Leading with the Heart

an army of deer led by a lion will defeat an army of lions led by a deer.

“Too many rules get in the way of leadership. They just put you in a box.… People set rules to keep from making decisions.”—Coach K

Too many rules get in the way of leadership. They just put you in a box and, sooner or later, a rule-happy leader will wind up in a situation where he wants to use some discretion but is forced to go along with some decree that he himself has concocted. Of course, a few leaders like to be backed up by a long list of do’s and don’ts. “OOPS, you did this on the list. I got’cha.” Well, I don’t want to be a team of “I got’chas.” I got’cha means “I” rather than “we.” And a leader who sets too many rules is making it appear that it is “my” team, rather than “our” team. The truth is that many people set rules to keep from making decisions. Not me. I don’t want to be a manager or a dictator. I want to be a leader—and leadership is ongoing, adjustable, flexible, and dynamic. As such, leaders have to maintain a certain amount of discretion. At times, there may be extenuating circumstances for a person violating a rule.

“Leaders have to search for the heart on a team, because the person who has it can bring out the best in everybody else.”

When you first assemble a group, it’s not a team right off the bat. It is a collection of individuals, just like any other group. And there is some truth to the adage “You’re only as good as your talent.” As a matter of fact, I think everyone understands that you can’t win championships without talent. So assembling skillful individuals as part of your team is a given. Then, of course, it becomes a matter of motivating those people to perform as a team.

The leader has to assess the quality of the team, set the standard of excellence, and then work with the team to achieve that standard—to be the best they can be every time out. That’s what I do. I determine how good our kids can be by watching them, by getting to know them, by building relationships with them. I constantly try to take a realistic look at our team and try not to let the final outcome of any game spike emotions too high or too low. And then I also work with the guys over the course of the entire season to help raise them to their highest potential. When you view winning the way I do, it becomes clear that leaders are ultimately responsible for how their teams perform—and whether they are the best they can be. But that’s not really pressure, it’s reality—and it is also a wonderful challenge. I really believe that if a leader is a stickler on high performance, on excellence, then winning games will be a natural by-product. In building any winning team, it’s important to remember that the members of the team don’t have to be perfect, they just have to keep trying to be the best they can be. That’s my definition of a winning attitude.

The season is so long, we have to create a series of objectives to strive for. It can be a series of games or anything that makes sense. I like to call it an energy cycle. In order to keep a team motivated over an extended interval of time, planned short bursts of energy like this can be very effective. In 1999, for instance, I scheduled our team to play a late-January game against St. John’s University in Madison Square Garden—three days before we played North Carolina, our archrival. I could have left the schedule alone and given the team those three extra days for rest and preparation. But I was thinking ahead to the NCAA tournament. So I told our players that the four-day period that encompassed the St. John’s and North Carolina games would be a simulation of what we might experience in March.

“There are five fundamental qualities that make every team great: communication, trust, collective responsibility, caring, and pride. I like to think of each as a separate finger on the fist. Any one individually is important. But all of them together are unbeatable.”—COACH K

When it comes to my philosophy surrounding teamwork, I have a simple, straightforward saying that I pass on to anyone who will listen: Two are better than one if two act as one. And if you believe that two acting as one are better than one, just imagine what an entire team acting as one can do.

The overriding concept I employ in teaching revolves around this simple phrase: “You hear, you forget. You see, you remember. You do, you understand.”

Leaders should be reliable without being predictable. They should be consistent without being anticipated. Instead of providing a spawning ground for creativity, a leader may be so structured, so ruled, so totally predictable, that he completely erases any enjoyment on the part of the team. I recall one year, for instance, when our guys had been playing very poorly and expected a good chewing out from me. But when they showed up for practice, they found a volleyball net set up on the court. And that’s all we did during that practice—play volleyball. I felt the players had forgotten what it was like to have fun playing ball.