Success Secrets and Stories
To share management leadership concepts that actually work.
You are responsible for your development as a leader. Don't expect the boss to invest the training budget in your career. Consider this podcast as an investment of time in your career, with a bit of management humor added at the same time.
Success Secrets and Stories
Elevating Team Performance Through Mindful Management Strategies
Discover the strategies of legendary coach Phil Jackson and how his mindful leadership transformed the Chicago Bulls into an NBA dynasty. Alongside my co-host Greg, we unravel the intricate weave of Management by Responsibility (MBR) and its parallels to Jackson's triangle offense, a system that amplified the unique talents of players like Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman. We reflect on the monumental shift from Doug Collins' more autocratic approach to Phil's inclusive and emotionally intelligent style, emphasizing the power of active listening, empowering others, and nurturing a collective team spirit. These stories are not just inspiring; they offer practical lessons for leaders in any field seeking to harness the potential of their teams and create an environment where creativity and independence flourish.
As the discussion unfolds, we turn our attention to the critical role of communication and decision-making in high-pressure environments, drawing comparisons to aviation cockpits and surgical operating rooms. Here we dissect lessons from Crew Resource Management programs and surgical checklists, which have revolutionized safety protocols by fostering unequivocal communication and teamwork. This episode isn't just about sports or management theories; it's a deep dive into the essence of human collaboration under stress and the importance of shared responsibility. Whether you're navigating the boardroom or the basketball court, these insights can help you elevate your leadership game to an all-star level.
Presented by John Wandolowski and Greg Powell
Hello everyone and welcome to Success Secrets and Stories. I am your host, john Wanoloski. I'm here with my co-host and friend, greg Powell. Hey everybody, yeah, and today we're going to talk about a leadership style and there's different things that I think is important to try to highlight. We're going to step back a little bit and I always come back to this line of okay, mbr, yeah, fine, prove it. Show me some examples of what communication really means, this management by responsibility being applied. Now, one of the things that I have learned is that some great examples are of people who probably personally, I know, didn't take the course, but how they did their work, how they did their job, how they actually produced their end results, were MBR kind of approaches or philosophies. So one of my favorite examples whenever somebody says, give me an example of somebody who's really done this, I like talking about the Zen master, phil Jackson, and if you think about it, here's a coach that was dealing with some of the biggest personalities in terms of basketball the.
Speaker 1:Dennis Rodmans, michael Jordan, kobe Bryant, shaq I mean you named the people who were probably the biggest stars in the 1990s and he worked with probably the cream of the crop, some of the best that ever played basketball. And it's interesting that he wrote a book on leadership, the 11 Principles of Mindful Leadership, and what I really liked is that there's elements that he put into the book or elements that, as he was developing the book, that I thought was very relevant to MBR and you know talking about those kind of applications and where I saw the successes. Greg, maybe you want to start off with the story of Tex Winter.
Speaker 2:Thank you, john. So let's take a look at those bulls, those 80s, 90s bulls that were just incredible, but it took them a while to get incredible. So Phil Jackson had this view similar to the principles using to foster greater creativity and innovation in an organization, he used a system known as the triangle offense. He got that triangle offense from a college coach, tex Winter, who became an assistant coach for the Bulls, and what Phil said that attracted him to the triangle was the way to empower the players, offering each one a vital role to play as well as a high level of creativity within a clear, well-defined structure. So let's talk about that from the NBR human development perspective. So again, tex Winter, hired in 1985 as an assistant coach for the Chicago Bulls, installed the triangle offense, something he'd used in college and was very successful with. He worked with two other Chicago coaches who had limited results and just couldn't figure out what was going on there. But then Phil Jackson got elevated to head coach hired in 1989, and the Bulls were able to apply the offensive concepts effectively. It was Phil's approach to develop his assistant coach and the team's listening skills. At that point the team was able to understand how to work the triangle design and apply the offensive scheme.
Speaker 2:So you're probably saying, hey, the Bulls, they had a coach before Mr Jackson. Yes, they did, a gentleman who played great college ball, great pro ball. His name is Doug Collins. You're saying to yourself, wait a minute, doug Collins was really good. What happened there? Well, doug was a great player and he had a good mind for the game, but he didn't always, perhaps, demonstrate those listening skills. Doug was a guy who was really smart and knew what he felt. He knew what he needed to do, when he needed his players to do and when to do it, and he didn't need an assistant coach or someone like that to give him some other ideas. But the results that the team had proved that they needed to do something to take him in a different direction. Team had proved that they needed to do something to take them in a different direction and they needed to listen to all the head coaches, the assistant coaches, to come up with the right scheme for the team.
