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HAVE A CONCRETE VISION
Back in the late seventies and early eighties at Boston University, even though I was a very young coach, I fundamentally understood the importance of a great work ethic. At the base of my coaching was always the belief that in order to do great things you must deserve them, and that you did that by being willing to put in the proper effort it takes to be successful at anything. It’s the cornerstone of my philosophy, this sense that you must deserve victory.
I also understood the importance of team harmony and chemistry. I had been on teams all my life and had come to learn that teams that got along and helped one another—teams that had a common goal—had better chances to be successful than teams in which it seemed as if all the players were stars floating around in their own solar systems.
But as a young coach, I didn’t understand the importance of having a vision, and I didn’t understand the importance of being able to impart that vision to others. Eventually, I realized the people you are leading will have frustrations and failures, times when what they’re doing is simply not working. When this happens (and rest assured it happens to everybody eventually), it’s human nature for them to want to quit, either that or start to question what they’re doing. Or else they look for people around them to blame, the inevitable finger-pointing that’s so endemic in situations that are not successful.
What can stop people going through a tough time from taking these destructive, and self-destructive, actions?
Their vision.
All the great leaders have been people of great vision, men and women able to provide insight into what is possible. Vision is your view of the group’s future, the place you want to be after the transformation is complete. For the people you’re leading, vision is their belief in the overall game plan, their belief that this plan is in their best interest. Without this, all your dreams, all your ideas, can easily be derailed.
Ever since I was at Boston University, I’ve always been very conscious of creating a grand vision wherever I’ve coached. You simply cannot show up as the new leader and just wish everyone good luck. You must come in with a plan, a dramatic statement.
I remember the first meeting I had with the booster club when I got the Providence job. It was in the spring of 1985 at the Providence Civic Center, in a large upstairs banquet room that overlooked the court. Providence had been one of the bottom teams in the Big East since the conference had started six years before. There were limited talent, facilities, and resources. There also seemed to be a pall of negativity that hovered over everybody, this sense that they were never going to be successful in the Big East, and that had become one of life’s sure things, right there with death and taxes. Everyone seemed to believe it. The players. The boosters. The fans. The media. It almost seemed as if there was “losing” water everyone had been drinking.
Still, my job was to get the people in that room to believe in a better future. During that meeting I tried not only to get them excited about the new era starting, but also to get them to contribute more money to the program and be more emotionally committed to it. In my mind, I was the new CEO of Providence College basketball and I had to get everyone to believe in the future.
The next day, a local sports writer compared me to a tent evangelist. He was right: That was my intention, to have the people in that room feed off my energy, my excitement, the tremendous passion I had for this new job and its potential. I wanted them to not only see my vision, but feel it, too. I wanted them to walk out of that room believing in possibilities.
“And when you go to bed at night,” I finally said at the end of my speech, the energy in my voice, “I don’t want you to count sheep. And I don’t want you to worry about how much you owe on your Visa card. I don’t want you to worry about your bills. I don’t want you to worry about your troubles. I don’t want you to think about your problems. When you go to bed at night”—my voice rising now, almost shouting, I looked out over the court and said, “when you go to bed at night I want you to dream about cutting down the nets.”
Overdone? Probably.
Overstated? Maybe.
But that was my vision and I wanted everyone to know it. Just as Phil Knight had a vision of the future, back when he was driving up and down the West Coast to track meets, selling sneakers called Nikes out of his trunk, long before the clever television ads and the incredible success of his corporation. Just as all those people in those little computer shops talking a language nobody understood except them had a vision. Just as anyone who has a dream of one day building something greater has a vision.
What no one knew that day in the Providence Civic Center—even me—was that in less than two years we would cut down the nets in Louisville’s Freedom Hall after having just qualified to go to the Final Four.
BE DIRECT
The message of a leader’s first meeting with any organization is that the leader’s vision is going to be their new reality, and the people in the organization are going to have to want to be a part of it. It’s not a “yes” or “no” vote. It’s not a democracy. In fact, they don’t really have a choice at all. The bus is about to leave the station and they better be on it. But they are being invited to be part of the ride, and that’s important.
In this first meeting you must not only seize the moment; you also have to take control. Right from the start. Like a general must take control of his troops, a leader must lead. Not in some undetermined future. Not in some fuzzy, unfocused way, but instantly, and in clear language that has a sense of urgency about it. Because if people do not believe that you believe in your vision there will be increased anxiety, doubt, cynicism, bad morale—all the things that poison a group and ultimately destroy it.
