10
ACT SELFLESSLY
Leading the Celtics has been, without question, the most difficult challenge I’ve ever had in my professional life.
Acquiring and keeping talent with the NBA’s salary cap is extremely difficult, as is coaching contemporary athletes. I can’t always understand why it’s so difficult to reach today’s players, and after talking to a variety of coaches in the NBA, the problem is not endemic to just the Boston Celtics.
But I can’t sit back, throw up my hands, and say, “Well, this is the culture,” and do nothing about it. I must find a way to reach them.
In the 1999–2000 season it wasn’t until we had a trip right after Christmas that I saw a glimmer of hope. We left Christmas night for Los Angeles to play the Clippers, a game we thought was winnable if we played the right way. The point I tried to make to the team was that the Clippers were going to take a lot of three-point shots, even if these shots were challenged. We had to limit their three-point shot attempts and force them to drive to the basket. Sure enough, when it looked like we were in control of the game, the Clippers started taking three-point shots and making them. The result was we lost a hard-fought game.
Afterward, we were all down. Everything we said had come true.
Then we proceeded on to Sacramento.
The Kings pass the ball very well. They have great ball movement and great player movement. In short, they have great teamwork and we lost another hard-fought game, Sacramento eventually pulling away in the fourth quarter.
Next, we headed to Denver.
On paper, this was the most difficult game of the trip. Not only are the Nuggets very tough at home, but we had had a big trade with Denver over the summer, so it promised to be an emotional game, too. Plus, we had blown them out three weeks earlier in the FleetCenter and they no doubt wanted revenge.
The day before the game we had a practice and for the first time all year I sensed a real malaise. We had a couple of guys faking injuries to get out of practice, to the point that we had to scrimmage four against four, and you could just sense that everyone was down, discouraged.
I was extremely upset.
The next morning I called the team together. I had stayed up most of the night thinking of some way to get them back, to get them to refocus.
I started off by telling them I knew it was a difficult road trip and I knew everyone was discouraged. I told them adversity was setting in and it was affecting everyone. I also told them I didn’t like the way they were always “trash-talking” in practice, putting one another down, that I thought there was a danger in that, even though it was supposed to be in fun. Even though I was from another generation I told them I wouldn’t try to change them unless I saw that their attitudes were contributing to a defeatist attitude.
Then I said that this was going to be the most important game they were going to play. That they had to prepare in everything they did and that they not only had to believe in the team, but in themselves, too. And that, “If you quit on yourself you have nothing left.”
All of the players got juiced up.
Danny Fortson, who had played in Denver the year before, called them together and said that we were not going to lose. That night in the locker room you could see a dramatic change in attitude and it carried over into a great road victory for us.
The message?
Sometimes you have to first get people to believe in themselves. Then you get them to believe in the group.
Unfortunately, a few days later we went to New York and reverted back to all our bad habits.
But what we’re looking for is improvement. Sixty percent is better than 40 percent. It’s not as good as 80 percent, but it’s better than 40.
What we’re looking for is consistent growth. It’s not always going to come as quickly as we want, and it’s not going to be without its setbacks, but that’s what we’re always seeking.
We cannot let ourselves get ground down by failure. We must totally believe—and be very positive about—the future. That is what we’re trying to do at the Celtics, even though we haven’t been as successful as quickly as I had hoped. We are still struggling, still climbing, still scratching, and it’s very easy to get down.
This is why I adopted my “98–2” philosophy at the start of the 1999–2000 season, my promise that I was going to try to always be 98 percent positive, even during the most trying of times.
I refuse to succumb to failure and one of the ways I do that is by looking at the travails of other leaders. Look at Joe Torre’s career, for example. He managed the Braves, Mets, and Cardinals before he ever got the chance to manage the Yankees, and by his own admission he had come to view himself as someone who probably never was going to get a chance to win a championship. Dick Vermeil was viewed as being burned out as an NFL coach, someone who belonged to the past, before his St. Louis Rams came out of nowhere to win the Super Bowl in January of 2000. Bill Parcells, who is generally recognized as a Hall of Fame football coach, had a disappointing season with the Jets in 1999, primarily because his quarterback, Vinny Testaverde, got hurt in the first game and missed the rest of the season.
