NBA Finals Coaching Tip

by John Agno

Published on this site: June 14th, 2005 - See more articles from this month...

Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split- second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court.

Great basketball coaches, military commanders and business leaders know that practice of the rules of engagement coupled with split-second decisions in execution by their team can make the difference between winning and losing.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his bestseller, "blink" (Little Brown), tells us that great leaders know that if you can create the right framework (by everyone knowing the rules and practicing them), when it comes time to perform, your players will engage in fluid, effortless, spur-of-the-moment dialogue and action. The leader provides the overall guidance and intent to the team, coaches them in mastering tools and general techniques through practice and then allows them to use their own initiative and be innovative as they move forward.

Placing a lot of trust in your subordinates has an overwhelming advantage:

Allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves within the rules of engagement, focuses their energy and opens the possibility for extraordinary leaps of insight and instinct in decision-making. When the team is "in the flow," split-second decisions are unconscious flashes of insight that drive extraordinary performance on the basketball court, battlefield or shopfloor.

It is the leader's job to keep the momentum going; so as not to lose the flow. Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out by external means. Know that these kinds of fluid, intuitive, nonverbal experiences are vulnerable...and...your players can drop out of the "zone" or "flow" when you, as the leader, start to become reflective about this rapid cognition process.

For more information on the importance of our "adaptive unconscious," go to:
http://home.att.net/~coachthee/../conventionalwisdom.htm

John G. Agno, certified executive & business coach Signature, Inc., PO Box 2086, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 Telephone: 734.426.2000 (US Eastern Time Zone) Email: mailto:[email protected] The most critical knowledge is self-knowledge. http://www.MentoringandCoaching.com