Leadership Lessons from John Wooden
Dr. Cory Dobbs, The Academy for Sport Leadership

It’s Been Decades Since “Coach” was on the Sidelines but His Commitment to Character is as Relevant as it Ever Was

March is known for its madness. A time when team greatness is revealed. March is also a time when the best baseball players in the world go back to work— fine-tuning the fundamentals of their game. College basketball’s greatest coach was a tour de force for principled leadership and success. Great teams and fundamentals are of vital importance no matter what your endeavor, no matter what time of year.

Do you need proof that leadership is not about style? The legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden suggests that leadership is influence derived from one’s character. For Wooden, the ideal leader is someone whose life and character motivate people to follow. The best kind of leadership derives its capacity from the force of example, not from the power of position or personality.

Much of what passes as leadership today is nothing more than manipulation of people by sticks and carrots—threats and rewards. That’s not effective leadership for the long-term. Authentic leadership seeks to motivate people from the inside, by an appeal to the head and the heart, not by use of command and coercion. Compliance seldom, if ever, leads to authentic commitment.

Wooden influenced players through his character which he displayed in everything he did, from the way he recruited student-athletes to the way he taught them to put their socks on.

For Wooden character is the essential element necessary for great leadership.

Steve Jamison, author of best-selling books on John Wooden and Bill Walsh, has spent the past fifteen years working with Wooden on various books on leadership. He teaches Wooden’s principles to business leaders at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.

“The reason he resonates with people, relate to him is as a teacher, leader, coach, he was extraordinary and as a person he was even more extraordinary. That’s a tough combination,” Jamison said.

Jamison began working with Wooden to organize and distill his wisdom for coaches and leaders in any industry. At the time he couldn’t find a publisher because most thought Wooden was no longer relevant. As one publisher told him “Coach Wooden is a little dusty on the shelf.”

Character, however, is never a quality to be shelved. Coach Wooden, as Jamison said, “Didn’t seek players who were characters. He wanted players that had character. Character was something that he felt essential to being a good performer, a good leader. Much of the problems we see today we can lay at the foot of leaders that have little character.”

When You’re Through Learning, You’re Through
Coach Wooden practiced life-long learning—as you would expect from a great teacher. Jamison, a leadership expert and educator said, “A lot of leaders get to a position with a lot of authority and power, it’s very easy to become overconfident and arrogant and think you know it all. John Wooden never made that mistake. He was very secure in what he knew but he never stopped learning. Never stopped looking for answers.”

“How willing are you to learn?” Jamison asks. “That doesn’t mean just opening a book or taking a course but how willing are you to challenge your beliefs and the way you do things, examining ways to improve. How willing are you to entertain new ideas? Whatever your level of success, self evaluation is important.”

Jamison said Coach Wooden simply asks leaders “How can you improve if you don’t have the ability to analyze yourself?” Jamison backed up this declaration from Coach Wooden by offering a story that exemplifies his commitment to self-evaluation.

“In Wooden on Leadership, Jamison explained, “ he tells the story of getting to the 1962 semi-finals of the NCAA national championships where UCLA played Cincinnati, the defending nation champs. They lost in the last seconds. On the flight back his assistant coach Jerry Norman says to him ‘coach you know we got some guys coming in next year (Goodrich/Erickson). You know, maybe we should look at bringing in the full court press.’ John Wooden knew what it was, he’d tried it his first two years at UCLA.”

“Maybe it’s time to revisit the press, said Norman.” Wooden, secure in his self, listened to his assistant. The next year UCLA pressed full-court. And the rest, as they say is history.

Wooden on Teaching: The Little Things Make the Big Things Happen
“One of the great abilities John Wooden has and had was his ability to take a complicated issue, distill it, so that, as he said, that ‘little things make big things happen,” said Jamison.
“In my view, what it was that he did to teach leadership, and it’s not complicated, he behaved like a leader. He acted like a leader. The primary teaching tool he used was his own life as an example,” Jamison commented.

Coach Wooden was a proponent of the principle that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. According to Jamison, “John Wooden had an effusive way of letting players know he cared. His practices were ferociously intense. There wasn’t any slack in practice where you could hang out and shoot the baloney. He found time at the beginning when players were coming onto the court to take a moment, to pull someone aside as they were ambling over to the practice and ask about how things were going. ‘How’s your mother.’ ‘How’s that history class going.’ He did this to show his sincere care and concern for his players.”

 

Pyramid of Success
Coach Wooden’s primary teaching tool has been his leadership model as distilled in his Pyramid of Success. Jamison commenting on this influential model for effective living said, “His definition of success isn’t about big, it isn’t about power, fame, fortune, and prestige. For him the highest level, the highest standard of success is making that effort to become the best that you can become whether it is a coach, teacher, student, member of a team.”

