Explore an Uncommon
Approach to Leadership!
Monty Williams Coaching Deandre Ayton
Love the message and the composure. Perfect example of a conversational tone to coach your players.
Conversational Approach
It's interesting watching the NBA playoffs to see the way the coaches talk to their players. All of the mic'd up segments give good insight into the approach the NBA coaches take. It's very much a conversation when they are talking to their teams, with a measured tone. There really isn't a lot of emotion involved in the way they address their team.
I had the opportunity to visit with a few G League teams and get behind the scenes with them on game day. And the approach was the same. The communication with the players was very much in a conversational tone. It was more like two people talking to each other than it was one person telling another one what to do. It made an impact to me to see they way these coaches talked to their players, and I notice it every night when they show the mic'd up huddles in the NBA playoffs.
Compare this approach to what we see in college most of the time. There always seems to be a lot more emotion in the communication in college. I know I've been guilty of this as a head coach and an assistant. It's like I'm trying to infuse energy into the players every time I say something, to get them to feel the sense of urgency. I don't think emotion is always a bad thing either - there are times when you want your players understand he urgency immediately. But if you use that emotion every time you speak it's not going to have the same impact. And a lot of times too much emotion can shut down the engagement of your team.
I find it telling that NBA coaches, and other coaches when talking to pros, don't really use a ton of emotion. I understand they are grown men and being paid to play professionally, so they dynamic is different. But when it comes to communication, ultimately it should be about the best way to get the message across. The dynamic in the NBA seems to have better balance. It's not one person telling others what to do. It's a conversation about what is best for the player or the team, where it feels like the player can ask questions or have input. It's a little bit more of a casual conversation, and because of that is it a more connected one?
Think about it when you are watching the NBA playoffs, and when you are next communicating with your team. What role does emotion play in the way you communicate? Ultimately it's about the best way to get the message across.
NBA Coaches - Mic'd Up
G League visits
Chris Paul JV Point Guard
Chris Paul Played JV Basketball. Now He’s Playing in the NBA Finals.
Before he was the Point God, he was a junior-varsity point guard—for two years
Chris Paul is having one of the greatest, unlikeliest seasons of his career. MARK J. REBILAS/REUTERSSHARE
Tim Fuller became the coach of a high school’s junior-varsity basketball team in 2001, and it didn’t take him long to recognize that his point guard was good. Then he realized that he was too good.
“Why are you playing JV?” he asked.
His coach was not the only person wondering why a sophomore named Chris Paul was still on the JV. His teammates were, too. “I thought that all the time,” said JJ Cook, who is now a yoga instructor.
When a local newspaper honored Paul as the area’s player of the year—the Winston-Salem Chronicle’s headline was “Paul’s leadership, unselfish play set him apart in JV basketball”—his own coach admitted that he was overqualified for the award. “I felt lucky to have him all season,” he said, “because I thought they were going to move him up to the varsity.”
If someone is playing JV basketball as a sophomore, he’s probably not bound for college basketball, and he’s almost certainly not making it to the NBA. He might not even make varsity. It would be unusual for a future star to play even one season of JV. Paul played two. He was on the varsity football team before he was on the varsity basketball team.
But there was a prescient strategy behind the Paul family’s counterintuitive decision to keep him down a level for another year. They didn’t want him to be a role player for the varsity. They wanted him to be the leader of the junior varsity.
“When he played JV, he made everybody better,” said Charles Paul, his father. “The same thing he’s doing now, he did on JV.”
What he’s doing now is playing in the NBA Finals, finally, after one of the greatest, unlikeliest seasons of his career. The Phoenix Suns hadn’t been to the playoffs in a decade. Then they traded for Paul. It was a wise move. They won the Western Conference on Wednesday night, when he turned in his latest masterful performance, scoring 41 points to secure his first appearance in the Finals when the rest of the basketball world least expected it.
Paul is 36 years old and 6-feet tall. NBA players would prefer to be neither. He’s already played more than anybody of his size in the league’s history, and he once had a team attach draft picks to dump his seemingly toxic contract. It was a long shot for him to get to the Finals with this team at this point in his career.
But a peculiar thing about the NBA’s best players is that many of them look in the mirror and see underdogs. In the stories they craft about themselves, they are forever the versions of themselves right before their ascents. Chris Paul will always think of himself as the sophomore on JV because those two formative years at point guard shaped the player now known as the Point God.