There always are going to be people who say, “I don’t like this,” or “I don’t understand this,” or “Why can’t we do things the old way?”
They cannot be tolerated.
And in this first meeting you are conveying this, even if you are not being heavy-handed about it. Your message is: This is a new era and it starts right now and you really don’t have a choice.
In the book Leading Change, John P. Kotter say the biggest mistake people make when trying to change organizations is to plunge ahead without establishing a high-enough sense of urgency in fellow managers and employees.
“This error is fatal,” Kotter writes, “because transformations always fail to achieve their objectives when complacency levels are high.”
He’s right on target.
Your message has to be that change is not simply coming, it’s already here. With a vengeance. Without that emphatic message it’s too easy for people to rationalize; to say things like, “Things aren’t that bad,” or “We’re simply in a little down cycle and that’s just the way it goes,” “Yes, we have some problems as a group, but I’m doing all right and that’s the bottom line.”
All of these are potential killers, instant impediments to what you’re trying to do. People must leave that first meeting with a sense of urgency. Which is why I love the following Lou Holtz quote. When asked how long it was going to take him to transform the University of South Carolina football program, which was woeful when he took it over, he said, “Someone said, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ I like to think that’s because I wasn’t born yet.”
And even though Holtz did not win a game in his first season at South Carolina, he has the people of South Carolina fired up about its football program. He has the people around him believing in him and in his vision.
GET PEOPLE EXCITED
The other thing I try to do in this first meeting is stir passion.
Present the vision.
Then get people excited about it.
If you look at some of the people who are viewed as great leaders—John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. as two prime examples—the one common denominator is passion. Both were able to move people emotionally and get them excited about the possibility of a better future. Want to see a textbook example of how a leader can stir passion? Listen to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It is a classic in presenting a vision of the future and then stirring people’s passion for that vision.
Why were African Americans so moved by King’s speech in the sixties, even though they’d been subjected to so much racism and discrimination through the years? Even though King’s speech sounded so pie-in-the-sky?
Because people want to believe. They want to see themselves in a better future. And even if you don’t have the oratorical ability of Martin Luther King Jr., we can still learn from his method. The by-product of articulating your vision is that it starts to get people excited. You are talking about a better future for everyone and that raises possibilities. People don’t want to fail. They don’t want to wallow in mediocrity. They don’t want to see their work as some endless journey that never really goes anywhere. They don’t want to be unfulfilled. They don’t want to be continually frustrated. People want to be successful. They want a better future. They want to see their dreams become actualized, they’re just not sure how to go about it.
Your first job is to tell them this can happen.
Your second job is to tell them how.
Stirring passion is crucial, for the simple reason that leaders without passion have problems. What’s the point of having a vision for a turnaround of your company if you’re not able to articulate it? What’s the point of having a vision of the future if you cannot get people excited about it?
Raising people’s passions chips away at the doubt. This is vital because you want people to begin to feel the future can be better for them. Yes, they’re entering a time of change, but they don’t have to fear that things are going to be worse. Instead, you want them believing that this is a new beginning for everyone, full of hope and promise. You have to show them the future.
The next step is to tell them how this is going to happen. Change raises most people’s anxiety level. So you must try to assuage the fear and quell the doubt. You do this by telling the people the methods you’re going to use. The vision and the methods used to reach that vision must be similar.
In every first meeting I’ve had with a team, I tell the players the story of the full-court press, one of the staples of my defensive philosophy as a basketball coach. I tell them how it caused twenty-three turnovers a game in 1987, the year my Providence College team went to the Final Four. I tell them that without the press we were a very mediocre team that year, that the press was our weapon, our edge. It was the reason we were able to beat more talented teams. I show them what the press accomplished, so that they can see the whole, what the fruits of their labor will one day accomplish. That’s the process: Show them the whole, then start implementing the parts.
This is vital.
You must tell people what their hard work is one day going to get them. You just can’t institute a work ethic, essentially tell people they’re going to work harder than they’ve ever had in the past, tell them that there is going to be change and they are going to have to adapt to it whether they want to or not, and not tell them there will be a reward. This is not the Age of the Pharaohs, where people are going to push rocks day after day in the noontime sun just because the king tells them to. People are not going to give you blind obedience. They are not going to do what you want them to do just because you say they’re going to. They are not going to blindly follow you simply because you’re their new leader.
