Sunny Wicks - UWGB

Some great stuff on culture from Sunny Wicks at Wisconsin-Green Bay.

https://x.com/CoachSundance/status/1751971291257540953?s=20

Team Leadership

Your team’s leadership is your responsibility.

If you are struggling through a bad year and one of the reasons is your team lacks the right kind of leadership, that is on you. Not every great team has natural leaders, who speak up, take control and are capable of lifting everyone else around them. You have to provide the leadership you want from your team.

Leadership is a skill. While I do believe certain people have natural leadership instincts, leadership can be taught and developed. If leadership is important to your team, then you have to teach and develop it. Wherever your team lacks leadership, you have to fill the void. Figure out what your team needs, and if you can’t teach them how to do it, you provide it.

Certain teams require a more hands on approach from the head coach. It doesn’t mean they can’t be great teams. It’s just a matter of you figuring out what your team lacks and finding a way to give it to them.

Don’t let a lack of leadership be the reason why your team has a bad year. To me, that’s an excuse for many head coaches, when really it should be a void that they fill. If your team needs better leadership, provide it for them.

Appreciation

How much do you tell your players you appreciate them? Perhaps the most powerful leadership approach you can take with your players is to be a fan. It’s one of the keys to motivation. Too often as coaches we think our job is to teach, demand, yell, scold and correct. We fall into a trap where we don’t appreciate the good things we see every day, because we take them for granted. We come to expect them.

To get the most out of your players, they need to know that they are appreciated - and they need to hear it from you.

From Admired Leaders on appreciation:

Here’s a surprising fact that many leaders don’t understand: If people aren’t told or shown that they are appreciated and valued, they will presume the opposite. 

This is true even for top performers who receive the highest compensation and enjoy the most influence on the team. Unless a leader explicitly tells people they are appreciated, over time they will come to feel undervalued and taken for granted. 

To many leaders, this doesn’t make any sense. Team members, who are highly rewarded, included, and treated specially shouldn’t require the leader to say it out loud, right? Showing is more powerful than telling, or so we have been taught. So why would self-secure, mature, and clearly effective team members need the leader to confirm their value through simple expressions of appreciation? 

The answer is strikingly simple. 

In a world of profound uncertainty, overt ambiguity, competitive jealousy, and constant change, people seek validation. Everyone wants to know where they stand, especially in the eyes of those they respect and who have the authority and social position to validate them. 

They desperately want to know that the leader appreciates who they are, what they do, and how they contribute to the team’s success. An appreciative leader confirms exactly what team members desire most—a stamp that acknowledges how important they are. 

Producers

We all want to get the most out of our players. We them all to be hard workers, great competitors, leaders and great teammates. We establish a culture for our team, we set standards, and we want all of our players to live up to them.

But every player has different strengths and weaknesses, and not all of them are going to fit the mold we set for them. We get frustrated when certain players don’t give everything they have - they aren’t leaders, they aren’t vocal enough, they don’t seem to care as much as we’d like them to care.

I’ve learned that certain players are simply producers. They are talented and they help the team by putting up numbers, but they don’t always do it the way we want them to do it. They don’t always play hard. They may not be the best competitors. Maybe they are a bit selfish. They aren’t perfect, but when the lights go on they are good enough and they produce. They help the team.

Producers are valuable but they can be hard to coach. A lot of the time they are just relying on their talent, not giving everything they have. We spend a lot of time trying to get them to change. We want them to compete harder, to care more. We want them to be vocal and lead the team, to be great teammates. But not everyone has that in them. Some players just want to play.

You can get very frustrated as a coach trying to change these players. We want them to care more, we just know they can give more, and it bothers us. But as we continually harp on them about the things they aren’t doing, they are still producing. Maybe not as much as we think they can, but they are helping the team. And we are trying to turn them into people they are not - they’ll never be the best competitors, the tone setters, or the leaders. They won’t carry your culture. But they will be productive players.

The best way to handle producers? Let them produce. Stop trying to get more out of them from an approach or leadership standpoint. You are only going to frustrate yourself, and probably get less out of them as players. Just tell them to produce. I’ve had many conversations with these players over the years, where I’ve had to say “Look, I’m not going to get on you to be our hardest worker, our best competitor, or our leader. But what you have to do is produce. You have to bring it every day and be our leading scorer and rebounder. That is your job, that is how you help this team.” They may not do it the way you want, but give them the room to be productive.

