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BE CONSISTENT

How can you be consistent and adaptable, too? Isn’t this a contradiction? No. While you must be adaptable with your methods, you also must be consistent with your message.

But it’s more difficult to be a leader than ever before.

Once upon a time authority went virtually unquestioned. Parents, teachers, coaches, bosses: they were given the utmost respect because of their title. They said, “Jump!” and people asked, “How high?”

Those days are as far removed as record players and black-and-white television sets. People don’t follow blindly anymore. They don’t bow down to titles. Many times it’s just the opposite. Often, their first response is to question any kind of authority, if not outright rebel against it. They want to know why they’re being asked to do things. They want to know what’s in it for them. Leaders must understand that they’re going to be questioned all the time, second-guessed, and their motives examined.

Authority is tested all the time. Teachers everywhere talk about the lack of respect, the erosion of what we used to call traditional values. Bosses in the workplace complain that employees don’t have the loyalty they used to have. Coaches lament that today’s athlete is different from the ones just a decade go, more concerned with individual accomplishments than ever before. You hear about how many parents want to be friends with their kids, not discipline them. Individualism is the new god. Everywhere you look you see the disease of “me,” a self-absorption run rampant.

Is it any wonder why it often seems leadership is under attack?

A case in point is the story of Corey Maggete.

In the spring of 1999 Corey was a freshman on the Duke team that lost the national college basketball championship in the final game. By all accounts he is a great young talent, but on a deep team he only averaged something like sixteen minutes a game. Yet shortly after the season ended he announced he was considering leaving Duke after his freshman year to enter the NBA draft, even though Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski advised him not to, telling him that he wasn’t ready and he’d be better served by returning to school. As the story goes, Maggete also called Michael Jordan to ask for his advice, Jordan telling him the same thing.

Still, Maggete declared himself eligible for the NBA draft.

This is not meant to denigrate Maggete, yet he’s an example of what leaders of young people are facing today. For if some young basketball player at Duke isn’t going to listen to Mike Krzyzewski and Michael Jordan, then who is he going to listen to?

Many people don’t necessarily want to listen to advice, or at least not from the right people. Nor are they willing to subordinate their individual interests and private agendas for the good of the group. Many of them have come of age in a different era, one in which their first allegiance is to themselves and their careers, not to the company for which they work or the group of which they are a part.

I first discovered this around the third or fourth year in my tenure at Kentucky. I would go into a recruit’s home and there would be several people in the room, all in the role of “unofficial adviser.” Where there used to be just the parents and maybe the high school coach, now invariably there was the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) coach, a couple of family friends, an entourage of people ostensibly there to give the kid advice. And more and more the message was that this young man was really only interested in coming to Kentucky for a year or two before going into professional basketball. The idea of this young man coming to Kentucky, maybe paying his dues for a year or two before taking on more of a prominent role? That wasn’t even open to discussion. The idea that he might want to come to Kentucky to be a serious student in search of a degree, something to fall back on when the ball stopped bouncing for him? Too often, that didn’t even seem to be a consideration.

It became obvious to me that this was the new reality for the elite high school players, this view of college as little more than a springboard to the NBA, this idea that the player was a commodity in which many people had a vested interest. It also became obvious to me that more and more the mind-set was strictly individual-based.

This is today’s climate and it transcends basketball, transcends sports. People have no patience, no sense of paying dues or waiting their turn. They want instant gratification, instant rewards, and if they don’t get them from you they inevitably will be looking for somewhere else to obtain them. Invariably, they also don’t have a lot of discipline either.

But it’s pointless to throw up your hands, blame the culture, and say there’s nothing you can do about all this. If that’s the case, you have no right to be a leader in the first place. Success or failure as a leader depends on how well you can navigate these individual agendas and keep your group’s focus clear and consistent. You have to find ways to combat these cultural realities.

One way to do this is to stress the “partnership” approach.

