Explore an Uncommon
Approach to Leadership!
Steve Kerr
"You knew they cared about you. You could feel that they loved you and they cared about you. But you were a little afraid of them."
Steve Kerr talking about the one quality that made Greg Popovich and Phil Jackson so special.
The Jockey and The Corner Man
Dan Hurley talks about the different personalities he takes on with his team between practices and games.
Dan Hurley talks about the different personalities he takes on with his team between practices and games.
Bold Action
"The true mark of a leader is the willingness to stick with a bold course of action…”
"The true mark of a leader is the willingness to stick with a bold course of action — an unconventional business strategy, a unique product-development roadmap, a controversial marketing campaign — even as the rest of the world wonders why you're not marching in step with the status quo. In other words, real leaders are happy to zig while others zag. They understand that in an era of hyper-competition and non-stop disruption, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special." -Bill Taylor
“Work While You Wait”
https://x.com/JLucroy20/status/2029766844152713694?s=20
Good stuff from Tony Robichaux, University of Louisiana baseball coach, who recently passed away.
Kelvin Sampson
“Kids want to be coached… they do.”
“Kids want to be coached… they do.”
https://x.com/thewinningdiff1/status/2024805955431461232?s=20
Celtics Film Sessions
A cool inside look on Joe Mazzulla asking his players to engage in the scouting report.
A cool inside look on Joe Mazzulla asking his players to engage in the scouting report.
I’m always at my best when I listen to my players.
4 Levels of Competitors
Robert Saleh on the four level of competitors: Commanders, Competitors, Contenders and Survivors.
Robert Saleh on the four level of competitors: Commanders, Competitors, Contenders and Survivors.
https://x.com/titansfilmroom/status/2013664267472445764?s=20
Bennett Stirtz
“He looks like the guy who mows your lawn.”
“He looks like the guy who mows your lawn.”
Confrontation - Kelvin Sampson
Confrontation is an essential part of high-performing teams.
Confrontation is an essential part of high-performing teams.
Ben McCollum
“I don’t really pay attention because it’s not something that is going to benefit me. It’s not going to help us improve.”
“I don’t really pay attention because it’s not something that is going to benefit me. It’s not going to help us improve.”
Mark Cuban Invests in Cignetti
For Mark Cuban, Indiana’s championship was a familiar business lesson: teams with clear leadership and repeatable systems tend to win.
From Inc.Com:
For billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban, backing Indiana’s football program was like a Shark Tank investment. Rather than chasing star power or flashy spending, Cuban said he was drawn to a disciplined system and proven leadership, traits he typically looks for when backing founders. That mindset helped turn a long-overlooked program into a national champion.
For Cuban, landing Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti was like “investing in an entrepreneur on Shark Tank,” according to a recent interview on ESPN’s First Take.
“He’d been there, done that, and he had an approach.” What stood out, Cuban added, wasn’t a grand vision or a promise to outspend competitors, but a clear, repeatable system.
“He didn’t come in and say, ‘I’m going to do all these grand things,’” Cuban said. “He just said, ‘This is how we do it. I have a specific way. It’s always worked.’”
A rejection of grandiosity runs counter to current college football norms, where NIL and the transfer portal have ignited bidding wars between top programs. But this rejection is exactly what Cuban believed in.
“It wasn’t about designing a program that just went out and tried to outbid everybody,” he said. “It was putting together a program and an organization and a culture, all the things you need to do to win, no matter what the sport is”
Excessive spending, according to Cuban, is not a means to success. “When a program does that, that’s a desperate program,” he added, dismissing the idea that success comes from something like landing the most expensive quarterback.
Instead, Cuban emphasized strategic spending and clearly defined roles, principles familiar to any founder scaling a business. “It’s not about winning the portal,” he said. “It’s about getting athletes who know their role, will work to fill that role, and understand their position with the team.”
Like a well-run company, the program succeeds not because every player is a star but because each individual has distinct strengths that work together with the distinct strengths of the others’.
It’s the ability to create this cohesion that initially drew Cuban to Cignetti. “The fact that he has a system, the way he designs everything, the way he builds organizations, that’s really what connected me,” he said.