“I wasn’t this phenom,” Paul said recently. “I played two years of JV basketball.”
Michael Jordan was so distraught that he didn’t make the varsity basketball team as a sophomore that he clung to the grudge for the rest of his career and spun the half-truth that he’d been cut by his own high school into the sport’s most famous origin story. Paul was more diplomatic about his time on a North Carolina high school’s JV team.
“It bothered me at first,” he said in 2001. “Now I think it was the best thing that could have happened.”
Paul was old and wise even when he was young and inexperienced, according to more than a dozen people familiar with the West Forsyth High School (Clemmons, N.C.) junior varsity in 2000 and 2001. He could have been on the varsity. But what he couldn’t have done was lead the varsity. “He was better at being a leader and the guy in charge of the JV than a guy coming off the bench for the varsity,” said David Laton, the varsity coach.
Instead of being the backup to a senior point guard on the varsity, “he was going to be the man on the JV,” said Chris Miller, one of his classmates. It was a decision inspired by the experience of Paul’s older brother, C.J., who made the varsity as a freshman before their father intervened. “I didn’t like it,” Charles Paul said. “I told the coach: I need my son on the JV. The only way he can get better is to play.”
They followed that formula for their younger son who got so much better that he would play in the NBA.
Chris Paul was a basketball savant long before he could have been on varsity. In eighth grade, he traded scouting reports with Tommy Witt, the coach of another school’s eighth-grade team. It was the only time in his 25 years of coaching that Witt swapped intelligence with a middle-schooler.
An opposing JV coach named Jeff Overby was impressed by Paul the very first time he schemed against this diminutive freshman point guard. Overby called for his team to press and trap. Paul took a dribble backward, split the double team, shielded himself from a future college-football defensive tackle and scored on a layup. Overby kept pressing and trapping. On the next possession, Paul whipped a one-handed pass for another layup. Overby called off the presses and traps. “That right there told me that his basketball IQ was way ahead of anyone in the gym,” he said.
Overby was surprised to see him back in that gym the following year. He wasn’t surprised that Paul was calling out their plays. He knew that “Dallas” meant they were trapping off the dribble but “Pittsburgh” was off the pass. He seemed to know everything there was to know about his rival JV team.
“We changed our calls because he knew our calls,” Overby said. “That’s how smart he was.”
It had taken Overby two plays to recognize that Paul was unlike anyone else on the floor. It took David Gelatt one.
He moved to Paul’s school before their junior year and was told by the varsity basketball coach that he might be the star of the team. He called his father with the good news. Then he went to an open gym. That point guard from the JV took off on a fast break, passed to himself between Gelatt’s legs, finished the layup and handed the ball to the new kid.
“Welcome to North Carolina,” Chris Paul said.
Gelatt called his father again. He wasn’t going to be the star, he said. He wasn’t even sure that he would make the team.
But together they formed the backcourt of the rare junior-varsity basketball team worth remembering. Paul turned a bunch of future salesmen and yoga teachers into the JV version of the Suns. He controlled everything. He yapped at everyone. He perfected moves that would dupe NBA defenders, and he learned to have the ball in close games. “But very rarely did games get close,” said Austin Allgood. “I mean, we had Chris Paul.”
That year turned out to be the beginning of the rest of his life. He blew up that summer. He picked Wake Forest for college basketball. He left two years later for the NBA as one of the country’s finest young players.
But first there was another team for Chris Paul to leave: the JV.
How to Lead As Part of the Group
From Scientific American Mind Magazine in 2007, talking about the "New Psychology of Leadership."
- Effective leaders must understand the values and opinions of their followers - rather than assuming absolute authority - to enable a productive dialogue with team members about what the group stands for and thus how it should act.
- No fixed set of personality traits can assure good leadership because the most desirable traits depend on the nature of the group being led.
- Leaders must not only fit in with their group but also must shape the group's identity in a way that makes their own agenda and policies appear to be one expression of that identity.
The Next Chair Over
You hear it all the time in basketball coaching circles. The move to the next chair over - from the assistants spot to the head coaches spot - is a big leap. It's completely different, and something you really can't get used to until you make the move.