I tell my team all the time that it’s like we’re shareholders in a company. That company is the Boston Celtics and we all either make it successful or we don’t. It’s really up to us. And for us to succeed we need teamwork, that none of us can do it alone. This cannot be stressed enough. As we said in the first chapter, people need to know that your fate is tied to their fate, that you—as the leader—cannot succeed unless they succeed, too.

This is a message I give them during our first meeting together, and one that’s repeated consistently. I don’t think you can say it enough. Not in today’s climate. It’s why I talk to my team for ten to fifteen minutes every day. For without this, people’s focus quickly wanders. I have players whose moods can change by the hour, never mind the day. They must be constantly reminded what the common goals are.

HANDLE ADVERSITY

There are going to be times when you’re not successful. There are going to be times when whatever you do doesn’t seem enough, times when you begin to question everything that you’re doing because the traditional markers of success are simply not there. There are going to be times when you fail.

This is adversity and you must find a way to not only get through it, but do so in a way that your vision is still intact.

Sometimes you simply cannot be successful at the present time. That’s the cold, sobering reality and it happens to everyone sooner or later. It happened to me in 1999.

It was my second year with the Celtics and one to which I had looked forward. Throughout my coaching history the second year always had been a very successful one, the breakout year, the season that was the symbolic turnaround in the program. In my second year at Providence College we came out of mediocrity to go all the way to the Final Four. In my second year with the Knicks we won fifty-two games and the Atlantic Division title. In my second year at Kentucky we were dramatically better than we’d been the first year.

These things simply didn’t happen by accident; there were specific reasons for improvement. First and foremost, the system already was in place, the players no longer in culture shock. The work ethic had been established. We already had gone through the transition year, the one that’s always the most difficult, so in the second year we picked the fruits of our labor.

I expected the script to be the same with the Celtics.

The year before we had won thirty-six games, a twenty-one-game increase from the year before. Attendance had been up at the FleetCenter, there were many nights when the building had been buzzing, there finally was the feeling that the Celtics had a future and not just a storied past. By all accounts, it had been a very successful first year.

But from the beginning of the second year it almost seemed jinxed.

It was the year of the lockout in the NBA, a work stoppage that had begun July 1st and lasted until January. Not only were we prohibited from talking to players in the off-season, the players also were barred from any NBA workout facility. For a young team like ours, one that’s trying to instill a great work ethic in our players and get them to improve in the off-season, this would eventually cripple us. When training camp finally opened in January only two of our players really were ready for the pressing, frenetic style we want to play.

So from the beginning of training camp I knew we were in trouble.

Not that we were the only team with this problem, certainly. But for a young team that relies so much on high energy to be successful, I knew in those first days of training camp that we were nowhere near ready to be successful playing our style—a harbinger that quickly came true as soon as the shortened season began.

The question became: How am I going to deal with it?

I had never been through this before as a coach. Yes, I had sometimes struggled in my first year in a new coaching situation, as I had tried to both implement my vision and start acclimating my players to the methods that eventually were going to get them toward that vision. But never in the second year and never when it appeared as if we already had turned things around, as we had my first year with the Celtics, winning thirty-six games when the Celtics only had won fifteen the year before. I also wasn’t used to sensing that the people around me were feeling sorry for me.

So I had to do some soul-searching, too.

And you know what I discovered?

I had to stay focused on my vision for the team.

What I came away with was a stronger belief in my coaching philosophy. At the foundation of this is the belief that you must deserve victory and this is based on first establishing a strong work ethic.

I had seen most of my players report to training camp in marginal shape at best, as if the lessons about hard work and dedication from the year before already had been forgotten. Deserve victory? Hardly. They had strayed from their fundamentals and now they were paying for that. In many ways they had committed one of the original sins: They had forgotten the path that had made them successful in the first place.

And this only made me more secure in my philosophy, more convinced that without working hard and deserving victory we were virtually programming ourselves to fail.

So how do you handle the challenge of adversity as a leader?

