EPILOGUE
Leadership is always evolving.
It’s never static. It’s always changing, just as your group or organization is always changing. No situation ever stays the same. There always are new challenges, as well as the ongoing ones we face every day. That’s a lesson that was reinforced for me midway through the 1999– 2000 season, in my third year with the Celtics.
We were going through a difficult stretch approaching the All-Star break, the symbolic halfway point of the season, and I was beginning to see the look of defeat. Invariably, we would be very competitive for most of the game, then start to fall behind in the fourth quarter. I could see it in the players’ eyes as they came to the bench during a timeout. It was that look of defeat. They were deflating right in front of me. They were succumbing to a sense of failure.
And you can’t do that.
In our last practice before the All-Star break, I posed this question: Who is willing to go to war? I told them that it’s not enough that you feel badly when you lose. This keeps you in a cycle of despair and inaction. The question is, are you willing to pay the price to turn things around?
Earlier that day, I had a conversation with Antoine Walker. I told him that this was now his fourth year with the Boston Celtics, and it might also be the fourth year he’s not been in the playoffs. I told him that he will take the blame for that, just as I and the rest of his teammates will. I told him that I thought he was beginning to let the losing get to him, and if that was the case, then maybe he should look into going to another team for a fresh start.
“No,” he told me. “I want to stay with the Celtics.”
Then you can’t succumb to losing,” I said. “You must battle losing.”
Just as I had to battle it.
I told Antoine that we were coming close in games. We were more competitive than we’d been in the past, but we weren’t winning. At night, I would go home and play the game tapes over and over. Each game seemed like the same tape. I told him that this was the hardest thing I had ever gone through in my professional life. I was working harder than I had when I was a young coach, yet nothing seemed to be enough. The team was so young, so poor defensively.
But my message—both to Antoine and the rest of the players—was that we are all in the foxhole together and that we will crawl out of it if we don’t get cynical, don’t start pointing fingers, and don’t get beaten down by losing.
We were about to go on a six-game road trip out West, the kind of trip that never had been kind to the Celtics in the past. So, I challenged the players, essentially telling them that we had to go to work and stop complaining. We had to learn to stop deflating. We had to have heart and courage and resolve to stay the course.
In a sense, we had to live in a future of hope and success, and not dwell on a past that would get us down.
And what do you do as a leader?
You deflate behind closed doors.
I have a lot of bad nights. I have a lot of times when I’m down. But when I get up in the morning, I’m upbeat, positive, and have a plan for the future. For the thing I have learned in the NBA is that there are no Cinderella stories.
It’s true that I’ve been a part of a lot of Cinderella stories over the years in college ball, but this is the heavyweight division of basketball, and it’s about talent. The job is about acquiring and developing talent, and that takes time. It can’t be expedited. It’s one thing to go from 15 wins to 36 wins like we did in my first year with the Celtics. A lot of that you could do with hard work and effort. But going from 36 wins to 46 wins is about talent.
What gives me inspiration is looking at other leaders who have gone through great periods of adversity, but who persevered and triumphed in the end.
I see someone like Joe Torre, the manager of the New York Yankees, who just won back-to-back World Series. If you look at Torre now, he seems the personification of the perfect leader. He deals with superstar players who make millions of dollars. He deals with the most difficult media in the country. He deals with a difficult owner. He dealt with adversity in his family, the well-publicized illness of his brother Frank. He dealt with his own prostate cancer. Through it all, he retained both grace and class.
Yet, if you look at his record prior to his coming to the Yankees, it was below .500. He had managed the Braves, Mets, and Cardinals, and in many ways had been a victim of circumstance. What Torre did, however, was to keep believing in himself and his methods. He kept believing that he was a good enough Major League manager to win a world championship if he was in the right situation. Through all of his tough times, he kept believing that even if he might not be able to win as much as he wanted, he could still be successful. For Torre always believed that success was getting the most out of his potential, both personally and professionally.
That’s a great lesson for all of us.
You can’t deflate when things aren’t moving as quickly as you want them to. You can’t get down, especially as a leader. Because if you deflate in public, then everyone around you will immediately deflate, too. You cannot lose your optimism. I look at my situation here with the Celtics, at this difficult task of rebuilding this proud franchise, and I know I cannot lose my optimism; I am never going to lose that. I am going to be optimistic at every job I ever have, and I am going to believe in a better future for everyone. I can’t stop raising the bar, for that’s what leaders do. They keep pushing the people they are leading.
You have to stick to it. And that’s not just basketball or business. That’s life, too.