Success, as Coach Wooden says, is the peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.

The Two Most Destructive Attitudes: Resentment and Arrogance
Dr. Cory Dobbs, The Academy for Sport Leadership

Parents, teachers, coaches, and managers, all invest a great deal of time trying to instill attitudes they consider appropriate. The central role of each of these leaders is to guide those they lead to adopt, modify, and deploy relevant ways of thinking—which includes forming attitudes that influence desired behavior. The opposite happens as well; a great deal of time and effort is spent to correct or punish the behaviors that result from inappropriate attitudes. To the extent that leaders are able to construct preferred attitudes will determine the health of the individuals, team, and organization.

Behavior and Attitudes
Creating an environment in which trust and respect are paramount, where healthy and inspirational relationships flourish, is vital to success in today’s environment. To create this culture requires an understanding of the nuances of attitudes. An attitude is the spontaneous interplay of preexisting emotions and integrated assumptions. Furthermore, attitudes result from the neural activity of the brain, such that the “cells that fire together wire together” creating a habit of mind. And assumptions are mental models that provide structure to the sense making process. Together they generate emotional and cognitive cues that impulsively (they can agitate a person to act faster than the speed of sound) lead to behavior. In a sense, then, an attitude has two distinct fibers weaving it together.

An attitude has an immediate and enduring influence on how we see, think, feel, and what we do. And the sobering reality is that an attitude (such as “I don’t care,” or “Why are you picking on me?”) can construct itself indiscriminately with little regard to whether it is helpful, useful, neutral, or harmful. If you stop and think about it, an attitude begins as an invisible entity—an emotion or assumption embedded in the brain—that progresses into a subjective experience in which one’s perception of a person, object, or event is greatly shaped, and greatly shapes the actions one takes.

And that’s true for both positive and negative attitudes. However, despite what most people think, we (yes, you and me) struggle to “grasp” our own predisposition for holding a certain attitude. As irrational actors, we are often unaware of how our attitudes impact those residing in our outside world. Often, transgressions are small and seemingly insignificant. But they aren’t. Collateral damage abounds with disagreement, disconnection, and disengagement. Over time, attitudes harden and the relational participants become antagonistic toward each other. The hidden costs are many.

Attitudinal Mindset
Let me unveil the two most destructive attitudes. They are resentment (“I won’t forgive or forget,” and “apologizing is not for me”) and arrogance (“You’re not worthy” and “I want what I want”). Stop for a moment and think about these two pillars of negativity. Imagine a close friend revealing resentment toward her boss. Not difficult to do. Let’s say she is asked to work overtime—and everyone else is allowed to leave early. The thoughts and feelings produced by the immediate feedback that encompasses resentment quickly wires neural circuits ensuring the brain has recorded this incident.

Your friend has now created an attitude of resentment toward her boss (and likely the boss resents the attitude of the worker too). Whenever they are in the same room, the memory of the previous “injustice” has the potential to emerge giving energy and power to an internal state of resentment. If another incident happens, it will only amplify the initial event. What makes this especially unnerving is how automatically it happens. Moreover, both parties will ultimately find out that lingering resentment is emotionally damaging and that life at work will never be the same.

And arrogance, well ego-involvement is simply a part of athletics. We all have the need to feel worthy, but the person with an unhealthy sense of self—selfish and self-centered—usually has a tough time when it comes to emotional competencies. They are unaware of how others’ respond to their actions as they yearn to be the center of attention.

The trouble is that arrogance makes the individual a pawn to their emotions. The challenge for the arrogant person is that they must protect and promote themselves at the same time. For example, if they have the need to be seen as confident in order to feel worthy, they will protect themselves (“save face”) from a threat to their competence, and feel compelled to put others down while building themselves up. The more arrogant the actor, the less room there is for others.

To the extent that the arrogant person is driven by impulses to protect and promote their self-concept, they will perceive others as less worthy than themselves—this self-serving bias is rooted in one’s upbringing. Yes, it is the job of the ego to give us a sense of who we are and where we belong—a social compass with which to define and affirm our individual and collective identity. But the attitude of superiority ultimately prevents the arrogant individual from fully developing a healthy ego and an accurate view of self. For the arrogant, life is a roller coaster ride.

Action Steps
Okay, time to take action. You have work to do. Write down on a sheet of paper (old school) these two attitudes. Describe in bullet points each concept as you have seen others deploy these attitudes. Seriously, take ten minutes to “study” resentment and arrogance in greater detail by reflecting on your experiences with others. Then invest another ten minutes assessing how you can improve yourself by challenging and changing these destructive attitudes realizing you are not immune to them.