First of all, you need a strategy. Sure, you might want to rant and rave and bemoan your fate. You might want to blame the people who are working for you. That has a short shelf life, though, usually complete with a backlash. Eventually, you have to find a way to get through the adversity as quickly as possible.

You also have to be stronger and more resolute than ever. You are the one to whom others will be looking and if they see panic or doubt in you, then everything only gets worse. You have to be more positive, more visible, more out front with your message.

It’s during such times that groups are fragile. They can go in either direction. They can fight through the tough times and eventually be better off for them, or they can succumb, betray all the progress that’s already been made, to the point that they end up all but starting over.

Leaders must understand why people win and why they lose. We must learn from our failures, not only to prevent them from becoming a recurring theme, the same repeating over and over, but to know what not to do in the future. It became paramount for me as the coach to not only navigate my team through adversity, but also to make them understand why they were losing and what they ultimately could do to change that.

Failure demands explanations and it is up to you as a leader to provide them. There are reasons why companies fail, why teams lose. People must be made aware of them or else they are doomed to repeat them.

This is especially important with young people. They must be made aware that the line between who wins and who loses can be a fine one and that they control it. This is not about wishing and hoping. This is not about trying to get lucky. This is not about waiting for someone else to lose, so you can win by default. This is about taking control of your situation, using your basic fundamentals and skills to impart your will on a situation.

At one point during our struggles in 1999, my assistant coach Jim O’Brien said, “I can’t believe you’re dealing with this as well as you are.”

Jim has been with me for years now, a relationship that dates back to when he first became one of my assistants with the Knicks in 1988. He knows me well.

“If I acted now the way I normally act when I lose we would have tremendous anarchy right now,” I told him. “You can’t balance success and adversity the same way.”

I discovered years ago that if a team is doing well you can work them hard. When a team is winning its collective self-esteem is very high, thus you can demand more of them, be tougher on them. You can push them to limits they didn’t believe they can achieve. You almost can’t be too tough on them because they can handle anything. All of my successful teams through the years have shared this trait.

Conversely, when a team is losing it’s more fragile. Its self-esteem is low, it has no confidence, it fears the future. It doesn’t believe in itself. It believes that whatever can go wrong ultimately will go wrong. Thus, you as the leader must deal with them with looser reins. When a team is losing everything gets magnified. Criticism. Doubt. Uncertainty. Fear of failure. Everything.

So my way of dealing with the team during that period of adversity was not to come down hard on them, as much as try to get them to understand why they were not being successful. Losing was bad enough, but losing without realizing the specific reasons for why we were losing was an even greater sin.

My other goal was to convince them that the adversity they were going through now was only going to make us a better team in the future, that we were going to survive this adversity and it was going to make us stronger and hungrier to win; that this was part of the maturation process any group must go through before it truly can be successful. Failure must be treated this way. Not as a stigma, but as a learning tool, something that shows us what not to do.

The problem with the 1999 Celtics was that not enough of my players had been through real adversity before.

This long period of feeling in an overprotected state is what kills a lot of organizations.

If a group doesn’t have people who have survived adversity before and it suddenly arrives, people panic. They instantly lose sight of the vision. They lose focus. They lose their patience. They start to dwell on the negatives and get caught up in the short-term. Maybe more significantly, people start looking for ways to save themselves. They look inward. They no longer have faith in the group, so now it’s every man for himself.

I saw this start to happen with my Celtics team in 1999. As soon we started to struggle it was like we immediately forgot all the lessons we’d learned the year before. It was like every night was Oscar night. Players started being more concerned with individual performances, their thinking being that, yes, the team is losing but I have to show everyone that it’s not my fault. Yes, the season is a huge disappointment, but my career isn’t going to suffer because of it.

I had to address this, to try to stop it.

“Here’s why you’re losing,” I told them. “You are all twenty-two years old and you are suffering in this league because of that. You are all twenty-two years old and that is not helping you right now, not in a league where the older, more experienced teams are winning. You are all twenty-two years old and if you could dominate this league at twenty-two then you wouldn’t have much of a league. You are all twenty-two and you look at things personally, not collectively, and that is the main reason why you’re not successful. You are all twenty-two and if you don’t stop caring about your personal stats and your contracts and your individual performances, then you are not going to be successful.”

