 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our virtual event today. I'm Paula Lance. I'm the James B. Houdak Professor of Health Policy and the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs here at the Ford School of Public Policy. And it is my great honor and pleasure today to be hosting a conversation with the amazing coach, John Beeline. Welcome, coach. Thank you. Thanks, Paula, very much. This is great to be back sort of in the classroom again right now with a lot of people, a lot smarter than me, but maybe I got some things we can share. Well, I think we're gonna have a really fun conversation today. So we're so glad you're here with us. I know coach Beeline does not need any kind of introduction for many people, but let me just do a little bit of introduction before we get going here. John Beeline was the head coach of the University of Michigan's men's basketball program from 2007 to 2019. And during this time, he led a golden era in the men's basketball program, appearing in two national title games and making it to the NCAA Tournament nine times out of his 12 seasons at the University of Michigan. He is the winningest coach in the history of the University of Michigan men's basketball program. And he is beloved in the University of Michigan community. And it's not just for his coaching ability and record, but he's also greatly admired because of his positive spirit and his winning approach to team development and leadership. So again, thank you, coach, for sharing your time with us today to talk about leadership and how lessons from elite competitive athletics are relevant to leadership and team building and other arenas, including the arena of public service, which we care so much about at the Ford School. Thank you. Great, so I have some questions. I'm going to ask coach Beeline. And we also have received a number of questions already from people in the audience. And so I'll be weaving those into my conversation with him. We hope we have time for some more questions from the audience. So those of you joining us right now, please submit your questions either via the chat function or you also can tweet your questions via Twitter using the hashtag policy talks. All right, coach, you ready to get going? I am ready. Let's go. All right, question number one. A little bit of background. So here at the Ford School, our core mission is really making a difference and we're a community dedicated to the public good. And our definition of leadership here at the Ford School is really simple. We define leadership as the intentional behavioral process of having a positive impact on others, on organizations and communities. So leadership to us is just really having an intentional positive impact on others, organizations and communities. What's your working definition of leadership? How do you define it? How do you see it? And also, why is leadership such an important component of athletic programs and also really specifically related to team building and team performance? Yeah, I think we're on the same page with the definition. I have it sort of that defined just slightly different that leadership is the practice of educating, inspiring, influencing and motivating others to be their best selves. And let me break those four things down to you. One of the things that we've learned as we build a culture and teaching our players to be leaders, assistant coaches is there's an education component to it. I think you have to understand leadership is we're not just born leaders and some may be, but most people, most people, I have to learn about it. And that's why I have a passion for teaching now and teaching over in the School of Education. And it's important that you educate this. We found that people aren't gonna learn to lead through osmosis. You have to actually give them some of the steps that you have to take. I think that inspiring them is huge. And I think that has an awful lot to do with how you build relationships in leading. You can't inspire anyone if you don't have a good relationship with them or really a positive one that you know them, you have empathy for them. We say, the player is inside the person. You don't get the player unless you get the person. And that's so important. And then next is just influencing. I think old leaders and still some leaders today, they think they influence through power. Or I'm gonna lead you because why? Because I said that's why, that's because I'm the leader and that's not the way you're gonna lead. You have to really choose influence over power all the time. It's really, General Martin Dempsey told me that when I was with the Cavaliers last year, he's a tremendous hero, army general and talk to me about that as I was trying a different method of leadership. And then finally, right, in motivating there, that's so important that you said a positive, you know, this tone at the top that Dave Brandon used to talk about with me, our extra athletic director is this positive sort of, I'm there, I'm there every day. It's like Michigan's defense right now. Every day they're coming to play defense. They may have a bad day now and then in offense, but their defense is there. If you come every day with this positive attitude, you know, people will go your way and they will follow you if they feel it's amazing. It's a heliotropic effect that people go towards sunshine. They're gonna go that way, whenever they can. Kim Cameron is a great teacher at Michigan over in the business school. And he's taught me a lot about this heliotropic effect. So that's my long-winded one of leadership, but it's got four pretty good components to it. Yeah, I really, I like that. And I wanna rip off of that a little bit and go a little deeper into this. What are some lessons about team building and leadership from athletic teams that you think are important for other groups of people who work together professionally or even people in communities who are trying to get together to make some kind of positive change within their community? And what are the behaviors and skills that are important for leaders across the board? You know, we spend teaching this course, as I said, and we spend the first couple of weeks about self-awareness. In order to be a good leader, you have to really know who you are. I mean, one year I tried to lead, I was reading a book about Bobby Knight, this great coach from Indiana and one of the best ever three national championships and probably tried to coach more like him and that's not my personality. I'm not saying one's better or the other, but you have to find out who you have, build your own core values, decide just right now what's really important to you. That's how we came to our core values at Michigan. We huddled up with my staff, I had a new