The lesson?
No leader has it easy all the time. There are always going to be rough stretches, down times, and you can’t lose sight of that. It’s all part of the learning experience of being a leader.
In mid-December 1999 we got beat at San Antonio and I felt about as low as I could be. I was exhausted, both mentally and physically. I was totally depressed. In truth, I felt very sorry for myself.
But you can’t let failure keep you down. Failure is not the end of the world.
And it’s all right to feel sorry for yourself once in a while. It’s all right to have a bad day. It’s all right to cry.
But then what are you going to do about it?
What you’re going to do is get a good night’s sleep and get up the next day ready to start fighting again.
That’s what leaders do. They keep moving forward.
As a young coach I was more interested in personal accomplishments.
I think this is normal.
You are just starting out in your chosen career and you’re trying to prove yourself. You tend to see the world in terms of “I.” Your focus tends to be on your own goals, your own ambitions, your own successes, your own world. Certainly this was the case with me.
There are many times now when I lie awake at night and I can’t fathom why my players do some of the things they do, think some of the things they think. Then I go back to the early days of my career and I understand. It’s youth. And I understand the ills of being young. I had great passion, a great love for what I did, and without question I was trying to show people how good I was.
Never mind history repeating itself. People repeat themselves.
This is something all young people go through. In a sense I almost had tunnel vision back then. I was so consumed with mastering my craft, getting better at it, advancing my career, exulting with the wins, dying with the losses, absorbed in each individual season, that I failed to see the true test of leadership.
Once you get a little older, though, and you attain a certain measure of individual success, you start to realize that the only true success is group success; that true greatness is the ability to make those around you better.
This usually doesn’t come in some great epiphany, one magic moment of sheer insight when you realize the error of your ways. Instead, it’s usually a gradual process, evolving over time, until one day there it is in front of you as clear as day.
In basketball, this is what made Larry Bird and Magic Johnson such great players. It wasn’t that they simply had great ability or were marvelous talents. Those were the obvious things, the qualities everyone could see. More subtle was their ability to raise the level of everyone else’s play, too, their ability to always make their teammates better. That’s what made them the icons of basketball they became. It’s the lesson Michael Jordan had to learn when he first came into the NBA as a young player. Yes, he was an amazing talent from his first season. Yes, from the beginning it was apparent Michael had the kind of physical gifts for the game that one day were going to take him to the Hall of Fame. But it wasn’t until he began understanding that he also had to make those around him better, too, that he began to win championships. It wasn’t until he learned that he was an even greater player when he helped those around him succeed that he became the kind of mythic player we all remember.
In the book Playing for Keeps, David Halberstam writes about how in the first years of his career in the NBA Jordan always was very tough on his teammates. He was such a perfectionist that he had little tolerance for people who didn’t perform well or to the level he expected them to. It wasn’t until he retired from basketball the first time and became a minor league baseball player that he changed. One theory is that because he struggled in baseball with his hitting he had more tolerance for failure when he came back to the Chicago Bulls. Whatever, after his baseball experience, Michael Jordan was a much more supportive teammate, an even better leader than he’d been before, more concerned with trying to make his teammates better.
That’s a lesson we all can learn.
To be a great leader is to make everyone better. That’s the greatest gift of all. To elevate the people around you, to get them to maximize their potential, to get them to reach their dreams. This is what the great leaders of history have done and it’s what the great leaders do who are far from the spotlight, whether they are teachers, business leaders, or simply people leading a small group: They make the people around them succeed.
For, ultimately, leaders are judged by the success of the people they lead.
How you get them to be successful is not the issue, as there are almost as many leadership styles as there are leaders. The important thing is getting the people you lead to be successful.
This is the lesson I have finally learned after being a coach for over two decades, the one that transcends all the others.
My two years as the coach of the New York Knicks in the late eighties taught me that I wasn’t going to out-coach anybody. The NBA was full of great coaches who worked hard and were very well prepared. The NBA was also full of great players, to the point that sometimes you could have the best game plan in the world and execute it flawlessly; you could do everything in your power as a coach to be prepared and still you would lose because sometimes great players are going to beat you regardless of what you do as a coach.
