Explore an Uncommon
Approach to Leadership!
Losing
What can you do to turn things around when your team is losing?
When I became a head coach in 2005 at Rhode Island College in 2005 I took over the best team in the league. We were good enough to win games regardless of the mistakes I made. When I became the head coach at Maine in 2014, I took over the worst team in the league. We weren't good enough to win no matter what I did. I gained a lot of valuable experience as a head coach with both winning and losing.
Understand The Pulse Of Your Team
Any important decisions you make as a leader start with the pulse of your team. You really have to know what makes them tick as individuals and as a group. That is harder to due when your team is really struggling, especially with a new team.
When you are losing your approach tends to drift away from the people on your team and how to connect with them. The overall mindset becomes "we just aren't good enough" and you need an overhaul. I know when I got there as a coach, the individual mentality didn't matter to me as much as it should have. It was a major reconstruction project and this was how we were going to do it long-term, and connecting with the players wasn't as important. We cared about them and we tried to make them better, but changing the mindset became a group thing, with individual personalities not being as important. That made change that much harder.
Some teams are really loose and a little bit wild, and maybe they need things to be tightened up a bit to change the narrative. Other teams are too rigid and put a lot of pressure on themselves to perform, and that has a negative impact. Understand what type of team you have to help find your way out of it.
Any type of meaningful change is still about connecting with individuals mentally and establishing and maintaining buy-in. Motivating players when you are winning and they are playing well isn't that difficult. Connecting with them to get more out of them when they are losing is really hard, and knowing who they are and how to get to them is crucial. Don't lose sight of who they are because you are losing.
Evaluate Their Ability
Talent matters. Some players are good enough and some aren't. When you are going through a losing streak, make sure you are honest with what your players are capable of. Are you putting them in position to be successful? Are they good enough to do what you ask?
When you are trying to shake things up to get your team out of a rut, make sure you are putting them in the best position to win. It's not a bad idea to mix it up. But it is easy to make things worse. If you are struggling to shoot the ball and you are shooting a lot of 3s, maybe you aren't as good a shooting team as you think. If you have a great post player who you keep feeding inside but he can't finish, maybe you need to different approach.
It's so easy when you are losing to get pissed off at your players and blame them. Sometimes they aren't good enough. Make sure you are asking them to do stuff they are capable of doing before you hammer them about the way they are playing.
Look Inward
Take a look at how your actions and tone have changed as your team has started to struggle. Are you being consistent with who you are and your organization's core values? Do they still see someone they can trust every day?
Taking responsibility is a great way to show vulnerability to your team and the value of taking ownership. When my teams were struggling I felt one way to relieve a lot of pressure was to tell them it was ultimately my fault. I prepared this team to play a certain way, and we aren't playing that way. It's on me. But I'm going to keep working as hard as I can to get this right, as long as you guys are willing to do the same.
Ask some veteran guys that you trust how your own approach has changed in their eyes. Do they see the same guy they saw at the beginning of the year? Is the message still consistent and clear? Ask a lot of questions and listen. Having those conversations will teach you a lot about yourself and your team.
You want to end a losing streak by figuring out what your team can do better. Sometimes it's about figuring out what you can do better.
Change Something
Sometimes you just need to do something else. Make sure it sounds different and feels different to your team. Get them out of their rut and give them something to be excited about.
When we were struggling defensively at Maine I was continually pounding our guys on the defensive end. It was the emphasis every day. The drills were harder and longer. I was going to make sure the guys knew we were going to guard people no matter what. And it wasn't working.
I just decided to go the other way. Before we played Hartford after a tough loss at Stony Brook, I went completely opposite. I told our guys I wanted to try and score 100 points. That was it. That was the scouting report before Hartford. I didn't say anything about the defense, because the guys were tired of hearing about it. All we were going to do was try and score 100 points.
It definitely changed our guys mentality a bit. It gave them something to get excited about, something to smile about in practice. We had been losing game after game, so we needed something to change. We went out and beat Hartford in the next game, and we did score 100 points (although the game went to overtime, and it took us overtime to do it).
Stay Focused On Who You Are
Stay true to your core values and behaviors. Make sure that is how you continue to evaluate your team. Negative results can impact the way you see your team, and you have to fight that. The process is what really matters. If your team is competing the way you expect, make sure you celebrate that. Too much goes into the results that you can't control. Evaluate your team based on their approach every day and you'll continue to get their best.
Trust Relieves Pressure
I heayrd a really interesting take from Joel Sherman, a long-time reporter for the New York Post, on "The Captain," Derek Jeter's documentary about his career. If you are a Yankee fan or a Jeter fan, you'll find "The Captain" interesting and fun, but it's basically just a recap of his career.