I also told them one more thing:

“There are people telling me we have to get older to be successful, but if you start acting older and stop worrying about your individual statistics, then we are wiser beyond our years.”

In speaking to the Knicks’ coach Jeff Van Gundy, he was telling me that veteran players don’t like to practice, the inference being that younger players do. That’s not true. Young players follow the same pattern as older players. Practice is tiring to them because of the eighty-two-game schedule. So I believe it really has nothing to do with age; it’s about how much you love your vocation.

I don’t think people know how to get themselves out of a rut. I think they have to be taught how to do this. If they’re not, they will revert to all the bad behavior all unsuccessful groups exhibit: They will lie, they will blame others, they will point fingers at others. They will do almost anything to take the onus off themselves.

And this is where leadership comes in.

You have to help them get out of ruts, and you do that by being consistent.

You must constantly be reinforcing your vision, constantly reinforcing the goals of the group, constantly getting the people you’re leading to go back to their methods, trying to convince them that by adhering to these methods they ultimately will be successful.

Take Antoine Walker, for example:

During much of the 1999 season he really struggled from the free throw line. Much of foul shooting is practice and endless repetition. The rest is mental. One of the by-products of Antoine’s struggling at the line was a loss of confidence, which only made the problem worse. Yet when we wanted him to work with a foul-shooting coach he balked. It was only after we told him that such great NBA players as Danny Manning, Grant Hill, and Glen Rice had used this particular coach did Antoine agree.

You guessed it.

The immediate results were dramatic. He improved greatly in just ten days.

This is why having people around you who have been through adversity before is a decided plus. They know it’s something you have to fight through, but that you can survive it and ultimately will be better off for going through it. There’s no substitute for experience. People who have not been through adversity before tend to see it as a death march.

What kills a lot of companies is they don’t have enough people who are dependable, people who have the wherewithal to withstand adversity. People with character. People who are going to fight through the tough times, with great courage, instead of looking for someone to blame. That’s why I do background checks on every person I hire. I want to know as much as I can about their lives, because distracted people are distracted at work, too. People who come out of motivated families tend to be motivated people. People with good work habits and values will bring them to your company, too. And the more people you have with these traits the better chance you have to be successful. This is essential in today’s cultural climate.

Still, you must understand that so many things in today’s culture are working against you as a leader.

Take this example:

We lost a home game to the New Jersey Nets in the 1999 season. One of the turning points in the game was that Paul Pierce, a rookie at the time, missed two free throws, then came back down the court and blew a defensive assignment because he was upset at himself for missing the two free throws. What upset me was certainly not that Paul had missed the two free throws, but that he had let that affect his defensive performance, especially after it happened shortly after a time-out during which we had stressed what we were going to do defensively. So afterward I expressed my displeasure to him in the locker room in no uncertain teams.

That night we flew out to a future away game. I was still upset at Paul, at what I perceived to be one more example of us being victimized by a young player letting his immaturity show. These were the things that were killing us and I had taken some of my frustration out on Paul. At one point on the flight Paul came up to me and said, “Will you stop beating this dead horse with a stick?”

I laughed.

“You’re right,” I said. “That’s the last time we’ll mention it.”

So I figured it was over, right?

Wrong.

Shortly afterward Paul went into a slump, not playing nearly as well as he had previously, something which is standard practice for a rookie. But in one of the Boston papers was a story—quoting an anonymous source—that said Paul’s slump was directly related to me chewing him out in the locker room after the loss to New Jersey for missing the two free throws. What should have been an isolated incident took on a life of its own, having ramifications that far transcended its actual importance.

