Tom Brady: Leading Teammates

Some in-depth thoughts from Tom Brady on leading his teammates.

https://hbr.org/2024/09/tom-brady-on-the-art-of-leading-teammates

Create Space

Creating space for your players to take ownership is one of the toughest challenges for a coach. But it unlocks the potential to finding elite, sustained success.

It’s a great challenge, because when we think of coaching and leadership, we think about being in control. Telling people what to do. But the art of elite leadership is giving your team enough space to figure it out with their teammates, while providing the guidelines and structure that will help lead them down the right path.

Your leadership is much more powerful and effective when you give up control. Give your team the room to make some mistakes, to ask questions and to challenge the approach you take. When they discover the autonomy involved in their path to success, that’s when they will really buy in to everything you are doing.

The hardest part for you is giving them the freedom they need to take ownership. Year after year, you should examine ways you can give up control and create more ownership. Your team will be much better for it.

Getting Better As A Coach

In what ways are you a better coach now then you were back then?

Somebody asked me that question recently in a conversation about coaching. After 13 years as a head coach, where we experienced both sustained, elite success and some awful losing seasons, how will I be better the next time I’m a head coach?

It’s a great question to think about, whether you are an assistant coach or a head coach. Every day you spend as a coach is an opportunity to get better, so now matter how long you’ve been doing it you should be better at it tomorrow than you are today.

One way I feel strongly that I have gotten better is in my approach to teaching and leadership. As a young head coach you are convinced that you are the person in charge, you have to set the tone and you tell the players what to do and they do it. But eventually I learned that leadership isn’t about you, it’s about them. Telling them what you want them to do and having them follow orders isn’t the best way to get the most out of your team.

I learned over time that I don’t want to give commands. I want to give intent. I don’t want to tell them what to do. I want to show them what we are trying to accomplish and teach them how to solve the problems to get us there. I don’t want to teach them how to jump through hoops. I want to develop problem solvers.

When I first started as a head coach I was telling the players what to do. Now I’m trying to teach them how to figure out what to do on the court.

Who Is Challenging You?

As a head coach, I wanted to challenge my team to be great every day. Our practices were intense, efficient and fun - if you were a true competitor. I instilled the idea that practice was the most important thing we did as a team, and hammered our guys constantly about being mentally prepared - for practice. You could no longer just show up and be the best player like you did in high school. To compete at an elite level every day, you had to be mentally prepared.

I knew to challenge my guys I had to be at my best. They needed to see consistency from me in the way I was prepared, the energy I brought and the message they heard. If you do this, you tend to attract the players who are great competitors and who are hungry to get better. I’ve always said I’ll put the way we practiced at RIC and (eventually) at Maine up against any practices at any level in the country.

Everyone has off days - even the head coach. You may have heard the statement that there are 3 people who can never have an off day - your best player, your point guard and the head coach. While I love the thought, it’s not practical. Everybody has a day here and there where they just aren’t feeling great or didn’t bring the same energy.

What’s important as a head coach is to make sure you have somebody who is challenging you. Too many teams (and organizations) are built with a top-down leadership model, where the head coach dictates how things are going to go, and the message is then enforced by the assistant coaches, the captains and the veteran players. There are a few issues I have with this model, but one of them is the question of who holds the guy at the top accountable? Who makes sure the head coach is at his best every day as he is demanding of everyone around him?

Naturally it should first come from your assistants. But that dynamic is challenging, unless you play close attention to it when you hire assistants, as well as when your organize the responsibility and approach of the staff. You have to allow them and encourage them to challenge you. If not, they’ll just fall in line as loyal soldiers. Because that’s what they think they are supposed to do. Make sure they feel comfortable and empowered to evaluate and criticize your performance as the head coach. You need them to have the guts to speak up when things are going well and you may not be at your best.

Are you comfortable doing that as the head coach? If you aren’t you won’t be consistently at your best, and neither will your team.

Just as important, and oftentimes even more effective, is allowing your players to challenge you. If you set the tone and are clear with the standards and the culture of the organization, eventually your players should start to take ownership of it. When they start to do this you have unlocked the key to sustained elite performance. When they own the approach every day, and they hold one another to that standard, it flows naturally that they can do the same for you. I’ve had many a player over the years check me as far as my approach, my tone and my messaging when things seemed a little off.