staff and they said, coach, we gotta put this down, we gotta teach this, we cannot just wait for it to happen. What's really important to you? And then we'll work with the team, see what's really important to them and try and mesh these things. And that's where it starts, that self-awareness that you have. And then after that, to be this good leader, you gotta stay true to those values as you go through. If that's what you believe in, you gotta go there. A certain flexibility, versatility is huge, but you have to be true to that and stay there. I call it, and then I call it the vet and I learned this from, I don't like throwing names around, but I don't like to take credit for something I didn't think of. But I was fortunate last year to go down and see the St. Louis Cardinals in spring training and I wanted to talk with their GM about leadership, John Mosella. Can he, he mentioned three things that were really important today's leadership. And I call it now the vet. I teach it to my class. Be invulnerable, be vulnerable. You don't know it all. People won't follow you if you will not, you will not admit your mistakes. And I think if you look at this past year, with this pandemic, if we had addressed it, maybe differently, if we have several people say, we goofed, let's do this, let's do that. What could have happened in that? Or, you know, the political parties now fight with each other. How about my bad, just I was wrong. You were right, admit it. And what a good thing. And then empathy. I think today's world, it's so important that we have that for each other. I think we've seen that in all different ways of inclusion right now of people reaching out, social justice, empathy is so important. And then as we're all in the Twitter world and the email world and the Instagram world, if you aren't transparent, people are gonna find out the other way. And you'd rather be out front and be transparent and say, in vulnerability, I goofed, or we're gonna do this because this with the big data says, not because I said so. Those things are huge. And then the last thing in being this leader is you gotta be a listener. I finally went to this point where never having assistant coaches early in my career, I thought I had to do it all. And when I started listening to more and reaching out and asking questions, I found out I certainly didn't know it all. And let's bring in people who know differently than me and let's blend together and incorporate that, including with your team. Listen to your team. And there may be some values you're not, if they all will say to you, all right, we really wanna be late for practice every day. There's some non-negotiables you're not gonna do. But they're gonna say, hey coach, I used to make the guys really dress up for dinner. And then after a few years, I just end up saying, and I don't even know it was Michigan, I think it was at West Virginia, they said, coach, we really have to dress up for dinner. It's just a pre-gay meal. And I said, yeah, I think you're right. We don't have to, you just give it in to these different areas or coach, we're practicing too early on a Saturday. Could we move it back? Those are those little things that are so important that you listen to them, because then you give them ownership. When you listen to them, you give them ownership. And our best teams, our best teams, the championship teams are the ones that went all the way national championship. We were on cruise control in March. I mean, the coaches and I put together a few things. The Moe Wagner's, the Trey Burks, the Tim Hardaway's, Duncan Robinson, they were running those teams at the end. Nick Stauskis and Glenn Robinson, that was their team coach. We got it. We got it. And that's where I think you wanna get to. That's great. That's great segue into the next question. And you had mentioned this before that leadership is not about power. And here at the Ford School, we talk a lot about how being a leader doesn't mean you're the boss of everything or that you have control of all the resources. And every team needs everyone to show up with their leadership skills. But an audience member did pose a, I think what is a fair question, and that is does a team have to have one clear leader? Might have a lot of leaders on your team, but should there be someone who is more sort of a point person in a leadership position on a team, or can you just have a team? Or everyone's the leader? Well, I do think there's gotta be somebody, maybe a name to be able to do that, but they don't have to be the leader. I mean, they could be the coach, but I mean, there's teams that in the NBA and things like that, that when it came to decision time, they would look to the captain and say, what do you wanna do? And so, but I think that the more leaders, the better. I mean, really the more leaders are better. We studied leadership. We went down to see Lieutenant Colonel Mike Irwin at West Point, because I mean, they're teaching to the West Point cadets that they're teaching leadership every single day. And truth is not everyone becomes a general. So they're not, they don't all become this ultimate leaders, but they can lead in different ways. You know, somebody decides for them to charge, but somebody's gotta lead them out of there and somebody's gotta have the rear flank while they're charging. So there's all different elements to leadership. And our teams, many times our non-scholarship guys were our best leaders because they brought it every day with no agendas. And that example was really leadership to the great players. Austin Hatch brought us leadership every day without saying a word. When he came in every day for practice, a great player could not play anymore, but just his visualization was showed leadership in some ways. But I don't think you can have too many leaders unless they're like this and they're not willing to have empathy for each other, walk in each other's shoes. So here's another question from an audience member. And you spoke before about the core values that you had that were motivating. So can you talk a little bit about what were those core values? But also what were the methods you used to get your players to buy into the core values and the team culture you were trying to create? And how do you think that impacted performance? Well, as I said, when we went on this mission and we actually wrote up a mission statement and then we went to our core values and it came out to be as an acronym you paid, unity that we were gonna be the team, the team, the team. You know, we listened to Bo Schembeckler's speech, every year to start our season. Passion, we wanted people that we were looking for and recruiting on the team, everything. They love Michigan, they love basketball and they love their teammates. Appreciation, we