As a Duke University grad, I have long admired Coach K (head basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski) for his success on the court and the inevitable school pride that comes with cheering for the Blue Devils.
However, the last two years of developing the leadership-development program, PowerForward, with Coach K has taken my admiration one step further: Over and over I’ve seen Krzyzewski demonstrate an incredible ability to understand team dynamics far beyond the basketball court. And in this way, he’s essentially presented critical lessons for building a startup.
Related: What Coach K Can Tell You About the Morning Habits of NBA Stars
How does he get those lessons across? Well, there are his words, for a start.
In our regular meetings, I find myself feverishly jotting down notes as he talks about his teams — both Duke and USA Basketball — and how he’s approached different situations as a coach. The beauty of his approach is that it’s simple and applicable to a broad range of “teams” (business as well as sports) at various stages of the entrepreneurial journey. Here are three of the major lessons I’ve learned.
A true leader moves beyond “my idea” to “our idea.”
One of the words Coach K uses commonly with his teams is “ownership.” Recently, he shared an example of how he created this atmosphere with the USA Basketball team. In bringing the team together over a relatively short period of time (several weeks), Coach and his staff filmed the players talking about various topics such as what it means to play for their country.
Then, before the August 2016 game against Argentina (which we won 105-78), Coach K dismissed the notion of giving a speech himself and instead played a video montage of the players themselves talking about winning the gold medal and their commitment to the team.
In doing this with your team, you enable its members to own the problem, solution, cause — whatever you need them to be singularly…