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Chadwick explains that Dean E. Smith was extraordinarily successful because he knew what was most important in life. For the thirty years he knew and observed Coach Smith—originally as a player and then later as a friend—he developed principles that encapsulate why Smith was extraordinarily successful as a leader and a man.
In Coach Smith’s life, three different core values defined his leadership:
- First, he placed people above everything else.
- Second, he believed the team is more important than the individual. The individual talents of the player, even if a superstar, must be submitted to the good of the team.
- Third, personal integrity and character were very important. The leader leads by conviction, care, and character. Then people will trust him and naturally follow.
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE 1: Be Loyal
“If you ever need me, call!”
Dean Smith understood and practiced the reciprocal law of loyalty: if you put others first, they’ll work and play hard for you. In fact, reciprocal loyalty was the primary principle Coach Smith lived by. Loyalty was foundational to him. Coach Smith gave his players advice, guidance, and access. In exchange, the players gave him hard work, respect, and deference.
He understood that success is not defined by winning or losing, but in doing the best you can, where you are, with what you have. As Jim Collins and Jerry Porras suggest in Built to Last, successful visionary companies never fall prey to the “tyranny of the OR.” They believe you can pursue both caring for people and profits at the same time, all the time.
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE 2: Provide a Family Environment
“I’ll never be your real father, but I guess we do have a large Carolina family.”
One of the reasons for Coach Smith’s great success is that he created a family environment for his players. In fact, he created a family before he created the team.
Functional families care about one another and openly share their failures and their successes, their happiness and their hurts. The first thing Coach Smith did to create that family environment was to be vulnerable before his players and staff.
Michael Jordan—the greatest player to ever play at the University of North Carolina for Coach Smith—gave this statement after learning of Coach Smith’s passing on February 7, 2015: “Other than my parents, there is no one bigger influence on my life than Coach Smith. He was more than a coach—he was my mentor, my teacher, my second father. Coach was always there for me whenever I needed him and I loved him for it, teaching me the game of basketball while he also taught me about life. My heart goes out to Linnea [Coach Smith’s second wife of thirty-eight years] and their kids. We’ve lost a great man who had an incredible impact on his players, staff and the entire UNC family.”
How do you go about creating a family environment? Coach Smith did it by being vulnerable, being a surrogate parent, treating those who work with you like family. Coach Smith recruited players he knew would fit into his understanding of family. When doing his in-home visit with a recruit, he would carefully watch the family dynamics within the recruit’s home. Often he would talk more to the parents than he did to the recruit.
When Coach Smith chose his assistants, he looked for personality traits he didn’t have in order to bring balance to the coaching staff and better meet the needs of the players in his family.
Leaders who want to be effective at managing the next generation will need to develop a sense of family in the workplace. With so many broken homes littering people’s pasts, there will be many who desire to learn how they can best nurture their own families.
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE 3: Be a Friend Forever
“But when you leave, you’re my friend.”
Coach Smith described his leadership style this way, “I was a benevolent dictator. I was the leader. But, after you left, after you graduated, you became my close friends.”
Dean Smith expressed his friendship by wanting the best for his players as individuals, desiring their success, no matter what it cost the team.
Just as Smith emulated, employers and employees can be friends. It is the friendship that forms the foundation for the best possible working relationship. But for this to happen, you must see people as your highest aim, your most important product.
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE 4: Put the Team Before the Individual
“The individual must submit his talents for the sake of the team.”
Coach Smith preached that teams, not individuals, win games. He constantly exhorted us to play as a team, to believe in his vision of the team. This concept of team may be Coach Smith’s greatest gift to basketball, leadership, and society.
B.C. Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine, once said you spell success T-E-A-M-W-O-R-K.
Coach Smith developed the team concept through his commitment to the principle that we won games and he lost them. He really believed that as a leader, he should take the hits. Another way Coach Smith helped develop the team was by knowing the players and communicating honestly with each member of the team regarding their strengths and weaknesses. Regularly, Coach Smith would cry out in practice, “Know your limits.” He would then carefully outline the specific giftedness and limitations of each individual player.
