The Wisdom of Jeff Van Gundy - Part V

The sage was at it again the other night during the Oklahoma City - Memphis NBA playoff game.

In case you don't know what I am referring to, former NBA head coach, and current TV analyst Jeff Van Gundy (JVG) dropped another bit of simple, yet essential knowledge about basketball that I think is also directly applicable to the workplace, management, and organizational dynamics.

By my reckoning, that is nothing new for JVG, and if you wish - you can check out the previous installments of the JVG 'wisdom' series here -  (Parts I, II, III, and IV).

But back to the story. During the game Oklahoma City forward Nick Collison made a smart play on defense to cause Memphis to lose the ball, hustled to the offensive end of the floor, and then positioned himself properly to make a scoring move when the ball was rotated to him in the flow of the offensive play. It was a brief series of actions that were not necessarily terribly athletic or skilled or even that remarkable, but as a kind of orchestrated series did add up to an excellent and winning (apologies Chas. Sheen) play.

Immediately after Collison, who is not a starting or star player on the team, completed the play, JVG observed that winning teams need guys like Collison, players that may not have all the physical skills of the top players on the team, but have found ways to contribute using capabilities and attributes that are mostly 'choices' and not simply genetic gifts.

The money line from JVG:

'Guys like Collison, guys that grind, are essential. The best ones are coachable, accountable, and professional. And you can win with guys like that.'

Coachable - willing to accept suggestions, able to make adjustments in style of play to fit the team goals, and cognizant that what may have worked in the past (in college, or on former pro team), might not be the desired behavior on the current team.

Accountable - understands the role, knows how the role impacts and contributes to the success of the team, makes the effort to put himself in the right situations, and simply does his job fully knowing the rest of the team depends on him to meet his objectives. And if other guys on the team, maybe the star players, are having an 'off' night, then he knows when to try and give a little more than normally needed.

Professional - in the narrow sense, we are all professional, i.e. we are paid to perform. But what JVG really meant was a level of personal integrity, pride, and dedication to himself as a player, to his teammates, and to the supporters of the team. This means showing up and giving your best effort even when times are tough, when the team is down, or when you are not meeting your personal objectives. It means being proud of your contribution in every game, and even every practice. It means setting an example for others to follow, even if you don't hold a formal title or leadership role.

Coachable, accountable, professional. All important. All under your control every day. Super talented people in any game or industry or field can get away with only one or two of these, and can still make incredible contributions to the organization. But if you are like most people, and are not in that rare category of naturally talented superstars, just focusing on being coachable, accountable and professional will go a long way in determining your success in any role.

And stacking your team, no matter what the game, with those kinds of players will make you look pretty smart as a leader as well.

And that my friends, is the Wisdom of Jeff Van Gundy.

The 8 Man Rotation - Ebook

Today I am really pleased to support the launch of a little not-so-secret project that has been in the works for the last few months - an Ebook called 'The 8 Man Rotation', that I have the pleasure and honor to have played a small role in creating.

The good Dr. Matthew Stollak, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at St. Norbert College, author of the excellent True Faith HR blog, and one of the most passionate sports fans I know hatched the plan to collect, curate, and organize some of the best 'Sports and HR' blog posts written in the last couple of years from a fantastic collection of writers, and create a free Ebook from the hundreds of pieces.

The roster of contributors for The 8 Man Rotation Ebook reads like a who's who of dudes whose better athletic days are far behind them, but whose passion for sports, and the lessons and insights sports can offer to our profession, our workplaces, and our relationships continues unabated, and in spite of withering criticism from some who would hold that the endless sports analogies are tiresome and irrelevant. Haters.

The starting lineup:

Kris Dunn - The HR Capitalist

Lance Haun - ReHaul.com

Tim Sackett - The Tim Sackett Project

Matt Stollak - True Faith HR

and little old me.

The Ebook covers topic ranging from Workforce Planning and Strategy, to Recruiting, to Performance and Talent Management. Of course with a heavy mix of basketball, football, and baseball mixed in.

The PDF version of the Ebook can be downloaded here, and also can be accessed on Slideshare here (also embedded below, email and RSS subscribers may need to click through).

 The 8 Man Rotation Ebook

View more documents from steveboese

Many, many thanks to Matt Stollak for having the idea for the project, sifting through many hundreds of posts about LeBron James, and compiling this really awesome publication of which I am proud to be a small part.

Now download the Ebook and keep it handy while you watch the NBA Playoffs tonight!