I've always found that description as being a little too dramatic. Sure, it is different being a head coach. But I'm not sure it's as dramatic as we make it out to be.
To me, there are two big differences to get used to. First of all, you have to be on all the time. When you are the head coach, everyone is always looking at you, reading your body language or your mood, and you are impacting their behavior whether you know it or not. You are always the head coach, and it's hard to turn that off. Secondly, you go from making suggestions to making decisions. It's not that you have to have the answers all of the time. You can always say you don't know or you aren't sure. But if you aren't prepared, you are losing credibility with your team immediately. And that is hard to come back from. You can't just make suggestions or tell the players you have to run it by the head coach. You have to be ready to make decisions.
It's not like you just get hit by a ton of bricks when you become a head coach. You've been preparing for it throughout your whole career. Not too many people get blindsided by being named the head coach. It is intense and can be overwhelming at first, as you immediately feel the pressure of the responsibility and everything you want to do. By no means am I saying it is easy. But it is something you can prepare for, and should be preparing for every day as an assistant.
The best suggestion I can give to ease the transition when you become a head coach is to focus a lot more on your leadership approach than the basketball stuff. The leadership side is where you will spend a lot more of your time - relationships, messaging, culture, communication - and the basketball side will take a back seat. As you prepare to be a head coach, think more about who you are as a leader, what type of culture you want to create and how you are going to communicate it to your players. The mentality you establish will have more of an impact on your program than what defense you play or what plays you decide to run.
It's never easy taking over a new program and being a first-time head coach. The pace moves really quick and there are never enough hours in the day. You feel the pressure all of the time, and it's different than being an assistant. But you can absolutely prepare for it. Think about how you are going to carry yourself as a leader and what's really important to you off the court. Establish that, and develop genuine relationships with your players through communication.
You'll certainly have a lot more on your plate. But it's an opportunity you've dreamed about, that a lot of people don't get. Be intentional about what is important to you as you prepare to become a head coach, and focus on the big picture. It's not really that different, because once you become a head coach you get used to the responsibility. If it's what you always wanted, and you prepared for it, it's just the next step in your coaching career.
The Challenge of Body Language
I've been reading a lot of stuff online recently about body language. This is always an interesting conversation to me, as most coaches are really into eliminating bad body language. I just don't think it's a very big deal.
The following is a chapter from my book "Entitled To Nothing," where I was glad I didn't overreact to negative body language. Yes, you can buy the book here!
Body Language – What Really Matters?
NCAA Tournament, Round 1
When Friday finally arrived, I knew we were ready. We had a great three days of practice and we were confident we were better than Coast Guard (remember, we had beaten them at their place in December). The only thing I was worried about was our nerves. It wasn’t easy to predict how we’d respond to playing in the NCAA Tournament.
We had a great atmosphere in the gym, made better when six busloads of Coast Guard Academy cadets showed up to cheer on their classmates. Our guys enjoyed the environment and so did Coast Guard, with both teams playing well. It was a really competitive, well played NCAA Tournament game. We held the lead most of the way.
While I was doing everything to make sure our guys were mentally prepared, my inexperience as a head coach in this spot probably hurt us. As the second half moved on and we couldn’t pull away to a comfortable lead, I got tight. Normally we played ten or 11 guys, but I got out of character and shortened our bench. Usually midway through the second half I’d rest a couple of starters to make sure they were fresh down the stretch.
But we couldn’t take control, and I left my starters on the floor, hoping we could pull away. I didn’t get my key guys the right amount of rest and in an intense, emotional environment that had an impact. With about seven minutes to play, Kinsey Durgin took a wide open pull-up three and banged it off the backboard. I realized he was dead tired, and I had to get him out. Tirrell Hill missed an open 15-footer badly, and I realized he was tired as well. I had been thinking I’d ride the game out with them on the floor, but I had left them on the floor too long. I had changed my approach under pres‐ sure, a leadership mistake from a young coach.
I had to get them a breather. I took Kinsey out first and gave him a quick break, and then put him back in for Tirrell. When Tirrell came out, he really wasn’t happy. He had just thrown up a brick, we were only up by three points, and he didn’t want to come off the floor. Tirrell was a great competitor, and he always wanted to be on the court. His body language showed he was clearly unhappy.
