral schemes: dominance, inducement, submission and compliance. When Brown saw his own results — they fit him to a tee — his head started spinning with ideas. This was the answer he’d been searching for in coaching, a way to help eliminate so much of the guesswork involved in constructing a team. “How can I make this work for coaches?” he thought to himself.
By the time he sat down across the card table from Painter, Brown was heading up Profile, a company he created that married his belief in personality assessments with his passion for sports. With the aid of a software developer, Brown took the principles of DiSC and expanded the test. Along with detailing behavior traits, he developed questions that would help determine an individual’s most important values, creating a composite that included who a person is, and what his or her motivators are, and how that translates into a positive work environment, or in the case of athletes, into a positive team experience. Armed with his new tools, he barnstormed around the country, trying to entice coaches to give it a try. “This isn’t for everybody,’’ Brown says, by way of explaining much of the skepticism he’s been met with since launching.
In Painter, though, Brown found a receptive audience. Painter is analytical and a thinker — when he eventually took the test, he scored as a CS, someone who is compliant and stable, and requires accuracy and reliable facts — and the idea of something concrete appealed to him. And let’s face it, he also was a little desperate. Painter listened to Brown’s pitch, did his own research and decided to take a trial run to see if the results were, indeed, reliable. He asked some of his former players to serve as guinea pigs, and when their scores rang true to their personalities, he was sold.
The test is pretty straightforward and takes about 15 minutes to complete. Test takers are first asked to choose from successive lists the adjectives that best describe them and are the least like them. Next, they must identify 36 sentences out of a list of 86 that describe things that are important to them at work — everything from salary and benefits to social interaction with coworkers and personal responsibility. The first set of questions generates where they fall on the DiSC evaluation, and the second determines which values — things such as competitiveness, recognition, wisdom, loyalty, spirituality and family happiness — are most important. (Full disclosure: I took the test. I’m an IS, a people person who trends more toward emotions than hard facts, but is nonetheless able to adapt and act as a good listener. I value integrity, creativity, responsibility, wisdom and financial security. That’s all very accurate, though my family is still searching for the part that points out my chronic impatience.)
Most people who take it are impressed with how true the results are. “Honestly I don’t think most of us thought much of it until the results came back,’’ says Purdue senior Ryan Cline. “And then it was like, ‘Whoa! That’s exactly right.’ It’s kinda crazy how spot on it is with all of us.’’ Brown now counts some 15 Division I programs among his clients and works the NFL Combine for the Dallas Cowboys, with the league office maintaining an interest in his findings. But while he feels confident in his test what he stresses with his coaches is that it can’t account for everything, especially external factors. “You are who you are, and your personality doesn’t change, but it can be affected by things outside,’’ he explains simply. Cline, for example, is a high “I” or influencer. He likes to make sure his teammates are loose and enjoying the game. Channeled properly, that’s not a bad thing but two years ago, when Cline’s personality was infused with outside influences, it led to trouble. As a sophomore, he was arrested for marijuana possession after he was found unresponsive in his car.
Cline’s personality hasn’t changed, but his actions have. “It’s really, are these people helping me more than those people?” he says. “It was about maturing, understanding who I am and figuring out how to guide myself and be more serious.’’
Painter bides his time while recruiting, waiting for what he believes is the proper moment to broach the subject. It’s hardly a deal breaker. He will neither stop nor start recruiting a kid because of the results of the test. Nor is it mandatory. (Though most recruits agree to take it willingly — and their parents are especially intrigued — a handful over the years have never gotten around to it.) He admits it can and has raised red flags when coupled with his own concerns about a player, and has made him question whether a recruit is worth pursuing. But it can swing the other way, too. Caleb Swanigan grew up in an unstable and frequently fractured family environment. Yet he scored as a very rare “high D,’’ a person who is a natural born leader. That reaffirmed what Painter already believed about Swanigan — that his external forces, which could have adversely affected him, only made him stronger.
Mostly it’s allowed Painter to understand how to best coach the players he has (who is task oriented and can handle more responsibility versus those who need more nurturing), identify the players that suit him, and give his team a better understanding of what makes him tick. “A lot of times, kids don’t know who they’re playing for,’’ Painter says. “You give speeches, you talk to them, but this lets me say — ‘Here. This is who I am. This is what’s important to me.’’ Consequently as part of his annual presentation to the Boilers, Brown shares the coach’s results. Painter isn’t in the room, so the information comes off as conversational instead of a ‘my way or the highway edict.’ Privately Painter even will allow his players to read his profile if they ask. “I love that he’s putting himself out there, saying ‘This is who I am,’’ Cline says. “He wants us to feel comfortable around everybody and really understand who we are.’’
So is the test really the secret to all of the Boilermakers’ turnaround? Of course not. Painter also has learned better how to build a team, to surround uber-talented guys with role players who make their free throws, don’t turn the ball over and take smart shots. He’s borrowed from other coaches, specifically Bo Ryan and Brad Stevens, in trying to mimic how they defined roles for each player on their roster. And he’s taken inventory of himself, growing more confident in the kind of coach he wants to be and the kind of program he wants to run.
“It’s not that it’s the answer,’’ he says. “People want to pay a fee, get an answer and boom! Their team is better. That’s not how it works. You have to grow into it. You have to process the information. Instead of the answers, it gives you the questions.’’
And a much more enjoyable card game.