Yet, I knew I had contributed to this, too. In retrospect, my mistake was taking my frustration out on Paul in the locker room after the loss to New Jersey. What I should have done was wait until the next morning’s practice and then made the larger point that what Paul had done was something that everyone was doing—making mental mistakes.

That’s something Hubie Brown was very good at when I worked for him with the New York Knicks for two years in the early eighties. He rarely brought his displeasure into the locker room after a loss, at a time when emotions often run high and no one is happy, the time when it’s easy to say things you really don’t want to say. Instead, he would save it for practice the following day, when the passions of the moment had cooled.

That’s what I should have done. If I had, the situation never would have occurred.

TREAT PEOPLE FAIRLY

One of the ways to be consistent is to treat people fairly.

I tell my players that my door is always open if they want to talk to me. Why are they not playing as much as they think they should? Why is someone playing ahead of them? Why does it seem like I have little faith in them? I will answer these questions.

I don’t want them guessing. I don’t want them hearing things third-hand, distorted messages. I want them to hear it from me. I tell them, “You may not like what you hear, but you will hear the truth.”

People want that.

They want the truth, they want to be treated fairly, and they want consistency. They don’t want variables, things always changing. They want to know what’s going to happen, to believe that things are going to be fair.

Case in point:

We began the 1999–2000 season with Adrian Griffin as one of our starters.

Who is Adrian Griffin?

That’s a good question. Because heading into training camp odds are that not too many people knew who Adrian Griffin was. He graduated from Seton Hall in 1996, someone who had a good college career, but by no means a great one. At six foot five he was considered a classic NBA “tweener,” too small to really be a forward, not quick enough to be an off-guard. He wasn’t drafted by the NBA and spent the next couple of years knocking around on the lower levels of professional basketball. And though he was the MVP of the CBA in 1999, the doubts about him were still there.

But we brought him into our rookie camp in the summer and he just grew on our coaching staff, one of those players who is not flashy, but plays without ego and does all the little things right. The more we saw him the more we liked him, so we signed him later in the summer. Still, he was the lowest-paid player on our team and no one probably figured he was going to see a lot of playing time.

In our first meeting, though, I told our team that the players who bought in to what we were trying to do were the ones who were going to play, independent of their salary status or other variables. And when Danny Fortson got hurt and we were looking for someone to replace him in the starting lineup, it was the consensus of the coaching staff it should be Griffin. If nothing else, it was a reaffirmation we were going to be both fair and consistent in what we said at our first meeting.

TAKE THE HEAT

Being criticized—fairly or not—comes with the territory and is part of your professional diet.

When I first began coaching at Boston University my style of play was immediately criticized. My style was to press all over the court, to run and trap and play up-tempo. From the beginning there were people who said that style couldn’t be successful over the long haul, they said it was a gamble defense, they said it would wear my players out, they said it was a gimmick. They even said that my players eventually would get sick of playing that way and that other players would not want to come play in that style.

No matter that we were successful, essentially proving these criticisms wrong. Throughout my head coaching career—a journey that took me to Providence College, to the New York Knicks, to Kentucky—those criticisms never really went away. To some extent, they’ve always been there, lurking beneath the surface, ready to spring out anytime there’s adversity.

You must understand, though, that, as a leader, criticism is here to stay, that it’s part of your job. So prepare yourself for it.

You also must understand that people today tend to be very sensitive to any kinds of criticism. An off-hand comment. A cutting remark. The wrong thing at the wrong time. All these things can lead to overreaction, which can strain the ability to lead.

Another thing to remember is that you will be scrutinized like never before. It’s simply the tenor of the times. From the media, to the people you are leading, to the public, they will all be looking at you under a microscope, just waiting for those flaws to appear, whether they are personal or professional. Leaders today live in a fishbowl and have to be like Caesar’s wife—above suspicion.

Even if you are, though, you still will be criticized. No one is immune. Look at all the great leaders in history. All had people who opposed them. All had people who wanted them to fail. All had people who doubted them, questioned them. All had enemies. It simply comes with the territory. And the more public your position is the more you will be criticized.