I went right over to Tirrell and told him it was my fault, that I had left him on the floor too long without getting him a break. Then I told him he was going to go back in quickly, and he was going to help us win the game. He needed a quick blow. He listened, but he was still frustrated. He wanted to be on the court. I wanted to get his mind right.
The best thing I did was ignore his body language. I didn’t react to it, partially because his fatigue was my fault, but also because we had more important things to worry about. We had a game to win. I stayed focused on what really mattered to my team at that point. Under pressure, it’s easy to get agitated by stuff that’s not important. For basketball coaches, body language is often one of those things. We look at negative body language and come to conclusions, and often times those conclusions are either incorrect or irrelevant.
Tirrell was frustrated because he hadn’t been playing great, we couldn’t take control of the game, and he didn’t want to come out. I understood that. His body language wasn’t a message to me, or him “showing me up” as a coach. It wasn’t personal. He was tired and frustrated and I needed to help him deal with that.
I’ve learned to coach the behavior, not the personality. It’s not like I’m a fan of negative body language, but I don’t make a big deal out of it. I’m sure my body language wasn’t great at that point in the game either. On top of that, body language can be hard to read. I’m just not very good at it. It’s easy to come to the wrong conclusion. If bad body language leads to bad behavior, then I’m going to address it.
There are plenty of little things that might aggravate you but don’t really have a big impact on your team. Remember, it’s about what they need, not what you feel. Body language is simply one data point that may give you insight into what is happening with a player. And it’s hardly the most important one. Their behavior is much more valuable to you than how they look doing it. Body language can be more about control – I want you to act a certain way, don’t show me up! – than about the impact on your team. If it is a sign of bad behavior that is affecting your team, then address the behavior.
Had I been worried about Tirrell’s body language I probably would have left him on the bench. But he was a huge part of our team and we needed him. His frustration didn’t bother me; it was my job to get him right. I settled him down, and after a quick two minute rest, I put him back in. He made several key plays down the stretch, as he usually did, and we won the game.
After our first NCAA Tournament win in almost 30 years, we were now 25-3.
I have three general thoughts on body language - 1) It is very subjective and hard to read. One person's "great competitor" is another guy's "negative attitude." It's easy to add your own emotion to it as a coach and read it wrong. 2) It is often hypocritical. How is your body language as a coach? This gets you into the "do as I say, don't watch what I do" area, which I always want to avoid as a coach. 3) It can actually help me as a coach. When I see a player react with their body language, it gives me a clue as to how to coach them - even if it's negative. It can give me a good read on what to do next.
I'm on record as saying I think most of us as coaches make way to big of a deal about negative body language. Coach the behavior, not the body language.
Jim Collins - Level 5 Leader
"A Level 5 Leader puts the advancement of the company above his or her own reputation and builds loyalty and trust through quiet but purposeful action."
Self-Awareness
From Andrea Jung, Chair and CEO of Avon Products:
"Of all a leader's competencies, emotional and otherwise, self-awareness is the most important. Without it, you can't identify the impact you have on others. Self-awareness is very important as a CEO. At my level, few people are willing to tell me the things that are hardest to hear. We have an advisory counsel - ten people chosen each year from Avon offices throughout the world - and they tell me the good, the bad and the ugly about the company. Anything can be said. It helps keep me connected to what people really think and how my actions affect them."
Are you surrounded by people who are willing to tell you the truth?
Comfortable
One of the biggest challenges to sustaining success is getting comfortable. Things are going well, everything is working, and it is natural to feel good about everything. It's also natural to lose your edge. You don't see things through the same critical eye, and you don't have the same sense of urgency.
You want to enjoy success, and you have a right to feel good about accomplishments. To keep performing at a high level, you not only have to recognize the danger of getting comfortable, but you also have to be intentional about how to attack it.
Ask critical questions, even when things are going well. Require those around you to challenge something you are doing. I used to tell my staff at Maine to go home and think about something they didn't agree with, something they thought we were doing wrong or had to do better. Don't just let the people around you validate everything you are doing. Study other organizations who do things differently than you do, and see if you can pick up some things that may help you. Take a different approach to off-season workouts for a week. Put some guys at different positions in practice. Find ways to make things different, and maybe make yourself and your team uncomfortable, when things are going well.