If you find yourself banging your head against the wall with a player who is productive but not quite giving you everything you want, take a step back. Maybe the best thing you can do is just get them to be their best. They may not be leaders for you, but they can’t take a day off from doing what they do best. They are producers. Accept that fact, and get the most out of them.

“Where They Have Not Been…”

“The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.”

Henry Kissinger, former U.S. National Security Advisor & Secretary of State

Great Simplifiers

“Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.”

Gen. Colin Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State

Mission

One of my favorite stories about having clarity of mission and a shared purpose involves JFK visiting Nasa (although, depending on where you read it, this story may or may not have actually happened. But it illustrates a great point.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy visited NASA for the first time. During his tour of the facility, he met a janitor who was carrying a broom down the hallway. He introduced himself to the janitor, then casually asked the janitor what he did for NASA. The janitor replied “I’m helping put a man on the moon, Mr. President.”

The point is that everyone at NASA, regardless of role, was on the same mission. They shared the same purpose. It’s a great thought process for any high-achieving organization. What are we all doing here? What is our mission? I think we all try and take care of the support people who help our programs on a daily basis - managers, equipment room, managers, and bus drivers. We want to make sure they feel like they are a part of the team. But do they know the impact they have on the mission?

When I was at Rhode Island College we used to host a big time recruiting event in our gym every year in February. It was always on a weekend when we played away so they could have the gym all weekend. One year we were playing up at UMass-Boston and a bunch of coaches I knew were in Rhode Island to watch the tournament. One of them was asking around to see if I was there, and he had a conversation with someone who worked in our equipment room.

Our equipment guy told him we were up in Boston but would probably be back by 6, we had a game. And he asked if we won the game, and our equipment guy was like “I’m sure they did. They are a championship team. You should see the way they play. They really compete for each other. They are very hard to beat.” He went on to talk about how much respect he had for our staff and players and how well respected our program was on campus.

When I saw my buddy he pointed him out and was like “I don’t know who that is, but that guy is definitely on board. He is all in on you guys.” That made me feel pretty good.

The mission and the purpose of your program should be shared by everyone involved with your team, even in a supportive role. Define what the mission is - what are you trying to accomplish - and make sure everyone knows it. And it should involve more than just “winning championships” because winning is a moving target. Of course we all want to win, but if your purpose is just a result it will be shallow. You can’t control the outcome, only what you put into it. Our guys talked about winning championships, but I reminded them the result depended on a lot of things out of our control. So when we talked about championships we talked about being at a championship level every day, not just winning or losing.

“Championship level, everything we do.” That became our mission. That’s what we were trying to do. And it was shared by everyone. You want everyone on board with what you are trying to do.

Find a simple and accessible mission for your program, that sets a high standard for all of your daily habits, and make sure everyone around your team knows what it is. A clearly defined mission for all is an integral part of elite, sustainable success.

Commitment To Loyalty

Does your loyalty to a specific player or players impact the decisions you make for your team? I’ve been guilty of it as a head coach. I don’t know if it’s just “loyalty” to a player, or if it’s simply that I liked certain players and wanted to see them succeed. I felt because of the way they operated every day they deserved success. But that doesn’t always translate to the best decisions for the team.

This is from Admired Leaders on how loyalty to a person can undermine what’s best for the organization.

However, loyalty can undermine a decision critical to the health of the enterprise. When leaders factor in loyalty to people in their decision-making, they are often seduced to think differently about what is best for the team or organization. They justify a bad or poor decision by elevating the loyalty they have for a particular person affected by that choice. 

Unfortunately, no matter how virtuous loyalty to others is, when it comes to major decisions, allowing loyalty a big seat at the table will likely produce a poor choice. 

I’ve always been skeptical of loyalty as a critical factor in personal or team success. I just feel like it’s a moving target, and a definition that can be manipulated to fit a certain narrative. I understand the value of being loyal to people who you can trust, and people have have been really good to you. But when does that loyalty run it’s course? When I’m running a team, I have to be loyal to that team over any individual. Well, the reality is their are many decisions that are in the best interest of the team, that come at the expense of an individual who has been very loyal to you.