It made me a much better coach. There were plenty of times when I was preparing for a practice and maybe feeling a little sluggish that I thought about my captain, or a group of seniors, or someone else on my team who I knew would notice if I wasn’t at my best. By taking ownership and demanding the best out of each other, they were doing the same to me. There was a right way to do it, and it was always done with respect - a private conversation, a quick check-in during a water break - and those moments had a huge impact on me.

As the head coach you should always challenge your team to be great every day. But you also need to play attention to who is going to challenge you. Don’t carry yourself above the rest of the team. Walk beside them. Make sure the people surrounding you are challenging you to be great in the same way.

Team USA Coaching Staff

Really cool look at how the four coaches on the Team USA coaching staff approach their time together in the olympics. The best of the best don’t take themselves too seriously and are lifelong learners.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2024/08/02/team-usa-mens-basketball-coaches-olympics/74632175007/

Profile and Purdue Recruiting

Profile is a company that does personality assessments for coaching staffs, players and recruits to give you better insight into who is a good fit for your team and how to better connect with your players. Their website is worth checking out.

This is a good story on Matt Painter and Purdue from a few years back about how it impacted his recruiting and coaching from The Athletic.

The secret behind Purdue's turnaround is a simple test Matt Painter gives recruits

Dana O'Neil

Sep 5, 2018

Kicking back with his buddies over a few beers and a friendly game of cards, Matt Painter is complaining. Complaining a lot actually, and though he kinda can’t stand himself for bringing down the conversation, he also can’t help himself. He needs to vent. This is 2014, not long after the season has ended, and the source of Painter’s frustration is his Purdue basketball team — or more accurately his handling of the Purdue basketball team. The Boilermakers finished 15-17 and, combined with the 16-18 finish a year before, Painter is crushed that his alma mater has slipped so far under his stewardship. Even more galling, he can’t figure out how to fix it.

As Painter is bitching, Chad Brown is listening. Brown, a fellow Purdue grad and former football coach, doesn’t know Painter that well — he earned the card game invite via his college roommate, former basketball player, Brian Cardinal — but eventually, he has to speak up. “Man, I don’t mean to push this on you,’’ Brown tells Painter. “But I think I can help you.’’

Since that conversation Purdue is 104-27, and Painter has reconfigured his entire recruiting strategy, searching for guys who are productive as well as talented, who are more dominant and stable in their personality rather than extroverted influencers who merely want to be the life of the party. How did he figure it out? How did he identify the players who fit? Simple. He took Brown’s advice and had them take a test.

Eleven years ago, Brown was Painter — a fed up coach. He spent 10 years on the sidelines, crisscrossing the country as an assistant and recruiting coordinator. He loved the game but couldn’t stand the uncertainty, always hoping a recruit would fit his team’s style and staff’s personality.

His frustration led to, as he calls it, an “identity crisis,’’ and in 2007 he left Northern Colorado for a job in the corporate world, signing on with a sports tech company. As part of the hiring process, Brown took something called the DiSC Assessment test. Developed by William Moulton Marston, who also helped with the first polygraph test, DiSC has been around forever, used frequently by companies in the hiring process and for team building. It essentially separates people into four behavioral schemes: dominance, inducement, submission and compliance. When Brown saw his own results — they fit him to a tee — his head started spinning with ideas. This was the answer he’d been searching for in coaching, a way to help eliminate so much of the guesswork involved in constructing a team. “How can I make this work for coaches?” he thought to himself.

By the time he sat down across the card table from Painter, Brown was heading up Profile, a company he created that married his belief in personality assessments with his passion for sports. With the aid of a software developer, Brown took the principles of DiSC and expanded the test. Along with detailing behavior traits, he developed questions that would help determine an individual’s most important values, creating a composite that included who a person is, and what his or her motivators are, and how that translates into a positive work environment, or in the case of athletes, into a positive team experience.  Armed with his new tools, he barnstormed around the country, trying to entice coaches to give it a try. “This isn’t for everybody,’’ Brown says, by way of explaining much of the skepticism he’s been met with since launching.