After six years at Rhode Island College we completely changed the way we played offensively. We had been to 5 straight NCAA Tournaments and back to back Sweet 16s. We were rolling. But I didn't think our returning personnel fit the way we had been playing, so we had to make a change. We went to a more structured offense (something I don't really like) and played off the dribble a lot less. We got the ball to our best players where they were most comfortable. We were a different team offensively, without changing the core of who we were as an organization. We were still tough and competed extremely hard. The change made a lot of people uncomfortable at first, including myself, but it allowed us to adapt and stay ahead of the curve. We won the regular season league title, the league tournament, and went back to the NCAAs. We finished the year 26-3.
It's so easy to be comfortable. Especially when you are winning. But sustaining elite success is really hard, and comfortable doesn't get you there. You have to find a way to keep an edge. I've worked with a number of coaches over the years who didn't see things starting to slip until the results changed. Recognizing your own comfort level and challenging it is hard, but if you don't you'll find yourself in the middle of the pack wondering how you got there.
5 Questions to Ask Your Assistants
Thoughtful stuff from Jack Fleming for head coaches. I really like "Tell me why I shouldn't do that."
https://www.coachjackfleming.com/post/5-questions-for-head-coaches-to-ask-their-assistants
Start With I
I always want to coach players that start with "I." When I ask them what went wrong, why they are struggling, or what they have to do to improve, they start by saying "I have to..." They talk about what they have to do better.
Too often you hear players talk about what happened to them. When things aren't going well, they immediately go to everything else around them. The officials weren't very good, they double-teamed me right away. If someone asks them about why they didn't play much, they'll say "well, coach didn't give me a lot a minutes..." If they start answer the question with "they..." they aren't taking full accountability.
I want to be around people who own their situation immediately. There are always outside factors that impact what happens to you. But no one needs to hear that. And whatever those factors are, they aren't going to help you. What can help you is what you can control. I want to coach guys who own what they control and take full accountability for what happens to them.
Fran Fraschilla - Successful Coach
From Fran Fraschilla via Gordie Chiesa on a recent clinic...
5 skills that make for a successful coach:
- Teaching skills
- Communication skills
- Organizational skills
- Motivational skills
- Under pressure skills
Elite Teams...
- Play for each other
- Communicate directly
- Commit to constant performance improvement
- Get to class on time
- Practice good habits
- Recognize the long term value in their approach
- Confront bad behavior
- Offer critical feedback to the coaching staff in the proper setting
- Get over someone yelling at them quickly
- Do not take criticism personally
- Enjoy the hard stuff
- Adapt constantly
- Compete relentlessly
- Lead from the middle
- Don't care about status
- Can beat you in a lot of ways
- Eliminate rank from the conversation
- Turn values into behaviors
- Hear the coach's voice in their heads on the weekends
- Take care of the locker room themselves
- Limit their egos for the good of the team
- Get up early
- Form connections through shared experiences away from the gym
- Don't always do the right thing... but own up to their mistakes
- Understand the power of choices
- Relentlessly seek the truth
- Practice competitive excellence
- Find an efficient approach in the gym
- Learn to evaluate their process
- Are not defined by results
- Understand the value of practice
- Put teams away
- Win on the road
- Have a shared purpose
- Grow as people through team culture
- Are willing to fight for their core beliefs every day
- Answer critical questions with "I..."
- Are loud on the court
- Correct mistakes in practice before the coach can say a word
- Take control of the off-season
- Own their approach
- Have great perspective
- Refuse to let one another down
- Recognize down the road the hard stuff was well worth it
- Walk together forever
Shortening The Rotation
I grew up a Knicks fan, but for the last, say, 25 years or so I really haven't been much of a fan. Over the last two weeks I found myself watching the Knicks on purpose for the first time since the late 90s.
Not only were the Knicks pretty good this year - making the playoffs as the fourth seed in the East - but they were incredibly fun to watch. They played a lot of guys, with 11 or 12 guys getting regular minutes in most games. They finished with a different crew almost every night. They shot the ball really well, spreading teams out on offense and sharing the basketball. They also defended their asses off. They went from being 27th in the league in defense to being 1st in the league in a year, a credit to the job Tom Thibodeau did in changing the approach and the culture.
I was excited to see the Knicks play games that mattered again, but it was also great basketball to watch. They had a lot of guys who could hurt you and they got leading contributions from different players every night. It was pretty disappointing to see them get handled by the Hawks in five games in the playoffs - and the Hawks clearly looked like the better team.
