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Check it out – you and your players will be glad you did!

Merry Christmas from your friends at HoopSkills!!

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The Famous, Former GE CEO Jack Welch once offered his “Six Rules for Successful Leadership” and they CERTAINLY apply to basketball coaches:

1. Face reality as it is; not as it was or as you wish it were

2. Be candid with everyone

3. Don’t manage, lead.

4. Change before you have to.

5. If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.

6. Control your destiny, or someone else will.

Now there may be some who think “If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete,” means to shy away from competition but I don’t think that‘s what it means at all. To me this means two things. One, don’t get in over your head. If you’re David you can take on Goliath now and then but not 25 times a season! Pick an opponent slightly better than you are and set that as your standard. Once you are able to compete with them pick another team – again slightly better until you can methodically improve your program to the point where you are now Goliath.

The second thing this means to me is the most important. It means that you need to find, or possibly even create, a competitive advantage
for your team. Is it your speed, your size, your work ethic, or your depth? What about your level of coaching? Can that give you a competitive advantage? Whatever it is, develop and nurture it to the point where you have something in place that no one else can match and always remember an advantage is just that – an advantage – not a guarantee!

To get more leadership advice from Mr. Welch we suggest reading his highly acclaimed book “Winning“.

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The following 5 things didn’t make Winning Hoops Top 10 list but they all showed up on enough surveys to merit mentioning. Still interesting to note that not one item in the top 15 deals with offenses, defenses, press breaks, league standings, state rankings, being the underdog, or trying to slow down a star opponent. Maybe it’s because those kinds of stresses are just taken for granted in the world of coaching!

1. Officiating
2. Administration
3. Player’s Grades
4. Substance Abuse
5. Non Basketball Problems

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I’ll admit it – I don’t sleep well during basketball season. There’s always game tape to watch, scouting reports to organize, practices to plan out, and game plans to create. In January 2010, Winning Hoops magazine published an article on the Top 10 Things That Keep Coaches Awake at Night. The interesting thing to me is that they are not really related to coaching the game itself  but are all “necessary evils.” I know they come with the job – but I sure wish they didn’t!

10. Transfers/Recruiting

9. Players Don’t Work Hard Enough

8. Time Commitment

7. Salary

6. Budget

5. Specialization

4. Travel / Club / AAU

3. Contact Time With Players

2. Commitment of Players & Distractions

1. PARENTS

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As a coach, there is a temptation to consider oneself preeminent and look at players as pieces of the puzzle who enable the coach to achieve his goals. When I viewed myself as a servant of the other coaches and players, things went better for our team and for me personally. This does not mean that I was any less demanding or did not expect great effort and solid preparation. It did mean, however, that I was there to do whatever I could to help them accomplish team objectives and mature into better people.

- Tom Osborne

Faith in the Game: Lessons on Football, Work, and Life

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I’ve been a fan of Pat Riley’s ever since he started coaching the Lakers decades ago and have made it a point to read anything and everything he has written. The things he wrote in his book The Winner Within applies to coaches, players, parents, businessmen, and just about everyone else I can think of. Here is what he has to say about teamwork:

Teamwork is the essence of life.

If there is one thing on which I am an authority, it’s how to blend the talents and strengths of individuals into a force that becomes greater than the sum of the parts. My driving belief is this: great teamwork is the only way to reach our ultimate moments, to create breakthroughs that define our careers, to fulfill our lives with a sense of lasting significance.

When our teams excel, we win. Our best efforts, combined with those of our teammates, grow into something far greater and far more satisfying than anything we could have achieved on our own. Teams make us part of something that matters.

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Last week we mentioned how Patrick Lencioni wrote in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team how teamwork is the ultimate competitive advantage. Lencioni felt so strongly about the importance of teamwork that he wrote about it again is his second book, Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Take a close look at your own current team – is your level of teamwork developed to the point where you have a chance to accomplish the impossible?

I honestly believe that in this day and age of information ubiquity and nanosecond change, teamwork remains the one sustainable competitive advantage that has been largely untapped. I can say confidently that teamwork is almost always lacking within organizations that fail and often present within those that succeed.

The power of teamwork cannot be denied. When people come together and set aside their individual needs for the good of the whole, they can accomplish what might have looked impossible on paper.

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As coaches we are always looking for the ultimate competitive advantage. We watch hours and hours of game tape, we thoroughly scout our opponents, and we painstakingly plan practice down to the minute. Is it possible that we often overlook developing the one area that could have the biggest impact on our teams and thus pay the biggest dividends? In his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni shares an idea, that while easier said than done, is often skimmed over and neglected.

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.

A friend of mine, the founder of a company that grew to a billion dollars in annual revenue, best expressed the power of teamwork when he once told me, “If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

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If you are a coach, do you change your “system” to fit your players or do you try to find players that fit your system? if you are a college or club coach where you can recruit players with the specific skill sets your philosophy requires then you might be able to run the same offenses and defenses year after year. But if you are coaching youth, middle school, or high school you might not have that luxury. How you use the talent you have on your team may be one of the most important decisions you make as a coach. Here is what Tennessee’s Pat Summit (8 NCAA Championships) has to say about the subject in her book, Reach for the Summit:

A lot of coaches and managers try to force personnel into a system or framework that doesn’t suit them. They have a certain way they think things should be done. What they don’t understand, out of stubbornness or ego is that it may not be the most intelligent use of talent. How many times have you seen a player languish in a lineup, not fulfilling her potential, but as soon as she is traded to another team, she bursts out of her slump? I see that a lot. When you force somebody into a slot, you are inviting disaster.

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John Wooden often compared his teams to a car with players such as Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul Jabbar), Bill Walton, and Sidney Wicks acting as the engine, but made sure everyone knew that an engine alone is not enough to be effective. The following quote is from the book Wooden. As a coach myself, I especially took notice of his statement!

A lug nut may seem like a little thing, but it’s not. There is a role that each and every one of us must play. We may aspire to what we consider to be a larger role, or a more important role, but we cannot achieve that until we show that we are able to fulfill the role we are assigned. It’s these little things that make the big things happen. The big engine is not going to work unless the little things are being done properly.

Remember that Michael Jordan was with the Chicago Bulls several years before he ever played in a championship game. Was he talented? Of course he was, but that powerful engine called Air Jordan was in a car with some parts that were not functioning properly.

Of course, when I told the players about their roles and the car with the powerful engine, new tires, and tight lug nuts, I also reminded them the car needed a driver behind the wheel or it would just go around in circles or smash into a tree.

I told them the driver was me.

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