Can you handle unwarranted criticism?

Some people can’t, especially the first time it happens to them. They are simply not emotionally ready to handle it. They want to strike back, retaliate. They want everyone to know the criticism is unfair, wrong. It begins to dominate their professional life, taking up much more time than it should.

Interestingly, you often see this with successful people in industry that get involved in professional sports teams. These people all have been tremendously successful, but often they’re not used to being under the kind of media scrutiny that professional sports teams are under. They start to get taken over the coals on the sports page or on the sports talk shows and they can’t believe it. They don’t know how to react.

In their book, The Leadership Lessons of Jesus, authors Bob Briner and Ray Pritchard tell the story of tennis great Arthur Ashe, who worked very hard as the president of the Associa-tion of Tennis Players to help the players who were not great stars, those who often lost in the early rounds of tournaments. Yet many of these players verbally attacked Ashe in a pre-Wimbledon players’ meeting one year and the unwarranted criticism greatly upset Ashe. Never again did he put himself in a leadership position that could subject him to that kind of attack.

But criticism is part of being a leader.

I first learned this in New York as an assistant to Hubie Brown with the Knicks. When it started to go badly for him Hubie would read everything and it ate him up inside. Someone would question him and it would bother him. He took it hard and I understand why he did. From a coaching standpoint he knew he was right, but it didn’t matter. You can’t answer writers. They’re like echoes.

So when I became the Knicks coach in the summer of 1987 I knew what to expect. New York is the kind of town that will boo you on your wedding night if you lose. I used to tell my players then that you can’t play in New York if you are bothered by people knocking you or even making things up.

And the worst part of criticism?

When you know the criticism is wrong. Rest assured, that’s going to happen, too. You are going to be criticized and sometimes that criticism is going to be misguided. When that happens, you simply must realize that it’s part of the business you’re in and there’s really nothing you can do about it.

When I get criticized—either in the newspapers or on talk radio—my strategy is not to deal with it. I learned that in New York, too. I soon realized it was simply easier not to read it. That way I could deal with people professionally and objectively and not be influenced by what they might have written the day before. For the most part it worked and I’ve taken that lesson with me. I don’t read it, I don’t listen to it, nor do I want the people around me to tell me what’s being written or said. Sometimes, though, that’s impossible. During those times when I’m aware of the criticism I do my best to ignore it. And even if I can’t, I’m not going to let it effect me.

A couple of days before the 1999–2000 season started there was an article in the Providence Journal by Mike Szostak on our upcoming season, titled “Celts Season Over Before It Starts.” I did not see the article, but several people told me about it. In fact, on my coach’s show, that’s aired on WBZ in Boston, the host Bob Lobel asked me about it. My reaction? To defuse it. I said that particular writer had every right to say what he did. That his job is to have an opinion and be able to present it and that even though I might not agree with it, I have no problem with that kind of story as long as that person has his name attached to it, for how can you have a problem with someone’s opinion?

What people write, and what they say on the radio, is not going to change the way I lead. I am going to be consistent. I am going to be true to my values and beliefs.

REINFORCE GOOD HABITS

A leader must also reinforce good habits.

Take Dwayne Schintzius, for example:

He is a seven-foot-three player, a former first-round draft pick, who has bounced around the NBA. We signed him before the start of the 1998–’99 season, essentially taking a chance on him, and then he was a part of the Ron Mercer trade the following summer. When we got him, though, we soon discovered he had a major self-esteem problem. In training camp, Schintzius said he hurt. I told him that he should hurt, that when you come into training camp as a professional athlete and you’re not in shape you should hurt. If you run the race you should be tired. But you also should be gratified. Because you’ve done something for yourself.

One day Lester Conner, a former NBA player who is in his first year as my assistant with the Celtics, said he’d been up all night watching film.

“How was it?” I asked.

“I loved it,” he said, “but I’m tired.”

“You’re supposed to be tired,” I said. “You just spent all night watching film. You should be tired.”

