Some of the best leadership lessons come from legendary sports coaches, men and women who have transformed groups of talented individuals into 99th-percentile teams. Business leaders can and should steal liberally from their leadership playbooks.
Great coaches elicit sacrifice by challenging players to do more than win
Great sports coaches serve as unique role models for business leaders because, for them, the game is more than just scoring points on the board. They understand that winning games, and even championships, is the most basic requirement, the goal for which the game was invented.
But for the great coaches, there is always a goal behind the goal, a compelling vision of what winning, if achieved, can mean, not only to the team, but to everyone invested in the team, including the community for which they play.
If winning is the most basic requirement, then the commitment and athleticism it inspires are too. By creating a compelling vision, coaches inspire something deeper. They inspire sacrifice, the internal urge to go above and beyond the basic requirements.
“Ultimately, I believe that’s what leadership is all about: helping others to achieve their greatness by helping the organization to succeed,” wrote John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach.
Let’s clarify one critically important detail: John Wooden is one of the winningest and most decorated basketball coaches in the history of college ball. He and his teams won, a lot. Like, almost all the time, for several decades.
You’d think his former players would go on and on about winning games, championships and scoring records, right? Nope. When they talk about Coach Wooden, they talk about how he helped them become better men. It is worth five minutes to watch the great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s eulogy of Coach Wooden. There is precious little talk of the game.
For Abdul-Jabbar and his teammates, like all of Wooden’s players throughout the decades, winning was the basic requirement, and certainly an important core goal. But Coach Wooden clarified that disciplined basketball was a vehicle for something much deeper: achieving personal greatness and building the character to live a great life.
To apply these principles to business, ask yourself why you created your business. The answer to this question will tell you why your business exists. But why should your business continue to exist? What is the gift you yearn to give to the world, to the people around you, including your employees, via your business?
If you can tap into that, you’ll inspire more than performance. You’ll inspire sacrifice.
Great coaches create capacity, which is the synergy between skill and autonomy
Coaches at the highest level of a sport know that skill in the fundamentals is table stakes. Being great at the sport’s fundamentals gets you into the arena. Maintaining and developing those fundamentals is what keeps you there.
That is why professional sports teams have armies of staff members to assess training needs, and plan and execute practices.
But skill building is not enough. The leader must create an environment where skills meld–and reform–into something greater, the whole no mere sum of the parts.
The coach must show players how this team collaborates, how players can also be leaders, how they can be more coachable, and how they can coach each other.
At the highest level, a team, then, is no mere admixture of skills. It is an organism in and of itself. It possesses a group mind and makes decisions on its own, because it operates at an immeasurable level of trust. At that level of collaboration, the leader provides strategic objectives, and the team provides pathways, executing confidently. Autonomously.
This kind of autonomy in a team gives strategic bandwidth back to the leader.
In The Playbook, legendary soccer coach José Mourinho talks about coaching the best football players in Europe. He says, “It is very important for a coach to understand, you are not going to teach them how to play football…you are going to teach them how to play football in that team…the players have to understand the game [that your team is playing at the highest level], because during the game I cannot make decisions for them. They are guided. They discover the way.”
Mourinho says, “I don’t coach football players. I coach football teams.” In other words, the leader’s job is to teach a team to transcend its individual components. Then to show them the mountaintop. And let them discover the pathway there.
Great coaches understand that sacrifice and capacity are sustainable only through deep relationships and culture.
Eliciting sacrifice from and building autonomy in a team requires extraordinary focus. But this challenge pales in comparison with sustaining the sacrifice you derive from a compelling vision, and sustaining the autonomy you derive from coaching teams, not individuals.
The only path to sustaining those great organizational gifts is building great relationships, based on trust, to feed a performance culture.
It may seem obvious, but it bears emphasizing here that we cannot build trust with people whom we do not appreciate for their uniqueness, for the gifts they possess. Can we call this appreciation ‘love’?
If that’s too much for you, call it ‘honor’. Can we honor what is unique in the people who work with us? Of course we can, assuming we can exercise the humility required to set aside cynicism and judgment. The reward is loyalty.
Honoring what is great in our colleagues provides them with confidence from an external source (i.e., you, the leader) when they are struggling to find it in themselves; it helps the leader to swiftly find the right place for everyone in the organization–or, just as swiftly, determine that there isn’t a place, and doing them the kindness of freeing them to find meaningful work elsewhere; and, perhaps most importantly, it creates a platform for trust.
Three simple ideas about trust that every leader needs to know:
- Trust is not something you demand from others. It is something you earn from others
- Monitor your self-interest, as nothing erodes trust faster
- Demonstrate your willingness to let the organization and its people be the object of your decision-making at all times. This will serve as a bulwark against self-interest
Here at IGW, we define leadership as that uniquely human energy that unlocks the will inside of others to actualize a worthy outcome. How can you…
- Develop a mission and vision that inspire sacrifice?
- Provide the training in skill and autonomy to create capacity?
- Foster appreciation for the inherent greatness of every member of your team?
- Earn trust?
The bottom line? Leadership isn’t about having power over others, but rather creating power with others. And if you can master these lessons from the coaching world, you’ll be amazed at what your team can achieve.
At IGW, we are dedicated to fostering transformative leadership experiences, and we believe in building leaders who, in turn, build leaders. Sign up here to receive inspiration and valuable resources to empower your leadership skills directly in your inbox!