In my second year as a head coach at Rhode Island College, one of our returning seniors got hurt in the pre-season and couldn’t practice. He was a former first-team all league player, someone who struck fear in the rest of the coaches in the league. He had played for me as a junior and had a solid year, and we won 19 games. But coming back for his senior year he was hurt, and we had a sophomore who had played some as a freshmen and was very talented. The sophomore got the time when he was out, played very well, and our team had success - getting off to a good start and beating a division I team in the pre-season.

When the senior came back from his injury, what was I supposed to do? Give him his job back? Some of our discussions as a staff and with players on the team that I spoke with revolved around being “loyal” to the senior. So does loyalty mean as a veteran you get to keep your job forever? From his point of view, he could say he deserved my loyalty, because it fit his narrative.. But what if I thought the team was better off with him coming off the bench and the sophomore in the starting lineup? My job was to make the best decisions for the team, and I’m glad I’ve always been a little cold-blooded in that regard. The word loyalty just doesn’t resonate with me the way it does for many others, because I don’t really understand the blurred lines between loyalty and actually making the right decision.

(Friendly reminder, kids, when a coach says “you won’t lose your job to an injury,” that’s all well and good. But you might lose your job to the kid who is playing well while you are injured.” That’s just how team sports work).

I have been guilty of making the wrong decision, however, because of the way I felt about someone. There are certain players you just love and you expect to have success, and you keep giving them chances. You’ve got to fight that feeling as a leader. Make your decisions based on what is best for the organization. Loyalty may be a value that is important to you, but it shouldn’t lead you down a path of bad decision making. Figure out what your team needs, make the call based on that, and deal with the personalities separately.

Coaching Without Fear

“The opposite of fear is not fearlessness, but commitment. The highest form of commitment is an unparalleled focus on action rather than emotion.” - Laird Hamilton

It’s natural to think about the result. Every decision you make in a game can have significant consequences and affect the outcome. But the emotion that comes with that outcome can cripple your ability to make a decision.

I’ve felt it many times as a head coach. If I take him out, what if they go on a run? If we switch to zone, I don’t want them to hit a three. I have to put my veteran guys back out there, I don’t trust the freshmen. A big part of coaching decisions is assessing risk and reward, but if you are thinking too much about the results, you’ll never take the risk. You have to learn to make bold decisions to be great.

I love the above quote because I think it encapsulates the approach you need to have as a game coach. You don’t have to be fearless. You can have some apprehension about a negative outcome that might come from a decision. But you can’t let that emotion impact the right decision. That’s the challenge.

Your focus should be locked on what you need to do to win the game, not how you might feel if you don’t. The more you think about action and take away emotion, the more comfortable you’ll be with making a brave decision. It helps to prepare without emotion. Think about the scenarios you might face in a given game and what the best approach is for your team, and do it in a quiet moment by yourself. Make those decisions when you aren’t feeling the emotions of the game and you aren’t worried about a negative result. Preparing yourself mentally will allow you to make a brave call when needed.

Coaching without fear is not easy. The results are real, and it’s natural to think about what might happen. But prepare yourself ahead of time for the scenarios you might face, and think about the right decision for your team. When the time comes, take the emotion out of the decisions - as best you can - and think about the action necessary to help your team.

Developing Trust

Trust is an essential element of a high-performing team. But it takes a lot of time and a consistent approach to develop. Trust doesn’t come about just because you say it’s important. Trust is something built, more through what you do than what you say to your players.

When there is a power imbalance, as there is between a player and coach, trust starts with one question. Would you do it for me? Meaning, whatever it is you are demanding out of your players, would you be willing to do the same? Of course, you don’t have to do what your players ask of you as the coach. But to get them to trust you, they have to see that you’d be willing to do the same. That you are putting in the same amount of time, that you have the same work ethic, that you are willing to sacficie the same way you are asking of them.

Between the player and the coach, the question of trust might come down to “Are you making the same commitment you are asking of me?” As a coach to really earn their trust you have to model the behavior you want to see in them. Not only is it setting the right example, but it’s part of the foundation of trust for your team. They have to see it in you, so when things get hard and they don’t see a lot of reward, they believe you are in the trenches with them. They’ll trust you with the hard stuff when they see you are making the same commitment to the team.

What you do is so loud, they can’t hear what you say. You can talk to your team about the importance of trust all the time. But they need to see how you operate and the commitment you are willing to make for them in order for trust to fully develop.

The Other Team

Preparing for your opponent is important, but how much energy do you spend on the other team? Every minute you spend focused on the other team takes time away from developing your own players. I think many of us are guilty of spending too much time worrying about the other guys.