For Cuban, Indiana’s championship was a familiar business lesson: teams with clear leadership and repeatable systems tend to win.
Curt Cignetti
“There is no problem with average… except in my business.“
“There is no problem with average… except in my business.“
The Present Moment
“The competition happens in the present moment.”
“The competition happens in the present moment.” - Mark Daigneault
Accountability
Joe Maddon developed a motto: “If I tell you the truth, you may not like me for a week. If I lie to you, you’ll hate me forever.”
Really good stuff from Rustin Dodd of The Athletic regarding teams and individual accountability…
How Do You Hold A Star Athlete Accountable?
It was after midnight on Halloween, and Ja Morant, the star of the Memphis Grizzlies, was frustrated. He stood before a group of reporters in the locker room. One asked what had gone wrong in a home loss to the Los Angeles Lakers. Morant pointed elsewhere.
“Go ask the coaching staff,” he said, before repeating: “Go ask them. They had a whole spiel in here.”
The “spiel,” in this case, was a rebuke from first-year Grizzlies head coach Tuomas Iisalo, who had called out Morant’s effort and leadership in front of the whole team. Morant responded with a terse interview that lasted 55 seconds. The incident led to a one-game suspension for Morant, weeks of consternation in Memphis and a widening of questions about Morant’s future and his own views of the organization and its leadership.
Still, the narrative is familiar: A head coach and a star player clash, leaving bruised egos and a fraught atmosphere. And even with much to sort out, the confrontations underscore one of the eternal questions of coaching: What is the best way to hold a player accountable?
If anything, sports locker rooms remain one of the last workplaces where harsh, unfiltered criticism remains a common motivational tactic. Gregg Popovich, the legendary former coach of the San Antonio Spurs, said he preferred “brutal, between-the-eyes honesty.” José Mourinho, one of the most successful soccer managers of all time, preached the virtues of “confrontation leadership,” routinely calling out his stars. And former NFL coach Bruce Arians used a direct, ruthless philosophy while leading two franchises to the Super Bowl, including a championship in Tampa Bay.
“For me, it’s like, ‘Hey, my door’s always open, man. Come on in,'” Arians said. “But you might not get the answer you’re looking for. You’re going to get the truth.”
That doesn’t mean it always works. It can light a fire in an employee; it can backfire, too. Every day, coaches must figure out a way to establish a culture of accountability — to have difficult conversations with players, to deliver necessary feedback in the most productive way possible.
“It’s important to recognize that (these conversations) are hard,” said Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School who researches team dynamics and organizational learning. “If you’re under the idea that they should be easy, then they just won’t happen.”
The approach is more art than science. A coach has to build trust, understand personalities and know when to push and when to pull.
When Jim Caldwell coached the Detroit Lions, he used to pull players aside and give them a heads up before calling them out in front of the whole team, softening some of the sting. Popovich believed in the power of one-on-one conversations. Arians always wanted to make sure his raw remarks came with a measure of love.
“You’re a hell of a guy, but your football sucks,” Arians said.
Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin adheres to a simple creed — “The standard is the standard” — and an open-door policy for any player on the team. World Series-winning manager Joe Maddon developed a motto: “If I tell you the truth, you may not like me for a week. If I lie to you, you’ll hate me forever.” Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh has long believed the key is never making things personal.
“We talk a lot with our players about confrontation,” Harbaugh said at the NFL Combine a couple years ago. “Our idea of confrontation comes from my dad; confrontation gets a bad rap in terms of definition. Confronting things is a good thing; we want to confront everything, but we don’t want to confront anybody.”
When it came to Morant, Iisalo had chosen blunt honesty, not exactly an unorthodox ploy. When Iisalo was a young coach in Germany, he realized he had a problem — an issue which he called the elephant in the room. He did not know how to handle tough and selfish players.
Iisalo, who had grown up playing in Finland, often found himself sitting in his office, grousing about player behaviors, venting to his staff. It was never productive, and he soon realized there was only one answer: Just address everything head on.
