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A Will to Win: Rick Pitino on Motivation
March 01, 2007
By Maggie Rauch
In about a week, the curtain will rise on the most exciting annual event in U.S. amateur athletics—the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. Over two weeks, 65 teams compete in a single-elimination format for the national championship. Anything can happen, and every year it does. Big dogs who have ridden high in the rankings since November go down hard, and teams that just weeks ago weren't expected to get invited to "The Big Dance," scratch and claw their way to buzzer-beating wins. (In fact, if they haven't done so already, soon your own sales team will be frantically filling out those tournament brackets.)
In a league where "veterans" are 22-year-olds with four years of tenure, a coach spends the season pushing players not just to work hard on skills, but also to develop the intensity and poise necessary to prevail in the tournament. University of Louisville's Rick Pitino is one of the league's most successful at this. He's the only coach to have led three different teams to the semifinals, has one championship under his belt and boasts the third best all-time tournament winning percentage among active coaches.
Pitino was a coaching prodigy, taking his first head job at Boston University in 1978 at the age of 25. He went on to coach the NBA's New York Knicks nine years later, returned to the college game at the University of Kentucky, and coached the Boston Celtics for four years before taking the Louisville job in 2001.
In the off-season, Pitino speaks to organizations all over the country, helping business leaders translate his proven motivation method into tangible results at their companies. He draws on new experiences, as well as wisdom from his two books, Lead to Succeed: 10 Traits of Great Leadership in Business and Life and Success is a Choice: 10 Steps to Succeeding in Business and in Life.
At press time, the Louisville Cardinals were gearing up for a post-season run after a slow start. It was in the midst of this surge that we caught up with Coach Pitino, who answered such questions as: How do you motivate Generation Y? What do you do with a talented team member who has trouble with the "work" part of working hard? How should you deal with media criticism?
So quit worrying about how much time your salespeople waste filling out their tournament brackets, and read on to learn motivation secrets from a future Hall of Fame coach.
A lot of people and things influence your players. What role would you say you play in their motivation?
As a team you motivate collectively. But you really have to motivate [in] this culture today individually, and you have to know what light switches to turn on with each young person. They're all motivated by different things. Some want their parents to be proud of them; some want to make a great deal of money; some want to have a lifetime job in a certain profession. So after you sit down with them and you find out exactly what motivates them, you know exactly how to turn on the switches.
You spend most of your day with 18-to-22-year-olds. What advice do you have for executives about motivating Generation Y?
The one thing you have to do for young people is make it clear it's not going to happen overnight for them. They're not going to be a vice president in their first few years, and they have to understand the pecking order and how to grow in the company. Give them their goal, and let them understand where they could possibly get to one day, but make them understand that they're going to need a work ethic second to none to work their way up that ladder. And if they're willing to pay the price, they certainly will get there.
I have guys that think they're going to be an NBA player when it's not even a possibility. That type of thinking is part of this instant gratification, microwave culture that we're in. And the way to deal with that is to get them to be goal-oriented and then to have a work ethic second to none. After doing both things, then see if they've arrived at the goals they've set forth, on not only a daily basis, but a weekly and monthly basis.
What do you say to a player who comes in and says: "I'm goal-oriented. My goal is to be drafted as a pro at the end of my sophmore season?"
I tell them that you cannot calculate that at all. You have to deal with your goals much more in the immediate future. I tell them to deal with the precious present, where we are today. I say, "Rather than talk about your sophomore year, let's have a goal after this week." So let's say they want to become a great shooter. I say, "OK, we're going to have a week shooting drill. They take, say, 200 shots per day. After we establish the number they're going to take, then they have to make so many before they move on to the next spot. So I give them a number, I give them their goal, and after it's done I give them feedback to what they accomplished. It's not enough just to work hard—you've got to master what you're trying to do. In order to master that, your goal has to be met each time out. Your goal has to be challenged.
Whose example do you try to follow when it comes to motivating your players?
I've had to do it more by being in my own laboratory and experimenting—not only in developing a style, but in finding ways to motivate and also finding ways not to do it. I've tried to find out my errors and make sure I don't repeat them the following year in terms of motivation, by sitting down with my graduating seniors at the end of each year. I say, "Tell me what you liked about the way I coached you and tell me what bothered you about the way I dealt with you." I would see what they liked, and what I needed to improve on as a leader. Sometimes you think you're too easy or you think you're too hard, and you're totally off base. Not until you get feedback from the people you're leading can you truly improve as a leader.
What role do your assistant coaches play in team motivativation?
In basketball, you oversee three or four coaches and you're in constant contact with them. They interact with the players in a different way [than I do]. If I'm driving one player real hard, and he's not accepting it as well as he should, they'll make sure that before that young man leaves that night, he understands why I'm doing it. That's what you have to do in today's culture—leaders today have to explain "the why." Back when I played 30 years ago, nobody had to explain the why.
When you have to shuffle the lineup—bench player X, start player Y—what are the motivational issues that come along with those changes, and how do you handle them to maximize production?
I don't ever get them to think it's benching or a demotion. I explain it to them this way: I had one of the greatest college teams of all time at Kentucky in 1996. On that team there were seven guys that played in the NBA. I started the five best players, and we lost the second game of the season because it wasn't a group that was cohesive. And then I took a walk-on point guard, gave him a scholarship and made him a starter. He was totally willing to sacrifice for the good of the team and worked to make other players better. He didn't care about scoring; he didn't mind doing the dirty work. He just wanted to make the other people better. The other person who became a [substitute] still played the same amount of minutes and I made him understand, this is just about making the team better—it has nothing to do with your significance to the team. We didn't lose another game until the end of the season, and we won a championship, all because that young man accepted his role. I think defining roles is very significant—any time you alter a role of someone you not only have to define it but explain that this is what's best for the team.