You have to tell them what’s in it for them. We all want to know that if we work hard and give our allegiance to the group that we’re going to be rewarded for it. No one wants to think that his hard work, all his energy, is simply going to benefit someone else. It’s essential, then, that you convey this message in your first meeting, so there’s no chance for misunderstanding. This will help combat the inevitable doubt and anxiety that’s inherent in any kind of change.
In a company it’s the same script.
It’s essential that the people directly under you on the organizational ladder both understand and share your vision, for they will be the ambassadors of your vision to the people who work underneath them. They’re the ones on the front line, the ones who will have much more interaction with the employees. Therefore, they must not only share and understand your vision, but also be able to articulate it.
In July of 1999, I read a newspaper article that showed a good example of communicating vision. Chris Palmer, the coach of the Cleveland Browns, the new expansion team in the National Football League, said two weeks before the team’s first training camp that he was going to screen for his players some old films of the Browns’ glory days: Jim Brown breaking tackles, Bernie Kosar throwing touchdown passes.
“I want the players to know what it means to play for the Cleveland Browns,” he said. “What it means to play in this city and in front of these fans.”
That’s an example of showing the vision.
Communicating tradition is a good way to present your vision for your organization. Every five or six years, a new generation will lose sight of the group’s tradition unless it’s constantly reinforced. Tradition is not something we can take for granted. It must constantly be reinforced or one day you will wake up and it will be gone. Especially now, in an age when leaders move from job to job with more frequency, remaining aware of and continuing tradition is an important message for new leaders to convey.
JUMP IN THE BOAT WITH THEM
In the beginning—when you are new in your role as a leader—you also have to gain the respect of the people you are leading.
How do you do that? Why should someone follow you, when you haven’t proved anything yet? Why should people give you their allegiance?
From day one, you must convince them you’re all in the boat together. And you can’t just verbalize this. You have to get into the boat with them. Your message is: “We’re in the boat together and we’re going to succeed or fail together.”
Understandably, this isn’t going to happen overnight. By its very nature respect must develop over time, based on both results and trust. It’s imperative, though, that you expedite the process, do everything in your power from the beginning to let people know your fate is aligned with their fate, that you cannot succeed unless they succeed, that this is a partnership.
An important way to begin this process is to show your employees you’re concerned about them.
One of the first things I did when I came to the Celtics in 1997 was to begin pushing for a new practice facility. Part of my motivation, certainly, was that the Celtics had made themselves noncompetitive when it came to facilities. They were using part of the gym at Brandeis College in suburban Boston, and while it always was a good relationship with the school, the locker room was cramped, the weight room was insufficient, the facilities were simply not good enough for an NBA team on the eve of the millennium.
I was convinced we needed new facilities to be able to attract free agents, something all NBA teams must be able to do. Professional athletes are just like other valued performers in today’s business climate. They want to be courted. They want to be recruited. They want to feel important. They want to go work for companies that have great facilities and in a buyer’s market that’s what they’re going to do. I had done a similar thing at Kentucky, redoing the offices, putting in a first-class weight room. When you’re trying to recruit quality players to your organization, these things are essential.
Besides, inferior facilities send a negative signal to your players. The inherent message is that the organization is something less than first class. This is one of the worst possible messages you can give your employees. Upgrading facilities is a tangible way to tell employees that things are indeed changing, that it’s not merely hollow words and empty promises. It also shows them that you want them to have the best work environment possible.
This is probably even more important in today’s corporate culture, when the technology is changing rapidly. Few things send a deadlier message to your employees than working with what they perceive to be outdated equipment. It’s an instant morale killer. You must keep pace with your competition, and the inability to keep pace with the best equipment sends the message that you cannot keep pace with your competition.
Your underlying message—one that must be constantly reinforced—is that you care about the people you are leading. You value them. You care about them as individuals. You care about their work environment. You care about their success.
This cannot be stressed enough.
All employees want to feel they they’re important. It’s up to you to see that that happens. Obviously, one way is by salary. But it’s not the only way. Praise. Encouragement. Recognition. Some form of personal touch: These are ways to not only reward people, but to make them feel important.
Because your vision can’t be an “I-my” vision. It is not just about how I, Rick Pitino, will turn around a team and get all the credit. It must be a collective vision. It also must be a blueprint based around hope and morale, the sense that we’re all in this together; that everyone has a vested stake in turning the company around; that everyone will benefit, not just the leader. You don’t want people to mentally dangle, to exist in some gray netherworld of doubt, afraid of the future, uncertain about their fate. There’s always going to be uncertainty in any new leadership situation, a certain built-in stress, that’s a given. People always have a fear of the unknown, an instinctive reluctance to change. You must not only understand this, but deal with it.