Speaker 2:Phil Jackson's approach to communication was giving up control and, as I've already alluded, mr Collins didn't want to give up control. Phil used the meditative state to allow his audience time to prepare to hear his message. Remember he was called the Zen master. He developed the ability for his team to be in the now, and you've heard us talk about that a lot on this podcast. Being in the now, so from an NBR human development role, being conscious means being engaged, fully engaged in the moment, in the scheme that's being applied. You're there, being aware of what is happening in the environment around you, all in. We used to talk about being in the zone. That's what we're talking about. You're also mindful of how these things are affecting you directly. So being conscious with the act of being determines whether we live evolved lives or not. Again, think of these words being in the now, evolved lives or not.
Speaker 1:Again, think of these words being in the now. And what was interesting is those comments weren't just in his book. It was actually from an Oprah interview that he did about Dennis Rodman. It was his comments about Dennis and trying to bring him into the now.
Speaker 1:Coaching is one of those things that requires a skill of knowing when to speak and when to listen, and it's also looking for that balance. The one that I thought was interesting from an MBR kind of approach is we over me, which is Phil's Jackson view of how they're dealing with the people that are on the fringe the John Paxtons and the Steve Kerr of this kind of environment, and managing the egos is a considerable part of it. It's imperative not to inject his own ego. Being Phil Jackson's, I think the MBR approach that Dr Durst talked about and what's interesting is Dr Durst is trying to talk about other people, like Maslow, and talking about the perspective of a healthy human being. They do not want to be controlled, they prefer to feel free and to be free, prefer to feel free and to be free.
Speaker 1:The MBR process promotes independence, creativity, emotional stability, organization, discipline all those things that you're looking, and also for the physical, the spiritual well-being. It's how you handle health and your life, and when he was dealing with John Paxson and Steve Kerr, one of the challenges that he had was making sure that he didn't throw in his own two cents. He wanted them to take on the responsibility of being a group no-transcript. That was, I think, essential in helping them to take that transition with the stars that they had, and how would they make that kind of transition? Now the next one, in terms of developing staff, I think, greg, is something that you can talk about better than I.
Speaker 2:Thanks, john. When I think about my human resources background, I quickly think about people development. Phil Jackson had a view, and it was let each player discover his own destiny. Jackson's goal wasn't to provide all the answers. He wanted thinking people on his team. He always was interested in getting players to think for themselves so that they could make difficult decisions in the heat of battle. We certainly know that Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen were two prime examples of folks that were thinking on their own, making things happen. Coddy Pippen were two prime examples of folks that were thinking on their own, making things happen.
Speaker 2:From an NBR human development role standpoint, to assist employees to grow into responsible, mature beings is the ultimate ongoing purpose of management. And again, I think back to those days of trying to develop staff. And you do it one because you're trying to get the most you can out of your talent. Another reason you want people to stay they need job enrichment, right. They love when they're getting good challenges. They love when they're learning things. It makes the job so much better. It makes the career, as John likes to talk about, so much more fruitful, so much more engaging and enjoyable.
Speaker 2:And then you start thinking about wait a minute, what if I don't want to develop? Well then, you're faced with retention issues. You're faced with what does it cost to replace someone who was a good employee that I just didn't help get to the next level or help them develop and fully become all they could be? Yeah, I pay for that. And bringing somebody else on board waiting for them to get ramped up. There's a loss. There's a loss of productivity, there's a loss of performance, and so it's worth your while. It's an investment to develop your people.
Speaker 1:You had to tell management on occasion how much you're wasting because of turnover and that whole cost of retraining and pulling people off the job that are in like accounting positions or different positions for training or different positions for training and repeating that process of pulling talented people out of their jobs so that they could train new people. That impact has a dollars and cents value. Did you ever give them like a cost estimate of how much they're burning on training and multiple high turnover training rates? We did.
Speaker 2:John and probably more of my time, believe it or not in retail years and years ago, because retail turnover was so high and we used to calculate the training costs. We would calculate the onboarding and ramp-up costs, how long it took them to get really proficient, sometimes the cost of having two people there at the same time to get a job done, because they needed somebody to shadow them or whatever. And so, yeah, we did share those costs with folks, and I think the one that got people's attention was the loss of really good people when I said, yeah, I hated Duluth, so-and-so they could have been great. Yes, they could have been great, but you needed to help develop that person, you needed to invest in that person.