always wanted this attitude of gratitude for everything we did. We're blessed to be able to play at this university. We're blessed to have the skills to play at a high level to have a scholarship for some of them, right? Integrity, the absolute most important one. I would have had it first, but I should have, I guess I could go to iPad, you know, but I wouldn't know what to do with the U then. So it is, it's really, you can have all this stuff. You can have passion, you lie, cheat, steal, you shortcut, you don't have integrity. You lose it all, you lose it all. And then diligence was the last one that we were gonna work and everybody thinks all the time, well, I'm gonna work really hard that's gonna put me ahead. Yes, because if you don't work, you won't get ahead. But everybody else is working hard too. So you have to understand that. That other teams, other companies, they're working hard too. You're the only ones that invent hard work and that's why you have to be efficient with it and know that you will not survive without it. You might get some breaks, you might do the right thing here or there. But so how did we teach it? Is we taught it that we would go in in the first day of practice or video or something. We was unity and we would give the definition of unity. We would look at every word in it. We would talk, we'd give different examples of unity. Go to when we'd have different speakers come in, all right? Tell me about a team in the past that you've had that was very unified and how did they do? And then tell me about a team that wasn't and how did they do? Just giving them those ideas. Because you know what, many times, and I don't mean this in a bad way, mom and dad, right? Brothers and sisters, your friends back home, they don't care if you win, they wanna know how many points and rebounds you have and it's absolutely conflicting and you gotta get to that point. So we taught all those things every day and brought people in also speakers to do it as well. And pretty soon, there's not one of our, you know, there's a lot of people have core values, they can't remember them. There's not one of our guys I'm confident doesn't know what you paid stands for. And it's probably applying it in every aspect of their life. Exactly. After college. We added accountability in year five or six because we had lost a lot of people and we'd be from to the NBA. We had a bunch of young people and they were still learning how important that was to hold themselves accountable and each other. Brian Townsend said something, what is the, it's a, oh shoot, I'm forgetting. Brian Townsend teaches leadership over in the athletic department, the weight of honesty, your team can bear the weight of honesty. Just think about that, that you can tell the truth and people can take it. And that's so important that people don't want to hold each other accountable because they're afraid whether that, you know, that people can bear that weight of honesty. That's great. I love that. All right, so next question. What is your advice for teams in regard to understanding and working through differences they might have and especially differences that arise from people coming together from really different backgrounds, cultures, identities and life experiences. You know, what can individuals and then teams do to get past conflicts and tensions that arise? We ended up every year, Paul, bringing Brian Townsend over from the leadership department and the athletic department. And we had everybody by themselves at their own tables put down their values. What is your, what's the three things most important to you? And very rarely were they the same. And then we put them up in a spectrum going across and there would be somebody I love and I would coach to the end of the earth and I did it too. And I would say, he's at the under end of the spectrum than me. He values different things. When I became a father, in particular Andy, my son may be watching right now, the fourth of my four children. When I found Andy, when I got to know Andy better, he's not a baby anymore, but I'm just watching him move around. I said, I'm four for four. All four of my children are very different. And so when I became a better coach immediately that Shawna, Patrick, Mark and Andy, that they're also different, that how could I ever expect my team to all be the same? When we're the same mom and same dad, they, these were all so different. So we would teach the values. And I'd say at the other end of the spectrum is for example, John Teske. And I'm way over here. And we are very aligned, but we think differently. And once you understand that different people have different values and you respect them, you just get there. You just, there's so much respect because they'll do it to you. They'll do it to you. And you don't know how they were raised or what challenges they had or maybe they had no challenges too. And if you realize that, then you understand maybe that's why they're having trouble with this challenge. Or if you, you know, the whole thing is try and find out why they are the way they are by just getting to know them. And that's, it's very, very simple. So we really put a lot of time into that and have coaches gone and just Greg Hardin from the university would come in and talk with every player. And I remember we had one player I won't mention, but he really broke down in front of the team to say about a relationship he had that it really been difficult for him his whole life. And now the team knew all the time. They know all, they knew from the rest of the time what he had gone through and look at him differently. So again, walking and walking steps in someone else's shoes is really important. Even as Joe Biden said for a moment, Joe Biden's mother for a moment, right? Said for a moment, just walk in their shoes. And I think we need to do that for a moment no matter what political party you are and what type of leadership you're in. Were there things you looked in, looked for and potential recruits related to these leadership things we're talking about and how could you see them or how did you try to get things revealed as you were trying to build and recruit? Yeah, it was the, and you couldn't do it now. So I probably wouldn't have done very well recruiting right now, but we used to make everyone, a lot of people offer scholarships and they haven't even met the guy yet. We intentionally made everybody had to come to campus to meet us to get a scholarship offered. And even we didn't mind, I haven't seen them play yet. And we, and, but we get that out of the way. Once you come to camp, we get to know you. We didn't care who we didn't get Paula. We cared who we got. I told the group today at 12, 35 games in a season. You don't do your due diligence