Recent Highlights of the Saturday Blueprint

This fall, the Saturday Blueprint has featured lessons and perspectives from coaches, CEOs and keynote speakers on organizational dynamics, remaining stoic amid high stakes, and the dangers of success.  

For this week's edition, The Daily Coach put together some of the recent highlights from our guests. 

What are the most critical qualities for a coach or leader in your opinion?

(This is from) Max De Pree’s book. Leadership is an interactive relationship whereby you get put in a position, you get hired, you grow to that position, however you get to the position, you must get a result. That’s it. That’s the definition of leadership. It’s an interactive relationship you have with everybody because you’ve been put in a position to get a result.

So, how do you do that? How do you get that result? You only get it through trust. When it comes to trust, it has to be sincere as a leader. Your coaching has to be sincere. You’re not just coaching them to get something out of them for yourself. You have to be sincere in your efforts in helping them achieve what they really want to achieve if they put in the hard work. 

You can only gain their trust if you’re competent. Players know immediately if you’re putting them on, if you’re a fake or a fraud as a head coach. You’ve got to be competent, and your competency has to lead to them becoming better. They have to believe that you can help them become better players and they can earn more and reach the dreams they want to reach. But you have to be competent.

The last thing is you have to be reliable. They will only trust you if you’re going to be there when it’s tough. In the pros, that’s a hard one because sometimes players get traded. You’re teaching trust and can be trading a guy tomorrow. That has to be explained to them — that this is a business that goes both ways. But you have to be reliable in those instances where things start going sideways for a player or for a team. 

-Pat Riley, Miami Heat president

You’ve had pretty remarkable success over the last decade. What skills did you find from your coaching and teaching background translated into business?

When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re essentially a talent scout. There’s no solitary company. You’re constantly looking to get people on this team who can help us win. You need to get different personalities to work together.

You want people who are self-motivated, but there’s a line between that and being selfish. (You want) people who can grind, people who can overcome adversity.

I make basketball analogies all the time here. There are a lot of similarities I think in how people on a team interact. You have leaders and players, who have to respond to the leadership positively. If someone’s not being a leader, you have to call them out.

What I learned from coaching really prepared me for business and trying to get people to buy into something bigger than themselves. If work is really hard and you’re not bought into the end goal, you get people who aren’t bought in. if they’re bought into the vision, then they look at what’s hard as, “This is challenging, but I’m in on this. It’s just a tough time.”

If you’re not interested in getting to the North Star, it’s kind of hard to get people to really be bought in and go through the hard times.

-Anthony Katz, Hyperice founder 

You frequently tweet E + R = O (Event + Response = Outcome). Can you elaborate on that equation a bit?

My dad taught me E + R = O when I was a teenager. I started taking it super seriously my senior year of high school. In college, it all expanded. I started seeing it socially, academically, financially, people who responded poorly to events consistently got really, really bad outcomes.

I dropped out after one semester of college, moved back to L.A., started waiting tables for a year. Imagine what an aggressive, competitive 19-year-old living on the beach in L.A. would do. I did that. The responses were downright bad and delivered immediate, serious consequences. It wasn’t the event. It was my response. The outcomes weren’t happening because of my environment but because of what I was doing in my environment.

I went back to college, finished there, graduated, moved back to L.A. again… I really started to craft and cultivate it and came to the recognition that every outcome in my life was a consequence of my responses, not my events. The events happened, and in every event I was in, I had choices, attitudes, perspectives, emotions and actions. If the event happened, that wasn’t the end, that was the start. If I wanted great outcomes, I couldn’t rely on the event.

-Brian Kight, keynote speaker, founder of “Daily Discipline”

You took over at Duke with great experience as a player, coach and TV analyst. But was there anything you weren’t fully prepared for?

I think the biggest adjustment was probably the managing of the staff. When you become a head coach, you know you have to manage the team. But the staff at every level is so large now. There’s management involved in that. Even though they don’t play for you, they do work for you. You have to spend time on standards and expectations.

There’s less oversight with a staff member because they’re older and most have done the job before. But you have to have great cohesion with the staff because players sense that right away. It’s kind of like kids and parents. If mom and dad aren’t on the same page, the kid knows and feels that. If they’re not aligned and mom says no, what’s the thing they do next? They go to dad. You might get a different answer. 

I want to make sure there are no different answers outwardly. Obviously, inwardly there are tons of different answers because we debate and argue and go back and forth. That’s how it should be. That’s a healthy staff conversation about strategies and schemes. But when we leave, we all have to be aligned. There can’t be a hint of misalignment because people pick up on that.

-Kara Lawson, Duke women’s basketball coach

How do you maintain that level of discipline to not react to plays or what’s happening in front of you when there’s so much at stake?

I think there’s a humility to it and not going over the top with your behavior when you’re a leader. I think people expect all coaches, all executives to behave in a manner where they look like they have a presence, they have an expertise, and they can be followed by other people. Not just men and women but anyone in a position of leadership, you want to be respected. If you give somebody a chance to ridicule you for something you might do that’s out of sync, that’s on you. I don’t do it consciously. That’s just who I am as a man.

-Pat Riley

You think a lot of leaders are ill-prepared for what success can bring.

You see a lot of people who perform really, really well and get more criticism. The world criticizes people who perform better. Nobody ever told that to the 16-year-old. As a 16-year-old, we’re taught that as you perform better and become a better leader, you get celebrated. Nobody ever says that as you become a better leader, more people are going to dislike and borderline hate you.

The 16-year-old starts doing a really good job, gets some haters and is super-confused and starts to resent the people who are doing that and the role they’re in. I want people to make sure they’re not surprised by the adversity or the presence of this in their life. 

You’re going to experience this. Accept it from the beginning. Whenever it comes into your life, remind yourself, “Oh yeah. I knew something like this was coming.”

Then, go respond.

-Brian Kight