Sherman was talking about the difference between the Yankee Dynasty (1996-2000) teams that one four World Series and the teams from the next decade who had a lot of talent and struggled to win. Jeter during those years used to always say "these teams are different" without elaborating on what the difference was.
Sherman said that the Yankee Dynasty teams had built up such a level of trust that the following teams didn't seem to have. He said the trust that was built relieved a ton of individual pressure in the locker room because there was so much trust and confidence that somebody would find a way to get the job done. The individual players didn't feel as much pressure because they knew the team as a collective could handle it.
I'd never heard a take like that on trust and the collective pressure, but it makes a lot of sense. When I first started coaching championship teams that were good year in and year out, the power of our trust in one another was tangible. It sounds silly, but I felt you could just see how much we trusted each other on the court. It was a collective mentality, borne of hours and hours in the gym with the right approach. The way we played, shared the ball, covered for each other and competed every day, you could tell how much we trusted one another and our approach.
I never thought about the concept that the trust helped relieve the pressure. Now that I've heard it, it fits perfectly with those great teams I coached. There was an ease about our mentality in tight games. We were confident and never got rattled, and if you were going to get us, you had to beat us. We never really gave in to the moment.
The level of trust we had for one another relieved us of individual pressure. No one person had really felt it, because they were surrounded by people they knew the could count on. Trust made it easier for us to come through in tough spots and win big games.
I've always felt strongly about the importance of trust in your culture, ever since I became a head coach. I never connected it to our ability to perform under pressure.
Teach Them How To Get Better
I remember talking with a Division I head coach a few years back about the summer access rules and our ability to work with our players in the off-season. He said "We really need it, because these kids don't know how to get better on their own." And my response was, "Well, if they played for you for a year, shouldn't they know how to get better on their own?"
Most players need to be taught how to get better on their own. What are they doing when they are alone in a gym or on the playground in the summer? There is a big difference between working on your game and shooting around, and at some point everyone needs to be taught. If you play a musical instrument, somebody taught you how to practice, and how to get better. You didn't just pick up the flute and start playing it. Somebody taught me math, and showed me the problems I needed to work on to get better at algebra. Similarly we need to teach our players how to get better.
I would say that most players when they get to college don't have a great idea how to get better when they are alone. I know there are workout people everywhere nowadays, and everyone has a guy or two that they "work out" with. It's not that hard to ask someone to work you out, rebound for you and pass you the ball - if you go hard, you'll get better at some rate. I'm talking about guys going to the gym by themselves, or with a teammate to work on their game.
If you are coaching in high school or college it's one of the most important things you can do. Show your kids how to get better when they are alone in a gym. They don't have to take a day off just because they don't have someone to work out with. Show them full-court ball-handling drills. Show them how to get shots and make one on one moves off of spin-outs to themselves. Show them the pace they need to work out at, and how to catch their breath shooting free throws in between drills.
Too many young players are reliant on other people to help them get better. They'll go to the park or the gym when there is pick-up to play, and they'll join a work out when someone has room for them. But when they are on their own, what are they doing? They need to be taught how to get better on their own.
"Live With Paradox"
"An ability to embrace new ideas, routinely challenge old ones, and live with paradox will be the effective leader's premier trait."
- Tom Peters
It's What You Do
When you take over an organization, it's natural to want to talk about who you are and your core values. You want to explain to your team everything your team will be about. It feels like you can't repeat the message enough.
I've learned that your team really won't understand your values until you see them in action. Long meetings with dialogue about what you are all about lose their impact quickly. As much as you feel the urge to share your core values and everything you stand for, words won't have a huge impact. They will figure out who you are and what's important to you through your actions every day. That is where you should focus.
We used the phrase "Win Anyway" as a way of illustrating our no excuses approach. The point was that no one cared about whatever adversity we may face. It was about the bottom line, getting the job done, regardless of what happened around us. I used to talk about that to my teams all of the time - Win Anyway. No excuses. That would be a big part of our core value of toughness.
But it struck me that those conversations lost energy pretty quickly. OK, coach, we've heard that before. Got it. They had heard what I said, and they weren't ignoring it, but it wasn't really resonating. When we got on the floor and something happened, and they head me talk about it - that's when it started to sink in. If someone thought they got fouled in practice but it wasn't called, they'd hear me say "Win Anyway." OK, you think you got fouled, you didn't get the call, what are you going to do about it? Somebody is going to win this drill, either you or them. How are you going to respond?
The message was so much more effective when they saw it in action and there was behavior connected to it. I could literally see the response on the floor, the determination to take what I had said and put it into action. I quickly realized that all the time I spent preaching to my team, especially when I first took over, wasn't nearly as effective.