and you get the wrong guys on your team, right? They will, they could beat you 35 times. Your own guys could beat you. He goes somewhere else because you're unsure. He might beat you once or twice. So we don't want people that just don't get that and or to come from have that same values. Now, with all that being said, we have kids that came from the dirt poor situations and just barely because of a lack of opportunity in their grade school and junior high and high school, they had the ability, but they didn't have the resources to actualize their potential. And then we had other ones that were the valedictorian of their class and every guy graduated because we made sure we saw that they got it. Michigan, they understood Michigan was going to be academics first. Yeah, you can go to the pros, but unpack your bags for four years. And if you, if you go to the pros, fine. But if not, you're, you're going to study all you're doing, you're doing everything just like everybody else in braces experience. So I think that's it. Getting to understand each other and knowing that we're all different and the world has come so much farther. We're not there yet, maybe not even close, but I just looked back 23 years with inclusion in all areas and we're moving in the right direction, just not fast enough. Thank you. So I think some Ford school students and some of my colleagues at the Ford school might be surprised to learn that I was actually a competitive athlete back in the day. My sport was gymnastics and gymnastics is very different sport than basketball for sure. I know basketball is hard, but I'm going to say try thinking a moment about performing feats of strength and flexibility and precision and grace on a four foot piece of wood elevated off the floor. That's, it's a very different sport. You know, what I really want to get to is that gymnastics is a really different sport from a lot of other sports because it's a team sport. You're competing as a team, but you're also competing as an individual against your own teammates, which is, it's hard. There was always a tension in that for me, competing as the team and then also trying to beat my teammates as well. And I think on any team there, we can't deny there is some competitive tension on teams who are trying to achieve the same goal. So how did you coach your team members around this tension regarding individual performance versus team performance? And with the money that's available in the NBA and the pressure from home or anywhere, you know, when after a game, you know, I mean, we were fortunate enough to have an awful lot of NBA first rounders and second rounders. And everybody sort of saw that, but everybody else wants to do that too. And they think maybe it is their best way to get there is to focus on themselves. And really the best way to get there is focus on your team. I can't tell you how much Tim Hardaway, the only pressure on him was he wanted to be the best player he could be. And winning was so important to him over his own self. And his first two years didn't even look at the NBA because his dad had lived it. He wanted to just be good. And as junior year, we had to say, you know, you're a first rounder, what do you want to do? And while he wasn't completely surprised, it wasn't like all he dreamed about, I got to get to the NBA, I got to do that. We're some, that really gets in the way that the high, we say the high tide rises every boat. We all know that the high tide rises every boat. And so if I contend that we've had so many guys drafting the NBA because we were playing in late March, when all of the world is watching college basketball. And so if we don't win, nobody knows about you. And so we preached that. I think regarding gymnastics, I heard this, one of our speakers at my class brought this up and it was really, apparently the Norwegian cross country rifle team, I believe it is. So they cross country ski, shoot a rifle, and then they go and they're competing against other countries, but their own team. And apparently what they would do is some of their best ones would go out front first and then call back to their teammates what the challenges were. The conditions, yeah. Giving them a chance to do better than they were. And what's happened is they've become the elite ski team because they all have gotten better through it. And they changed the leaders and different things like this. And it's so, people have to understand that that if you look at this thing that I'm okay, you're okay, we both can do this. Iron sharpens iron, the competition. There's so much to that of the competition of just being at your best every day or somebody else gonna take my spot here on this team. It's healthy. That area where you don't want it too easy and you don't want it too hard, but there's that bell curve at the top that is really good where you have pressure and you have demand. That's where you get the best out of everybody. Excellent. All right, got a question from the audience. Someone writes, I often find it hard to judge myself as a leader. Things are not always easily observable or measurable. So how do you recommend that people evaluate themselves as leaders? And do you wanna share how you've done that over the years? How have you assessed yourself and your leadership? I think that you, first of all, there's probably a million books on leadership out there. I will not be writing one, but it is really, it's really important that you know, there's resources out there to learn about this. I think, again, write down what's really important. What are your values? What are your core values that are really important to you? And they may be just with you. That may exclusively to you, but then you may not be comfortable going out there with all those things. We say all the time, just pivot every now and then. Just pivot and move yourself a little bit into that arena where you can speak up and say something or do something that has leadership to get you comfortable being a leader. And all of a sudden, like Trey Burke, John Teske, very rarely said much, but every now and then they would say something in practice or in a game that everybody listened to when they did their little pivot. Scott Novak, or yeah, Novak, he never had to say anything about him, right? Zach Novak, I get him mixed up with a guy named Scott Unger who was another great leader for me at Richmond, but Zach Novak was the ultimate leader. I mean, he was given orders or given leading coming out of the womb, but the other guys just had to pivot at that time. And so it is really a, it comes down to yourself right now, getting to know yourself and then being comfortable, right? With what you want to lead it, like it could be. When we ask our classes, some people say, I want to lead in