With the technology we have available today we have all the information we need on our opponents at our fingertips. It allows us as coaches to feel fully prepared and leave no stone unturned. But a lot of that is really about making us feel better as coaches, and not necessarily what our guys need to be successful. Our scout tapes get longer, we have more film sessions, we go over more plays. It makes us feel great to be really prepared, but we can also clog our guys minds with too much information.

“A cluttered mind equals slow feet.” - Stan Van Gundy

We spend a lot of time worrying about other teams running up the score, pulling their starters out when they are up, or pressing when the game is decided. I just don’t think it’s a valuable use of our mental capital. We spend less time working with our own players and building our team, and a lot of time worrying about stuff we cannot control.

Your players know exactly what your priorities are based on what you emphasize. They know if it’s about them or the other team. They thrive with the attention you and the staff give them to make them better. They love to feel that you are investing everything you can into them, to make them great.

Scouting and preparation are very important. Your kids absolutely want to know what the keys are to win and how to stop the other team. But the amount of time you invest in them versus the other team has an impact. Don’t get caught up too much in everything the other guy is doing. Invest as much as you can in your players and you’ll get better results.

Overweighing Loyalty

How important is loyalty in the decisions you make?

From Admired Leaders on loyalty:

Leaders sometimes make decisions they know are wrong. Even though their experience, values, and instincts confirm the decision is exceedingly bad, they go ahead and make it anyway. 

They talk themselves into the idea that they are doing the right thing, all the while knowing they aren’t. They willfully commit to a decision that will likely blow up and potentially destroy their credibility. Why would leaders, even good ones, make such a choice? 

That’s what happens when leaders overweigh loyalty to people when making a critical decision. 

Loyalty is a virtuous value. Leaders who are loyal to those they lead display a commitment that builds trust. Knowing a leader is loyal creates a sense of security and reassurance. Team members and colleagues reciprocate that loyalty by protecting the leader from unfair criticisms and advocating for the ideas the leader believes in. 

Over time, loyalty allows leaders and team members to reaffirm their mutual commitment in the face of bad or challenging times. Loyalty is a wonder drug for preserving strong relationships. 

However, loyalty can undermine a decision critical to the health of the enterprise. When leaders factor in loyalty to people in their decision-making, they are often seduced to think differently about what is best for the team or organization. They justify a bad or poor decision by elevating the loyalty they have for a particular person affected by that choice. 

Unfortunately, no matter how virtuous loyalty to others is, when it comes to major decisions, allowing loyalty a big seat at the table will likely produce a poor choice. 

To make matters worse, everyone looking from the outside knows exactly what is going on. They conclude the leader is incapable of making a sound decision because of their attachment to a particular person. This conclusion undermines confidence in the leader and exposes them as biased and partial in a way that damages their long-term credibility. 

The best leaders always elevate what is best for the organization, the clients or customers, and the team before they consider their relationship with any particular team member.  While this is an exceedingly hard thing to do when loyalty is a primary value of a leader, as is often the case, it is what the job requires. 

The next time you observe or read about a decision that seems so obviously bad that is unfathomable why a leader made such a choice, consider that loyalty to a person probably warped the decision-making process. 

Do your best to commit more highly to what is best for the enterprise over what is best for any particular person when it comes to your own decision-making. Loyalty is a principled and noble value. But when it comes to making major decisions, loyalty will likely confound your thinking. Try not to let it.

The More I Listen

The more I listen to may players, the better I get as a coach. When we first get into coaching we think we should be talking all of the time. We think coaching is telling the players what to do. We coach them, and they play. They have to listen to us.

The reality is we aren’t training players to do what they are told. We should be training them to solve problems. If I knew when and how every situation was going to happen on the court, I could tell my players exactly what to do. But that’s not how sports work. We should be training our players to make the right decisions at the point of attack.

If we are going to do that, we have to listen. How am I going to know what my player saw, and why the made the decision they did, if I don’t ask them? I want to know what my players see, so I can understand why they made the decisions they did.

If I really want to get a pulse of my team off the court, I need to hear from my players as well. The idea that they should always be listening to me. just doesn’t work. I’m always amazed how much I can learn about my team by listening to my players. You will be as well, if you take the time to ask the right questions and actually listen to the response.

Solitude and Leadership

One of my favorite leadership reads ever, from William Deresiewicz, addressing the Plebe Class at West Point in 2009.

