On teamwork and a busted out tooth

With the NCAA's March Madness basketball tournament underway I wanted to share a little story from the world of college basketball before I come back to my senses and realize once again that the college game is inferior in every way to 'real' basketball, i.e. the NBA.

A week or so ago, during the West Coast Conference's post-season tournament, the team from Saint Mary's University found itself in a tough game versus conference rival San Diego. Late in the game during a scrum for possession of the ball, San Diego big man Jito Kok managed to separate Saint Mary's forward Brad Waldow from one of his front teeth.

Undeterred, and as you can see in the GIF below, Waldow reacted like most tough competitors would, with the knocked-out tooth in hand he proceeded to head over to the bench to find someone to relieve him of said chiclet so he could continue playing in the still undecided game. But take a look at what happened as Waldow looks to the sideline for some help with the tooth:

Thanks - Business Insider

Did you catch what happened as Waldow approached the bench and looked for someone to take the tooth from him?

First Saint Mary's head coach Randy Bennett leans back in a 'no 'effin way I am taking the tooth' manner, and delegates down the bench to his assistant. The first assistant coach then coolly points to the next assistant down the line. And once that assistant refused to help a brother out, Waldow just tossed the tooth on the floor in order to head back into the contest.

Waldow, the player, the guy out there on the front lines taking shots to the mouth, loosing teeth, bleeding all over the place couldn't get any of the suits on the bench, the organization's 'leaders' to give him an (admittedly gross) hand when he needed it. And all Waldow wanted to do was to continue playing, to keep putting it on the line for the team.

Sure, the natural reaction just about anyone would have in that kind of a circumstance would be similar to the Saint Mary's coaches - I mean, who the heck wants a handful of someone's bloody, busted-out tooth?

But their reaction is also instructive I think, because when their player was in need, no one stepped up to help, they let their first reaction overcome their roles as leaders. They ask players like Waldow to make all kinds of sacrifices in the name of the team. It would not have killed one of them to make a little bit of a sacrifice themselves and help him out when he needed it.

This may be a goofy, insignificant example but I think it serves as a good reminder for any of us that have a leadership position. We ask the people we are leading to give up things all the time. 

What are we prepared to give up for them?

Have a great weekend!

Carp, addictive bait, and just showing up

We have all heard the old chestnut about the connection between 'showing up' and success - there are a few variations of the idea, but the one that is most often repeated, and that we probably cringe in horror when we see it randomly shoot past on a Twitter feed or a Facebook page is attributed to Woody Allen, and reads something like:

'Eighty percent of success is showing up.'

The idea being, I suppose, that often we short-circuit our own chances for success by not doing theI prefer Romanian bait simple, basic, and often kind of easy parts of the work, making true success even more unlikely. It is a kind of comforting notion as well - one begins to think that merely 'showing up' - i.e. getting to work on time, doing the pre-reading, passing on eating the extra donut - will put you 80% of the way towards wherever you'd like to go. And maybe that is true. But often just showing up won't get it done in a truly competitive situation, unless of course you call 'showing up' arriving five months before it is actually required, and creating a set of conditions from which, during the actual competition, you will be certain to win. 

Submitted for your review, from a piece on the sports blog Deadspin, the story of the recent World Carp Fishing Championship, (yes, such a thing exists), and how 'showing up' five months early paid off for the Romanian team.  

Winners Romania had spent the five months preceding the tournament feeding the fish of Lake Corbu with a secret bait recipe. Unfortunately for the 10-man England side, who finished 18th, they turned up at last month's tournament with £10,000 worth of traditional "boilies".

The mash-up of flour, egg and flavorer such as blended dried dog food is popular with British fish but failed to spark a flicker of interest in the Romanian carp which were happy to gorge on the feed offered on the hooks of their hosts which they had grown obligingly fat on throughout the summer.

The debacle has prompted fury in the highly-competitive world of carp fishing, a discipline where technical know-how and secret techniques can make the team tactics of cycle road racing appear as complex and cut throat as a round of tiddlywinks.