their empathy. That's my thing, but then just do it and it will sort of happen to you. Show you, do that every single day. Make a list of things you're gonna do that are gonna be empathetic that day and do them. Both Scott Unger and Zach Novak will laugh now because I called Zach Scott many, many times. They were both left-handed, both playing out of possession, both brightest can be and both great leaders. So I'm sorry about that, guys. I've mixed your name. What do you think about, you know, the 360 evaluations are pretty, they've been around for a while and pretty common. You know, what do you think about that? Like, you know, everyone asking, everyone else they work with, how am I doing? Yeah. So I'll take a look at each other and see, you know, how everyone's doing individually, but then also how we're doing as a team. Yeah, it is, can I say I love it and I want people to do it? No, we did virtually do it one time with me. Very uncomfortable, but what also happened out of it was there was some clear misunderstandings that I had not communicated well, but our intentions were the same. And it was just the simplest mistake that we could correct. And at the same time, I also heard, you know, things that probably were, I thought I was doing a good job. There's a book, Leadership and Self-Deception, which my class is reading right now at just finish reading. And it's exactly about that. You think you're leading sometimes and you're not. You're not. And you got, you're really portraying yourself when you do not look at yourself truthfully and try to get on the other side of that. And it basically comes down, are you treating everyone are you treating everyone as a real person or are you treating everyone that's the janitor? You know, that's my wife or that is the teacher that is my classmate or is that John this very unique man has a family does everything and he happens to be sweeping the floors and it's a different thing. And as a result, I think that's so important that we get to that point with everybody when we, as we're looking to lead. Thank you. So last week when we met and we're having our pre-session for this, we discovered that we both have a mutual appreciation for the same person who you actually mentioned already and also a book. So University of Michigan alumnus Michael Irwin has a book called Lead Yourself First, Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude. So I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about this book and Dr. Irwin's main message in the book about the really important role of solitude and reflection in leadership. He's not quite a doctor yet, but he'll work on it. That's right, that's right. He's a Lieutenant Colonel. And but he is a major. He started a PhD, he was in a PhD program in psychology at the University of Michigan. Right, so he is an amazing man who has studied this for a long time and just some of the best leaders. You just need this time, especially today to have solitude, to think. And if you think about it, meditation is the best. I mean, it's the best. I've used it now for 20 years. Prayer is a similar vehicle. Exercise is a similar vehicle where you shut everything down and you just think. And it's so important that we turn off the noise and just get away from it. You just, the time right now, the focusing times, I think, Mike, these are approximate numbers, but let's say people used to stay focused for 30 seconds or attention span was 30 seconds 10 years ago. Well, now it's 15 seconds. We actually did this with our huddles. When Mike told us, we tried to break up our huddles to make sure that we did not go too long in a huddle on one subject and change things around with a different person talking. But you're dealing with a, I forget the numbers, but it's unbelievable number of times that a high schooler, a college student, a grade school looks at his phone in a day. And it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds that, and they did the studies too about, if you put a phone next to you and take a test, you put a phone in your bag and take a test and you put your phone in the next room and take a test. And consistently data was you do the best when the phone's in the other room. So those things are so important that you shut out so you can think clearly. I mean, you have to be able to do this. And it was so important for me that meditating before every game, I had a positive one that I did that I always saw us winning the game. I always saw our team me shaking the hands of the team we beat. I could smell the hot dogs. I did everything to do that so that when I'd get into a huddle, I'd been there before. And it's the power of it. LeBron James uses it so much. I'm sure that golfers use that like crazy. I mean, I need to start doing it with golf. So it's like this power that we all have, you got to try and make that your competitive advantage. You have to make it your competitive advantage. And all the resource we have in that phone, they're tremendous but it's like me running too many plays. If we ran, and I probably did run too many plays but if we ran a hundred plays lousy instead of 10 plays really good, right? We would not have the success that we had. So we're running plays every day and you got to cut it down so that you do what's most important. Yeah, everything you're saying is so important. I want to focus this part of our conversation more on Ford School and Ford School students and even all of us here at the Ford School. I mean, we've just come through a incredibly contentious election year and election cycle and the aftermath from that. And to be in the field of public policy and public affairs is to be up on the news and every bit of news and what's happening not only in the United States but globally and you sometimes feel like if you don't look at your phone for two hours you're way behind in the very fast paced news cycle. So I know I'm guilty of it. I have my phone by my bed and if I wake up and which I do every night I wake up in the middle of the night and I check the COVID numbers and stuff. It's bad, right? But I think part of it is it's better to have all this information at our fingertips but it's too easy. So yeah, actually can you give me some advice and I'm getting all the four. The people who are sort of in our world where again being up on the news and every political take on the news is what we do and we have to do our work in the world. Well, it's the same thing with me. I'm checking back scores in the middle of the night see how my NBA guys are doing or how different teams in the Big Ten are doing and people forget that we all turned out all right when we waited for the paper to come in the next morning to read the news. And what you have to do anything that's really important you're