Dr. William Schultz, a psychologist who developed strategies to increase productivity at places like Proctor & Gamble and NASA, once said that the key for success lies in how well people work together. He went on to say that, in his opinion, the key to people working together is mutual trust and honesty. He concluded, “If people in business just told the truth, 80 to 90 percent of their problems would disappear.”
In their book The Wisdom of Teams, Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith wrote, “Teams usually do outperform other groups and individuals. They represent one of the best ways to support the broad-based changes necessary for the high-performing organization.”
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE 5: Be Flexible with Your Vision
“We don’t have a system, but a philosophy that is flexible and innovates.”
Coach Smith had many memorable mantras, including:
- “Play hard, play smart, and play together.”
- “You play like you practice.”
- “Little things win games.”
- “Keep trying! Good things happen when you play hard.”
- “Being in shape doesn’t mean you’ll never get tired. It means you’ll recover more quickly.
This last one is a great fundamental of life to teach to those who work with us and for us. We all become tired in our work. We then feel guilty for being tired, thinking no one else ever tires. Fatigue is a reality, but we know we’re healthy when we recover from it quickly. If a person doesn’t recover quickly from a mistake, that’s a sure signal to us as leaders that he needs more conditioning, more training. Continual mistakes may be the fault of the boss, not the worker!
How important is it in business for a leader to have foundations that remain flexible enough for innovation? Peter Drucker once predicted failure within four years for any leading corporation that loses its innovative proactivity. Fully half of the Fortune 500 companies between 1975 and 1980 no longer exist. Drucker later updated his prediction. He said it would take only eighteen months to go from leader to loser.
Nicholas Imparato and Oren Harari give a startling insight into this leadership secret in their classic book Jumping the Curve. After interviewing CEOs of various companies that averaged fifteen times better growth than the Dow over the past twenty years, they concluded that the biggest threat to a company’s survival is complacency. The refusal to be innovative is a terminal disease for corporate America.
Courageous leaders are unwilling to say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” They know they constantly need to break something in order to make it better, in order to reach even higher objectives. Wayne Gretzky, perhaps the world’s best hockey player, said it this way: “You miss one hundred percent of the shots you never take.”
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE 6: Get Better, and the Team Gets Better
“If you want to make the team better, become a better individual player.”
As a leader, it’s your job to take the unique giftedness of different individuals and mold them together as a team with a common vision and goal. The stronger those individual parts are, the stronger the team’s potential.
The toughest opponent you’ll ever have to overcome in yourself. If we want to be successful, the first victory we have to win is over ourselves.
Management guru Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, explained that organizational change and growth starts with the individual. The kind of change that is most productive is inside-out—that is, it starts from within the person.
Coach Smith used this inside-out approach to teach personal responsibility and self-discipline, and he did it with a bare minimum of rules and regulations. Coach Smith refused to let us compare ourselves with one another. He knew this kind of comparison was deadly to a team. It destroyed the uniqueness of the individual and could abort the need for claiming personal responsibility.
Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, in their book Built to Last, state that the extraordinary success of visionary companies is not so much because of superior intellect or supposed success secrets, but most often because the workers demand so much of themselves.
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE 7: Speak Positive Words
“By how many points do you think we’ll win?”
Discouragement is a powerful negative force. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Ever heard that one? It’s a lie. Words do hurt. They divide and discourage us as nothing else. Proverbs 18:21 says, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”
You cannot give out encouraging words, however, if positive thoughts don’t fill your heart. Coach Smith thought positively; therefore, it was easy for him to be an encourager. Coach Smith encouraged his players to watch their words about others. They learned how silence carefully guards a reputation and helps guarantee unity. There’s an old maxim that says, “If you can’t say something good, don’t say anything at all.” That’s dead wrong. Say something good! Say a lot of good and encouraging words to people.
Sometimes obvious calmness in a high-pressure situation is the loudest word of encouragement others can hear from a leader. Coach Smith’s words and looks of disapproval were always directed at the behavior, not the person. He always encouraged who a person was and disapproved of what a person did. There’s a huge difference between the two. Coach Smith understood how important this difference is.
A key part of Coach Smith’s ability to be positive—to believe even when things seemed impossible—was his absolutely thorough preparation. One of Coach Smith’s favorite thoughts was this: “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE 8: Pass On What You Know
“If they learned anything from me, I’m grateful.”