Grading Talent the Big Tuna Way

Last night ESPN ran an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how American professional teams typically evaluate talent, with special guest former National Football League executive and head coach Bill 'Big Tuna' Parcells. The context of the show was the league's upcoming college player draft, the annual exercise where the league's teams assess, grade, and ultimately select from 5-10 players each to 're-supply' the talent on their teams. It is a massive, high-stakes, expensive, and critically important recruiting, assessment, and alignment exercise.

Parcells' resume and achievements as a successful coach, and talent evaluator are solid - he served in very senior roles at several NFL organizations, winning two Super Bowl Championships as the Head Coach of the New York Football Giants. 

In the show Parcells' shared some of the talent selection criteria and thought processes that organizations that he was a member of, and in general, most other teams tend to follow when making player selections in the league's annual college player draft. Some of the criteria and processes were fairly obvious, and would apply generally to any talent selection or recruiting context, (players who had been kicked off their college team for disciplinary reasons should be avoided), but some of the other concepts Parcells discussed perhaps are not so apparent to casual observers, and just might have some additional applicability to more conventional talent selection processes.

Here are three Talent Evaluation ideas straight from the Big Tuna:

1. Understand the predictors of success (some are not so obvious)

In NFL football every team measures and grades the basic and easily understood physical characteristics of potential draftees, (height, weight, strength, speed), but during the show Parcells mentioned a few not-so-obvious keys he assesses, (e.g. for the position of cornerback, length of the player's arms). For potential quarterback prospects, Parcells insisted he only wanted players that actually graduated from college, as he felt it demonstrated intelligence, and more importantly commitment. 

The larger point is every competitor has access to the same talent pool, the basic and obvious assessment criteria are widely known and universally adopted, so finding the less clear and more predictive evaluation criteria that other teams may not have discovered is one of the ways to claim some advantage and make better selection decisions than the competition.

2. Make sure everyone involved in Talent selection understands these predictors

Once the criteria is established, and a process to collect and assess these criteria developed, Parcells emphasized the critical need for everyone involved in the talent selection process to understand the criteria, and consistently grade to the criteria. From scouts, to assistant coaches, to even the team owner, the definition of what a top candidate looks like has to be understood by everyone. There are so many players to assess, that no one member of the organization can possibly 'know' every candidate, so the selection process becomes a team effort, and the talent selection team has to have that common ground for any chance of success. Talent is talked about in the common language of the team's assessment ratings, and no conversation about talent fails to reference these assessments.

3. Know yourself

Parcells described a common acronym used in football draft processes, NFU, which means 'Not For Us'. This term is assigned to players that the strict adherence to positional capability assessments or past production in the college game might indicate are good candidates and should be considered in the selection process. But these NFL players have raised some concern off the field, of their attitude, style, work ethic somehow will not be a cultural match to what the organization is looking for. Parcells strongly advises teams to know themselves, know the style they want to play, the kinds of mental makeups that players need to have to 'fit' on the team, and to avoid the temptation of selecting players with fantastic physical skills that might not 'fit' otherwise. These kinds of gambles rarely work out, and they are the ones that get coaches and talent evaluators fired.

But in the end, despite incredibly detailed and complex processes for physical measurement, tests of intelligence, and well-documented and easily reviewed past performance in college football, selecting players for NFL teams is still and imperfect process. So-called 'can't miss' top prospects often fail to live up to expectations, while others deemed marginal prospects once vetted by the traditional processes end up as star players.

Having a system and some ground rules to follow, to find ways to uncover predictors your competition may have missed, and perhaps most importantly a deep and confident organizational self-awareness are a few ways our pal the Big Tuna offered up to try and land more Peyton Mannings and less Ryan Leafs (inside football reference, Google it).

The NBA, where your team leader hates your chances

Tonight is like Christmas, my birthday, and the last day of school all rolled into one - the start of the 2010-2011 NBA season!

For me, it means 50 or so nights to be disappointed by the New York Knicks, the chance to watch LeBron and his talents with the Miami Heat pretty much every other night, and hopefully more great and pithy leadership lessons from Jeff Van Gundy.

At the start of the year most NBA teams have some sense of excitement, (real or fake), and express optimism (at least publicly) about their chances for a successful upcoming season. You know, the whole 'hope springs eternal' bit.  And why not?  Every team has at least a few star quality players, and even the 9th and 10th guy on the bench is a pretty talented player as well.

So prior to the start of the campaign, confidence is pretty much the order of the day, and standard cliches abound. 'If we stay healthy and stick to our strengths, we can contend', or 'If we all concentrate on our roles and share the ball, we will be right there at the end', are mostly what you hear from the top players and team leaders before opening night.  

Given that, it was pretty surprising to see the quotes attributed to two-time NBA league MVP Steve Nash about his team, the Phoenix Suns, and their prospects for the coming season. Nash has been reported to have said (variously) that the team has "a long ways to go", is really a "work in progress". and finally, "to be honest, if I was outside this picture, and a betting man, I would probably pick us to be outside the playoffs".