probably gonna get a phone call on. If you don't respond you're gonna get it. If it's really you can't miss it you're gonna get a phone call on and the next day you can take care of it but I'm guilty of it. I'm really guilty of it. I have a lot of things going on and we would talk with our team about it and but it's something that we have to address because it's not gonna get better. You know, one suggestion Mike had take all your notifications off your phone just eliminate them. Don't get any notifications because how many of them are really important but how many of them are gonna distract you so much and take you away from what's really, really important and you just cannot, you can't go there. And but the other thing again is that your brain is scrambled. It is scrambled. You're not using the parts of the brain that allow you to be successful. It's just cluttered in a mess. And I think I do a pretty good job with it now and I've always done a pretty good job with it but I think we're in danger with the younger generation has grown up with it that this is huge, that they understand this and manage it. You can't eliminate it but just manage it better and make it one of your goals. Like right now I'm trying to find a time that I just do email at this time. I'm not gonna do any emails during the day but I'm gonna do it from five to six at night or seven to eight in the morning. That's it. I'm not gonna look at it again. And then I've gone where I'm not looking at the sports scores till tomorrow morning. I'm just not gonna do it. Believe it or not, you youngins, if the team played on the West Coast back when I was growing up we had to wait for the evening news to get the scores the next day. You had to go out to the mailbox in the evening news and then you'd find out how the Cardinals and the Dodgers did in a game because it wasn't, or everybody stayed up till 11 o'clock to get the news 11 o'clock every night on three channels. So we all got through that all right. Our generation turned out all right. We don't need all of this. All right, well, how about we make a deal? I'll hold you to not looking at the sports scores all the time and then I'll try not to look at the daily new COVID numbers every day. All right. All right, I'm looking at some questions that have come in from audience members. So let me peek at that. So someone from the Ford School posted this question. Often teams will have two members who clash in some way. It can be just a personality clash. It could be a clash around values that you talked about before. As a leader, how do you help people on a team resolve those differences? And then what do you do if you can't fix it? I think the best way that we've always done this and we've had these issues before, when you have two or three guys all trying to have the same goals, make it to the NBA, there's gonna be these times where somebody shoots when somebody else is open, et cetera. The best way that we've been able to handle it was, let's all get in the room together with, you know, always as a leader, always have somebody else in the room with you that is another leader. Do not ever meet with anybody individually because you wanna make sure that everybody repeats what was said in there and there's somebody else to hear it. But we had to take an assistant coach and one time we had four players that all had taken the same amount of shots over like 20 games. I mean, they were within one shot per game of each other but all of them were wondering, didn't think they were getting enough shots. So we had to say to them, all right, so what do you want us to do? Once so and so gets to eight shots, he can't shoot anymore because they're leaving him open but you gotta get your shots too. I mean, you just be real with them. And I think when you get, when you take two people like that and you put them in a room with an assistant coach or a co-manager or something and just say, this is our observations. How can we assist you? What are the differences? You are to be positive. You are two amazing talents and we wanna get the best out of both of you but I don't see that happening right now because of some friction. How can we eliminate that? Because that's one thing, that's one value we cannot coexist that way. And that's where you gotta be real with them. You gotta tell them this, you guys can get this done or I'm gonna have to get it done but let's talk it out and maybe I can advise you. Anytime, there are so many times that you have to tell the truth. Just tell the truth. And I'm not saying people lie, I'm just saying tell them the truth and show them data. It's always good to have big data too to show them that this is one game or this was one event. Show them over a year, keep a log. That's what all these, I always keep a log on everything that's going on for your own protection but more to say, okay, they'll say, you know what, last night you didn't, I didn't like the way you were in the locker room and you said some things and then, well, it's only once coach. I said, no, let's go back to last year and then via this year and then these things are really important as a leader. You don't wanna do it but that's no leader usually complains on payday. There's extra responsibilities to be in a payday to be in a leader. There's extra responsibilities and you can't say, they'll figure it out or damn them, they're not good teammates. No, you're the leader. You gotta figure out a way to do this and it usually works out but not if you hide from it or you pull one in and talk to them and then pull the other one in and nobody knows that you talk to each other and you're trying to slip it in the side door. No, just face it right in front of you in a positive way. Did you ever have the experience that you couldn't work it out between two people? It was more the person and the team. The person and the team. Finally, at some point, we had to let people go. We just had to say, listen, this is good luck and you're still on scholarship but we have to move on. We have to move on. So it's just best for you and it's best for the team and it's hard but I think virtually every place that I've been that has happened at least once and virtually every place that we've been there's been success following that because maybe success for them too. More success for them but certainly for us every time. Addition by subtraction, you don't want it but if people have their values are that different and they're not willing to see eye to eye then you got to, and maybe two people have to go. If both are, if it continues to go but usually what the one that you see is the most detrimental to it, you have to make a decision. Hard decision. It's a hard decision. All right. Another question from the audience. When you are the leader of a team