Ask Questions To Create Alignment

An excerpt below from my book Entitled to Nothing. Asking your players questions gives them ownership of your culture, and creates alignment between your team and staff. The way we played pick-up in the off-season was a huge part of our championship culture.

Questions Create Alignment

Like most aspects of our culture, the first key with our pickup games was the kids. We had kids who loved to play, kids who played hard, and kids who were tough. Giving them ownership was pretty easy. I wanted to provide the structure they needed but still make it theirs. I started to discover the value of asking questions.

After talking with KP, I asked the players in an informal meeting about the pickup games. Did they think they were good enough? Should they be better? Did we need to do something different? There was a consensus – some days the games were good, some days they were bad. They weren’t consistent, and they definitely needed to be better. I asked them if they thought the games were important, and they all said yes. They were playing four days a week for almost two hours at a time. If we were going to invest that much time in it, should we make sure we do it the right way? They all agreed. They wanted to change the way we played pickup.

I learned that asking questions of my players really helped my devel‐ opment as a leader. It started us down the road of developing real trust. Asking questions creates alignment, and alignment creates a safe space for change and growth. When you come across the inevitable difficult times, you can circle back to your questions and reinforce your alignment. This strengthens the trust within your team when you need it the most. You can never ask too many questions.

The players felt like I valued their opinion, and it allowed them to take more ownership. There’s an old adage that applies to leadership “If I say it, you doubt it. If you say it, it’s true.” By asking them questions about the pickup games I was giving them freedom to establish what needed to change. And perhaps more importantly, I wasn’t coming in and laying down the law. Lao Tzu said ,“To lead people, walk beside them,” and that’s what I was doing. I didn’t want to be the new coach who had all of the answers and blamed any lack of success on them. Asking questions created alignment, ownership, and trust, while showing them a pathway towards meaningful change.

The whole team agreed that the pickup games were important and that they needed to change. My next question was “What can we do about it?” Again, I allowed them to take some responsibility and give feedback. Then I was able to give some suggestions. “How about if we brought some structure to it? How about if we made all of the games more competitive? Do you think you guys can handle that?”

We talked it out and came up with a structure:

Each week we’d pick three teams, and everyone stayed on the same team for the week.
The players would count the wins and losses each day, and the team at the end of the week with the most losses would get up and run a timed mile on Monday morning. This made the games very competitive. No one wanted to run on Monday, and guys took great pride in never being on the team that had to run.

Games were straight to seven, with no three pointers. Everything was a point. We didn’t want the games to run too long and get lazy, and we wanted to avoid arguments about a shot being a two or three. I also wanted to encourage guys to get to the rim.

On the seventh point, the scorer had to make a free throw to win the game. If you missed the free throw the bucket didn’t count and you played the rebound live. The game continued.

If the offense scored a basket and all five offensive players hadn’t crossed half court, the basket didn’t count, the ball was turned over to the defense. If the offense scored a basket and all five defensive players hadn’t crossed half court, the bucket counted, and the offense got the ball back. This forced players to run hard and play every possession.

The offense was not allowed to call fouls. All fouls were called by the defense. There’s no stopping after a contested shot so people would just assume you got fouled. If the defense fouls somebody, they call it. If there is no foul called, keep playing. This is perhaps the most important and most challenging rule. You certainly need buy-in from your leaders, but it goes a long way to developing trust. You might think there were a lot of arguments over fouls with this process, but the opposite was the case. Everyone knew they couldn’t stop and assume a foul would be called. You had to play through it.

The more we talked about our pickup games, the more excited the guys got about them. It may seem like a lot of structure, but it was theirs, even though I had provided some suggestions. They owned it, and when they played, they knew I wouldn’t be there. They had to execute the plan.