3 Lessons from The Greatest Coach of All Time
Years ago, I read about this writer, Neil Paine, who set out to determine who the best coach in the NBA was. He used player performance metrics and raw talent evaluations to create an algorithm to predict how many games a team should win in a given season.
He was trying to find every coach's "wins above expectation." He ran the algorithm for every season for every coach since 1979 and compared it to the number of games coaches actually won.
The algorithm worked. Nearly every coach won the number of games they should've won… except for one.
Gregg Popovich ("Pop") has been the San Antonio Spurs' coach since 1994. He has five championships, a 71% winning percentage, and 20 consecutive winning seasons from 1998 to 2018.
And at the time Paine's story was published, the Spurs won 117 games more than they should have won. The next closet coach had half as many.
I was reminded of this story last week when I saw a video of Dejuante Murry, one of Pop's former players, on Instagram. It was a clip of a podcast interview with Murry where he was reminiscing on his time playing for Pop. You see Murry get emotional and say, "I love that dude to death, man. He's like a father to me. When I would lose people, I would go [into] his room, and he would give me that hug. I would cry on his shoulder. I'd vent to him. He was just there for me. And that [has nothing to do] with basketball. We're talking about real life. He's one of one, bro."
By the numbers and by the anecdotes, Gregg Popovich is one of the greatest coaches of all time in any sport.
But when I study Popovich, what I see disturbs me. On the surface, the guy seems like a total jerk. He's short and seemingly intolerant of the media. His face turns bright red and he screams things at his players that doesn't seem very "father-like" to me. There's one YouTube video titled "Popovich Tells Danny Green to Shut the F— Up." Even in the Dejuante Murry podcast interview, the clip was taken right after Murry scored a career-high 44 points and hit the game-winner for his team, but took 44 shots. Pop immediately texted him a "congratulatory" text that read, "Pass the fucking ball."
Such a sweetheart..
Gregg Popovich seemingly breaks every single guideline and rule I advocate on my pod, Take Care Radio. On the surface, he seems to embody the idea that to get results, you have to be the drill sergeant coach or the fear-mongering leader.
Most managers and coaches I work with are terrified of coming off like a jerk. They (understandably) don't want to discourage people or worry about getting fired. So much so that they consistently withhold valuable feedback or refuse to hold clients accountable.
So they're stuck in the middle. Do I become the ruthless drill sergeant or the cheerleader coach?
Of course the answer is neither. It's a fallacy that you either have to be the jerk or the push-over. According to The Culture Code by Dan Coyle (a must read for coaches and managers), there are three things that Gregg Popovich does that allow him to coach his players hard and be direct, while also getting results and being beloved.
1. Develop Up-Close, Personal Connection
Embody body language, attention, and behavior that translates as "I care about you."
What you don't see in the YouTube videos of Pop is what happens during an everyday practice in San Antonio. Behind closed doors, Popovich walks around and is very intimate with his players. He touches them on the elbow, the shoulder, and the arm. He'll casually chat in several languages (the Spurs have had a lot of international players during Pop's tenure). He laughs easily. He's engaged, present, and active in the conversation. He asks a ton of questions.
This is a foundational principle of Take Care Radio: Connection over everything. If you can build meaningful relationships with your clients, they'll stick around. And if they stick around long enough, they're going to get results.
When I was an in-person trainer, I used to attend my client's birthday parties. I used to invite them over to my father's house for cookouts. I participated in book clubs, basketball leagues, and volunteer work with former clients of mine. These events outside of the gym allowed me to learn about the human beings I was working with: the people that matter to them, their life stories, their values, and personal preferences.
Connection is the great differentiator in leadership. If people feel like you care about them, you have much more room to criticize them directly and coach them harshly. Which brings us to number two…
2. Give Ruthlessly Honest Performance Feedback
Coach relentlessly and criticism in a way that communicates that "I have high standards for you."
Something coaches consistently forget is that praise without honesty is empty. When it comes to feedback, humans do like what psychologists call self-enhancement. We love to be seen positively by ourselves and by others.
But we also crave self-verification. We want to be perceived accurately by others—to be seen as we truly are (or as we believe we are).
On some level, humans know when their efforts are lacking or their skills are coming up short. We want to be held accountable. It's why we hire a coach in the first place!
People's BS meters are attuned. It's why we're so disillusioned with politicians.
At times, our job is to give our people some harsh truths. It's our job to hold people accountable and help them live up to their potential.
And to be frank, the whole false positivity thing just isn't working. In health and fitness, 3% of people who lose weight in a nutrition program maintain that weight loss (and in my experience, only about 30-40% even lose weight in the first place). In management, 73% of change efforts fail, and of those that do "succeed," 70% of those new strategies fall short of expectations.
Not a hot track record..
We don't have to be a jerk, but we have to be direct. When giving people feedback, focus on criticizing their behaviors (not their character). Be as honest as you possibly can. Tell you clients what you think.
And as long as you follow guideline one, your clients will love you for it. Spurs assistant coach Chip Engelland says, "A lot of coaches can yell or be nice, but what Pop does is different.. He delivers two things over and over: he'll tell you the truth, with no BS, and then he'll love you to death."
And that's the secret.
3. Big-Picture Perspective
Keep your work in perspective in the bigger picture of life
There’s a story about Pop where instead of watching film during a team session, he pulled up a documentary on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. His players learned about MLK, LBJ, and other pivotal characters of history. They saw the decisions they made and the actions they took.
When the documentary ended, he went around the room and asked, What did you think of it? What would you have done in that situation?
In another anecdote, Sean Marks, General Manager of the Nets (and former Spurs assistant), says, “You’ll be sitting on the plane, and all of a sudden a magazine lands on your lap, and you look up and it’s Pop. He’s circled some article about your hometown and wants to know if it’s accurate, and where you like to eat, and what kind of wine you like to drink. And pretty soon he’s suggesting places where you ought to eat, and he’s making reservations for you and your wife or girlfriend. Then you go, and he wants to know all about it, what wine you had, what you ordered, and then there’s another place to go.”
Pop continually signals that life is bigger than basketball. He openly talks about politics, history, food and wine, and culture that transcends his day job.
Now, I don’t think we have to ask our people who they’re voting for in 2024, but the idea is worth chewing on. We work with human beings who exist within larger cultures and societies that impact their decisions, behaviors, and emotions. They’re not mice in a lab with controlled doses of macronutrients.
These conversations touch the humanity in all of us and to me, they’re worth having.
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To close, I want to reinforce an idea that some of you might be struggling with. Point number two above: being ruthlessly honest.
Comfort will come with time and practice, but there’s a study I came across that might help.
A team of psychologists from Stanford, Yale, and Columbia discovered that one particular form of feedback from teachers boosted student effort and performance like no other. They were so blown away by the results they called it “magical feedback.” Let me repeat: academic researchers used the term “magical” in their paper.
The feedback structure was simple. It consisted of one simple phrase:
I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.
Preface your more direct feedback with this to soften the blow.
We don’t have to be exactly like Gregg Popovich and tell our people to “Shut the f--- up” but we have a lot more room to work than we think to be direct and honest with our feedback. And it’s worthwhile goal. Our people are counting on us to hold them to a standard that helps them grow.