for a long time how do you maintain engagement of that team and what strategies do you use to continually be effective? Yeah, that is a good question because I didn't have to do that until I was at Michigan. Every year I'd been, every place I'd been except for the morning was five years, five years, fix it, five years, move on, fix the program, moving in another direction. Then after being at Michigan for the first five I realized I had to continue to evolve. I had to do self and analysts to see who I was. And understand it was I in touch with the team. It's so important that they understand, I said this this morning that you have to stay, continue to relate with your team members and try to stay up with what's important to them. And as you're with somebody a long time you're gonna get older, they might get younger. And you have to show you can relate with them number one. You can have to show that you care about them off the court, off the field, out of the business room number two, right? That you end up have to show them you know your stuff. So all of a sudden you've been in this that you've been coaching or you've been leading but you're not ready to go in the digital age because you're uncomfortable with it and you're still trying to lead, you're not gonna be able to lead anymore. So you know your stuff and then can you benefit them? Can you make them better? That's one that I brought in a woman from Cal to coach at the Cavaliers one of the first women to be on the bench. There's several now but not the first but few. And that's how she coached those three things and I talk to everybody about that now. Those four values there. But the biggest thing is relate with them that you know that you can relate with them and you care about them off the court. So that's basically how you get to that point in leadership. So that the example you just gave makes me, I really wanna ask you, were there any gender issues with bringing in a woman to coach at the professional basketball level? And I know that it's not the first time this has happened but I, you know, in my work, I think a lot about gender issues and other kinds of identity issues on teams. So I'm just wondering if you have any of that experience and other experiences. How gender- Yeah, Lindsay, a locker room was the hardest thing in the NBA that she could have her own locker room. And so we built her one as she was the only one but we built her own locker room. And there was just these things that we had to do but she brought a perspective that was very unique. And we really, she's gonna be, as long as she wants to stay in the pros, she can be able to stay in the pros as long as she wants because she has, you know, and I don't wanna put it out there that just women are empathetic but she had a look at things, her empathy for our players, her relational ability with our players was just, she was so authentic with them and they really, they loved her. And so it was really, turned out to be a great move for both. But that was the only thing. There was no really difference that we had to be aware of. Thanks for that. All right, so another question from the audience. Did you use different leadership styles for dealing with younger, you know, young men when you were coaching college basketball versus professional? Oh yeah, it's gotta be very different because you have them somewhat, you know, they have school, they have their study halls. You have a responsibility to make sure they're getting an education and that you can really not regulate their life but you can direct their life a little bit different. So this is the time practices, this is the time, you're not gonna go in front of classes, you're not gonna go in front of study hall, you had to practice at a certain time. These are when your meals are set up where in the pros, it's all, they have their money and they know when practices and that's it. And that's it. And you try to catch them whenever you can to have individual relationships with them but it's really hard because they're grown up men, they have families and they do not, you don't have those situations where you can really meet with them the way you'd like to. And so it's hard. I think in what I learned, if I was back in that arena, again, I would probably work even harder at it now and I know that how hard it was to do but it is difficult to do. And in college it is with younger and then younger players in college opposed to older players in college, our leadership with the younger players in college was basically really trying to teach them what they didn't have. They did not just know it, they had no idea they didn't know it. They really are coming in extremely naive to what it takes to be a good teammate. They've been stars their whole life and now you bring them in there and there's really a, it's a time period. Very few freshmen are like a Hunter Dickinson or a Trey Burke, very, very few or have that opportunity. Most need some time and you have to give them that time, you have to have patience but you also can't let them slide on the important values of integrity, of hard work, those type of things. Thank you. Another audience question. Do you think that our current political leaders could use some team bonding and leadership training? Don't get me going here. Sorry. Very short school question for sure. Yeah, I'm gonna say neutral year but I have never, you know, I grew up in an era of John F. Kennedy being elected to be the president. My mother and father are both active in politics and this past year has been amazing. And I, but the way that I think that we used to have and we got professors out there, I think we used to have about 60% in the middle and about 20% at each end. And it seems now we have 40% at each end and 20% in the middle. And so somehow, but just listening to each other and here's one thing, just tell the truth, just tell the truth and have no political agenda other than do what's right and do the next right thing over and over again. And a lot of our issues be, don't worry about being reelected, don't worry about anything except doing the next right thing. And I think it would solve a lot of our problems right now and be vulnerable and you'll bond because if you're vulnerable, then he or she on the other side of the aisle is gonna be vulnerable and it will go back and forth and pretty soon you realize everybody's got flaws and we can work together. How's that? Is that good? That was good. That was great. Nice day. You're not gonna get in trouble on that at all. I get in trouble, but I'd get in trouble what I say around my house. All right. Bear with me a moment. I'm looking at some of the other questions. So someone just wrote, I'm the captain on my volleyball team. My teammates are complaining about a