In “The Leader as Learner”, the author suggested that leaders must constantly be developing personal intellectual habits as well as the ability to analyze and interpret information for the purpose of strategic decision making. In other words, the leader who is a teacher or mentor must also be a student. That’s why Bob Knight suggested that being a great student of basketball was Coach Smith’s greatest asset as a teacher.
Evangelist Billy Graham was once asked if he’d do anything differently as he looked back over his life and ministry. He said that he’d take a few men, walk with them over a period of time, and teach them all he knew.
The most significant learning occurs within the context of a relationship. Coach Smith gathered gifted people around him and built friendships with them. He allowed them to observe his genius, often asking for their input. He gave them every opportunity to learn from him as he performed his daily coaching responsibilities. That’s what true mentoring is: taking your life and pouring it into another person, who then takes the same principles and pours them into another person, who then…You get the picture.
All effective leaders should lead with an eye to future generations. Max Depree, in his very popular book Leadership Is an Art, said, “Leaders are also responsible for future leadership. They need to identify, develop, and nurture future leaders.” In essence, this is what teaching and mentoring is all about—shaping the next generation. An effective leader understands this truth and passes it on to those who work with him, those who will be leading long after he retires.
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE 9: Be a Person of Good Character
“Your reputation is what other people think of you. Character is what you think of yourself.”
Coach Smith understood something about character. It’s who you are when no one else is looking. It’s being the same person publicly and privately. It’s your words matching your deeds. It’s your inside matching your outside. Therefore, character is not determined by what others think of you, but by what you think of yourself. Jay Bilas—former Duke University basketball player and current NCAA basketball commentator—said, “In a game full of characters, Dean Smith was a man of great character.”
What Character Traits Guided Coach Smith?
Stay Humble
When Dean Smith was asked what 879 wins represented to him, he quietly responded, “That I’m old.” Dean Smith’s humility illustrates a point Stephen Covey made: “One of the characteristics of authentic leaders,” he said, “is their humility, evident in their ability to take off their glasses and examine the lens objectively, analyzing how well their values, perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors align with ‘true north’ principles” (a term Covey uses to describe unchangeable principles that should shape every leader’s life).
Jim Collins, in his classic work Good to Great, said that in his research the one characteristic of every leader that took his company from good to great was humility. Indira Gandhi summed up this perspective well. “My grandfather once told me,” she said, “that there are two kinds of people: Those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.”
Work Hard
Will Rogers once said, “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll soon get run over if you just sit there.”
Watch Your Words
In addition to teaching us to present a good image by dressing for success, Coach Smith taught his players that their words reflected their character. He did not curse nor allow cursing for two reasons. First, it was because he wanted the best for us and himself. Dean Smith was an extremely bright man. He was an educator. He valued education. Second, he wanted a similar excellence of speech from his players. Cursing represented a poverty of vocabulary, and he wanted the best for himself and his players.
Practice Honesty
Another character trait that caused Coach Smith to stand out from the crowd was his absolute refusal to cheat. His unfailing honesty and integrity truly set him apart. Andrew Carnegie once said, “As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”
Coach Smith was able to run the UNC basketball program for thirty-six years and not once have the smell of scandal taint his program. Honesty was an absolutely essential life principle for him.
Honor Authority
Coach Smith understood what it meant to be under authority as a necessity for having authority.
His Athletic Director remarked, “Very successful coaches can make athletic directors’ lives miserable, wielding such power and influence over alumni and others that they end up causing constant chaos. This was never the case with Coach Smith. He respected proper lines of authority. Whenever we disagreed, or he disagreed with the chancellor, it was always behind closed doors.”
Treat Everyone Equally & Show Compassion to All
The reason he treated the twelfth man on the team the same as the superstar was his belief that all people are created equal in God’s sight. Coach Smith was a champion for the cause of racial equality.
Don’t Love Money & Support the Larger Good
Coach Smith was a great example of philanthropic giving, often helping former players who needed financial help in his modest, low-key way.
Keep Priorities in Perspective
One of Coach Smith’s firm convictions was that freshmen athletes should be barred from varsity sports so they could concentrate first on their academics. He believed athletes go to college to be students. Academics were more important than athletics.