Resentment Arrogance
Won’t forgive “You’re not worthy” (Self-centered))

Won’t forget “I want what I want” (Selfish)

Pat Fox – Head Football Coach, Pontiac Notre Dame Prep (MI)
Coach Fox is a football coach. We believe that his message is applicable to all programs and all sports.
The following content is provided by Glazier Drive

The following content is provided by Glazier Drive

Coach Adam Mathieson is a football coach and athletic director. We believe that his message is applicable to all programs and all sports.

A Pre-Season Note to the Student-Athlete

Dr. Cory Dobbs, The Academy for Sport Leadership

People want to matter.  Every member of your team has a yearning to matter.  Unfortunately it’s almost guaranteed that a teammate or two, on your team right now, feels like they don’t matter.

Mattering is a motive.  When we feel that others depend on us, we know we matter and respond accordingly.  When others are interested in us, we feel like we matter and enjoy the benefits of their attention.  And when others are concerned with our future, we feel like we matter and appreciate their guidance.

Mattering matters.  Mattering is a powerful influence on our actions.

Do you promote mattering or do you keep people on the periphery?  Draw a series of three concentric circles, expanding from small to large (you know, like waves moving outward), on a piece of paper.  Place your name in the middle circle.  In the next circle outward place the names of those on your team that you spend more time with.  Then on the outermost circle place the names of those you spend little time with.  This outer circle is the margin.  These are teammates that might matter less to you.  Do the same for playing time: Starters in the inner circle, bench players in the outer circle—on the margins.  Often the patterns (of status?) reveal an in-group and an out-group, with those in the out-group excluded from close interpersonal relationships with those in the in-group.

Marginality matters too.  It’s just that living life on the margin sucks.  When we marginalize others they’re likely to feel like they don’t matter.  In fact, they’ll probably tell you they know they don’t matter.  Those on the margins usually have ample evidence that informs them that they don’t matter.  They come to see the world from a perspective that they have little to contribute.  And this is very dangerous.

Like mattering, marginality too is a powerful influence on our actions.

When I speak to college teams I always ask the group of student-athletes if there was someone on their high school team (their senior season in high school) that did not play in games.  Or if they did play, it was the “marginal” minutes when the outcome of the game was already determined thereby the playing time didn’t really “matter.”  I’ve yet to find a group of collegiate student-athletes that isn’t curious as to why the last player on the bench was glad to be there.  It’s common to hear, “Ya, I’m not sure why they stuck around.”

Chances are, college or high school, you’ve got players on your team that are of lesser talent, perhaps “marginal” talent at best to qualify to be on the squad.  It’s easy for the star player to see that he or she matters. They know that others depend on them, are interested in helping them, and are concerned with their future.  Their contributions to the success of the team are quite visible.  They matter.  And of course they should.

We get that.

However, why is it others don’t matter?  Do you really want to marginalize people?

Sports participation involves many diverse interpersonal relationships.  Whether you are a top player or a role player, you come into contact with many people.  Developing quality interpersonal relationships with all of your teammates is a valuable team goal.  When you relate to others in a positive way, they’ll feel like they matter.  And mattering does matters.

So, here’s the big question you need to answer.  Ask yourself “what in my world am I willing to notice?

So often, those that are marginalized go unnoticed—that’s why they’re on the margins.
If you want to accomplish something worthwhile this year, make sure no one on your team goes unnoticed.  Set the standard.  Let others know they matter.

 

About Cory Dobbs, Ed.D.

Cory Dobbs is the founder of The Academy for Sport Leadership and a nationally recognized thought leader in the areas of leadership and team building.  Cory is an accomplished researcher of human experience. Cory engages in naturalistic inquiry seeking in-depth understanding of social phenomena within their natural setting.

Cory’s coaching background includes experience at the NCAA DII, NJCAA, and high school levels of competition.  After a decade of research and development Cory unleashed the groundbreaking Teamwork Intelligence program for student-athletics. Teamwork Intelligence illuminates the process of designing an elite team by using the 20 principles and concepts along with the 8 roles of a team player he’s uncovered while performing research.

Cory has worked with professional athletes, collegiate athletic programs, and high schools teaching leadership and team building as a part of the sports experience and education process.  As a consultant and trainer Dr. Dobbs has worked with Fortune 500 organizations such as American Express, Honeywell, and Avnet, as well as medium and small businesses. Dr. Dobbs taught leadership and organizational change at Northern Arizona University, Ohio University, and Grand Canyon University.

“Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will care.” -Your Student-Athlete The world of coaching is changing. In Coaching for Leadership you’ll discover the foundations for designing, building, and sustaining a leadership focused culture for building a high-performance team. To find out more about and order Sport Leadership Books authored by Dr. Dobbs including Coaching for Leadership, click this link: The Academy for Sport Leadership Books