The Morning Pep Talk #4: "LEADERSHIP"

"Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily, even if you had no title or position." --Brian Tracy

Good morning to the JWT Wolfpack. I hope you've been keeping up with our Morning Pep Talks. Today's word of the day...

LEADERSHIP

This is a topic near and dear to me. I have spent a lot of time in my life studying leadership. I have spent a lot of time watching good leaders and how they operate.

Now you might be thinking, "David, I'm not a leader. Why should I keep reading?"

Well first of all, because 99% of us work for somebody else, so we have to deal with leaders, good and bad ones. Second of all, you should read this because 99% of us end up being some kind of leader at some point in our lives... a parent, an older sibling, a mentor to a friend, etc.

Leadership comes in many different forms. At some point, some of this might pertain to you. So keep reading! LOL

The first real training I had on being a leader was from my high school basketball coach, Ronnie Cookson. He was a great coach, winning 13 state championships in boys basketball (a record in Missouri). He was phenomenal when it came to teaching shot selection, and he was as good as anybody I've ever seen at simplifying a game plan so that everybody understood it.

However, his greatest strength, in my opinion, was that he was a master psychologist. He was an absolute genius when it came to getting everybody to buy into their job on the team, whether that meant you were the starting post player or the guy at the very, very end of the bench. He was so good at making those guys at the end of the bench feel important, the best I've ever seen.

He did this, in my opinion, with one trick: WORRY ABOUT YOURSELF.

We live in a world where a lot coaches try to get their players to lead by telling each other what to do, even sometimes yelling at each other. Every time I see that, I just shake my head. How can we expect 15-18 year old kids to tell each other what to do, especially when the "stuff" hits the fan or when the game gets hard? That runs counter to what Ronnie Cookson taught us.

Coach Cookson drilled into our head from the time we were in 7th grade, you don't tell each other what to do. Just play. Don't try to coach each other. Just play. Don't worry about what somebody else is doing wrong. Just play. Why should you be upset because somebody else is messing up, when it has nothing at all to do with you? Just play.

This is always how I tried to run my teams. I've had some great leaders through the years. They all did it a different way. Kenyon Wright was a great leader, but was one of the most quiet kids I ever coached. He never "chewed out a teammate." He just worked extremely hard and was always encouraging his teammates. I think if Kenyon would have been worried about what everybody else was doing he wouldn't have been near as good as he was (102 made threes his senior year), and our team wouldn't have been as good, either.

Probably the best leader, and best winner for that matter, that I've ever been around was Dom Johnson. I coached Dom in almost everything he did from age 9 little league baseball until he graduated high school. He was the point guard on both of my state championship teams. Dom led our team in points (29.7), rebounds (9.1), assists (6.3), steals (2.8), and high fives (just kidding) his senior year. He scored at least 40 points in seven different games that year, including the state championship game, where he scored 40 (25 in the first half!).

Dom never, ever yelled at a teammate or tried to tell somebody else what to do. He was our best player by a mile, but he was also our hardest worker and our most unselfish player. I saw him, our best player, stay after practice to rebound for a kid who was struggling with his shooting. I saw him give teammates rides to and from practice. And at least 1,000 times I saw him say "my bad" after throwing a perfect pass to a teammate who dropped the ball.

Dom led by example. Nobody could question his work ethic. Dom wanted to win. You see, winning is a "we" thing. You can't win in basketball, or in life for that matter, all by yourself. When winning is the main objective, you're saying that you are putting the group's goals ahead of your own selfish goals. Dom did that.

My beliefs on leadership have been proven over and over again. Probably the best leadership training that I ever had in my life was when I went through Officer Candidate School (OCS) with the United States Marine Corps. They drilled into us various leadership principles, and a lot of them sounded familiar to me.

The motto at OCS was "ducto exemplus," Latin for "Set the Example." The best leaders I've seen up close and personal, guys like Dom and Kenyon, they definitely set the example. One way they demonstrated this at OCS was "officers eat last." Whenever we ate, the officers always made sure their entire platoon had eaten before they sat down to eat.

Another great leadership principle was "seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions." When you're the leader, you might take responsibility (I think a lot of people do), but do you "seek responsibility?" To actually try to find out how YOU can make a situation better, to seek that out, is what all great leaders do.

Back to the example of players yelling and fussing at each other, how can you "seek responsibility" when you're busy pointing fingers at what everybody else is doing wrong? How can you "set the example" when you're too busy trying to correct everybody's mistakes? And don't you know they're mumbling under their breath "you just missed a shot and had two turnovers" when you're fussing at them? LOL

Outside of sports, whether it's in the workplace or your relationships, whether you're a leader or not, you can benefit from some of the best advice I've ever received in my life: "WORRY ABOUT YOURSELF." When you're frustrated at work, is it a situation that is in your control? Is it something you're even capable of fixing? I guarantee 9 out of 10 times, the answer is NO! So why ruin your day getting upset about things that are out of your control and you can't fix anyway?

That's what Just Win Today is all about. How can you make today a WIN? How can you make today better than yesterday? How can you make sure that today builds towards a better tomorrow?

All you can truly control is what is right in front of you. Just worry about yourself. Just work on you. Just Win Today.

And try to help somebody if you can. That will always makes you feel better and improve your situation :)

#JWT

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