“Let’s just be brutally honest,” he explained earlier this year, on the X’s and O’s Chat podcast. “What’s the worst thing that can happen? Somebody’s going to be upset for a few minutes and we’re going to win more basketball games. But it’s such a human thing to avoid that because of fear — because of like, what if they turn against you?”
To Iisalo, the realization was the missing piece in a philosophy that made him one of the rising young coaches in Europe, resulting in a FIBA Champions League title in Germany, a EuroCup title with Paris Basketball, and eventually a move to the Grizzlies, where he replaced head coach Taylor Jenkins in March.
Iisalo brought the same mindset to Memphis. Evaluations took place in the open. Honest communication was emphasized. If players noticed an inconsistency or concern, they were instructed to speak up.
Iisalo is also an advocate for the DiSC Assessment, a popular personality profile which groups players and coaches into one of four categories — dominant, influential, steady, compliant — and provides a roadmap for the best way to communicate with each one. If a player is a high influencer — a high “I,” for short — a coach might emphasize that teammates are counting on them, tapping into their natural instincts to lead. But if a player is a high “C” — or compliant — a coach might dole out specific praise for their performance, fueling their desire to do things right.
What Iisalo intuited was something coaches have wrestled with for decades. You might know what needs to be said. But you still have to figure out how to say it.
“It’s never what you say,” Iisalo told the X’s and O’s podcast. “It’s what they hear.”
In the case of Morant, the road ahead remains uncertain. The Grizzlies went 3-8 in their next 11 games after the star’s suspension. Morant’s future with the organization has been the subject of rampant speculation, including from Kevin Durant on the court during a game.
When it comes to brutal, unvarnished honesty, it can go either way.
Memphis coach Tuomas Iisalo called out Morant’s effort earlier this season in front of the rest of the Grizzlies.
A few years ago, Deirdre G. Snyder, a lecturer at Cornell, asked a complex question: Where does team accountability actually come from?
In the business world, where Snyder studies management communication and organizational behavior, the answer has long been formal mechanisms. Companies utilize annual reviews; managers use metrics to measure employees; workers, in turn, are thought to be motivated by the system of sticks and carrots.
But after years of studying why teams function well, Snyder and two colleagues, Virginia R. Stewart and Chia-Yu Kou, co-authored a paper that took a different view. The most effective mode of accountability was not handed down by a manager but instead derived from the emotional connections that employees had for each other.
“It’s teams that know each other, trust each other, have an emotional connection to each other,” Snyder said. “The leader matters. But the leader matters because they can create this culture. I’m gonna feel more motivated to do it if I’m doing it because I don’t wanna let my teammates down.”
It was a simple idea about company culture. It illuminated a bigger idea about coaching. In Snyder’s view, there were easy ways to create a culture of shared accountability: clear expectations, consistent rules, assignments that required collaboration.
“If you have a star on your team,” Snyder said, “everybody should be held accountable to the same rules.”
When I shared the study’s findings with Joe Boylan, a former NBA assistant coach who also contributes to The Athletic, it reminded him of a story from when he worked for the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Chris Finch, the Timberwolves head coach, was brutally honest during film sessions, pointing out mistakes. But he always began with Anthony Edwards, then one of the NBA’s emerging young stars. Edwards was charismatic and supremely confident; he was also so receptive to the criticism that one day D’Angelo Russell, the team’s veteran point guard, approached Finch with a request. He needed to be included in film sessions more. He wanted to be criticized, too.
“It became a status thing to be the guy that’s getting ripped in film,” Boylan said. “Which is such a brilliant thing if you can create that culture.”
The only problem: The process of creating one is never easy.
Chris Finch and Anthony Edwards created a culture in Minnesota where players almost wanted to be called out.
The Grizzlies’ new coach was a blunt practitioner of public accountability. The franchise’s star was proud, sensitive and quick to question. The discord resulted in a tense feud that reverberated through the organization, a familiar story about what can go wrong when raw honesty is the policy.
Except the coach was not Iisalo. In this case, it was David Fizdale, who spent his first season in Memphis clashing with star forward Marc Gasol in 2016-17.