As a leader, are you just creating hoop jumpers? Are you allowing the room for your team leaders to think for themselves? Are you willing to be alone, to separate yourself, to come up with your own leadership approach?

Incredible stuff in here. One of the best.

Solitude and Leadership

Teaching Leadership

How do you teach your players to be better leaders? If leadership is important to the success of your team, you need to do more than complain about it. You better recruit it or teach it - or both.

Define it - Do you just talk about leadership with your players, or do you actually have a definition of leadership? Define what leadership means to you and make sure your players know exactly what that definition is.

Make sure it fits the context - Leadership is situational and contextual. Make sure it fits you and the ethos of your program. What worked for John Wooden at UCLA might not work for you at St. Mary’s High School. It has to fit who you are.

Connect it to behaviors - Your players will understand your leadership approach if it is connected to behaviors. Point out the specific behaviors that are examples of the leadership you want, and make sure everyone knows it. They need to know what leadership looks like.

Figure out who’s curious - The best leaders are curious about their teammates. They are capable of doing their job while they are thinking about others. Those are the players who can have the biggest impact as leaders. Don’t force a specific type of leadership on players who aren’t comfortable with it.

Give them space - Let them lead. Define it, show them the behaviors, and give them the room to take ownership. So often we complain about a lack of leadership on our teams when we aren’t giving them the opportunity to lead. If all we do is tell them what to do, they are going to do what they are told, and then wait for the next command. That’s following, not leading.

The Leadership Void

Every year in the off-season I have conversations with different coaches about the leadership on their team. Inevitably, the coaches who have had a bad year, bring up the fact that there team didn’t have great leadership. While this may be a defensive reflex for coaches (“it wasn’t me, it was them"), my response is usually to ask a question - if your team didn’t have great leadership, what were you doing?

Poor leadership is often used as a reason for failure. Leadership is pretty abstract and contextual, so it can just be a convenient excuse. It’s hard to pin down what bad leadership really is, we just know that the results weren’t good. But ultimately the head coach is responsible for the leadership on their team. If the players aren’t providing great leadership, then it had better come from you.

If leadership is so important to winning and losing, what are you doing about it? Are you recruiting it, or are you teaching it? Because if it impacts your results, you better find a way to improve the leadership on your team.

As I’ve grown as a coach and studied leadership more, I’ve felt there is a leadership void. Not just on basketball teams, but in a lot of organizations. There are countless people in leadership positions who don’t seem to understand leadership - so they can’t necessarily teach it or improve it. I think we end up with poor leadership because we don’t really get what great leadership is - and therefore who should be in leadership positions.

The best trial lawyer at a law firm isn’t necessarily skilled enough to be the chairman of the firm. The best sales person in a business may not have the right skill to run the company. The best player on a basketball team might not have the right mentality to lead the team. Great accomplishments and achievements don’t mean you are ready to run the company.

Define leadership for yourself and understand the context of your situation - what does your team need at this moment from a leadership stand point. You may have a couple of guys who aren’t key players but have great leadership qualities. You may not have anyone who is really comfortable as a leaders - and that means you have to take on that role.

Think about what leadership means to you, what your organization needs, and then determine who has the skill and approach to provide the right leadership. It may not be the best player or highest performer. There is a leadership void because we don’t put the right people in leadership positions.

Trust Within Teams

For me, the single most important element of a consistent, high achieving team is trust. I’ve coached some elite teams where you could literally see the way they trusted one another when watching them play. There are a lot of elements that go into great teams, and a high level of trust won’t automatically make your team great. But I’m convinced you won’t be great without it.

Trust is one of those intangible factors that is hard to evaluate and measure. Chemistry, sacrifice, competitive edge - there are a lot of these “soft” factors that we don’t always define for our players, yet we consider them essential for great teams. I think we often look at these factors through the wrong lens. We feel like they are important elements of a great team, and they are what helps make a team great. We assign these factors to our teams as a reason why the basketball works.

I think it’s the other way around. The basketball is what leads to these factors and helps create elite, sustainable success. Joe Torre used to say that “winning creates chemistry, chemistry doesn’t create winning.” We think that teams that trust each other (and have great chemistry) play basketball the right way. I think teams that play the game the right way develop trust and chemistry.