In Painter, though, Brown found a receptive audience. Painter is analytical and a thinker — when he eventually took the test, he scored as a CS, someone who is compliant and stable, and requires accuracy and reliable facts — and the idea of something concrete appealed to him. And let’s face it, he also was a little desperate. Painter listened to Brown’s pitch, did his own research and decided to take a trial run to see if the results were, indeed, reliable. He asked some of his former players to serve as guinea pigs, and when their scores rang true to their personalities, he was sold.

The test is pretty straightforward and takes about 15 minutes to complete. Test takers are first asked to choose from successive lists the adjectives that best describe them and are the least like them. Next, they must identify 36 sentences out of a list of 86 that describe things that are important to them at work — everything from salary and benefits to social interaction with coworkers and personal responsibility. The first set of questions generates where they fall on the DiSC evaluation, and the second determines which values — things such as competitiveness, recognition, wisdom, loyalty, spirituality and family happiness — are most important. (Full disclosure: I took the test. I’m an IS, a people person who trends more toward emotions than hard facts, but is nonetheless able to adapt and act as a good listener. I value integrity, creativity, responsibility, wisdom and financial security. That’s all very accurate, though my family is still searching for the part that points out my chronic impatience.)

Most people who take it are impressed with how true the results are. “Honestly I don’t think most of us thought much of it until the results came back,’’ says Purdue senior Ryan Cline. “And then it was like, ‘Whoa! That’s exactly right.’ It’s kinda crazy how spot on it is with all of us.’’ Brown now counts some 15 Division I programs among his clients and works the NFL Combine for the Dallas Cowboys, with the league office maintaining an interest in his findings. But while he feels confident in his test what he stresses with his coaches is that it can’t account for everything, especially external factors. “You are who you are, and your personality doesn’t change, but it can be affected by things outside,’’ he explains simply.  Cline, for example, is a high “I” or influencer. He likes to make sure his teammates are loose and enjoying the game. Channeled properly, that’s not a bad thing but two years ago, when Cline’s personality was infused with outside influences, it led to trouble. As a sophomore, he was arrested for marijuana possession after he was found unresponsive in his car.

Cline’s personality hasn’t changed, but his actions have. “It’s really, are these people helping me more than those people?” he says. “It was about maturing, understanding who I am and figuring out how to guide myself and be more serious.’’

Painter bides his time while recruiting, waiting for what he believes is the proper moment to broach the subject. It’s hardly a deal breaker. He will neither stop nor start recruiting a kid because of the results of the test. Nor is it mandatory. (Though most recruits agree to take it willingly — and their parents are especially intrigued — a handful over the years have never gotten around to it.) He admits it can and has raised red flags when coupled with his own concerns about a player, and has made him question whether a recruit is worth pursuing. But it can swing the other way, too. Caleb Swanigan grew up in an unstable and frequently fractured family environment. Yet he scored as a very rare “high D,’’ a person who is a natural born leader. That reaffirmed what Painter already believed about Swanigan — that his external forces, which could have adversely affected him, only made him stronger.

Mostly it’s allowed Painter to understand how to best coach the players he has (who is task oriented and can handle more responsibility versus those who need more nurturing), identify the players that suit him, and give his team a better understanding of what makes him tick. “A lot of times, kids don’t know who they’re playing for,’’ Painter says. “You give speeches, you talk to them, but this lets me say — ‘Here. This is who I am. This is what’s important to me.’’ Consequently as part of his annual presentation to the Boilers, Brown shares the coach’s results. Painter isn’t in the room, so the information comes off as conversational instead of a ‘my way or the highway edict.’ Privately Painter even will allow his players to read his profile if they ask. “I love that he’s putting himself out there, saying ‘This is who I am,’’ Cline says. “He wants us to feel comfortable around everybody and really understand who we are.’’

So is the test really the secret to all of the Boilermakers’ turnaround? Of course not. Painter also has learned better how to build a team, to surround uber-talented guys with role players who make their free throws, don’t turn the ball over and take smart shots. He’s borrowed from other coaches, specifically Bo Ryan and Brad Stevens, in trying to mimic how they defined roles for each player on their roster. And he’s taken inventory of himself, growing more confident in the kind of coach he wants to be and the kind of program he wants to run.

“It’s not that it’s the answer,’’ he says. “People want to pay a fee, get an answer and boom! Their team is better. That’s not how it works. You have to grow into it. You have to process the information. Instead of the answers, it gives you the questions.’’