So your team's best player, and leader, goes public with his expressions of doubt about the team's chances for a successful season.  Probably not going to do too much to fire up the fan base, or even inspire the rest of the players to (over) achieve.  It is pretty common for sports teams to try and adopt an 'no one believes in us' or 'it is us up against the world' strategy to generate and sustain motivation, but that generally only works when the 'them' are the media, the other teams in the league, or even directed against former players and coaches that have departed.

Usually 'it's us against them' falls down when the 'them' is one of your own, and worse still, your leader.

What's your take - does the team leader need to 'fake it', at least publicly?

Go Knicks!

The things we carry with us

Last week I caught the latest installment in ESPN's consistently excellent '30 For 30' series of documentaries, a film called 'Once Brothers', which chronicles the saga of the great Yugoslavian National Basketball team of the late 1980's and early 1990's through images, recollections, and first person accounts.

The story centers around the friendship of the two best players on the team, Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic, their time as national team members, their journey to America and the NBA, and ultimately their estrangement as war in their homeland (Divac is Serbian while Petrovic was from Croatia), tears apart their country, their team, their friendship, and their lives. 

Quick re-set of the major developments in the story:

1988 - Yugoslavia (essentially composed of Republics of Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia), and led by Divac and Petrovic, wins Olympic Silver Medal

1989 - Divac and Petrovic both join the NBA, Divac to the Los Angeles Lakers, and Petrovic to the Portland Trail Blazers. The comrades talk almost daily, and support each other as brothers would.

1990 - Yugoslavia wins Gold Medal in World Basketball Championships, defeating the USA and Soviet Union.

1991 - Petrovic traded to the New Jersey Nets, where he is afforded increased playing time and emerges as a star in the league

1991 - Widespread civil war breaks out in Yugoslavia. Croatia and Serbia are now at war (it was actually way more complex than that).  Armed conflict would last until 1995.  

1992 - Yugoslavian team disbands, Divac and Petrovic become estranged, as the conflict between their countries sours their relationship.

1992 - United States 'Dream Team' with Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson wins Olympic Basketball Gold Medal. The USA assembled this team of professionals in large measure due to the defeat at the hands of Yugoslavia in 1990.

1993 - Petrovic tragically killed in a car accident in Germany. He had just completed his finest season in the NBA, averaging 22 points per game for the New Jersey Nets

2004 - Divac retires after 15 years in the NBA

Divac serves as the film's narrator and central figure, and it is his quest to attempt to understand, and eventually find peace with his memory of the war, with Petrovic's tragic death, and the lingering questions of 'What might have been' are what drives the film and what gives it its emotional base.

It is of course a sad and tragic story.  The war was lengthy, costly, and devastating.  The lives and families of millions of people forever changed.  Petrovic dying at 28 in a car accident, just as he had emerged as a star in the NBA was such a waste. Divac, who we learn has carried with him for almost twenty years the pain, guilt, and unresolved questions of his friendship with Petrovic, never to find closure since Petrovic dies before the war ends, denying the former teammates, the former brothers any chance to reconcile the past.

Who cares right?  I mean, what does it matter about a stupid basketball team in the context of a bloody, brutal war?  Does it really matter if a united Yugoslavian team might have given the Dream Team a scare in 1992?

It doesn't I suppose.

But what is interesting to me in the story is Divac himself.  He carries on through war in his homeland (and we see in the film that Divac considered himself as a representative of Yugoslavia, and not Serbia), through the death of his best friend, and through the adjustment to a new country and culture under the intense spotlight of professional sports.  For more that 10 years after Petrovic's death he continues to perform at a high level.

For 10 years he showed up to work carrying the memory of war, and loss, and his dead friend, and of his country that would be forever changed. And I won't let you get away with, 'He was being paid millions of dollars to play, of course he continued to show up'. 

The money could never bring back Petrovic. Could never bring back any of the victims of the war. Could never heal the survivors facing their own painful memories. He showed up. He played. He endured. And for years I watched Divac not knowing any of this, ignorant of the baggage he must of had to carry with him on the court each night. 

The people we work with, work for, and each of us ourselves - we are all carrying something with us when we walk in the office today.  Sadness, pain, maybe even tragedy along for the ride.  Divac played through all that, but he never forgot any of it.

I hope we can be kind to those who perhaps are not as strong as him.

Note : 'Once Brothers' will re-air on Wednesday October 20 at 9:30PM on ESPN. Watch, set your TIVO, but don't miss it. The trailer for the film is below (email subscribers click through).