Speaker 1:And so, yes, we shared stats with them, but we also shared within the realities of it's worth your while to invest in. When you think about the Phil Jackson coaching of the Bulls and of the Lakers, the line that he talked about with Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen was, you know, being able to make difficult decisions in the heat of battle, and he was using that as an evaluator on the training and the effectiveness of the people that are on the team other than his stars. That was the push to get that independent thought and they had a lot of turnover in certain positions because there was a gap of how effective they were. So you could see the turnover was affecting the Bulls. But basketball is kind of a little bit of a bad example, because you need three to four people as a nucleus to make a team work. A lot of organizations don't have that luxury of just having some key positions. But if you think about it, the other piece that I always found interesting about leadership is quite often 20% of the team is pulling the majority of the weight and 20% of the team are the deadweights that sometimes often should be shown the door or trained up and that influence. Usually you spend more time working on that 20% that doesn't do the job. In a work environment, in a basketball environment, you're working with the 20% that does. So that focus really should be more mixed if you're doing it well and Phil did a very good job of mixing that approach making sure that the team was effective rather than just three players. Communication is our theme, but there's two parts to communication. One is doing what Phil did did. Communication in the air is another wonderful example of something that gives a pretty good example of what we're looking for in terms of a good team and a good leadership approach.
Speaker 1:In terms of the mechanics of that, and in the 80s and 90s, there was a lot of errors and a lot of accidents. What was interesting is this pilot started off with his description to the hospital team that the people who were in the cockpit needed to be there, and if they're not there, it's truly dangerous. A commercial cockpit is not the place to guess on whether you're doing something right. For example, they had mistakes in terms of fuel levels and, when they're trying to land, the position of the landing gear. Some of the most basic things in terms of are the flaps down or not. When you're trying to land the plane. They're all unacceptable and they are almost routine to the point where they became assumed rather than actually talked about.
Speaker 1:The continual list of accidents actually created a push for the government to get involved in order to help, so clearly wanted to find out what was wrong in terms of the written structure and how were checklists not being applied correctly. But at the same time the management structure of the flight crew that would not allow somebody to challenge the captain's response to the checklist compliance became far more apparent through the process. In 1993, the National Transportation Board formalized it from all their accident investigations and they developed a requirement of Crew Resource Management Program. I love the government, I love how they come up with names for programs and this is basically. You have to listen to everybody in the room. It's a CRM program but it's aviations, focusing on interpersonal communication, leadership and decision-making in the cockpit of an airliner airliner. So it was a full stop and it was an embarrassment to that management team that's in that cockpit of really the most important person, the captain, and bringing them into a team concept rather than a captain concept. That whole element of trying to save lives was shared by everybody that was associated with the plane, whether it be the ground crew, flight attendants, the navigator, it didn't matter. Those were eyes and ears of the pilot, because it isn't just the pilot that's flying the plane, it's that team that's flying the plane.
Speaker 1:Now, this is in a hospital environment and I think what's interesting is he turned and looked at the executive management and said I want to talk about the errors that you've made over the last 12 months in the operating room. Now, if you know anything about a hospital environment, those are the most painful conversations that you can have in a hospital because, admittedly, everybody has an error that's associated with operating rooms, because we're human and we're not perfect. But that's not an answer. I heard an old story from a quality college approach of saying how many babies are you allowed to drop in the delivery room? Well, it's a zero game here. You're not supposed to be dropping any babies. And this pilot said you're making errors and I've had a chance to review the errors and the simplicity of checking a number and not saying the number or thinking the number. You say the number to a co-worker, a co-worker repeats that number to you, and now there's two people that are listening and talking about the number, and now there's two people that are listening and talking about the number.
Speaker 1:One of the errors that they talked about that was really hard to accept was measurements. Is it a gram? Is it a milligram? Is it an ounce? What volumes are we talking about? They would read the label so fast that they assumed it was a milligram when it was a gram, or vice versa.
Speaker 1:And I think the one that everybody's probably far more aware of nowadays is when you're going in to have, like, a knee worked on or you're going to have some work on your eye, your arm, it really doesn't matter. You're going in and almost everybody, from the entry data clerk to the nursing, to the doctors, they're all asking the same thing of what arm are we working on today? What eye are we working on today? And they're doing things like writing it on your knee on your knee, yes or no, so that there isn't that confusion. And then other doctors or anesthesiologists or other people are going to walk in and sign or check off on the physical leg itself yes, this is the one we're working on, because those checklists and that redundancy eliminates errors, and it really is a wonderful example of listening and speaking in order to make sure you have clarity of purpose. That, I think, is probably one of the better examples that I can give of what management by responsibility means.