I don't know why, but I dig this story. Maybe it's the underdog angle, except I have no idea if the Romanian team were truly underdogs. Or maybe it's the appreciation for the way they figured out there was more than one way to win at this contest, and if they were willing to do the lengthy preparation and pre-work that was needed, that they would win in the end, with the extra bonus of it seeming like cheating or at least unsporting behavior making it even more compelling.

But in the end, I guess I like the story because it pokes a little bit at the Woody Allen quote that I am sick of hearing. The other teams all 'showed up' at the Carp fishing contest, but were crushed by the Romanians who just 'showed up' as well.  The difference was only how they interpreted 'showing up', something that no pithy quote from a celebrity can teach.

So here's my (non-celebrity) advice on when you should show up - earlier than you planned.

Have a great week!

MAMBA OUT: Leadership and Likability

One of the NBA's most accomplished players, the Laker's Kobe Bryant, has been a controversial figure throughout most of his career. Through the course of his 15-plus year career, highlighted by 5 NBA titles, he has been dogged by on-court accusations of selfishness and petulance, and off-court problems, most notably a 1998 sexual assault trial in Colorado.

Bryant is a lighting-rod type player, and opinions about him are mostly clear and starkly divided. He is, to use the cliche, a player you either love or hate. If you love him, it's for his single-minded focus and competitiveness, his intense drive to succeed, and his pursuit of winning, although certainly on his terms. For those that can't stand Bryant, they usually point to his on-court domination of the ball, his seeming lack of respect for teammates not as talented as him, and a sort of general 'unlikability' that makes him, at times, kind of difficult to cheer for. Bryant, as the best player on his team, and the de facto leader, has often had little patience or positive things to say about his own team mates that fail to live up to his standards and expectations.

And it's that last point, Bryant's unlikability that I want to call out, inspired by a recent little leadership manifesto of sorts, that Bryant posted on Facebook, and was reported on by the Pro Basketball Talk blog. Here's a piece of the Bryant message, with some comments, and really questions after the quote:

Sometimes you must prioritize the success of the team ahead of how your own image is perceived. The ability to elevate those around you is more than simply sharing the ball or making teammates feel a certain level of comfort. It’s pushing them to find their inner beast, even if they end up resenting you for it at the time.

I’d rather be perceived as a winner than a good teammate. I wish they both went hand in hand all the time but that’s just not reality.

Some interesting takes from the Mamba, (Bryant's self-designated nickname). In a hyper-competitive business, where the difference between winning and losing is razor-thin, and the window of opportunity for achieving the ultimate goal, winning championships, closes quickly, Bryant acknowledges that he views leadership and likeability as two mutually exclusive traits. In his view, you can do what it takes to lead, to inspire others to get the best out of themselves, and to put the team in the best place to win, OR, you can worry about being liked, and how you are perceived by the team, (and the public).

The Mamba is pretty clear on which approach works for him, and it is kind of hard to argue with both his personal and team success over the years.  But reading his manifesto seems to engender a contradictory reaction - Bryant sounds kind of mean, petty, and yes, almost completely unlikeable.

Which I suppose is the real question - can you be a true and successful leader and not be willing to point out in very clear terms the shortcomings you might see in the team? 

Can you be a great leader and worry about how you are perceived?

If you want to win in a competitive game should you worry at all about being likeable?

Mamba out...

The Obvious Wisdom of Turning Back

Late in 2011 the incredible Meg Bear gifted a number of her colleagues and friends with a neat gift - a Year 2012 'Despair' desk calendar - you may be familiar with it, but if not I am sure you are probably familiar with the cheesy, hacky, inspirational 'Successories' posters which the Despair calendar lampoons.

The image on the right of this post shows the 'October' page from the Despair calendar - a funny take on perseverance that reads:

Perseverance - The Courage to Ignore the Obvious Wisdom of Turning Back

Funny stuff, right? 

But also raises what is I think a pretty interesting question and points out a kind of pop-leadership paradox, or at least something that gives me pause for a minute which is this:

Failure, the need to have experienced pretty profound and sometimes public failure seems to get more and more acceptable all the time, (Yippee!). There are more and more pieces about the value of failure, and failing fast, and having fun with failure, you get the idea.