Fizdale had come to the Grizzlies from the Miami Heat, where accountability was a daily project. As an assistant, he used to push head coach Erik Spoelstra, the two ending up in shouting matches. The intensity permeated the locker room and provided one of the building blocks of “Heat Culture.”
But once in Memphis, Fizdale challenged Gasol. His star did not respond well. Early in 2017, Fizdale benched Gasol in a loss to Brooklyn. One day later, he was fired.
The details of the feud were complicated — disagreements about scheme, shifting power dynamics in the organization — but they underscored a truth: Brutal honesty sounds great in theory, but it’s not always a panacea for leadership. You still have to manage personalities and gain trust. You still have to employ a personal touch to pull it off.
“I coached him how my high school coach would have coached me, where I tried to tear his ego down to the barest bones in front of the group,” Fizdale told Andscape in 2021. “I got caught up in my own ego and my emotions because I was so frustrated with the losing.”
Fizdale later met with leadership experts from different industries, reflecting on what went wrong. He realized how much relationships matter.
Human egos are fragile. Research has shown that the feeling of shame is associated with reduced learning and self esteem. When people are confronted with harsh criticism, their nervous system often responds as if under attack.
“There’s a difference between holding someone accountable and humiliating them,” Snyder said.
Melissa Swift, an organizational consultant and author, believes there is a simple reason that criticism often backfires.
“People get very hung up on what they’re going to say to the person,” Swift said. “And they aren’t really considering that the person needs space to say things back.”
A few years ago, Darris Nichols, then the head men’s basketball coach at Radford University in Virginia, realized his players needed a team meeting to address some issues, clear the air and move forward. But he wasn’t sure how they would respond to a confrontational prompt, so he had a staff member cue up elephant sounds during the middle of a film session.
As the noise got louder, the players became more confused. Finally, a player caught on. “The elephant in the room,” one said.
“It was kind of like a laughing moment,” Nichol said. “But it made them talk. It gave them a platform … a space to problem-solve.”
Nichol went on Amazon and bought a stuffed elephant and named it “Truth.” When he was hired at La Salle University in March, he brought the elephant to Philadelphia, placing it on a chair in the film room and offering a disclaimer whenever it’s time to get real.
“If you leave the locker room and something’s bothering you and you didn’t say it to a team, you’re a fraud,” Nichols tells his players.
When Snyder, the faculty member at Cornell, advises business leaders on conflict management, she teaches the SBIA feedback model, in which the manager captures the situation, describes the observed behavior, outlines the impact in a factual manner and then comes up with an action to rectify the issue.
“We’re making all of these assumptions about why the person is doing what they’re doing and there’s not a place for that,” Snyder. “Explain the behavior and do it like you’re a lawyer.”
Just days after Iisalo angered Morant, Duke coach Jon Scheyer called out his own best player, freshman Cam Boozer, at halftime during his collegiate debut, telling the star forward he was “playing soft.”
It was a risk: How would one of the top recruits in the country and a projected top-five pick in next year’s NBA draft handle being challenged?
Boozer responded with 15 points and 13 rebounds in a victory over Texas and said after the game that Scheyer’s comments motivated him.
This time, it worked.
The Last Lesson
The last lesson my father ever taught me.
Seventeen years ago, on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2008, I was getting ready to head down to practice at Rhode Island College, where I was in my 4th year as the head coach, 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 I had to actually get in my car and drive down to practice. As I walked out of the Rec Center towards my car, I looked at my phone. It was my Dad calling, which was odd, 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 dead of a heart attack on the floor of his kitchen in Tampa by his cleaning lady. He was 63 years old.
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 scream she let out. 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 you're in the situation where someone close to you has a death in the family and you feel like you're 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, and my Dad had asked him what his name was, befriended him, developed a relationship with him. He asked him about his family. He found out he had two young kids in catholic 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 Catholic grammar school in their neighborhood.
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.I think about this man 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 in need.
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 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.
“You Can’t Just Wear The Sweatshirt”
“You can’t just wear the sweatshirt. You have to sweat.”
Tara Vanderveer on living the values you preach as a coach.