Do you think it's better as a leader to be loved or feared?
Whether you're leading your troops, whether you're leading your corporation or whether you're leading a team, it's when love and discipline come together that you have great chemistry. Your players have to understand that you love them but they also must be extremely disciplined. And they have to understand that if they don't create the proper habits there will be a penalty. With just love and no discipline you have anarchy. And I think with too much discipline, you also have anarchy with no love. You don't have people that will go the extra yard for you. That's what I try to build in any team, to have love and discipline come together in forming great chemistry. Discipline to us is an organized plan of attack—it's creating the right plan, the right habits and the right goals.
Coaching has a lot of built-in accountability. At Louisville, expectations are very high, and you've take some flak this year from fans and bloggers. How do you keep focused and keep players focused?
If you're a coach or a leader you don't listen to the fellowship of the miserable. If someone listens to call-in shows each night, then more than likely they're not succeeding if they have that much time on their hands. If you're someone that gets on a message board, then [you're] probably someone who's unsuccessful knocking someone who's successful. So you totally block out that element of your criticisms. Now, you do deal with electronic and print media on a daily basis—they have their fingertips on the pulse of what's going on. And if someone there is criticizing what you're doing, you take it as constructive criticism, but you don't change your focus, because you obviously know they can't do the job better than you. I accept the criticism that's come my way.
Do you set specific goals about where you want to be as a team at the end of the season?
Obviously, you want to win a national championship every time you go in. And if you are a runner-up and you get your silver medal or your bronze, you understand that. Everyone sets out to win a championship. But also you have the thing in front of you, which is your league, and you're trying to be the best in your league. So we put the standings up there and every game that we play we show them where we stand, but we play it game by game.
How do you continue to motivate yourself after what you've already accomplished in your career?
I've always believed it's about the letters PHD—it's about being poor, hungry and driven to succeed. I don't mean poor in terms of economics, but in terms of always learning. I have always said if I ever lose the PHD—the ability to get into work by 6:30, and to relate to the players, to take the job home with me and when the children are in bed, still watch film and watch games—if you lose that, then it's time to put down your PHD and let somebody else do it.
[Current Louisville forward] Terrence Williams said this about you: "On game day he's more amped than all of the players combined, because #1: He hates to lose. #2: He hates to lose. And # 3: He hates to lose." What do you think you've done to make this so clear to him?
They realize how to me winning is above everything else. It's above individual performance. I think to be a true winner you have to have a bad taste in your mouth when you lose. But then the next day you don't come in complaining or rehashing the loss—although you do watch film on what you did incorrectly. But after that's done, you get on and you deal with the next game. The only time I lament about a loss is just that evening. The next day that loss is totally gone, except for what we have to learn from that loss.
When you have speaking engagemnets in the off-season, what do you like about addressing a business audience?
It's just like writing books. You write a book because you're trying to accomplish something and help other people. With speaking it's the same thing; If you leave motivating 15, 20, 80 percent of that audience then you've accomplished what you set out to do and that's to make them better at what they do.
If you were to leave basketball for the business world, what would be your dream job?
I would probably enjoy Wall Street as much as anything. I love the pulse of New York City and I would identify with Wall Street because it's a very competitive world, and I love competition.
Sidebar: A Failing Star
It's a problem you're likely to face at some point in your management career: A talented rep joins the team, only to reveal poor working habits and a bad attitude. Do you fire the rep? Try to change him? Rick Pitino faced this dilemma with Derrick Caracter, a freshman this year who, talent-wise, was considered one of the top few recruits in the nation. But it was well-known that Caracter had a lazy streak. For that reason, Pitino never pursued him, but when Caracter asked to play for Louisville, the coach accepted him conditionally.
"I pointed out all the consequences of being late to class, and I told him the consequences of not working hard," Pitino says. "I told him what our program was about and he said he was buying into it. He's a terrific young man but the unfortunate thing is old habits are tough to break."
Indeed, Caracter found it hard to change and in late December, Pitino asked him to take a break from the team. "I realized that he was not part of this team, he exuded too much negative energy and not enough positive energy," Pitino says. "I sent him home and said… 'if you want to come back I'm going to make you sign a contract. If you violate it you will immediately be suspended and I'm going to work with you because we're going to try and change you.' " Caracter quickly violated two parts of his contract, the terms of which Pitino keeps private, and Pitino showed him to the bench.
"If he was in the corporate world he would immediately be fired," Pitino says. "But here you're dealing with a young person who you're trying to help in life, so you've got to go as far as you can go." In early February, Caracter still had the opportunity to come back if he met the contract terms, but Pitino says that all depended on the player: "The one thing I explained to Derrick before he broke this contract, is once you break this contract it's not me suspending you. If you violate any of these things that you've agreed to, then you're suspending yourself, it's not me."
Asked if it was worth giving up a talented player in the lineup in order to adhere to principles about effort, Pitino says, "When someone says 'your team really worked hard,' to me that's not a compliment. You're supposed to work hard. If your team doesn't work hard, then you don't have a team. That's your common denominator."
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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