You can’t just take your guys to dinner together or let them all go to a movie together to create trust, chemistry or any other intangible factor you’d like to see in your team. That stuff is created on the basketball court, with the level your players are willing to compete for one another. When guys play hard every day, sacrifice for one another, and communicate at a high level when things are hard - all of the things that go on in practice every day - that leads to trust. And trust can help create chemistry.

The way your kids play for one another every day - that is where trust comes from. They don’t have to all like each other. But if they are willing to lay it on the line for their teammates every day, trust will develop.

Trust comes from the way you compete every day, not the other way around. You don’t compete for one another because you trust each other. You trust each other because of the way you compete for one another.

Ethic of Accountability

This was a great post from Admired Leaders about an “Ethic of Accountability.”

It’s valuable to look at it through the prism of being a coach. Do you hold yourself “completely accountable” and “take ownership of everything” as the leader?

When your players aren’t vocal enough do you put it on them? Or is there something you are doing that keeps them from being comfortable speaking up?

Do you look to external factors every time something goes wrong? Is it the players, the officials, or the lack of support? Do you only look internally when things go right?

A lot to take away as a coach here.

Great leaders are different in subtle ways. They present themselves differently, ask questions others don’t ask, and balance short and long-term goals masterfully. Perhaps most distinctive about them is the view they have about responsibility. Over the course of their lives, they have created an ethic of accountability for themselves.  

For leaders with this ethic, whatever happens always starts with them. They immediately take responsibility, not the blame, for whatever outcome, reaction, or result that occurs. They accept and own any outcome, asking what they did to contribute to it, or what they could still do to change it. This powerful ethic of accountability changes everything about who they are and how they lead. 

Leaders who hold themselves completely accountable and take ownership of everything in their world naturally behave differently. They are rarely accusatory or seek to blame others. Instead, they look for solutions and remedies to issues and problems that usually start with them. 

Take, for instance, the common dilemma of team meetings where members don’t speak up or offer their candid views. A leader with a strong accountability ethic immediately points to themselves and presumes they have some role in the reticence the team displays.

They ask themselves what they can do to promote more openness and honest contributions by team members. Perhaps, they should take a seat that is not at the head of the table, or run the meeting by only asking questions, or refrain from offering their views too early in any discussion. They search for answers that begin with them and avoid the temptation to blame the problem on the team members, presuming they lack courage or are introverted by personality. 

Leaders and team members who have developed an ethic of accountability stand out, especially in comparison to those who have developed the opposite worldview. Some people always look to external factors for whatever goes wrong and point to themselves only when things go right. They are full of excuses and justifications and wear them like a shield of self-defense. This stunts personal growth and development and makes leadership credibility nearly impossible to attain. 

In contrast, those with an ethic of accountability presume they play the central role in whatever happens in their world, even when their contribution is objectively minuscule. They know that looking inward at what role they have played changes the way they lead in a powerful way. They see this ethic as a reason why people respect them and look to their leadership as a path forward in any situation. 

As it turns out, an ethic of extreme accountability may be the most formidable weapon a leader can have.

The Last Lesson

Fifteen years ago - so hard to believe it’s been that long - on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2008, I was getting ready to head down to practice at Rhode Island College when my cell phone rang. At RIC my office was in the Recreation Center, across campus from the Murray Center where we practiced and played, so we had to actually get into our cars and drive down to the Murray Center for practice. As I walked out of the Rec Center towards my car, I looked at my phone. It was my Dad calling.

It was odd that my Dad would call at that time, because he knew we practiced late in the afternoon. I had a lot going on getting ready for practice, so I let the call go. I’d give him a call back after practice. I got in my car and started driving down the Rec Center, and my phone rang again. It was my Dad calling again. I figured maybe he just had to ask me a question about something so I picked it up.

It’s hard to describe the feeling you get when your caller ID says “Dad” yet the voice you hear when you say hello is one you don’t recognize. My insides felt hollow. I was sitting at a stop sign waiting to make a right turn when I heard “Detective with the Tampa Police department.” My father had recently bought his retirement home in Tampa. “I’m very sorry to inform you…”

My father had been found by his cleaning lady, dead of a heart attack. He was 63 years old. Just like that, my father was dead. I was too stunned to know how to feel.

I drove down to the Murray Center, parked in the parking lot, and called my brother. I got his wife, who said he was not feeling well and was sleeping. I told her he had to wake him up. When he came to the phone I just said “I just got a call from the Tampa Police department. Dad’s dead.” They had picked up my Dad’s cell phone and looked at his text messages. I had texted him the day before to let him know Providence College was in Anaheim in a tournament, and their game was on TV if he wanted to watch it. He never got the text. The Tampa Police did.