So I learned that the only thing that mattered as far as coaching was winning. Not how I coached. Not how I was perceived by the media or by the fans. None of that mattered anymore. Only winning. So my goal was to become the most successful coach I could be. To do that, I had to find a way to have my players be as successful as they could be.
That is what motivated me then and it’s what motivates me to this day. The more I stay in coaching the more I know this is true.
The other thing I have come to know is that leaders must be selfless. It can’t be just about you. Your career, your record. Your advancement, your success. Your dreams. It must be totally about the group.
Just as groups must be selfless.
That’s why, as far as the other part of my job with the Celtics goes, I believe that the community involvement we do with the Celtics is very important. It’s another way we can be selfless, reinforce the notion that the Boston Celtics are not just a professional basketball team, but an organization that’s deeply imbedded in the community. So we give tickets to inner-city schoolkids for every home game. We support a variety of charities. We have community programs.
One of the things I instituted with the Celtics is something we call Heroes Among Us. Just as the Knicks and the Lakers make a big deal about the celebrities who sit in a special row at their home games, adding to the event, I felt we really needed something special at out home games in the FleetCenter, something that wasn’t about Hollywood, but reflected Boston and the surrounding area. We are the medical and academic leader of the country and we wanted to do something to reflect that.
We came up with the ideas of honoring people in the community who are doing something significant, usually with little fanfare. These people come from all walks of life, the only common denominator being that they’re doing something that makes life better, the real unknown heroes. So we announce them during the game and bring them to center court.
In addition to honoring worthy people, this also shows that the Boston Celtics are a vibrant part of the community. We live here. We work here. We are a part of the city’s fabric. We not only recognize our roots in the community, we try to do significant things in the community whether it’s giving to charities, having our players appear at schools and recreation centers, or giving away tickets to inner-city groups.
Hopefully, this also gives our employees a certain pride. Our message to them is we’re not just a professional basketball team whose sole objective is to win games. We are the Boston Celtics, with one of the best traditions in all of sports, a franchise that’s as much a part of the city of Boston as Faneuil Hall and the harbor, a franchise whose roots run deep, imbedded in the community. The Boston Celtics are special and to work for them is also special, but we also have to give back to the community that’s supporting us. This is the message I want all our employees to have, from our players to our support people.
This is a message that can’t be given enough, for it’s at the heart of everything you’re trying to do in building a group: get them to care about one another; get them to subordinate their self-interest to the goals of the group; get them to elevate the others around them.
OWN UP TO YOUR FLAWS
Many people think it’s enough simply to be good at what you do. They work hard, they are constantly striving to make themselves better in their chosen profession, they do all the things they need to ensure their success. They think they’re doing everything they have to do as the head of a company.
So when things don’t go well they complain about their employees. Their assistants are either not good enough or they don’t work hard enough, or both. The rank and file is lazy, only care about their paychecks and how quickly they can leave work. The younger people in the company seem to come from some other planet, almost as if they’re some new form of mutation. Blah, blah, blah. We’ve all heard the litany. We’ve all probably used it ourselves at some point. It’s human nature. We are working hard, yet something in the company seems to be missing. And we’re not quite sure what to do about it, right?
Wrong.
You have fallen into a common trap. And it’s a very simple one.
You have your vision, but it’s strictly a personal one. You have your vision, but you aren’t able to transform it to others. And if you cannot do that, then your vision will never get actualized, will simply remain some personal vision, the business equivalent of a daydream. You also have failed to remember leadership is a partnership, that you’re all in the boat together and when adversity hits you’re all going to be in the life preserver together.
Don’t fail to remember that your success is intricately linked to the people you are leading and you can’t be successful unless they are. You must also realize that things are going to fluctuate, almost like a stock price, up and down. So you have to get back to your fundamentals and ride out the tough times until you start to rise again. You have to also be aware of those around you and know that you might very well have to count on them for your job.
Reading the Vince Lombardi book—When Pride Still Mattered by David Maraniss—made me examine my weaknesses more.
