March Madness: Turning rookies into valuable team players

How Coach John Beilein built cohesive teams with mentors, big data, and a growth mindset

Part 2 of 2 • Part 1 of 2

Last week, we talked with one of America's great college basketball coaches about how to recruit talent to fuel a high-performing team. This week in the second of our 2-part series, Advantage CEO Jonathan Hodge talks with John Beilein about how he built relationships with rookies to help them become valuable team players.  Now teaching leadership at the University of Michigan where he coached for so many years, Beilein offers some great advice that applies to leaders in business as well as those in sports.

Here are some highlights:

• Be authentic with new recruits so they know what they're getting into.
• Choose a mentor who is just one step above them in development, someone who has just a little more experience. Make sure that person or someone else is in constant contact with them.
• Pay attention to big data so you can be objective about their progress. Offer data, not opinions. Some of their top college players who made it to the NBA had average first years. Some players didn't realize they weren't passing the ball enough until they were confronted with the stats.
• Set a growth mindset. The goal is to help rookies become unconsciously competent, a state of high performance that becomes second nature through learning and practice.
• Value team over talent. The high tide rises every boat.
• Be a lifetime learner to open the gate to new ideas.
• “So many times, our best (college) players, and then our best NBA players, didn't think about the NBA at all or how they were being evaluated," Beilein said. "They just did their best every day."
• "And the bottom line is we got so many people in the pros not because they were talented, but because we were playing late in March when everybody wanted to see them and the GMs valued winning more than just talent. And that's the same thing with a company, I think. If your company is doing really well, right, it's going to raise your level of performance as well."
• "It's amazing what you learn every day. And that's what I would say to all your employees, is be a lifetime learner in this industry, because it is it's like basketball. I would look at a basketball play in a game and I would say, 'I have coached 1,200 games. I have never seen that before in my life. What a great idea. How couldn't I think of that?' And I'm thinking about the same thing when I hear some great quote, and I've said, 'Wow, that just is perfect.' But if I wasn't teaching it, and if I wasn't studying it, I wouldn't know about it."

Photo at top by chelsea ferenando on Unsplash