In both these examples, I was trying to reinforce these good habits, to make both Dwayne and Lester aware that changing behavior is often difficult, they they were heading in the right direction.

As the leader, you must constantly be reinforcing the goals of the group.

Take the NBA work stoppage in 1999. Too many of the players failed to come back in great shape. Instead, they treated their time off as one long summer vacation that was never going to end, like ten year olds at summer camp. Instead of working extra hard to stay in shape, they used the excuse that 1) there probably wouldn’t be a season anyway, and 2) if there was a season they would have plenty of time to play themselves into shape.

The work stoppage created bad habits.

You must always be looking for bad habits, for bad habits always are going to spring up: the person who starts taking shortcuts, the ones who start to take things for granted, the person who starts to embrace success. The ones who forget the vision. These are all common failings and you always have to be looking for them, to nip them in the bud and prevent them from becoming ingrained.

Sports is a terrific microcosm of human behavior.

When a team is going well, it’s sort of a classic example of teamwork and selflessness. People have a shared vision and common goals. They depend on one another and everyone benefits from the success of the group. You watch them play and these traits become very obvious.

Conversely, when a team is not going well you tend to see the breakdown of these traits. People revert to individual agendas. They lose sight of the vision. You start to see the bad habits.

And the interesting thing about sports?

Both of these examples can happen in the same game.

But don’t kid yourself. This same scenario takes place in every business there is, even if it’s over an extended period of time and not as noticeable. People are forever drifting into bad habits, for a variety of reasons. So you must constantly be vigilant.

Your rule is simple: Reinforce good habits and nip bad ones in the bud.

Good habits are being team-oriented, being unselfish, putting the group ahead of yourself. Bad habits are not working hard, being self-absorbed, quitting, beating your own drum, being selfish, resting on your laurels, taking things for granted.

All these things are distractions, they get in the way of you building your team and they must constantly be addressed. If you look at any group that’s struggling—any team, any business—invariably you will find people that are more concerned with their own performance rather than the group’s, and the propensity to point fingers and blame others.

So you must constantly be vigilant when you see these habits.

I do this all the time. Virtually every day we show our players clips of them taking shots. What’s a good shot? What’s a bad shot? These things are constantly gone over, examined. As a coaching staff, we don’t want these things to go unnoticed.

In a business, you can take similar actions: Be in daily contact with employees, keep your door open, give a consistent message of your vision for them, let them know what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

And just as people get themselves into trouble by reverting back to their bad habits, leaders can get themselves into trouble, too.

How?

By becoming distracted. By answering their critics. By not being there. By doing things that lose people’s trust. In short, by losing consistency. That message that seemed so clear and direct in the beginning has gotten lost along the way.

As a leader, I am always looking for consistency from the people who work for me. I want players I know are going to play defense every night. I want players I know are always going to give me a great effort. I want assistants I can rely on. And just as I want consistency from the people that work for me, I know they want consistency from me, too.

KEY CHAPTER POINTS

• Handle Adversity There are going to be times when you are not successful, times when whatever you do it doesn’t seem to be enough. This is adversity and you must find a way to get through it, for sometimes you simply can’t be successful. During these times, you must keep adhering to your beliefs. You have to be stronger and more resolute than ever. You are the one others will be looking toward for leadership, so you have to be more positive, more visible, more up front with your message.

• Treat People Fairly One of the best ways to be consistent is to treat people fairly. People don’t like vagueness and things that always are changing. They don’t want to hear things third-hand, distorted messages. They want to know what is going to happen, to believe that things are going to be treated fairly.

• Take the Heat You are going to be criticized. You are going to be second-guessed. It’s simply the tenor of the times. No one is immune. So you must be able to handle criticism, even if it’s unwarranted.

• Reinforce Good Habits You must constantly be reinforcing good habits, just as you should constantly be reinforcing the goals of the group. You must always be looking for bad habits or people who are looking for shortcuts, or else others who are either taking things for granted or embracing success.