Recruit People of Character
Smith explained, “We always looked at a young man’s character. Indeed, if I had to do it over again, I think that would be an even bigger factor. I would not be so much concerned with his beliefs, but I would watch closely for his willingness to work hard, his tenacity to stay with a difficult situation.”
Someone once said, “Athletics makes men strong. Study makes men wise. Character makes men great.”
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE 10: Make Failure Your Friend
“Look at your mistake, learn from it, and move on.”
Coach told all his players, “If you can learn any one thing in life, learn that! Learn from your mistakes and move on.” When players failed, Smith wanted them to own up to the mistake (admit it), learn from it and not do it again (quit it), and not think about it again (forget it).
Tom Brady, the great New England Patriots quarterback, said that successful NFL quarterbacks must be great amnesiacs. They must learn from their mistakes and then quickly forget them. That is true for all leaders. Someone once said, “You don’t drown by falling in the water. You drown by staying there!”
Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda Motor Company, said, “Many people dream of success. To me, success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success represents the 1 percent of your work which results only from 99 percent that is called failure.” Or, as that inimitable philosopher, Dolly Parton, once said, “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”
Every outstanding leader knows this truth: we learn much more from our failures than our successes. It is in the pain of failure that we gain new insights about our weaknesses and how to succeed. Adversity becomes life’s university. Failure made his players—even Michael Jordan—better. Jordan once said, “I missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot, and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I’ve succeeded.”
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE 11: Know Who Really Is in Control
“There have been many times in life when I’ve had to give up.”
There is a story told of Winston Churchill that he walked to a podium and, in the course of a speech, told students, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never.” After he sat down, the audience broke into an uproarious ovation. For decades, ministers and speakers have used this anecdote about Churchill to motivate people to keep on trying when faced with adversity.
Smith countered that notion by saying, “There have been many times in life when I’ve had to give in and give the matter to God.” Sometimes you do have to give up; there’s simply nothing else you can do but quit trying and realize that, ultimately, you are not in control.
“Crisis brings us face to face with our inadequacy,” Catherine Marshall wrote, “and our inadequacy in turn leads us to the inexhaustible sufficiency of God.”
Coach Smith often struggled with athletes who credit God with all their success. A pro athlete may indeed perform better because his lifestyle as a Christian helps overcome anxieties experienced by other players. However, constant practice would help his performance the most. But do these same athletes ever credit God when they fail? Although Coach Smith was often open about his faith, he would never force it upon others.
Why did he consider the team more important than the individual? Because of his conviction that God created us to live together, in community, and one way that can be learned and demonstrated is through team play. Coach Smith believed that the best way to love God is to love those whom God loves: our neighbors in the world, people created in his image.
Coach Smith lived his life in gratitude to his Lord and Savior. This gratitude was seen in how he chose humility over pride, generosity over stinginess, serving over being served, the team over the individual, academics over athletics, grace over bitterness, friendship over personal gain, integrity over hypocrisy, justice over inequality, the poor over the powerful, and life over death.
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE 12: Commit Yourself for the Long Haul
“It’s daily living that really matters.”
Coach Smith was a leader for the long haul, patiently, year after year, building his foundation on the core values of people first, the team above the individual, and personal character.
Leaving the program in good shape meant several things to Coach Smith:
- It meant leaving the program in better shape than when he began.
- It meant leaving the cupboard full for his successor.
- Perhaps most importantly, Coach Smith wanted to enable his loyal associate to succeed at the same level or perhaps even a greater level than he had.
When it comes to knowing when is the right time to leave, here are some questions that naturally arise:
- Is the organization I am presently heading better now than when I first became its leader? If not, why not?
- If it is better, what’s the next stage to which my leadership is being called? Is it in this organization? Is it to another work?
- Am I nearing the time to retire? Am I still feeling the same passion for my work?
- Am I giving my work associates and my team my best energy? If that energy is beginning to wane, when should I step down?
- Who should my successor be?
- Am I choosing a time for retirement that gives him or her the best opportunity to succeed, perhaps even beyond my own success?
May Coach Smith’s leadership legacy—and his twelve leadership principles—impact how you “play the game,” as you shoot for the stars!