I realize the pull you feel when you first take over to deliver a great message and to clearly define your core values. But the longer you stand in front of your team talking at them, the less impact you will have on them. Deliver your message with action, and let it happen naturally. Your team will start to believe in your values over time, it won't happen overnight. It happens when they see those values turn into action, when it becomes behavior.
What you do is much more important than what you say. Deliver the message with who you are every day.
How Do You Make Your Team Tougher?
"If you want a team that is tough, get tough players." - Jeff Van Gundy
I recently had this conversation with a couple of local high school coaches. How do you make your team tougher?
Get Tough Kids
Coach Van Gundy said it best - you want a tough team, get tough players. Maybe not that easy at the high school level. But if you really want a tough team, then you have to value toughness every step of the way. With whom you take on the team, who you decide to start, who gets the playing time, etc. Value toughness every step of the way.
Define It As Behavior
If it's a value for you, you have to define it for your team in behavioral terms. Yelling at your team "we need to be a lot tougher!" doesn't make your team any tougher. They have to know what it is you mean, and they have to understand it as behavior. What does toughness mean to you? The kid who turns the ball over, but sprints back to get a deflection and save an easy basket in transition is tough. The guard who gets stuck in the spot on a big and works his ass off to get around in front and challenge any pass inside is tough. The guy who sprints in for an offensive rebound from the perimeter and gets his hand on the ball to keep it alive is tough. Any player who competes with 100% effort is tough.
However you define toughness, show your team the behaviors that fit that definition.
Get Physical
It's hard to have a physically tough team that doesn't play physically tough in practice. It seems like a lot of coaches are more concerned with somebody getting hurt than they are with getting tougher. I don't want to get anyone hurt either. But I don't see a way to prepare for the toughness needed to win games without battling it out in practice. You can control the level of physicality (and how long you go) in practice. I'm not saying have brawls. But banging bodies is part of the game, and if you want to be tougher you have to get used to it. Physical drills help breed toughness.
Run. A Lot.
Conditioning is one of the more underrated elements of mental and physical toughness. My teams always ran a lot to get in great shape. Get your team into great shape and they'll feel a level of toughness that can come through in any situation. It's a mindset that tough teams have. Start some drills with a sprint or two and then get your team right into what you are doing. Force them to get stops late in practice when they are dead tired. A team that is in great shape and knows it will be tough as nails.
Tough Situations
Put your team in tough situations and make them come through. When you have an early morning practice, demand the same level of intensity and effort. When you played the night before and have another game to prepare for, expect the same approach. If it's your fourth or fifth straight day of practice in the pre-season, don't make any excuses for them.
Give them the rest they need when they need it, of course. But don't always take the easy way out. Create tough situations in practice (after running some sprints) and demand their best. Tough teams are borne out of coming through in tough situations.
Indifferent to Injuries
This might sound a little harsh, but don't make a big deal out of injuries. In fact, move past them as quickly as you can. Obviously you want to make sure your players are safe and take care of them if they are hurt. But when the trainer gets involved and everything is okay, keep it moving. If it a kid goes down with a turned ankle and is limping a bit, get the trainer on it and move forward. You don't have to stop practice and have everyone get a drink until you find out the extent of the injury. If you are out of the drill, see the trainer and he or she will take care of it. But practice is moving on. For the guys that are milking things a bit and just need a break, they'll start to realize that the team is moving forward without them.
You can develop a mentality with your team that injuries are going to happen, and the trainer is the one who takes care of them. But the team has to continue to get better. No one who is tough is going to want to spend any time with the trainer while practice is taking place. If you get past the injuries quickly, your team will too.
Reward It
If you say you want a tough team, then you have to reward toughness. Celebrate the tough plays as much as possible. Stop practice and make sure they know how important it is to you. Show it on film and praise it.
If toughness matters, those tough kids need to play. Don't threaten to play the tough kids if your starters don't pick it up. Don't underestimate the value of having a tough kid who's not as talented in your line up. If you really value toughness, the best way to show it to your team is to reward it. The test of how you value toughness is how much playing time you will give to it.
Model It
Whether it's work ethic, consistency, showing up early, a great effort every day - however you define toughness, they need to see it from you. Make sure you model the behavior. If staying after practice and getting work in even when you are tired is a sign of toughness for you, then you should be there with them. If giving a consistent effort every day is a tough behavior, you have to make sure you give that effort. You might not be able to dive on the floor for loose balls (please, don't try it), but your team will definitely see whether you are tough or not, based on your standards. If you aren't tough your team won't be either.