I went inside the Murray Center, totally stunned, and told my AD. I went into the gym and gathered my players who were warming up before practice, and told them. It seemed weird that I told my team before I told anyone else in my family, but I had to let them know I wasn’t going to be at practice. I called my girlfriend – now my wife – and can still hear the shock in her voice.

I went home and called my brother again, and we started calling family and close friends. The feeling is hard to describe, it’s like being in a daze. I was shocked, stunned, empty, yet there was a lot of work to do. We had to let people know, to start thinking about arrangements. Throughout all of it, as bad as I felt, I had this one overriding feeling: Lucky. It’s still hard to explain how I felt that way in that moment.  I had a great relationship with my father, and I just felt lucky to have had the relationship I did with him for 36 years. I still feel that way to this day.  As stunned as I was, I just kept thinking about how lucky I was, and I guess that helped me get through that day somehow.

My father was very successful. He grew up in Parkchester in the Bronx and had to work hard to get to college. He attended Iona College just North of the City, joining the Marine Reserves to help pay for school, and started a career in business upon graduation. He took a job out of school with KPMG, one of the big accounting firms in New York City, and ended up spending 38 years with the company. By the time he retired he was a senior partner with a big office on Park Avenue. He was very actively involved at Iona College, his alma mater, as the President of their Goal Club, as well as their Alumni Association. He joined a golf club in Westchester and served a stint as the President there. He served on a number of different Board of Directors for different organizations.

My father’s wake was a few days later on Castle Hill Avenue in the Bronx, the neighborhood where he grew up. He was still a working class kid from the Bronx, but he had worked his way into being very well off and connecting with some very successful people. It was overwhelming to see so many people show up to pay their respects. Whenever your in the situation where someone close to you has a death in the family and you feel like your not sure what to do, just show up. That’s what you do. You show up. It really helped my brother and I to see so many people who cared about and had been impacted by our father.

The wake was a who’s who of powerful people. College President’s, executive VPs, high-powered attorneys, wall street millionaires. It made my brother and I feel very good to see so many of my Dad’s friends and associates. The line was long and it took a couple of hours to see everyone.

Towards the end of the night a man walked in who looked a little out of place. He was wearing a baseball cap and a pair of khakis with a golf shirt and a rumpled jacket. He had a work ID badge hanging around his neck, looking very blue collar in a white collar crowd. I noticed him as soon as he walked in, and I didn’t recognize him. He didn’t talk to anyone, he just waited on line and made his way up to our family to pay respects. He shook my hand and simply said “I’m so sorry for your loss. Your father was a great friend to me.” I said thank you, but didn’t ask him who he was. After he got through the line, he went and sat in the back in a chair by himself. I noticed he said a few words to a few of the people from my Dad’s office. Then he got up slowly, put his cap back on, and started to walk out.

I wanted to talk to him before he left, but I hesitated because I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable. I didn’t want him to think that I was stopping him because I didn’t know who he was. I watched him walk out the door of the funeral home and head back down Castle Hill Avenue – past a number of car service Town Cars ready to take some of the attendees back into Manhattan. He put his cap on and walked back towards the 6 train.

This man was on my mind all night. Before everyone left, I asked one of my father’s work associates if they knew who he was. I thought I had seen him talking briefly with some of the people from my Dad’s office. It turns out he did work in my Dad’s office – in the mailroom. He delivered the mail to my Dad’s floor of his Park Avenue office building. He would sort the mail for my Dad exactly how he wanted it. He would bring my Dad his coffee with the mail in the morning, make sure he had an umbrella when it was raining, call down to make sure my Dad’s car was ready in the garage when he needed it.

My Dad had asked him what his name was, befriended him, and developed a relationship with him. He asked him about his family. He found out he had two young kids in catholic grammar school.  He’d buy them Christmas gifts so they had nice toys under the tree.  At different times when things were a struggle, my Dad had helped out by paying the tuition for his kids so they could stay in the school in their neighborhood. He helped out the family whenever they needed something over the years, and he, his secretary and the family were the only ones who knew about it. I had never met the man or his family.