The Knicks looked completely different. One major change was in the rotation. Thibodeau stopped playing so many guys and cut down the rotation. He went with Derrick Rose for the most part at the point, leaving Elfrid Payton, who started a lot of games during the year, on the bench. With the shorter rotation, the Knicks seemed to lose some of their identity and their energy. The ball didn't move quite the same. There was a lot more isolation ball being played.
Now you can make the case that the Hawks defended really well and outplayed the Knicks from the jump, and that is why the Knicks tried to adjust. But it seemed to me like they lost what made them so good in the first place. The versatility, the connection and the different weapons that come with a deep rotation were gone. They weren't the same team.
I know it's conventional theory to shorten the rotation, but I've never really bough in to that approach. It seems to me like something Pat Riley did in the 80s and 90s, and everyone just followed suit. I guess I'm not a big fan of conventional theory. I've always loved playing a lot of guys as a coach, because I love what it can bring to your team. It makes you really dangerous and hard to game plan against. It really helps your teams confidence because everyone is engaged. It makes your practices better, because everyone shows up knowing they can earn more time on the floor (not that this matters much in the NBA, as they hardly ever have live practice). It gives you a lot of guys you can count on, and a lot of different weapons. It also seems like it creates a different energy - a connection within your team because everyone plays a key role.
I know the NBA playoffs and college basketball post-season are very different, with so many more games to play in a 7-game series. But I never liked changing my rotation in the post-season. Whenever I did, I usually didn't like the result. I felt like when things weren't going well in a post-season game for us, I got tight and shortened the rotation. It's natural to want to go with your best players as much as possible. But if your team is in trouble with your best players out there, it probably means they aren't playing that well. You probably need a different energy, and your bench can bring that for you.
I always tried to remind myself to trust the bench in the post-season. Forty minutes is still a long time, and if you start to change and your team senses you are tight, they will get tight as well. I felt like the Knicks played tight most of the series. If playing a lot of guys and having a deep rotation was part of your success in the regular season it can have the same impact in the post-season. You just have to believe in it.
Back to Backs On The Road
Do teams play worse on the second night of a road back to back? An Ivy League study done in 2011.
Pep Guardiola
An interesting article in the New York Times about Pep Guardiola, the manager of Manchester City, and his obsession with winning the Champions League title. Despite incredible domestic success, he hasn't been back to the Champions League Final since 2011 when he was on top of the soccer world with Barcelona.
Some insight into his "obsessive preparation" and how it may have hurt his teams in the biggest match of the year. Fighting the tendency to over-coach in a big game is not easy. Even the best in the world struggle with it.
By 2020, though, his players were wondering if that obsessive preparation was the problem. Guardiola was so preoccupied by what his opponents might do that he compromised his own principles. The ideas and the imagination that made first Bayern Munich and then Manchester City untouchable over the span of a season were jettisoned in favor of a more pragmatic approach.
Crucially, it did not seem to work, a view expressed inside and outside the club in the aftermath of the defeat to Lyon. Even Gundogan, as ardent an acolyte of Guardiola as one could hope to meet, used that word — “overcomplicate” — in an interview this week. The key for a final, he said, is “not to do anything different or unexpected: Stick with the stuff that you are convinced by, that works for you. You don’t overcomplicate it.” The ghosts of the last four years have not been entirely exorcised, not yet.
Leadership Is Contextual
One thing that gets lost in a lot of discussions about leadership approach: leadership is highly contextual. The situation you are in matters. You can read a lot of books and study leadership to develop the best approach that fits you, but you then have to make it work for your organization. Your leadership approach is not about you - it is about the people in your command.
I learned this through experience in my two head coaching jobs. When I took over at Rhode Island College, I took over a very talented team that was starting to have success, but had never really taken the next step to win championships. I also took over a group that had been through a lot together - I was their third coach in three years, and the core of the team had been together for at least two seasons. I also had a very talented freshmen class. That team was on the cusp of winning, and we just needed to come together with the right approach. I was a new head coach, so I learned a ton about leadership from that group. You can read all about it here.
