03 Mar, 2009

By Daryl Ogden

If, as either an incidental or serious student of the burgeoning field of 21st century leadership development, you ever wondered whether we had truly entered a new age of leadership, consider the following story.

An NBA basketball coach I know well – someone who over the past 40+ years has coached at virtually every level, and with considerable success – was watching on TV the men’s final of the French Open tennis tournament. Amid the red clay splendor of Roland Garros’ Center Court, the coach spotted one of his current players, surrounded by a group of bon vivant friends clearly having one of the times of their life. The player was a flamboyant, talented 22 year old first round draft choice who had just completed an NBA rookie campaign in which his scoring and rebounding averages – and playing time – had climbed steadily every month over the course of the season, due, it was widely reported, to the rigorous one on one work he put in with the coach, who was now watching his player on TV.

The coach was intrigued. No longer interested in seeing Nadal square off against Federer, he consulted his personal practice calendar and confirmed a suspicion: less than 36 hours later, the player was scheduled to begin his offseason workout regimen with the coach at the team’s practice facility, which was an ocean and half a continent away from the player’s present location, in Paris.

The coach picked up his cell phone, scrolled through his contacts list, selected the appropriate recipient, and added to the collection of several thousand text messages he had sent to the player over the previous 11 months. A break in the action brought the TV camera back in focus on the player, who was shown consulting the text message that had traveled its intercontinental route from the United States to France. A sanitized version of the message on the player’s phone would have read, in part, “Why are you sitting with a bunch of guys, when there are so many beautiful women in Paris?” The player laughed and texted back. A back and forth exchange of messages ensued, culminating, eventually, in the key question the coach had wanted to pose from the beginning: “You at practice Tues am?” The reply, a simple “Oui.” And that was that.

Approximately 36 hours later, coach and player convened the first of what would be approximately 60 intense personal workout sessions over the next three months. The coach’s first question, posed to the bleary eyed player after joining him on the basketball court. “What do you think you need to work on today?” The player shared his perspective. The coach listened carefully, reflecting back what he had heard and, drawing on decades of experience, built on and modified the player’s proposed workout, testing his own hypotheses and suggestions and creating space for the player to modify those hypotheses and suggestions in turn. After not more than two or three minutes of back and forth, in which they efficiently shared their points of view and modified the initial workout plans, they agreed to the final outline of that day’s workout.

So what’s the leadership lesson of this story? It doesn’t have to do with technology, though the use of technology and real time communication is important here and certainly characteristic of our age. And it doesn’t have to do with the collapsing of distance, though collapsing distance is what globalization – and there are fewer more globalized industries than the National Basketball Association – is largely about. No, the moral here – if moral’s the right word – concerns how a leader, in this case a coach, optimally positions himself to express his leadership as a form of collaboration and partnership, while at the same time retaining his authority as coach, expert, and leader.

In this case, such a coaching “best practice” was achieved by the coach entering the player’s frame of reference – a decidedly non-basketball frame of reference – via text message, engaging in a spirited and playful dialogue, and then and only then isolating his agenda, which concerned the player’s accountability to himself, his teammates, and the coach. The coach zeroed in on the player’s commitment, even while that player, sipping an Orangina and relaxing in the Paris sun, watched the era’s two greatest tennis champions reach for athletic immortality. Gently, but purposefully, the coach for a few minutes joined the player as a spectator at Roland Garros. Only when the relationship had been reestablished, via text, did he call the question by asking, in effect: “Are you going to be at practice on Tuesday, or are you going to screw around with your friends in Paris and let everyone down in the process?”

It wasn’t always so. In 1968, when the coach in question graduated from school as an accomplished small college point guard and declared his intention to enter the coaching profession, basketball coaches did not seek to establish collaborative relationships with their players. Certainly that was not true of the point guard turned coach in this story. For the next few decades, the coach told his players what to do, showed his players what to do, and drew up for his players what to do. Success had to do to the degree to which his players performed on court as he would have done if he had been playing.

No one exemplified this ideal of coaching leadership more than John Wooden, another ex-point guard and the legendary UCLA men’s basketball coach who, in 1968, was in the middle of a run of seven consecutive – and 10 out of 12 – NCAA titles, a record of excellence that will almost certainly never be matched in any major sport. In that era, Wooden was the model that virtually all coaches – and perhaps every young coach – aspired to emulate. The Wooden system was characterized by a powerful framework – the Pyramid of Success, which captured in diagrammatic form the components of a successful basketball player and, by extension, a winning basketball team. A pyramid was an apt metaphor for Wooden’s coaching philosophy, because he expressed a classic top-down model of organization leadership, with the head coach – the analogue of the CEO – at the top of the proverbial pyramid, with no room for anyone else at the apex. Wooden was a brilliant strategist, an unrivalled teacher, and an uncompromising micro-manager – his expertise extended all the way down to the way his players rolled their socks and tied their laces, which he showed them the proper – indeed, the only – way to do.

Wooden’s model of coaching leadership was right for its time, when organizations of all types were structured vertically, more or less in the shape of a pyramid, and players were coached, in a single, more or less uniform style, depending, dominantly, on their position and in keeping with a style of play that drew upon the strengths of a particular set of players who made up the team.

But leadership in the 21st century, for a variety of reasons – some cultural, some generational, some technological – calls for a more collaborative expression of mutual learning, of curiosity, of openness to, for instance, the ideas put forward by a junior colleague (or rookie basketball player). Over the course of his 40 year career, the NBA coach who is the subject of this piece has evolved his philosophy from a top down, non-collaborative style reminiscent of Wooden, to a far more collaborative – though still authoritative – approach that aligns well with the current climate, a climate at its best characterized by the collaborative and creative organizational cultures of Google and Apple rather than the ossified model of, for example, the American auto industry. Arguably the most accomplished leaders today, whether they be high tech CEOs or basketball coaches, deploy their expertise wisely, neither to dominate their direct reports or players nor to surrender authority to their subordinates, but rather to build individual and organizational capabilities with their colleagues and players by making sense together of what they see “on court,” whether that court be a state of the art conference room in Silicon Valley or a windowless basketball practice facility many thousands of miles removed from Roland Garros.