But as we simultaneously embrace failure, and even celebrate the ability to admirably overcome failure, we also seem to fail to acknowledge that turning back, bailing out, walking away, and yes, even the Q-word, quitting, particularly early enough so that the inevitable failure doesn't even occur, at least not to the level that could cause real and enduring damage, perhaps should also be celebrated.

Sometimes it is ok, and even the prudent and wise thing, not just to experiment and fail, but to experiment and withdraw when all signs begin to point to failure.

One last thing, while the 'celebrate failure' meme seems to continue to take hold and perpetuate, I have a sneaky suspicion that the people in charge, owners, investors, heck - even HR folks and average hiring managers, 'embrace' people's failures a whole lot less than the meme suggests.

Too much failure in your story might not be as wonderful a thing as you've been led to believe.

A history peppered with a little less failure and a little more 'got out while the getting was good' is better.

Of course, a career litany of resounding achievement and success is best, but that advice is about as useful as the Successories posters themselves.

Happy Monday! Try not to fail too much today!

Just kidding. Kind of.

Doc Rivers and Buying In to the System

Even though the Miami LeBrons dropped a discouraging loss on the Boston Celtics last night in the NBA Eastern Conference playoffs, the Celtics run over the last several years, (including an NBA title in 2008), has been one of the most compelling stories in all of sports. An experienced, veteran team, led by three aging hall of fame caliber players, (Pierce, Garnett, Allen), and driven on the court by a mercurial and fabulously talented young point guard, Rajon Rondo, that together present a unique set of challenges in terms of management and coaching. How to keep star players who were always the leaders and best players on every team they'd ever played on happy in a system that, in order to achieve sustained success, often demands that individual egos be sublimated to the greater good. How to blend in new and talented players like Rondo, and lesser (but still important), additional players to fill needed roles on the squad.

It is easy, and in fact every professional sports team and coach talks about the need for players in a team sport to be willing to sacrifice their individual goals at times for the benefit of the team's goals, but very often all the talk is well, just talk. For a myriad of reasons many players and teams never can reach that point where team goals are seen as more important that player's individual goals. Particularly on the professional level where each player might have one eye on his next contract, which very likely will be enhanced by his ability to post impressive individual scoring statistics, whether or not these statistics are achieved in the context of team play.

The fact that everyone talks about 'team play' and 'team goals' and very few teams ever seem to manage to actually buy-in to the concept, makes this short video (embedded below, email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), from Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers worth  two-and-a-half-minutes of your time on Friday. Rivers lays out the three simple, yet hard to pull off things a leader needs to do to get the best performance out of a team.

Short and sweet, but really a key point. Role players in the NBA, and perhaps even in your organization, don't necessarily see themselves as just role players. In order to get them, as well as the stars and former stars of team, to accept and truly buy-in to the overall team concept you really have to three things firmly in place.

One - First, the team has to buy-in to the leader as someone they trust and believe can lead them

Two - The team and each player has to buy-in to the actual business or team strategy and see it as a winning approach

Three - They have to understand their individual role and beyond that, have to see how the effective or exceptional performance of their individual role is essential for team success.

This last one seems to me the most important and often the most overlooked. We talk a lot in talent and performance management about things like goal alignment and line of sight and making sure employees and team members understand and buy-in to the organizational mission. And those things are certainly important and necessary. But that last bit that Rivers talks about in the video, that every player on the team needs to believe that their individual contribution is absolutely critical to the team's success, and that every contribution is essential in order to win, well it seems to me that part of the 'buy-in' formula often gets underplayed.

There are lots of variables and components that have to be assembled in just the right way to have a winning basketball team as well as a effective and productive work team. In the clip above Doc Rivers lays out his take on what a leader needs to install in order to get everyone on the team bought in and he does it in under three minutes. Nicely done Doc.

Now just take all the extra time on your hands and figure out how to keep LeBron from dropping 50 on you in Game 7.

Have a Great Weekend!