And a much more enjoyable card game.

Boston Celtics Analytics

Why the analytics were so supportive of Boston's dominant title run

HD INTELLIGENCE

JUL 30

Last month, as the champagne was still flowing and the Boston Celtics celebrated their 18th NBA title, the Wall Street Journal published a quick dispatch from the deciding Game 5.

The headline: The Boston Celtics Won the NBA Title. Their MVP Was Math.

Of course, this caught our attention at HDI Headquarters. We believe wholeheartedly in the power of empirical reasoning to build a championship basketball team, and here it was on the grandest stage.

The writer Robert O’Connell made the point that in rolling to a 4-1 series win against the Dallas Mavericks, the Celtics “seemed to be doing something other than playing basketball. Sure, they were driving for dunks, rising to block shots and launching 3-pointers. But really, they were solving a math problem, again and again and again.”

In Boston’s case, that meant seeking out high-percentage 3-pointers while influencing their opponent to take a high volume of lower-percentage 2-point shots. “The Celtics statistically had the best offense in the history of the NBA because they are more obsessed than any team in basketball with the data that increasingly defines the sport,” O’Connell wrote.

Certainly, the Celtics were not the first team to solve that math problem. The leaguewide 3-point attempt rate has, after all, risen in 12 of the last 13 seasons, increasing in that span from 22.2 percent to 39.5 percent of all field goal attempts.

But it was Boston that best executed an analytically sound strategy this season. The Celtics took a league-leading 47.1 percent of their shots from 3, while their opponents took the fifth-highest share of shots in the midrange and third-lowest share at the rim.

So, while the organization has drafted well, developed talent effectively, executed a number of advantageous trades and performed in the clutch — all critical elements of their success — they also put their players in position to maximize their abilities by having an analytically driven approach to both offensive and defensive strategy. (To say nothing about the way analytics has informed their approach to roster construction — that’s another post for another newsletter.)

But here’s what’s really interesting about Boston’s dominant path to a championship in 2024: The same franchise could have made the same claims last season.

The 2022-23 Celtics took roughly the same share of their shots from 3 (though they were second in the league), and their opponents took roughly the same share of shots in the midrange. All of that ended with a thud in the Eastern Conference Finals, when Boston went nine for forty-two from 3 in a blowout home loss to the Miami Heat.

Good organizations find formulas that work. Great organizations stick with them when at first they come up short. “Anytime you’re developing a new philosophy or style, it just takes time for understanding and execution,” Boston coach Joe Mazzula said after this year’s title.

So instead of abandoning their philosophy, the Celtics doubled down on it. While every team has progressed in their use of analytically driven offense — every team in the league took at least 35 percent of shots from 3 — the 2024 NBA title went to the team that fearlessly pushed its chips to the center and went all-in. It’s not enough to talk the talk about analytics; great teams must also walk the walk.

Leadership and Learning

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to one another.” - John F. Kennedy

Honesty

Honesty as a Leadership Quality

People want to follow an honest leader. Years ago, many employees started out by assuming that their leadership was honest simply because the authority of their position. With modern scandals, this is no longer true.

When you start a leadership position, you need to assume that people will think you are a little dishonest. In order to be seen as an honest individual, you will have to go out of your way to display honesty. People will not assume you are honest simply because you have never been caught lying.

One of the most frequent places where leaders miss an opportunity to display honesty is in handling mistakes. Much of a leader’s job is to try new things and refine the ideas that don’t work. However, many leaders want to avoid failure to the extent that they don’t admit when something did not work.

• Mark Shead , Leadership501.com

Empower Others

Empower Others

Great leaders understand that for people to give their best, they must have a sense of ownership over their work and believe that what they’re doing is meaningful. Communicate clear goals and deadlines to your team, and then give them the autonomy and authority to decide how the work gets done. Challenge them with high expectations and encourage them to be creative and show innovation.

• Are you giving your team the autonomy and authority to decide how the work gets done?

• Are you encouraging them to be creative and show innovation?

-From MichaelPage.com

The Cost of Leadership

Georgia Football Coach Kirby Smart on the cost of leadership:

Great leaders recognize there is a cost to leadership and accept these costs:

1. You are going to have to make hard decisions that will negatively affect people you care about.

2. You will be disliked despite your best attempts to do the best for the most.

3. You will be misunderstood and you won’t always have the opportunity to defend yourself.

Intentional and Honest

“The goal is to have an intentional and honest conversation. And to get to the point as fast as you can.”