Lombardi always has been a mythic figure to me, the person I admired most in coaching. That began when I was in college and first started to read about Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s. I had seen one of those NFL Flashbacks on Lombardi and also had seen the movie with Ernest Borgnine, and I became fascinated with both Lombardi and his methods. I read everything I could about him. I was fascinated by the way he spoke, the way he used his voice to command respect, the way he demanded things.
Lombardi was one of the greatest coaches in history, the man who led the Packers to the top of the NFL. He also understood the power of motivation and was able to translate that to the players he coached. He had a way of taking a disparate group of individuals and, through his will, mold them into people that were willing to lay it all on the line for the team.
I remember reading a quote by him years ago, one I’ve never forgotten: “Individual commitment to a group effort,” he said. “That’s what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”
So much of what I’ve come to believe is in that quotation.
The other thing I always admired about Lombardi was the way he balanced discipline and love. He believed you had to have both, the discipline to establish the group’s structure, and the love to make everyone help one another. No one had a better mixture of discipline and love than Lombardi.
There’s a part in the book when he talks about how anyone can love somebody’s strengths and somebody’s good looks. But can you accept someone for his inabilities? He didn’t want his players picking on one another, but rather concentrating on what they could do to make it easier on the rest of their teammates. Lombardi always understood that.
He also understood the basic concepts of motivation, namely that everyone can’t be motivated the same way. Lombardi knew his players. He knew who had to be prodded and who had to be pulled, who he could yell at and who he couldn’t. He knew his players’ individual buttons. In so many ways Lombardi was a coaching genius.
But Lombardi was not the saint I always had made him out to be. He always said that the great trilogy in his life was “God, Family, Packers,” but he didn’t treat his family well. He never forgave Jim Taylor for leaving the Packers, even though he later coached a year with the Redskins. He belittled everyone from Monday through Thursday. The love was only there on Friday and Saturday.
I also used to think Lombardi could have coached in any era, but after reading When Pride Still Mattered I now don’t think so. Lombardi could not have dealt with the current media, certainly not in the way he did when he coached. He held grudges. He denied writers with whom he was feuding access to the team. He tried to control his environment in ways you simply can’t do today. In short, he had flaws.
Just as all leaders have flaws.
Take Bill Parcells, for example. Especially how he responded when his New York Jets lost the AFC Championship game to the Denver Broncos in January of 1999. Now Parcells is a great football coach, a widely praised leader. He’s been called the best football coach since Lombardi, a modern day Lombardi, and I would certainly agree.
But what did he say after his team lost, a game in which they had several damaging turnovers?
He was upset that his players had lost their fundamentals in such a big game.
After watching a 60 Minutes profile on him, I saw that the Lombardi-Parcells comparison is right on the money. Both men are driven, passionate, expect nothing less than a winning effort, and will be long remembered for their coaching brilliance. What I walked away with, though,—as a current coach—is that for all their brilliance, for all their victories, it just doesn’t seem as if they enjoyed it enough. That’s not a knock, for my admiration for both men couldn’t be higher. But it’s a lesson for all of us: we must enjoy what we’re doing.
But back to Parcells’s reaction after losing that playoff game in 1999.
I did a similar thing when, at Kentucky, we lost to North Carolina one year in a regional final. At the time, it was a devastating loss, for we did not play well, nor did we play smart, and those are the kind of games that haunt you when you’re a coach, especially when the stakes are so high. These are the things I talked about in the interview room after the game. What I should have been doing was praising North Carolina. But I had been too wrapped up in my own disappointment. Looking at what both Parcells and I did, the lesson is that the best way to deal with a defeat is to praise the opposition.
There’s a lesson to be learned in this: No matter how great the leader there are always human frailties and these frailties eventually come out, especially in times of stress. There is no perfection among leaders.
My greatest failings as a leader, though, have come when I’ve lost my temper.
These are moments when I have lost control and when you lose control you both say things and do things that you often don’t mean. Invariably, when this happens these things will come back to haunt you. When you can’t control your emotions you can cause harm, for those kind of eruptions are harmful to a group. Don’t misunderstand. You can erupt. You can have moments when you’re angry and you can let that anger show. These times can be motivating, but you can’t let yourself lose control of your emotions.
As a leader you must discipline your emotions.
