Page 198 - How to Create a Winning Organization

Wooden on Leadership
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zation that fosters and breeds achievers, a superior team filled with
people striving to reach 100 percent of their potential in ways that
serve the team. It becomes a force with exponential power and
productivity.
Some of those achievers will be more talented or intelligent,
score more points or close more sales than others. But will a par-
ticular individual be greater than all the others on the team? No.
This is not a measurement or evaluation of primary concern to me.
Rather, my first goal was to do everything possible to ensure that
all members of our team were committed to doing their job to the
best of their ability—to attaining personal greatness. Accordingly,
I avoided using the term substitutes for those who were not on the
starting team. Substitute is a demeaning term for one who is fully
executing his role on the team. A player was a starter or nonstarter,
but never a substitute.
Thus, as you’ll see in Part III, the postseason awards I encour-
aged alumni and university groups to bestow on individual players
never acknowledged the top scorer. Instead, such qualities as “men-
tal attitude,” “most unselfish team player,” and “improvement”
were recognized and saluted.
Singling out an individual as the “greatest”—which in sports
“top scorer” perhaps suggests—devalues the roles and jobs of all
others on the team, makes them second-class citizens. It takes 10
hands to make a basket; I believe this principle deeply. Anything
that gets in the way of this cooperative attitude is counterproduc-
tive and can lead to a caste system within your organization.

NO INDIVIDUAL OWNS THE NUMBER
That’s why I have always been strongly against retiring a player’s
number. Doing so, in effect, declares a particular individual to be
the greatest—better than someone else on the team.