Happy
"The happiest people I know are those that really care about others and service to others. Most grumpy people I know are generally selfish types and upset about something that’s not going right for them. You want to be happy? Genuinely care about your family, friends and teammates are doing and how you can help them." - Stan Van Gundy
Escalation of Commitment
We often get so committed to a certain way of doing things that we can see an alternate path to success. We are sure we are right, and the answer is just to commit more, to work harder. We do this often as coaches, just "keep grinding" as a solution to our lack of success.
This opened my eyes as a trap we fall into as coaches a lot. From Adam Grant's book, Think Again.
When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn't going as we hoped, our first instinct isn't usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan. This pattern is called escalation of commitment. Evidence shows that entrepreneurs persist with failing strategies when they should pivot, NBA general managers and coaches keep investing in new contracts and more playing time for draft busts, and politicians continue sending soldiers to wars that didn't need to be fought in the first place. Sunk costs are a factor, but the most important causes appear to be psychological rather than economic. Escalation of commitment happens because we're rationalizing creatures, constantly searching for self-justifications for our prior beliefs as a way to soothe egos, shield our images, and validate our past decisions.
Escalation of commitment is a major factor in preventable failures. Ironically, it can be filed by one of the most celebrated engines of success: grit. Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance, and research shows that it can play an important role in motivating us to accomplish long-term goals. When it comes to rethinking, though, grit may have a dark side. Experiments show that gritty people are more likely to overplay their hands in roulette and more willing to stay the course in tasks at which they're failing and success is impossible. Researchers have even suggested that gritty mountaineers are more likely to die on expeditions, because they're determined to do whatever it takes to reach the summit. There's a fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness. Sometimes the best kind of grit is gritting our teeth and turning around.
My First Team
Every team you coach will teach you a great deal, as long as you are open to improvement. Perhaps no team will teach you more than the first one you lead. Looking back on my first year as a head coach, at Rhode Island College in 2005, these are the key lessons I learned.
They won't really play for you until they trust you. Be clear, concise and demanding. But make sure you are straight up with them - always.
They'll trust you when you trust them. It's a two-way street. If they see you believe in them, they'll believe in you.
Think long-term over short-term. This will be hard, but crucial.
Talent matters. Having some success as you are trying to figure it out is important. It's so much harder to create anything through losing.
Change is hard, but necessary. Things will be different with a new leader. Change is happening, and tangible change they can see has a big impact.
Avoid the urge to fit in and be liked. Even the best kids will find the easy way out, and you may not notice it.
Inconsistency hammers your credibility. Make all the mistakes you want. Own up to them. But don't ever say one thing and do another.
It's okay if you don't know. Admit it and show some vulnerability. It will create safety within your team, where they won't be afraid to make a mistake.
What you say off the floor matters more. It matters a lot more than what you say in the gym. Really get to know them.
Someone may have to go. You might have to remove a player that you like, who can really help you, for the long-term culture of the organization.
Talking about last year is counterproductive. It only creates resentment. Leave last year alone.
Define your defensive system. No matter how you want to play. The most important basketball decision I made.
Put your culture first - always. As hard as it may be, if you are only thinking about winning the game tomorrow, you are going to lose that game more often than not. Shortcuts to victory are not sustainable.
Talk to them in behaviors. Take all of your values, principles and buzzwords and figure outwit they look like on the basketball court. Then get them to do that.
The game honors toughness. A core value that travels with you always. Smart and tough wins.
Don't put them in a box. Resist the urge to define who they are. Let them be themselves, and see what they are good at. The more you tell them what to do and who to be, the lower their ceiling.
Create ownership. Ask a lot of questions. You want decision-makers at the point of attack. Create leaders, not followers. Compliant teams have a less potential.
The simpler the better - they will believe in you quicker if it makes sense to them. "A cluttered mind equals slow feet" - Stan Van Gundy. They'll buy-in if they understand it.
Conditioning is a separator. Other teams just aren't doing it that much. A team that knows it is in great shape is really mentally tough.
They don't really care how much you know - ever. What they really care about is if you are making them better. Once the know you are, you've got em.
You can't fool them. Even the dumb ones. Trust me.
Practice your timeouts. The right message delivered properly in 25 or 45 seconds... just isn't that easy. Work on it.
It's theirs, not yours. Don't ever forget it.
"True To His Own Contradictions"
A great quote about Jackie Robinson from Gerald Early, as told by Kostyra Kennedy in his great book "True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson."
"Jackie was true to his own contradictions, which a lot of people are not. We all have contradictions. Very few of us fit into a neat box of ideas and values if we really challenge ourselves. But many people swallow those contradictions as a way to belong to a larger group. Robinson didn't necessarily do that. He wouldn't likely be doing that now."
Greatness - L. David Marquet
Perhaps my favorite 10 minutes on leadership approach anywhere. Worth a check-in every now and then.