My other great failing as a leader was I tended to dominate things too much. My first year with the Celtics we didn’t get enough accomplished in staff meetings because I dominated the meetings too much. I had gotten away from what I believe is the principle rule about good communication—that you should listen about four times more than you speak.
That’s why leaders need introspection.
You must recognize your flaws.
Knowing yourself—your strengths, weaknesses, and your values—is essential, as is being able to ask yourself difficult questions. Are you being true to your values? Is everything still headed toward the future? Have you forgotten what made you successful in the first place? Are you thinking selfishly or about the team? Have you embraced success?
You must always be asking yourself these questions.
DON’T COMPETE WITH THOSE YOU LEAD
You must always be using your power to help people.
That might sound like an obvious statement, but it really isn’t.
It’s easy to take advantage of any leadership position, whether by accepting the perks that come with the job, expecting people to treat you deferentially, or simply by abusing your power.
My former assistants are always telling stories about how difficult it was to work for me. All the long hours they put in, all the crazy things they had to do. It’s as if they’re all members of some private club and these stories are part of the initiation night, so there’s always an element of “can you top this?” These stories are told with great humor and like all stories, they get exaggerated over the course of time, but whenever I hear them a little bell goes off in my head, too. For I did work them hard. I did sometimes make them do crazy things. There were ways I treated them I regret now.
For you must treat your assistants with respect, too.
You can’t misuse your power. You can’t abuse it. You must always be using your power to help people.
In a sense you must always have your own checkpoints, your own little system of checks and balances. What are your goals? Are you being true to your values? Are you still moving toward your vision? Because it’s so easy to stray, especially the more successful you become.
It’s almost become a cliché. You hear this all the time, about the people who become very successful only to forget where they came from, forget their roots. In a sense, it’s one of the worst things you can say about people and you must be forever vigilant that it doesn’t happen to you.
Because it’s easy to lose your way.
Just as it’s easy for people in the workplace to lose focus, it’s also easy for leaders to forget their core values, drift from their vision. You must never lose sight of why you have power in the first place, the inherent premise that comes with any kind of leadership situation; namely, that you’re supposed to be helping people to become more successful.
In coaching, it’s often called putting players in positions where they can be successful. That’s a microcosm for any kind of leadership. You can’t be competing with people. You can’t be threatened by their achievements. You can’t be hoping they’re going to stay in the same positions forever. You must rejoice in their successes, wish them well when they outgrow you and move on, just as parents do when their children grow up and leave the house to go off on their own.
BE OF SERVICE
When I first got to Kentucky I didn’t realize what I represented, the fact that Kentucky basketball is so ingrained in the state, how important it was to so many people, both emotionally and psychologically. In my mind, I always had been just a basketball coach.
It didn’t take me long, however, to realize I was the caretaker of all this and that it was something to watch over very carefully. It wasn’t about me; it was about what I represented. Coaches come and go, but the tradition of Kentucky basketball remains forever.
That realization had two sides to it:
Because of the power of the position it was very easy to get things accomplished. In just two months we raised enough money to start a shelter for the homeless in Owensboro, Kentucky, that’s named for my son Daniel, who died when he was six months old of a congenital heart defect. It feeds a hundred people a day and has beds for sixty.
The flip side was the responsibility that came with that, the very real sense that being the head of Kentucky basketball had very little to do with me and everything to do with what this basketball program meant to the state of Kentucky, the people of Kentucky. It was very humbling and it was one of the messages I was always giving to my players at Kentucky—they weren’t just playing for themselves or their teammates or even their university. They were playing for all those people who had never been inside Rupp Arena in Lexington but who had spent so much of their lives caring about Kentucky basketball, giving their hearts to it. They were playing for all the people who felt better about themselves when Kentucky won, all those people who were emotionally connected to it in ways that people who weren’t from Kentucky couldn’t understand. They were playing for all the players who had come before, the ones who had built the tradition, the ones who had expanded upon it. And they were playing for all the players who would come after them, would come after me. That was always my message to them, that they were all part of this continuum that was Kentucky basketball, this wonderful tapestry that was full of so many different threads.
This was what we had to protect. This was the heirloom we had to keep polishing.