Look at what usually happens with a failing company.
The first event is the CEO is let go. Then a new one comes in and the first thing he does is lay off 20 percent of the workforce. The result is a climate of negativity and doubt. The employees start to wonder who is next. Everyone worries about their own fate. The atmosphere is already poisoned.
Instead, let’s look at a different scenario:
The new leader comes in and right away he starts talking about a new vision for the company. Not “my” vision. Not an individual vision, but a collective vision. This is fundamental. The first thing you must do when you assume a leadership role is to build morale. You already know that morale is poor, the climate is full of negativity and doubt. This always happens with change, for people don’t like change. It destroys their comfort level and makes them fear the future.
Every time I’ve entered a new college coaching situation I know the players I’m inheriting have a lot of anxiety. It’s human nature. Both change, and the prospect of change, raise anxiety. Most people are infinitely more comfortable with the familiar, the known. Change is disorienting, upsetting. The remaining players, therefore, are saying to themselves that since I didn’t recruit them I will have no allegiance to them and discard them as quickly as I can. They are understandably nervous and unsure. Who wouldn’t be?
So the first thing I try to do is lessen everyone’s anxiety and calm everyone down. I tell the remaining players that they are automatically “my players,” for the simple reason that I believe in quick turnarounds, and in order to do that I need them, not my own recruits in the future.
That first meeting is critical. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression and the team’s first impression of me is going to stay in their minds for a long time after the first meeting.
More important, it’s the place where I must articulate my vision of the future and show them how we all can reach that future together. I must show them they can be successful, that it’s not simply some pipe dream, some flight of fancy that’s unrealistic. I want them to know that from now on there’s a purpose to everything, that this is a new beginning and they all are a part of it. That from now on we are going to share everything together, day by day.
I want people to leave that first meeting feeling encouraged. Sure, some people will be cynical. Sure, some people will have doubts. That’s human nature, too. I have no doubt that those Providence College players had doubts when I became their coach in the spring of 1985 and told them of my vision of the future. Sure, they wondered about me.
But they also had been given a glimpse of a better future.
Your goal, as a leader, is to eventually get everyone to share your vision.
Obviously, achieving this goal is easier the more success you have as a group. One of the commonalities of professional athletic teams that do well is how much easier it is for these teams to get their players to work hard in the off-season. I read an article in which Mike Shanahan, the coach of the Denver Broncos, said that the number of players committed to their off-season conditioning program rose dramatically after the Broncos won their first Super Bowl. That made sense to me. Those players had reached the mountain top and enjoyed the fruits of their success and were willing to do the work to stay there.
It is in the beginning, when there is little or no success yet, that this is infinitely more difficult. Doubt and second-guessing are always going to be part of the landscape then. There are always going to be people who don’t believe in you, the ones that have to be convinced. There are always going to be some people waiting for you to fail, in the hope that they can go back to doing things the old way.
Obviously, the more success you have, the more people will give you the benefit of the doubt. For example, when Bill Parcells became the coach of the Jets, the players he was inheriting were more likely to initially buy into his vision because they were well aware of Parcells’s great reputation as a football coach. Even so, there are always going to be doubters, those who want to go back to the old way, the familiar way. There are always going to be people who question you.
When I became the coach of the Celtics I knew that there were probably a few players I was inheriting who didn’t want to work as hard as I expected them to. I’m sure that there were a few who considered me a college coach, even though I had coached the Knicks for two years in the mid-eighties. It’s naive to think that everyone is initially going to unconditionally accept your vision.
Still, you must be sure that everyone is aware of your vision of the future and working at those methods to one day reach it. It is a clear vision that will get people through the difficult times. It’s vision that will allow them to survive periods of doubt and frustration. It’s vision that will allow them to survive adversity. It’s vision that allows your organization to always be moving forward rather than stagnating in negativity and regret, and it’s vision that’s the summit for which you’re always reaching.
KEY CHAPTER POINTS
• Be Direct People must understand what your vision is and that they are being asked to be a part of it, but that it’s really not a democracy. Change is coming, and they are either going to have to buy into it or get left behind.
• Get People Excited There is no underestimating passion. People have to not only know what’s in it for them, but be made to feel positive about the coming change.
• Jump in the Boat with Them People must know that everyone is in it together: They must understand that your success as a leader is linked to their success.