Best Practices
I'm a big believer in sharing best practices. But do we do enough to challenge what we are doing, even when it is working? Continuing to get better, despite your success, is a key to sustained elite performance. This will make you think.
From Adam Grant's book, Think Again.
In performance cultures, people often become attached to best practices. The risk is that once we've declared a routine the best, it becomes frozen in time. We preach about its virtues and stop questioning its vices, no longer curious about where its imperfect and where it could improve. Organizational learning should be an ongoing activity, but best practices imply it has reached an endpoint. We might be better off looking for better practices.
At NASA, although teams routinely debriefed after both training simulations and significant operational events, what sometimes stood in the way of exploring better practices was a performance culture that held people accountable for outcomes. Every time they delayed a scheduled launch, they faced widespread public criticism and threats to funding. Each time they celebrated a flight that made it into orbit, they were encouraging their engineers to focus on the fact that the launch resulted in a success rather than on the faulty processes that could jeopardize future launches. That left NASA regarding luck and repeating problematic practices, failing to rethink what qualified as acceptable risk. It wasn't for a lack of ability. After all, these were rocket scientists.
Focusing on results might be good for short-term performance, but it can be an obstacle to long-term learning. Sure enough, social scientists find that when people are held accountable only for whether the outcome was a success or failure, they are more likely to continue with ill-fated courses of action. Exclusively praising and rewarding results is dangerous because it breeds overconfidence in poor strategies incentivizing people to keep doing thins the way they've always done them. It isn't until a high-stakes decision goes horribly wrong that people pause to examine their practices.
We shouldn't have to wait until a space shuttle explodes or an astronaut nearly drowns to determine whether a decision was successful. Along with outcome accountability, we can create process accountability by evaluating how carefully different options are considered as people make decisions. A bad decision process is based on shallow thinking. A good process is grounded in deep thinking and rethinking, enabling people to form and express independent opinions. Research sows that when we have to explain procedures behind our decisions in real time, we think more critically process the possibilities more thoroughly.
Challenging your best practices, despite your success, is a huge key to sustaining elite performance. And as a basketball coach, it's very hard to do - because our results are public and how we are judged. Yet process accountability is huge in creating a championship culture.
Sustaining Elite Success
What I learned about sustaining elite success when I was the head coach at Rhode Island College, from my book Entitled To Nothing:
As we moved the program forward after 2007 there were some key components that played an important role in sustaining our level of success.
Define Yourself Clearly and Simply
You need a clear vision of who you want to be as an organization. And you have to make this clear and simple for your team.
Our first core value was “compete.” That was how we defined ourselves. Our definition of competing was “your best effort always, without compromise.” Nothing could get in the way of how hard we played. Ever.
The behavior was defined clearly every day. We celebrated competing in practice. The first one to dive on the floor for a loose ball. Sprinting back after a turnover. Keeping an offensive rebound alive. We showed the behaviors on film. There was no doubt about what competing looked like.
Define the core values and standards for your program clearly and in simple terms. Your values are who you are as a team—and you should define them as behaviors. Your standards are the benchmarks of your conduct. They are how you measure and evaluate what you do.
A clear vision of who you are, for everyone in your organization, is essential to sustain elite success.
Alignment
The culture of your organization needs to align with who you are, but also with the beliefs of your institution. If you are the President or CEO and you report to the board, your beliefs need to align with theirs. If you are a head coach, you need alignment with your athletic director and the school President. You also need to fill your team with people who are aligned. This doesn’t mean you can’t have differences of opinion. But your decisions should always be made with the vision and values of your organization in mind.
You have to be true to yourself. You also have to recruit and retain talent for your organization, and their comfort level is important. To do that in an environment where powerful influences are fighting over the direction of the program is very challenging—and I’d say unsustainable.
Live your culture every day. Your team will as well. They should be walking billboards for what you believe in. If you don’t have align‐ ment, and your culture isn’t something worth fighting for to them, it will be difficult to achieve at a high level.
You can have some success with some outliers, but it will be hard to sustain it at an elite level without true alignment. Get everyone on board with your vision and values.
Culture First – Always
Do you remember the story of Benjy Nichols in my first off-season? He didn’t want to run because his teammates had been missing class. He spoke up, and he walked away. He never played for us again.
That day was one of the most important days in establishing our culture. I was scared as it was happening, not knowing if it was going to cause a mutiny. And I hadn’t planned it. But I stood firm on our culture, and what we were really about. We were going to handle ourselves a certain way off the court.
From that point forward, our guys knew that if they tested me (or what we believed in) that I wouldn’t flinch. You have to be willing to sacrifice talent for your culture. In fact, if you don’t at some point lose someone talented who isn’t really bought in to your culture, something is probably wrong. The sacrifice necessary for elite success is not for everyone.
