Wooden on Leadership

John Wooden and Steve Jamison collaborated to write Wooden on Leadership. I have appreciated his writings along with John Maxwell's. Throughout my blog are entries about some of their writings. Maxwell is clearly influenced by Wooden. This book interestingly follows my reading of Relentless by Tim Grover, another basketball person with a very different view of how to be successful. Wooden's key to success is to be the best you as an individual can be, whereas Grover's is more about achieving the accolades of your particular field. Wooden strives for balance and achieving the best through mastering the fundamentals and practice in connection with positive relationships with your team and family. Grover sees those relationships as secondary and only important in that they help the individual achieve greatness. Wooden is about the team and Grover is about the individual. I prefer the team approach.

I have detailed Wooden's pyramid of success in the past. It is the foundation of his approach to leadership. He tries to embody it so as to demonstrate it's role in creating success. His book starts with an overview of the pyramid and then enters the 10 keys of leadership followed by a section entitled lessons from my notebook which includes passages from his notes and how he thinks they demonstrate skills, strategies and techniques to being a successful leader, regardless of your field. Each of the leadership chapters contains a description of the technique with examples of his time as a coach, a summary of rules to live by and a statement from a former player or coach that reinforces the concept.

Unsurprisingly, the chapter that stuck me most was "Call yourself a teacher." He states that effective leaders "teach those under... [their] supervision how they could perform to the best of their ability in ways to best serve the goals of the team" (p. 92). Not only share the goals of the team, but individually understand how each member needs to grow to optimize chances of achieving the goal. He later uses a concept he calls the laws of learning: "explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction when necessary (and it usually is) and then repetition" (p. 96). This law he repeats in the text at various times. He focuses on demonstration of what makes a person successful and private correction. Public praise for the entire team, not just the star, but the whole team because every person is instrumental in achieving a goal. He does not support rewarding top achievers so much as those that help those achievers become successful. This plays into his idea that it takes ten hands to score a point, another of his rules for leaders.

Another concept I particularly liked was from a piece of advice from Wooden's father- Make each day a masterpiece. Do the absolute best you can do every day. This is a noble and difficult goal. To think that each day you have done your best because you planned, practiced and executed to do better than the day before is truly a challenge. We all have bad days. We need to learn from our mistakes and endeavor to not repeat them. Ambitious goal that if you can do it will undoubtedly lead to success.