Speaker 1:It's taking the time for these kind of maybe redundant, maybe because it becomes so routine that people don't want to take that extra effort. I can reduce one error in my career. Just by doing this. I can save the heartburn and the angst that's associated with doing my job poorly. When it affects someone's health, it's worth every moment, every second. Now there's some doctors that were harder to get them to do this because it seemed just redundant beyond description. But the first time they made an error and that room went silent because this doctor that was pushing back was the first one to admit now I get it it reinforced it for the entire organization and those stories actually went right through the hospital in a heartbeat as soon as their actual applications, and they call them near misses.
Speaker 1:You learn more from a near miss than trying to go through the pain of actually failing. A near miss is an educational opportunity. Admitting that you made a mistake but you caught it before it actually affected anyone, that is something that they would make a lot of hay on. They would bring it up and it would make sure that everybody learned it so that they could share those lessons and not have to have repeats.
Speaker 1:So I think right now, greg, we've covered the elements that come from Phil Jackson in trying to speak to people. And one of the elements that come from Phil Jackson and trying to speak to people and one of the things that I liked about Phil is they call him a Zen master because he used to try to put them in an environment to listen and he had music and he had incense and he had them reading books about meditation. It was kind of entertaining. Meditation. It was kind of entertaining, and you've given your staff recommendations in terms of courses or books that can help them be a better leader. Those are all things that they're looking for and quite often the human resource department is tapped to help them understand how to do this listening and talking skill better. Do you have any examples of those kinds of courses?
Speaker 2:Sure, John. Fortunately, we're always pretty well outfitted with a learning and development department, and that was our focus at all types of training aids learning aids, teaching aids Some were video kind of things, Some were in-class scenarios where you sit down, Some of those were also situations where you would do practical application duets, et cetera triads. So we had, depending on what kind of the learning piece you needed, we offered pretty much everything, and the companies that I think were the best were the ones that offered the most options from a learning standpoint and the highest quality options.
Speaker 1:And the sad part is how many people came on their own and asked for the training, versus the ones that were forced when there was a problem, because I think you talked about, I think, one example of one executive that actually looked for the training, but for the most part that's the exception.
Speaker 2:It is the exception. Unfortunately, it's either I'm on a performance improvement plan I need some help, or my teammates and I have agreed that I'm the one holding a stack. So, sadly, it's oftentimes desperate situations versus situations that are not so desperate, where you can just say I want to advance myself, I want to learn something different, I want to get better at something on their own. Yeah, I would say. More often it is we're in a crunch. Now we're in a crisis situation. I've got to take this class, I've got to go to that seminar, I've got to have this learning ASAP.
Speaker 1:So I guess, as we wrap this up, there are resources that are available that you can use, but if you've never actually asked and the other thing that we have talked about before there are people that are doing the job that you're doing now that will pick up the phone and talk to you in case you want to try to get some insight. Very rarely do people pick up the phone and ask someone who's a peer. The more you feel comfortable being able to talk to your peer and ask for help, ask for advice, the more successful you're going to be, and that's the message I'm hoping that Greg and I are giving for you today to think about. Use the resources that you have, ask and learn and listen. So, if you like what you've heard, my book is available on Amazoncom, lulucom, barnes Noble. My e-book's available at Barnes Noble.
Speaker 1:The podcast is available on what you're listening to, thank you and a lot of other popular formats. Dr Durst's books eBooks available at Barnes Noble. The podcast is available on what you're listening to Thank you and a lot of other popular formats. Dr Durst's books and his MBR program is available on successgrowthacademycom. Greg and I, we have a thing called buy us a cup of coffee and you can leave us a message. Or, if you want, you can email me at wandando75.jw at gmailcom, and Greg, your contact is.
Speaker 2:I can be reached at gpowell374 at gmailcom. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And the music is brought to you by my grandson, so we want to hear from you. When you get an opportunity, drop us a line. Music is brought to you by my grandson, so we want to hear from you. When you get an opportunity, drop us a line.
Speaker 2:Thanks Greg, thanks John, as always, next time, next time.
Speaker 1:All right.