And when you begin to look at things this way it’s almost impossible to be selfish, to be self-oriented. When you realize you’re a part of something that’s far greater than yourself it’s easier to subordinate your own self-interest.
That’s the ideal, what you are always striving for.
From your first meeting when you present the vision, through all the traits of leadership, what you are striving for is selflessness: the selflessness of the individual members of the group, the selflessness of the leader. The sense that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. That’s the essence of what all great groups have, the one common denominator. They become families in the very best sense of the world, people who care for one another, who help one another.
One day, shortly into the 1999–2000 season, the weekly poll question in the Boston Herald asked if I should be fired as the coach of the Celtics. Someone left the article on my desk and my first reaction was why would someone do that?
But you know what my second reaction was?
What would Tim Sypher—who gave up a job three years ago to come work for me—do if I were fired? What would happen to John Connor, our equipment man who quit his previous job to come work for me when I got the Celtics job? What would happen to my assistant coaches, my staff? What would happen to the people who had hitched their fate to mine, the people who were now dependent on me?
That’s when I knew I had truly evolved as a leader.
Because when I was younger my first reaction undoubtedly would have been a personal one. What would I do now? How would this affect my career, my family? Where would I go next? The inevitable personal questions. Now, though, my first reaction was to be concerned with everyone else, not just myself.
That’s what leaders do.
They concern themselves with the well-being of others.
I am asked all the time whether winning the national championship at Kentucky in the spring of 1996 was the high point of my career. Certainly, it was one of them. It was one of those nights when you remember all the things you do early in your career, all the dues paying, all those years when you were so far from ever winning anything like a national championship, all those years when winning a national championship is as far away as Oz.
All those memories came rushing at me that night, like some newsreel in my head I couldn’t stop. All the recruiting visits when I was at Boston University in search of kids I knew I’d never get. All the coaching at summer camps when I was just starting out. All the speaking at summer camps when I was trying to make a name for myself. All the traveling and hours spent away from my family. All the cramped locker rooms and cold gyms. All the miles you travel when you are just beginning on the road, just trying to survive in the game.
I remembered all those things that night, how very far I had come since I was just a little kid falling in love with a game, a game that has come to define so much of my life. Could anyone have asked for more? That night in the Meadowlands, seeing us win the national championship, I didn’t think so.
But while it certainly was one of the most wonderful moments in my life, something I will cherish forever—not only for it being the symbolic top of the mountain in my profession but also because of the tremendous joy it gave to everyone in the state of Kentucky—in all honesty the night of the NBA draft in 1996, that was three months later, where I saw four of my players get drafted was just as sweet.
I saw those four young men, who had worked so hard, hugging their families. I knew how much getting drafted meant to them. I knew how much it meant to their families. I knew how very far they had come from when they had first arrived at Kentucky as freshmen, full of the same doubts and uncertainties all freshmen have when they enter college. I knew how hard they had worked as players, how much they had to surrender some of their individual goals for the sake of the team. I knew how much they had sacrificed and now I saw them being rewarded for it, all their basketball dreams coming true.
That was the ultimate moment in my career.
I got more satisfaction that night than from any individual awards I’ve ever won. Because I knew I had played a role in something that was filling someone else’s cup with so much joy.
Because what you eventually find out when you’re looking for your own gratification is that it’s essentially short-lived. Yes, it’s nice to win awards and be recognized for your accomplishments, yet those, ultimately, have a very short shelf life. But when you’ve had a hand in someone else’s success that connection, that bond, can last a lifetime.
That is the essence of leadership.
That is what makes the job worthwhile.
That is what makes success continually worth striving for.
KEY CHAPTER POINTS
• Own Up to Your Flaws It is not enough to simply be good at what you do. Your vision can’t be a personal one. It must be one you can transform to others. We all have flaws, but it’s important that you recognize what they are. You must always be asking yourself difficult questions: Are you being true to your values? Is everything still geared toward the future?
• Don’t Compete with Those You Lead You must always be using your power to help people. You can’t be competing with people you are leading, but doing everything you can to make their situation better.
• Be of Service The true leader is a selfless leader. Everything you do as a leader must be geared to nurturing an environment that makes people’s lives better.