On Taking Over a New Team and the Pitfalls of Success

Spring begins in a couple of weeks — meaning coaches, administrators and executives across sports and business will be evaluating their seasons, appointing new leaders, and giving deep consideration to the possibilities ahead.

For this week’s Saturday Blueprint, we put together some of the best thoughts from our guests about taking over new programs and resisting the temptation to become complacent with past success.

On taking over a new team:

You take over at Vanderbilt in 2003. What were you trying to establish early on with your program?  

I took good notes, both physical and mental with Coach Leggett (at Clemson) and left there with a large notebook and a thought process. When you move from an assistant coach to a head coach, I went into the program with adjusted confidence and innocence. You’re prepared to the best of your ability, but you’re still not prepared at the level the program is going to need you need to be. I went in with my eyes wide open with realistic and cautious optimism, no declarations, just kind of a workman-like approach.  

I was growing into my skin as a head coach, gaining intuition and just felt like Vanderbilt was like the Presbyterian of the SEC. There were no expectations. I just wanted to teach commitment and investment level to the kids and what it looked like. I understood I needed to model those behaviors first and create a vision.

I wanted to grow the baseball program based on what the university looked like: High expectations and values built upon high academic standards.

-Tim Corbin, Vanderbilt baseball coach

What stands out to you most from those early years in building your program?

When I got the job, I had a 4-year-old son. I gave birth to my daughter two weeks after the press conference. I had to recruit all over the country, and I didn’t have time to ask, “What if we don’t make it?” or “What are people saying about this?” it never even registered. I just had stuff to do constantly.

The first year was so hard. The second year was hard in the sense that we were having all of these private victories that were just awesome but never showed up on the scoreboard. If that year had happened today with all of the access everyone has to judge everything, I don’t know if those kids would’ve pulled through. But I had them in my bubble.

If we had a great two-hour practice, that was a win. If we reached our goal in a passing drill, that was a win that was celebrated. Our team was in that little bubble of belief and progress. The outside world couldn’t overtake that environment. We went 8-19, but we were way better than that in our minds and our hearts because we’d been using an internal gauge that was more about process.

-Sherri Coale, former University of Oklahoma women’s basketball coach

Looking back on your early successes and some challenges you faced, what retrospective advice would you give yourself that maybe other young coaches can apply?

You’ve got to know what it is you want to do. And when you know what it is that you want to do, you’ve got to have a philosophy and develop your own — or steal somebody else’s and add to it. You have to develop a plan or system whereby you get a result, and if you don’t get the right result, you’ve got to change it or tweak it.

When you know what it is you want to do and you have a philosophy or plan or system that works, then you take great pride in it. Most importantly, as we all know about Coach (Bob) Knight back then, it’s practice, practice, practice, practice.

-Pat Riley, Miami Heat president

You end up doing two combat tours in Iraq, the second as a sergeant. What type of leader were you and is there any retrospective advice you’d give yourself?

My second deployment, I had some rank on my shoulders. It was a totally different mindset. Before, I was following orders, executing, just trying to do my best every day and stay alive. Now, I was doing all of those things, but leading a team of 17, 18, 19-year-olds whose parents had entrusted the U.S. government with their lives. I had to help them cope with the mental strain of being deployed, the physical stress your body endures, the emotional stress of being at war.

I wish I could come to you with an ego and say I knocked it out of the park right out of the gate, but that would be a total lie. I struggled with basic fundamentals. I struggled with not spending enough time getting to know the people I was leading. I struggled early on with not getting a collective buy in and trust. I paid the price for it, but I learned a lot of lessons coming out.

I’m grateful to have had those experiences early in my career because they helped me come into my own and become more seasoned as a leader. You want to deliver, and you want to deliver excellence. The way to find that balance is you have to prioritize connecting with your people. You have to practice seeing the humanity in everybody and not just viewing them as a resource.

-Brittany Masalosalo, chief public policy officer at HP Inc.

On the pitfalls of success:

You shared an interesting thought recently that winning can lead to more issues for teams down the road. Can you elaborate on that?

I think we assume if a team is winning, they must have a great culture, that nothing must be going wrong. But I’d say bad cultures win all the time. Bad leaders win all the time. They don’t win over the long run, but they can win for a season, just not five, 10 or 20 seasons.

I found a lot of teams that start to win start avoiding accountability. When people are falling short of the standards, (leaders) don’t want to rock the boat or screw anything up. But those little cracks you ignore… can become massive fractures, and we could’ve just dealt with those a month ago when it wasn’t that big of a deal. Now, it’s a major deal.

The standard always has to be the standard, whether you’re winning or losing. We have to live, and practice, and communicate, and lead the way that we’ve committed to, not just base it on a result.

-Kevin DeShazo, leadership consultant, mental performance mastery coach

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, keynote speaker

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