Page 214 - How to Create a Winning Organization

Wooden on Leadership
196
NEVER ASSUME YOUR TEAM IS
AS GOOD AS IT CAN BE

The old UCLA Men’s Gym gave me an excuse for accepting our
performance results. Think about your workplace and the peo-
ple under your leadership. Are you holding your team back
with misconceived notions and false limitations? Identify and
then eliminate them. Seek solutions rather than excuses.

CHANGES THAT COULD HAVE BEEN
MADE SOONER
Throughout my coaching career, I had always attempted to operate
in a democratic way. One player described me as being “egalitarian.”
He was correct in the sense that I disliked anything that singled out
a player for special attention, and this included awarding playing
time. Instead, I tried to share it in a somewhat democratic manner.
In practice and in many games, my records from those previous
years showed that I was trying to appease players by working every-
one into the rotation. Of course, the five starters got most of the
time, but from the sixth through the twelfth player—almost 60
percent of the team—I tended to try and work each player into the
rotation equally, both in practice and in games. This was not pos-
sible in a literal sense, of course, but I made the attempt to let
everyone share as much as possible in playing time.
After review, however, I came to the conclusion that while this
objective may have been democratic, it also hurt the team. During
games when I benched a starter in favor of the sixth or seventh
man, our cohesion and quality of play dropped off. More mistakes
were made and things ran less smoothly.