At Maine I took over a team that had been beaten down by losing. The program had no recent success, very limited talent, and no real culture that everyone believed in. It was essentially starting from scratch. Everyone in the program expected to lose, to the point where they were used to it and numb to it. Everyone around the program expected us to lose as well. The talent wasn't good, the approach wasn't good - there was really nothing to build around, except a new beginning.
At RIC I was able to challenge our guys with expectations and follow that up with a demanding approach and a high level of accountability. At Maine, I had to learn to coach with empathy. The guys at RIC were eager to attack a new approach because they knew they had the talent to win and win big. I likened the Maine program when I got there to a dog that had been beaten. He would come close to you and wanted to trust you, but once you reached out your hand to give him some food, he'd back away scared for fear of getting hit. Losing had beaten the Maine program down to where I couldn't just hit the ground running.
Of course I had to build trust at both places - any new leader does. But going about how I did that was very different. At RIC I could use basketball and our approach to build trust, because our guys were ready for that. This is how hard we are going to compete, this is what I expect out of you - and when they started to see it in action and saw I was consistent, the buy-in started to come. At Maine I couldn't build trust on the court until I built it off the court. I had to spend much more time getting to know my players away from the gym, because the gym wasn't generally a positive experience for them. One of the mistakes I made at Maine was thinking I could get them bought in to what we were going to do on the basketball court, similar to what we did at RIC. But that group wasn't ready to buy in to that. We had to get to the same place mentally before we could start that process.
It's a great challenge for a leader to take over a new organization and figure out the best approach. You have to understand your team and the environment first. So much of the situation has an impact on what will work and what won't - the people, the organization around you, the expectations, finding alignment with the school. While you have to stay true to who you are, if you aren't adapting your leadership approach to your new situation, you likely won't get the right response.
There are thousands of different leadership books and I enjoy reading a lot of them. It's interesting to me that such an important topic can have so many different paths to success. Don't look for an approach that you can adopt and try to simulate in your current position. Find what resonates for you, what will fit with your current organization, and make it your own. If your approach doesn't fit your situation, and your team doesn't see it as authentic, it doesn't matter how much success it led to elsewhere. It won't work for you.
Building a culture at RIC vs. taking over at Maine
What Does That Look Like?
Your values should be reflected in behaviors. And everyone on your team should know those behaviors. Words like "Integrity" and "Toughness" look great on the wall in the locker room or the back of a tee shirt, but if they don't translate to the right behavior then your values aren't very effective.
A great question to ask is "what does that look like?" When I work with teams and businesses on leadership and culture, that is a basic question I ask a lot. We always talk about core values and what is important to them. But when I ask them about their values, and say "what does that look like," it usually takes a little time to come up with an answer.
Let's take trust as an example. Trust is a common core value, and a pillar of accountabilty and high performing teams. But what does trust look like? When I ask that question, I usually get answers like, "Well, we have to be able to trust each other to be successful. We really value integrity here." OK, that's great. But that really isn't behavior. What does trust look like?
I give them a basketball example. When our big guy leaves his man to attack the ball and help the guard who got beat off the dribble, without any hesitation, that is trust as a behavior for us. He knows he's leaving his man open under the hoop, and if nobody helps him, his man is going to get a dunk. To the average fan, he is going to look bad for giving up a dunk. The reality is he's doing his job, and the weak side defender has to rotate over to help him, and take away the dunk for his man. For my basketball team, that defender leaving his man without hesitation to help when he's supposed to - that is what trust looks like.
Trust is doing the right thing for the team, even if you risk looking bad as an individual. It's more than just saying "we trust each other, and we act with integrity." It is telling the truth in a meeting, even when it's hard. It's being able to listen to criticism because you know it's going to help you and the team, even though it's hard. Trust is essential to any high performing team. But like any other core value, it should be defined as a behavior. It should look like something.
What does that look like? It's a great question to ask to help you define your core values as behaviors and show your team exactly what is expected of them.
Compete. Toughness. Trust. Selflessness.
Hierarchy of Commitment
Some good stuff from A.G. Lafley, the CEO of Proctor and Gamble, on what he had to do when he took over in 2000.
I always talk about this hierarchy of commitment. On the high end it's disciples - people who really believe in what you're doing and in you. And on the low end it's saboteurs. And there's everything in between. So I had to make sure that we got rid of the saboteurs, built a strong cadre of disciples, and moved all the fenced sitters to the positive side.