Always put your culture first. That means making some very tough decisions and losing some talent that you feel can help your team. In the short term, it can be very hard. But over the long haul, any cracks in your culture will be devastating and almost impossible to overcome.
Create Ownership
The idea of ownership is all over this book because my teams at Rhode Island College showed me how it translates to sustained, elite success. Ownership is in the fabric of high performing teams. A lack of ownership is one of the most common differences between good teams and elite teams.
Your values, your standards, and your overall culture—they need to be things that are worth fighting for. To be willing to fight for it, it has to be theirs. It can’t just be something they hear from the boss every day. They have to own it.
Creating ownership comes down to how much control you are willing to give up. You are the leader, and you set the tone and guide the process. But let your players own it. Ask a lot of questions and listen as much as you can. Ask them about the core values and how they would define them. When something doesn’t meet your stan‐ dards, don’t declare that what they did isn’t good enough. Ask ques‐ tions: Is that good enough for us? Does that meet our standard? What are we going to do about it?
Don’t just get them to buy into what you believe. Get them to tell you what they believe. Get them to talk and be willing to listen. It’s extremely powerful when you can say to your group, “this is what you told me you wanted,” when something hard is on the horizon. It’s just as powerful when they hold each other accountable to your standards before you do. They will learn to compete for one another, and the strength of that approach will carry your culture.
The Value of Talent
With all the talk of the importance of culture, it’s easy to forget about the talent. Getting buy-in to the difficult stuff you need to do to win big is significantly easier if they are capable of meeting your demands. Talented individuals can do the hard stuff easier, and when they realize they can do it, they’ll buy into it quicker.
It seems obvious that to sustain a high level of success, you need to have talent. But it gets overlooked more than you think. Not every person you hire, or recruit, is going to be a foot soldier for your values or a great culture guy. But they might be able to consistently perform, and that’s also really important.
Look for natural talent. Guys who make difficult tasks look comfort‐ able, and guys who can adjust on the fly with ease. The right fit for your culture can’t be the only measure. Acquire the talent to succeed, and it will help advance your culture more than you think.
If your culture is right and your players take ownership of it, you can absorb some talent that isn’t as naturally bought in to your approach. The strength of your culture and the leadership of your team will give you a feel for who you can take and how they’ll fit. You need talent to sustain success and advance your culture. Don’t take that for granted.
Not Good Enough
The flip side to the talent paradigm is to make sure you have some teammates who “aren’t good enough.” I’ll explain to you what I mean.
At RIC I was blessed with a number of talented players who we didn’t recruit, Cam Stewart, for example, a key member of our Elite Eight run. Some of them showed up unknowingly. We always had a tryout to give kids a chance, and I started to notice a trend. Not only did we usually keep a couple of those guys every year, one or two of them would usually find their way into the lineup. They became key players for us.
Cameron Stewart. Nick Manson. Darius Debnam. Ethan Gaye. Jacob Page. These weren’t just good teammates who competed hard in practice. They started for us in NCAA Tournaments. Manson and
Debnam started on back-to-back Sweet 16 teams, and I didn’t recruit either one of them. Darius actually came to RIC after we told him we didn’t think he was good enough, and we wouldn’t have room for him. He was a two-year captain on Sweet 16 teams. Think about that for a second. Cam Stewart scored almost 1,000 points in his career.
The guys who “weren’t good enough,” so to speak, did so much to drive our culture. They were the glue to it. We had some elite talent and that was a big part of our success. But the program kids, the ones who had to fight and scratch for their place on the team every day – they were the ones most responsible for our approach. And it was the approach that made our success sustainable. Their hunger, commitment and toughness drove our organization.
John Beilein always said, “Never underestimate the value of a low- maintenance player.” We made it a point to find room for kids who were dying to be a part of it. It mattered to us a lot, and it should matter to you. Find a place within your organization for people with something to prove and reward their contributions. They will become the heartbeat of your team.
Be Flexible
Our championship culture was always fluid. It was constantly evolv‐ ing, as was my approach. We had our basic core values, but that didn’t mean we were averse to trying something new. If you aren’t adapting, you aren’t getting better. You are likely getting worse.
In my seventh year at RIC, the dynamics of our roster had changed. We lost the best point guard in the league, Antone Gray, who was also the best leader I had ever coached. He led us to back-to-back Sweet Sixteens and four straight NCAA Tournaments. While we still had talent, our two best players that next year were forwards, and my new point guard was more of a tough, physical player than a jet.
