Leading Business Teams

Guest Post by Bill Kane

In May of 2024, I had the opportunity to address the NY Alliance, where I spoke of my recently published book, Leading Business Teams (Routledge, 2024).

Written with Andy Hill, a three-time NCAA champion under Coach John Wooden, Leading Business Teams offers a compendium of best practices, case studies, evidence-based research, pragmatic advice, and personal business anecdotes depicting the time-tested principles of John Wooden, in a leadership model that can be emulated and efficaciously applied by people managers in today’s challenging business environments through their SCORE paradigm:

> Staffing: Attracting and Selecting Talent
> Cultivating Culture: Defining How People Should Interact
> Organizing and Planning: The Need for Direction and Focus
> Reinforcing Desirable Behavior: Managing Performance
> Engaging the Organization: A Leader’s Role and Responsibility

Background
High performing organizations understand that the key to creating competitive advantage is to build and lead a team of talented individuals with common goals who understand their personal and professional assets and limitations, as well as those of their team members. Embracing this concept builds cohesion and a culture that exemplify the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Basketball, like business, is highly competitive, team-oriented, and pressure-filled. It requires players to be conscious of strategy and their own innate talent, much like the employees in any professional organization. Its similarities include pace, real-time decision-making, span of control, contingency planning, and the need for heightened collaboration.

John Wooden, as a motivator, teacher, and Coach was one of the most important and lasting icons of his era—in and beyond the world of sports. His teams won a remarkable 80% of the time that they took the floor over his forty-year coaching career, including sixteen conference championships, an 88-game winning streak, and ten NCAA men’s basketball championships at UCLA, four of which featured undefeated teams. These records, set in the 1960s and ‘70s, have not yet been challenged and many believe that they will stand the test of time. They are a testament as to why Wooden is generally considered the greatest coach of all time and was selected as ESPN’s “Coach of the Century.”

How did he manage to do attain such numbers? There was no magic to the Coach’s success, but his recipe was unique (and is captured in the book). He simply reached and stayed at the pinnacle of his profession by creating a high-performing team culture based upon the timeless values and lessons learned from his boyhood days on a farm in Indiana.

Application

The book is ostensibly a roadmap toward optimal individual and team performance. Its principles have been clearly conveyed, researched, and demonstrated, covering a wide spectrum of current and emerging trends in people management practices. A macro-level sampler of 3 of the 21 of these Principles includes:

1) Focus on effort, not on winning

Believe it or not, Coach Wooden rarely discussed with his team the importance of winning. In fact, he was neither a cheerleader nor an evangelist about setting any quantitative measures by which to judge success or failure. He simply focused on effort and on-going skill development as steppingstones toward competitive greatness. To this end, Coach encouraged his players to focus upon that which they could control, and he provided continuous feedback. He wanted his players to know that missed free throws at the beginning of a game were just as important as at the end. He wanted them to know that mistakes needed to be corrected as soon as possible. He stressed fundamentals; fostered healthy competitiveness balanced with camaraderie, communicated accountabilities, and even went as far as having the players rate themselves. If he felt there were shortcomings of effort, changes were made.

2) The team with the best players almost always wins

As Coach noted, “No one can win without talent; Not everyone can win with it.”

The Coach’s approach to recruiting involved keeping a pulse on the “marketplace.” He used multiple sources such as interested alumni, former players, managers, players’ parents, and friends to locate and screen potential recruits. Once identified, he thoroughly investigated each prospect’s background through scouting reports, checking with the player’s high school coach, surveying coaches against whom the individual had played, and meeting the prospect’s parents. The goal of this inquiry was to not only validate a player’s current and potential skill set, but to explore the player’s personal character, temperament, motivation, as well as his ability to withstand pressure and adversity. In addition, with his understanding of the importance of team roles and individual competencies, Coach insisted that prospects had two essential attributes, quickness and team orientation. He wanted players who not only had talent, but who were “eager to lose oneself for the best of the group.”

When one considers the organizational implications of the Coach’s rigor in recruiting, the message is clear: Talent – its identification, recruitment, and integration is critical for organizational success. In this regard, organizations should be clear in their mission and values statements in order ensure individual “fit” and alignment.

3) A great leader cannot worry about being liked

An argument can be made that leadership is all about allocating limited resources. And not all decisions related to those allocations will be popular, or embraced.

When one is in a position of authority, it is incumbent to make decisions that place organizational needs ahead of individual accommodations. Thin-skinned need not apply. To this end, Coach knew what skills and behaviors were required to drive collective excellence. He set goals, defined responsibilities, held people accountable, and encouraged his team members to grow and develop. Every player knew their role and what was expected. No detail was too small; nothing was left to chance; no loose ends. The reward was playing time, and egos were bruised for those who sat.

When tough decisions are at your doorstep, trust and integrity must be part of the process. The leader who acts in this regard may not be celebrated by all of his or her subordinates; however, she/he will be respected.

In Conclusion

For those of us in managerial roles, we are being challenged on a daily basis to keep-up with multiple stakeholder and marketplace demands, lest falling behind. This entails making constant course adjustments, juggling business priorities and needs, and addressing an ever-increasing multitude of people challenges. Leading Business Teams is the definitive guide for optimizing team performance. It will be a terrific reference for you and help you become an exemplary leader along the way!

About the Author

Bill Kane (MA, MBA, MA, PhD) currently teaches at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. Previously, he was an HR executive for Sumitomo Corporation of America, Kyowa Pharmaceutical, and IFF. He has served on numerous human resources committees, as well as advisory boards, including the Smithsonian Science Education Center. Bill is also the author of The Truth about Thriving in Change (Pearson Education, 2008). Bill may be contacted at [email protected].