• Sundance Wicks, Wyoming Basketball Head Coach

Greatness

One of the best explanations of effective leadership you’ll ever see. David Marquet was a Navy Ship captain who changed the entire culture - and effectiveness - of the ship with a different leadership approach.

This is worth keeping close and re-watching every 6 months or so.

“Move the authority to where the information is.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8

Prosocial Skills

Adam Grant’s book, Hidden Potential, takes a deep dive into the science behind high achievement. I really liked this excerpt on prosocial skills and team dynamics and leadership.

Prosocial skills are the glue that transforms groups into teams. Instead of operating as lone wolves, people become part of a cohesive pack. We normally think about cohesion in terms of interpersonal connection, but team building and bonding exercises are overrated. Yes, icebreakers and ropes courses can breed camaraderie, but meta-analyses suggest that they don’t necessarily improve team performance. What really makes a difference is whether people recognize that they need one another to succeed on an important mission. That’s what enables them to bond around a common identity and stick together to achieve their collective goals…

Leaders play an important role in establishing cohesion. They have the authority to turn independent individuals into an interdependent team. But all too often, when it comes time to decide who takes the helm, we fall to consider the glue factor.

When we select leaders, we don’t usually pick the person with the strongest leadership skills. We frequently choose the person who talks the most. It’s called the babble effect. Research shows that groups promote the people who command the most airtime - regardless of their aptitude and expertise. We mistake confidence for competence, certainty for credibility, and quantity for quality. We get stuck following people who dominate the discussion instead of those who elevate it.

Do you see elements of this in your team?

Can you find ways to make sure your players recognize they need each other?

How do you develop your teams prosocial skills?

Are your leaders really those who are most qualified to lead? Or are they the loudest?

Grant’s book gives you a lot of great things to think about when you are trying to build your team.

Elite Performers as Teachers

“It’s often said that those who can’t do, teach. It would be more accurate to sat that those who can do, can’t teach the basics. A great deal of expert knowledge is tacit - it’s implicit, not explicit. The further you progress toward master, the less conscious awareness you often have of the fundamentals. Experiments show that skilled golfers and wine aficionados have a hard time describing their putting and tasting techniques - even asking them to explain their approaches is enough to interfere with their performance, so they often stay on autopilot. When I first saw an elite diver do four and a half somersaults, I asked how to managed to spin so fast. His answer: “Just go up in a ball.” Experts often have an intuitive understanding of a route, but they struggle to articulate all the steps to take.” - Adam Grant, Hidden Potential

I’m always reminded of workout I was doing with Herbert Hill when he was a redshirt freshmen at Providence College, and Ryan Gomes, who would go on to play 10 years in the NBA. Gomes was a college All-American, and Herb was a raw, skinny freshmen with a ton of potential but a long way to go (he’d go on to lead the Big East in scoring and rebounding and get drafted by the 76ers in the second round).

I was working with Herb on footwork, and Gomes was trying to help. But in trying to articulate what he did with his feet, Gomes was having trouble explaining himself to Herb. He could show Herb what he would do when he got cut off making his move and had to spin back to score, but he couldn’t really explain it in a way that Herb could understand. It was something that Gomes could do naturally, but couldn’t necessarily teach.

I just read Adam Grant’s latest book “Hidden Potential,” and he talks about many experts have trouble explaining what it is they are great at. I think a lot about great players who become coaches. We often think that someone who was elite at a certain sport would naturally make a great coach in that sport, but it isn’t always the case. That’s not to say you can’t be a great player and a great coach, but to do so I think you have to understand not only what made you great, but how to explain what made you great to others. That second part is not that easy.

Keep that in mind when you are thinking about leadership on our teams. The best players might not be able to articulate what they do that made them so good, and therefore might not be able to impact their teammates in the way you might like. Just because you have an elite peformer doesn’t mean they can teach others how they do it.

