Accountability

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.