We were a fast team that liked to play in transition and go off the dribble, but our personnel didn’t fit that style anymore. Our three best players all were physical and got their work done inside. So instead of our wide open, dribble-drive attack, we went to a flex offense—a structured approach that relied on simple screens and pattern passing. I was never a big fan of the flex because I didn’t like the spacing, and I wanted our guards to have room to create. But it fit our personnel better that year, so in year seven, as a head coach, we made a major change. We went on to advance to the second round of the NCAA Tournament, running an offense I really didn’t like. But I was flexible enough to make a major change to fit our personnel.
The most dangerous phrase for organizational success is “because that’s how we’ve always done it.” If you aren’t adapting, you are getting worse. You can stick to your core values and still be flexible. It’s one of the toughest challenges you’ll face, but it’s essential to sustain success.
Be Consistent
Be flexible and consistent? Sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t.
The reason why your culture has to be clearly defined and explained, and aligned with everything you believe in, is because your players need to see you living it. They have to see it in your behavior. When they see that, they’ll know how much it really means to you, and it will mean more to them.
You must be consistent. Your team is smart, and you aren’t going to fool them. They don’t have to hear it to know it. Your culture has to be who you are, and you have to live it on and off the court, in season and out. You can do it and still make the necessary changes to be successful.
A consistent approach with a flexible mindset can certainly work. Inconsistency in your approach will create cracks in your culture that you’ll never be able to repair. Be consistent in how you live your culture every day.
Fight Entitlement Aggressively
After our Elite Eight run in 2007, I wanted our players to own our success. High expectations were part of the deal and we needed to handle the pressure of being the best. Our warmup shirts had “The Champ Is Here” on the back of them, and we took the floor at the Murray Center to the Jadakiss song of the same name. We talked about being the best team in the league. We prepared that way and carried ourselves that way—with confidence and class. We were picked to finish first in our league in eight of our nine years, and we embraced it every year.
Along with that confidence and the success came a sense of entitle‐ ment. We expected success to happen to us, and we lost some aware‐ ness of the approach necessary to achieve it.
Entitlement is poison for elite cultures. It can get into your system without much notice and it gradually erodes the foundation of your success. As a leader, you must have your radar up and expect it. The confidence that comes with achievement naturally evolves into an expectation of success, and the process can easily suffer. Adapting and staying ahead of the curve is critical.
We started to take for granted what we had built, and I had to fight the entitled mentality aggressively. We no longer appreciated what we had done, or what it would take to maintain it. We talked about what was important to us. Were we happy with one championship or did we want to sustain an elite level of success? Did we want to do it again?
I reminded our guys every day how lucky we were to be a part of something special. We had long conversations about it. We cele‐ brated our competitive excellence and recognized our commitment to one another. We appreciated the people around us who helped us achieve our goals. Winning a championship wasn’t a defining moment for us. The preparation would define us. Not just as a team, but for the rest of our lives.
When I asked my team how they felt about our program, the one word that kept coming up was “grateful.” Grateful to be a part of it. Grateful to have my teammates. Grateful for the opportunity.
Being grateful was a perfect way to combat entitlement creeping into our program. As we moved forward, we decided we would be “Grateful for everything, entitled to nothing.” It became the core of our program.
Recognizing and aggressively combating the entitlement that came along with our success allowed us to sustain it for nine years.
Re-Thinking
"The best coaches understand when they need to change, and what they need to do to be effective moving forward." - Hal Nunnally, Randolph-Macon
When I first became a head coach, we had a late game defense we called "3D" where we switched everything. In our regular man to man we never switched, but late in games when we were winning in the final minute and we wanted to take the 3-point line away, we'd switch to our 3D to better guard the line.
One game at home in my 3rd year against Keene State (our big rival), we didn't execute. We gave up an open 3 off of a missed switch with about 20 seconds left, when one of my freshmen reacted too late and left a shooter open. We ended up losing the game in overtime.
After that loss I started to re-think my strategy. We never, ever switched in our regular man to man defense. We did practice our 3D in time and score situations, but it wasn't something we did a lot. Why was I asking my players to do something different defensively, something we rarely did, on the most important possession of the game? As I thought more about it, I didn't feel like I was putting them in the best position to win. I know a lot of teams just switch everything late, and I was probably doing it because that was conventional thinking. You see a lot of teams get caught on bad switches in big spots. As I thought more about it, it didn't make sense. I decided to scrap 3D. We never switched late again.
In the 2010-2011 season at RIC we were really good. We won 21 games, won our league regular season and post-season, and went to the NCAA Tournament. We went to Oswego State for the first two rounds. After winning our first round game against Penn St.-Behrend, we played Oswego to go to the Sweet 16.
Early in the second half we were in a back and forth battle with a small lead, but we couldn't get away from them. They were getting in the paint and scoring on us too easily close to the rim. After about a minute or two in the second half I said to my staff "we may have to do something different. We can't stop them." They were in such a good rhythm on offense and I didn't think we could win the game without finding a way to stop them.