Stan Van Gundy - South Beach Sessions

Incredibly open and vulnerable conversation between Dan Le Batard and Stan Van Gundy. Well worth your time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZykQdeUZYg

Planning Ahead

When I first became a head coach, like most first-time coaches, I wanted to get everything done as quick as possible. I was anxious to establish a new culture and set the tone for our program. I took over the job at Rhode Island College in September, so school had already started.

The fall for Division III coaches isn’t a lot of fun. There are no off-season workouts. You can’t get in the gym with your guys. School starts and you are excited to get everything started, and then you have to wait until October 15th to do anything with your players. It isn’t easy.

I was going to get ahead of the game. I spent the fall planning out our practices up until our first game. I figured out the off days and started calculating what I wanted to have in by when, leading all the way up to our first game. I planned out every practice, a process that took a few weeks to finalize. We were going to be prepared and ready to go once October 15th rolled around.

That lasted about 30 minutes into my first practice. I realized quickly that so much of what we did every day in practice depended on the players, what they could grasp, their strengths and weaknesses, and my ability to teach. Right away it was obvious certain things (mostly defensive concepts) were going to take a lot longer than I thought. And other things were going to have to get cut. There was no way to say we were going to do 20 minutes of shell drill on day one and be done with it. For the most part, teaching and implementing took a lot longer than I expected and that impacted our ability to move on to other things.

Planning ahead was really a waste of my time. Obviously it makes sense to prepare and to plan your practices, but trying to lay out a schedule a month ahead of time is useless. Your team and their strengths and weaknesses will dictate what you need to do and how long you need to do it for. And there is no way to really know that until you start practicing.

One of the best things you can prepare for is the ability to adjust. A large part of coaching and building a team is adapting to what is happening every day. Some days your kids may be really sharp and focused, and you realize you can get a lot of stuff in. On other days they may have great energy and once you start playing you don’t want to stop and teach, because you don’t want to slow them down. Having a feel and understanding of your team will dictate when and how fast you can teach.

It always makes us feel better to plan ahead. We love to feel prepared. But when it comes to practice, you have to be ready for the unexpected. When you are trying to build a team, the best path will be dictated by what you see in front of you. It’s hard to plan that path in September, and when you do you’ll probably find you are wasting your time.

Coach K On Leadership

Some great nuggets from Coach K on leadership:

1. Create Ownership

2. Coach The Person Individually

3. Unite Big Egos

4. Listen and Respond

5. Show Vulnerability

https://x.com/gb1121/status/1799902685291782452

Lead By Example

Everyone leads by example. It’s not something good players or certain leaders choose to do. By definition, everyone does it. Leading by example is going about your business a certain way, and having an impact on those around you. Everyone has a certain way of doing things, and they don’t choose the impact it has on the people around them.

Leading by example isn’t always a positive influence. The teammate with the wrong attitude or bad work habits is leading by example just as much as anyone. Everyone sees how he operates. Some may look at him in disgust as a bad teammate and say they’ll never act that way, but others may look at him and realize they can get away with some shortcuts. No one is telling that kid to lead by example, but he’s doing it. Everyone does it.

I’m not a big fan of using leadership by example as an example of great leadership. To me, it’s the most basic form of leadership. It’s going about your business every day, regardless of those who are around you. When I hear the first thing a coach says about a player as a leader is that he “really leads by example,” I think to myself maybe he’s a great player and a hard worker, but he’s not that great of a leader.

Great leadership is more than just what you do. Now, I’m not saying leadership by example can’t be impactful - it can be very powerful. The Mom or Dad who gets up at 6 am and works two jobs to take care of their family every day, they are setting a great example for their kids and having a huge impact. But on teams, we don’t have 25 years of growing up to really understand the impact of seeing something like that every day. High-performing teams need more than just leadership by example.

Some players aren’t comfortable with traditional leadership, and they don’t wan to speak up or take on a leadership role. Hopefully, they can just lead by example in a positive way. But your team is going to need more than that. I’m sure your team has some players that have great leadership instincts and qualities, and it’s your job to find them and develop them. Figure out who can handle a leadership role, and don’t just let them lead by example. Define leadership for them and nurture their ability to impact your team.

If you allow all of your players to just lead by example, you won’t have an impactful leadership dynamic within your team. To sustain success at a high level, you are going to need more.

Bill Walton on John Wooden

RIP Bill Walton

https://x.com/CGProgram/status/1795210523270590748