Passion and Level of Effort - The Magic Ingredient

Men's NCAA basketball - On January 4, 2012, Duke (ranked 3rd in current ESPN poll) was beaten by unranked Temple 73-78.

Big deal. Top-ranked teams get upset all the time.Well, it was certainly a big deal for the Temple fans, who stormed the floor after the game.

But it's interesting to appreciate why this happened, why a team with less talent can take control, lead the entire game and beat a team like Duke, most of whose players go on to play professionally. The answer comes from the Duke team itself.

Duke Head Coach Mike Krzyzewski - "They played with great toughness....For some reason, we didn't show up with the enthusiasm and the toughness that we usually display."

Duke's top scorer, freshman guard Austin Rivers - “We were slow and they played a lot harder than we did....They just outhustled us. We have a great team, but we just didn’t fight tonight.”

I watched the whole game and came to same conclusion. Duke has four players 6' 10" or taller, and most - if not all of them - were high school all-Americans. Only one of Temple's players is that big. But at the end of the game Temple had more rebounds than Duke. Duke always has a talented team, but usually when they are beaten it's because the other team played harder.

I often say that any unranked team can beat any top-ranked team if they play with more heart, with more ferocity.

I mention all of this because I love college basketball. And I'm a big Duke fan. I love to see them win, and I hate to see them lose. But beyond that, two questions...

1. Why can't legendary coach Mike Krzyzewski, who has won more games than any other coach in the history of Division 1 men's basketball, inspire his team of talented players to play with heart? Why can't he get them fired up for every game? Coach Dunphy did it for the Temple Owls. Why couldn't Coach K do it for the Duke players? I think it's a fair question.
2. How can YOU bring "toughness, heart, passion and ferocity" to your work? How can you engage your maximum level of effort to achieve what's important to you?

Can you coach yourself to do it?

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2012. Building Personal Strength .

COACH K - ON LEADERSHIP

Having read over 200 books on leadership, I prefer a book not by someone who has thought well about leadership, but someone who has actually been a successful leader. If John Wooden's book on leadership is my favorite, Mike Krzyzewski's book, Leading with the Heart is a close second.

Coach K and I were cadets at West Point at the same time. He was in the class of 1969, two classes after me, so even though we were assigned to the same cadet regiment, I remember him mainly from what he did on the basketball court. Back then, with Bobby Knight as the head coach, the undersized Army basketball team played in the final four of the NIT two years in a row.

I was a graduate student at Duke from 1971 to 1973, before Coach K's first year as coach. Translation: this was before he built the now-famous Blue Devil program, so in those days I paid more attention to American literature than to basketball. But now I'm an over-the-top Duke hoops fan. I even search the web for recruiting news during the summer.

So what would a basketball coach have to say about leadership? Here are some of my favorite Coach K quotes...

CHARACTER - "There are always those times when you're going to be down, it's how you step through it that makes you the person you are.''

COOPERATION - "People want to be on a team. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves. They want to be in a situation where they feel that they are doing something for the greater good."

EXCELLENCE -  "Everything we do has our own personal signature one it. So we want to do it as well as we possibly can."

LEADERSHIP - "Almost everything in leadership comes back to relationships."

LEADERSHIP - "People are not going to follow you as a leader unless you show them that you're real. They are not going to believe you unless they trust you. And they are not going to trust you unless you always tell them the truth and admit when you were wrong."

OPTIMISM - “Whether it's sunny or muddy or whatever, you figure a way to win. The only way you do that is to feel positively about your situation.”

PERSEVERANCE - "Don't let a single game break your heart."

RESPONSIBILITY -  "To be successful, you have to learn to do things you don't like. You find ways to like the process and make the most of that time."

SELF-DEVELOPMENT -  "Mistakes are a part of the building process. Mistakes have to be made. How you act when you make mistakes is of paramount importance."