We were the best defensive team in our league that year and we played exclusively man to man. We had played, literally, one possession of zone all season - at Eastern Connecticut, out of a time out with a short shot clock. Other than that, we hadn't changed defenses all year. But we had to do something different at Oswego, so we went to zone. And they stopped scoring. We never came out of it. We played zone the last 17 minutes of the game and won pretty easily, heading to the Sweet 16.
After that 2011 season, and back to back Sweet 16 appearances, we lost a lot of good players, including our starting backcourt. We lost two all-league players who could really go off the dribble and get into the paint. Our best guard coming back, Tahrike Carter, was more of a power combo guard than a pure point guard. He scored in the post, but wasn't as quick off the dribble. Our other two best players were our 4 and 5 man, the best players in our league at their position. They posted up and got to the rim.
We had always run a fast-paced, wide open dribble drive offense. We had guards who could go, and we wanted to spread the floor and get into the paint. We kept it pretty simple. But with our 3 best players now being guys who were better inside and posting up than they were off the dribble, so I had to re-think our approach. Instead of going with the dribble drive, we went with a tight flex offense.
I was never a big fan of the flex - I always preferred a wide open floor where we could attack off the dribble and make plays. But we didn't have the same personnel we usually had at RIC, so we made an adjustment. I had to re-think our entire offensive approach. In 2012-13 we went 26-4 and won our league again with a 13-1 record, playing with a completely different offense.
One of the biggest basketball mistakes I made as the head coach at Maine was heading into my third year. We had recruited very well our first two years, and we were playing as one of the fastest teams in the country. Pressing on defense, playing with an open floor on offense, constantly on attack. We had the most athletic team in our league by far.
After that second year, however, we lost our 5 best athletes - one of them to graduation, and the other four transferred (we ended up losing 9 kids to "up" transfers over 4 years). We replaced them with some recruits in the spring, but we went from being one of the more athletic teams in the country to certainly the least athletic team in our league. And I failed to re-think how we were going to play. We started the year with the same approach to defense, flying around and attacking, yet we didn't have the athletes to be successful playing that way. I realized about halfway through the year that I wasn't putting our guys in the best position to win because I hadn't re-thought my approach.
It's so easy to get stuck in a rut with how you do things as a coach, especially if you've had some success. The default response is we just need to do it better, or work harder, because we know it's not the system - the system works. But how often do you re-think your approach and examine the best way to operate as a program? Our personnel is constantly changing, so it makes sense that we are ready to change to get the most out of it.
Don't be afraid to re-think as a coach, regardless of how much success you have had. It's a process that will continue to make your program better.
Learning Cultures Vs. Performance Cultures
From Adam Grant's book, Think Again.
Rethinking is more likely to happen in a learning culture, where growth is a core value and rethinking cycles are routine. In learning cultures, the norm is for people to know what they don't know, doubt their existing practices, and stay curious about new routines to try out. Evidence shows that in learning cultures, organizations innovate more and make fewer mistakes. After studying and advising change initiatives at NASA and the Gates Foundation, I've learned that learning cultures thrive under a particular combination of psychological safety and accountability.
Over the last few years, psychological safety has become a buzzword in many workplaces. Although leaders might understand its significance, they often misunderstand exactly what it is and how to create it. Psychological safety is not a matter of relaxing standards, making people comfortable, being nice and agreeable, or giving unconditional praise. It's fostering a climate of respect, trust, and openness in which people can raise concerns and suggestions without fear of reprisal. It's the foundation of a learning culture.
In performance cultures, the emphasis on results often undermines psychological safety. When we see people get finished for failures and mistakes, we become worried about proving our competence and protecting our careers. We learn to engage in self-limiting behavior, biting our tongues rather than voicing questions and concerns. Sometimes that's due to power distance: We're afraid of challenging the big boss at the top. The pressure to conform to authority is real, and those who dare to deviate run the risk of backlash. In performance cultures, we also censor ourselves in the presence of experts who seem to know all the answers - especially if we lack confidence in our own expertise.
As coaches, we always say we are in a results-based business (In reality, what business isn't?). Can you foster a learning culture, as opposed to a performance culture, to maximize success when the results are the bottom line?
Family or Team?
3x5 Leadership looks into the question - are we a family or a team?
I don't think we value being part of a team enough, or do enough to understand the dynamics of elite teams. I've never liked to call my team a family, for one simple reason - my love for my family is unconditional. Being a part of a high-performing team is highly conditional. "Family" has long been a buzzword in athletics, but I don't think it's genuine. If you keep screwing up on our team, you won't be on the team very long. That is not what happens in a family.
3x5 takes a look at the question from both sides.