player who has great potential but won't bring her best but thinks she is the best. What should I say to her? You are much more powerful than you think, but you are not going to do it by ramming it, by just making her, forcing it on her. I think building a relationship with her or he, if it was a male, that she believes in you and she trusts you and with other teammates that are willing to get her to pivot little by little. She's not gonna change overnight, little by little in this direction of being a team player, team first and the better, the more you give yourself, just give yourself to the team, just do it. Give yourself to the team and watch what a great game you have personally. And gradually they'll get there, but most young players will come in like that and gradually they will learn and they probably gave the four stages of learning. Are you ready? The four stages of learning. And as you try and teach your lead is that basically our freshmen were unconsciously incompetent, most of them, that they didn't know what they didn't know. Next stage, sometimes in their freshman year they become unconsciously incompetent. Oh, I see, there's a lot more to this. I gotta eat right, I gotta go to bed on time. I need to share the ball. Then they become consciously competent. They really have to think about it and they can do it, but they gotta think about it. And then the great players, the great teams are unconsciously competent. They don't have to think about it, they coach each other, they coach other people. And that's where this young lady is right now. If she's a young, really good player, she probably doesn't know it all and you can't expect her to. She's never been in big 10, University of Michigan, you can't expect her to, so teach her gradually. I want, that's gonna be a quiz on those four. Consciousness. I like that. All right, last question. Okay. We'll give you a chance to make any parting shots that you want. So what advice do you have for students today? And in particular, foreign school students, but all students I think who share the goals of wanting to make a difference and wanting to improve institutions and communities in a very political and fractured world. What advice do you have to the leaders and best who are currently students at the University of Michigan? Well, this is another one from Dave Brandon and I hope I have, again, I don't mean to be dropped in names, I just, I don't want to take credit, but I'm gonna keep living these things because I surrounded myself with leaders so I could become a better leader. And David's quote, leadership is not a position. Leadership is a lifestyle. Leadership is not a position, it's a lifestyle. And that's the advice I give people when they're out there and they want to lead. There's another quote that integrity is a light. Send a signal. Send a signal wherever you go about integrity where it could be as simple as you know when you had the meal in the restaurant they undercharged you and all of a sudden you're going back and saying, hey, listen, I owe you five more dollars or you know that you did not do your group well enough in that simple group that you just didn't work hard enough and everybody out working, I apologize to it. These little signals you can send out that I'm trying to do everything the right way. And that just is a domino effect everywhere. And when you live this, you just can't turn leadership on and off. And with the price of that, you could do a hundred things. Well, John Beeline right now, I could do 99 things to do well. I could be wrapping bandages for the Red Cross all day long. But if I go out and get a DUI, right? It all goes away, right? It is you are held to a higher standard if you really want to be a leader with that responsibility, right? There's a lot of accountability to it. And it's so important that you just live that life and it's not easy. This is like my favorite quote. It's simple, but it's not easy. Just doing the next right thing to your conscious every day as a leader or as one who wants to be a leader that is not maybe ready for that. Just doing the next right thing is simple, but it is not easy. For example, Paula, tonight when you go to bed, you're gonna take that phone. It's simple. You can physically put it in the kitchen. I'm not sure about that. It's simple, but it's not easy. And so that's when teams see that, when you see that, it's that day-to-day grind. I was on a leadership call with some Navy SEALs. This is, there was five or six guys, this guy in the cellar series, and there was two Navy SEALs and they were talking about making it through Hell Week. And if anybody knows about that, these are approximate numbers again, but let's say a hundred guys come in on Sunday, whoever makes it to Friday, maybe 10 will make it to Friday, become SEALs. The other 90 get washed out. And the one that made it said, the ones that don't make it, they don't make it to Friday, they don't make it are the ones that are saying, all I gotta do is make it to Friday. All I gotta do is make it to Friday. They never make it to Friday because they're not living day-to-day. The ones that say, all I gotta do is make it to lunch. And now all I gotta do is make it to dinner. And all I gotta do is make it to bedtime. Those are the ones that make it. And that's why these little things of going through life, trying to do just the next right thing that comes in front of you. You don't know how many times I have a former player come up to me and just say, just try and do the next right thing, coach. Just try and do the next right thing because they're out there. They're out there. So that's it. I mean, that's, I'll go on for a while. You know, I just, I'm looking at the time. We are at the hour. So it's gone so fast. It's been amazing. Thank you so much for sharing your time, but also your wisdom, your inspiration, your experience. Just can't thank you enough on behalf of the Ford School community. So please accept our warmest thanks that switches to you and your family and go blue. Blue, every day of our lives, every day. So thank you, everybody. Love the Ford School. As I said, my son Andy is a graduate. I love the Ford School and you were all in a great place. And I'm envious of all of you because you're in the Ford School at one of the most interesting political times in the history of the world and certainly the United States. So embrace every minute of it, right? It's all, all this adversity is gonna provide incredible growth for all of you. And if things were easy, you don't grow. When things are tough, you get pruned, you grow. So good luck to everybody and thanks for listening to me and I hope I was helpful. You, without a doubt you were. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Everyone be safe. Thank you.