When I learned about this, I couldn’t hold back the tears. This man had gotten on the 6 train in Midtown Manhattan and taken a one hour subway ride to Castle Hill, then walked the six blocks to pay his respects, to say “I’m sorry for your loss” to two sons he had never met. He didn’t know us, and hardly knew anyone at the wake. He certainly looked a little bit out of place. But he knew my father, and considered him a friend.

I still think about him all of the time. I can still see him putting his hat back on and slowly walking up Castle Hill Avenue to the Subway station. He spent at least two hours on the subway and waited at least 30 minutes in line just to pay his respects. I didn’t even know who he was, nor did my brother.  We would have had no idea if he didn’t show up.  But he made the trip anyway.

I am very lucky to have had the relationship I did with my father, to spend the time with him that I did. I’m also very proud of the way my Dad lived his life. He made a lot of money and traveled in circles of very successful people. But he was always the same person, the kid who had worked his way out of the Bronx. He had no sense of entitlement about him. I learned so much from him, simply from the way he lived his life and how he acted towards others, even those he didn’t know. He treated everyone with dignity and respect and went out of his way to help people who needed help.

That night, that moment, that man who showed up to pay his respects for my father made me think about how I live my own life. Do I treat everyone with the same respect? Am I courteous and genuine to everyone I meet, regardless of their circumstances and what they can do for me? Do I give people the benefit of the doubt if they are struggling with something, not knowing what might be going on in their life? Do I show the right amount of gratitude in my daily routine?

How do I treat the people in my “mail room?”  We all have people in the mail room in our life. How do we interact with those people? Do we treat them with respect and go out of our way to make sure they are comfortable? Do we think about what we can do to help them? Or others who might not come from the same background that we do?

What am I doing every day in my life to make sure, when it’s my time, that the guy in my mail room is going to show up for me?

That was the last lesson my father ever taught me.

Leadership Instincts

I liked this take from Admired Leaders on leadership instincts.

Natural leaders use a combination of life experiences and core values to create their leadership “instincts.”

Where do Leadership Instincts Come From?

We often refer to highly effective leaders, especially those with less experience or background, as having great leadership instincts. In our estimation, they seem to know things we wouldn’t expect them to know. More importantly, these people land on a good or right answer seemingly without much effort. They are instinctively good at leadership, or so we believe. 

Technically speaking, an instinct is an intuitive way of assessing and acting on a situation or problem. Instincts are thought to be baked into the biology, family history, and personality of those who possess them. We are hard-wired to have instincts. We don’t develop or learn them. 

Which is why leadership is not a place where they exist. This is not to say we can’t use instinct as a metaphor and explain the prowess of a given leader as having a hidden clairvoyance that enables them to see things others don’t. Perhaps no better word exists to explain why some leaders inexplicably make quality judgments and decisions quickly and without much effort. 

But, when it comes to leadership, what counts as instinct is actually a very definitive recipe of two ingredients: past life experience and core values. 

Our past life experiences allow us to see what is important in a given situation and what will likely unfold. The more experience we have, the more insight we carry forward when assessing situations, problems, and people. When we’ve seen this movie before and we know how the story ends, then we have a big leg up on those who haven’t. 

But experience alone doesn’t allow leaders to land on so many right conclusions. There needs to be a second ingredient that binds past experience to decision or action. When it comes to leadership, that ingredient is values. 

All the best leaders are value-driven people for a reason. Values enable us to emphasize what is important in any given situation and how to elevate its significance. Decisions steeped in values can never be fully wrong, and the best leaders know that; therefore, they apply them religiously to every judgment and decision they encounter. 

While the rest of us attempt to deconstruct the many facets of a situation or person, great leaders always begin their examination from their core values. This guides them directly to what matters most and how any action is likely to align or impugn those values. 

When leaders combine deep, past experience with core values, something magical happens. They operate from what looks like instinct. They quickly and “instinctively” reach a conclusion without the need to hash out the arguments or explicate much of the data. By applying their values and experience to any situation or problem, they aren’t seeing things others don’t, but rather they focus everyone’s attention on what is an obvious answer.

Much of this process is done subconsciously, of course, hence the metaphor of “instinct” to explain what is not easily understood. Leaders who want to improve their leadership instincts only need to spend the time to know what they value and then gain more meaningful experiences to give them an edge in seeing what is possible and likely.

While the latter can take a lifetime, the best leaders constantly search for experiences from which to learn. Neither activity is instinctive and never will be.