The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
543: Eric Musselman - Running Great Team Meetings, Developing Your People, Building a Championship Program (Head Men's Basketball Coach at The University of Arkansas)
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes
Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." Mindful Monday is a carefully curated email you'll receive each Monday morning.
Eric Musselman is the head men's basketball coach at the University of Arkansas. Prior to his time at Arkansas, he was a head coach in the NBA with the Golden State Warriors and the Sacramento Kings. He's also spent time as the national coach for the Dominican Republic National Team and The Venezuela National Team.
- Learn from others. Muss shared many examples of times he's gone to other practices to watch and learn. He prefers to watch how and NFL runs practice and he's modeled his practices after NFL teams. And sends his coaches to do the same. This is something we should do in corporate America. Connect with leaders at other companies and visit them. Watch their meetings, their 1 on 1s, and embed yourself in their culture for a few days.
- When Muss got fired as the coach of the Golden State Warriors, he was offered office space (from Mike Lombardi) at the Oakland Raiders facility. While there, he learned the ins and outs of running a professional program and has modeled a lot of his system from that experience.
- Leadership "Must-Haves" to be on his staff:
- Loyalty
- Will to win
- Specialty area of expertise
- Meetings: PREPARE a lot. Grab their attention. Keep them on their toes with surprises. All of these things can be done in business meetings… BUT it takes time and effort to do it well.
- Muss's life philosophy is to be a constant learner AND a great communicator. He takes pages of notes with him to the gym every morning and reads, takes notes, and highlights the entire time. Then he synthesizes what he's learned and shares it with his team. We all can do this. Again, it takes intentional effort, but it's worth it.
- At the beginning of each practice, he does a "classroom" session with his team. He teaches a life lesson or a lesson on basketball.
- Family Coaching Legacy – Musselman's father Bill was also an NBA head coach and they were the first father-son combination to become head coaches in the NBA. His sons work with him at Arkansas.
- "Muss is a magician with how he communicates with referees." He works to build a genuine relationship with them.
- His coaching staff has metrics they produce that help him engineer how playing time and combinations of players on the floor can produce a win.
- His practices are legendary. Like a well-oiled machine. Everyone has a role. And they are open to the public.
- If a player isn't in a drill, he better be on the sideline dribbling or practicing his game in some way. Always improving, always working.
- Muss has a reputation for being the college coach who can get you to the NBA. He is extremely well-connected in the NBA. If a kid wants to enter the draft, Muss will do his homework to see where he thinks he'll get drafted, and then sit down with the kid and his parents to give him feedback.
- He revolutionized the use of the transfer portal and is extremely organized when a new prospect pops up.
- On his blog, Musselman wrote about the importance of matching an offense to the "team's makeup." Depending on the roster, a half-court offense might make more sense. In other cases, a team may be better suited for an "open offense." According to Musselman, the idea is to allow players to "play to their strengths."
In any meeting, in any interview, it's about preparation, it's about understanding your audience and then what are your goals, what are the teams goals, what is the organization's goals and how can you lay those out clear and concisely to your audience. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Text Hawke to 6686 to become part of Mindful Monday, you, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. I'll also receive details about how my book, The Pursuit of Excellence, will help you become a more effective leader. Text Hawke to 6866 now onto tonight's featured leader. Eric Musselman is the head men's basketball coach at the University of Arkansas. Prior to his time in Arkansas, he was a head coach in the NBA with the Golden State Warriors and the Sacramento Kings. He's also spent time as the national coach for the Dominican Republic national team and the Venezuela national team. By the way, two teams that do not speak English, which he shares a great story about. During this conversation, we also discussed how to use creativity to run better meetings. Coach Mus shares some great stories about some of the skits they run during their pregame meetings. Awesome. And then the leadership quality quote must haves to get hired as a coach on his staff. Super useful. And then coach shares a great story about when it's useful to use quote external motivation to help your team perform at a high level. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy coach Eric Musselman. Coach Mussel, it's great to have you here on The Learning Leaders Show. Welcome. Well, thanks for having me on. Ryan, look forward to this. I'm curious. So I've got an immense amount of notes from a mutual friend of ours named Rob Kimball. He's helped me a ton to prepare. And he said, your practices are legendary. You live for your practices. So I want to, I want to go through them. But apparently at the beginning of them, you do classroom sessions with your team that these are usually life lessons beyond basketball. But can you take me inside what one of those life lesson sessions is like prior to a practice? Sure, Ryan. So, I mean, we have a thing called VC, which stands for voices and choices. And so we try to dive into whatever could be relevant in the world. It could be a history lesson about a player in another sport. For instance, the other day we talked about communication. And we showed what a quarterback, what it sounds like when a quarterback is in a huddle. And then how the quarterback voice is then taken to the actual pre-hike. And so just how we want our point guards to be able to deliver messages, clear, concise, three times loud, clear. So it's kind of a time frame for us to learn something either about life, learn something about being a better basketball player, or slash just being a better athlete. And then we also try to try to do something fun as well. Since we're out of season, we haven't started adding spliced movie clips. But we do try to do some really fun things. If we show 15 clips offensively or defensively, there'll be something in there to lighten the mood in those 15 clips. You want your guys to have interest. When you do that stuff, what ends up inevitably happening is you have players that are sitting there waiting with excitement. What's going to be our, what is he trying to throw us off on today that we can get a good laugh out of? Do you have like a grad assistant team that's just always searching for clips or what's the process like to make these meetings? Because especially now, attention span seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. So the longer it goes, some may perceive it as like, when's the funny thing or where's the fun coming. So what's that process like to put all that together? Well, it's all encompassing. If I see a movie clip, if I read something, one of our graduate assistants will be assigned to hard knocks because they have such great content. So we'll pull some stuff out of there. We might have a grad assistant that's assigned to comedy movies. We might have somebody that's assigned to suspense movies. And their job is to kind of try to find something unique that we can pull a scene from that will possibly some way we can weave it into something we're trying to do either offensively, defensively, or most importantly, culturally. I also have heard that you're really good about connecting your players with leaders from outside of the sporting world, including, I don't know the name or I won't say the name in case I'm not supposed to share this and we have to edit it out. But the CEO of Walmart met with one of your better players because you wanted to help him meet and learn from a leader outside of basketball. Can you share more about that story and why you do that? One, our practices are open when we're in season to everybody and everybody. Basically, if someone calls our office, there's a pretty good chance we'll let them in when we're in season. One, I think the players like to perform in front of fans or boosters or other leaders, but we have had a lot of leaders come in for sure. When I think about Phil Nevin, the current manager of the Angels, he's probably spoken to our team for different occasions. We've had a former Kansas City Royals Mike Matheny come and speak to our team. We just feel like that's a way for our guys to learn, to understand that in Major League Baseball, they're looking for a player from college or in the draft, the same way that an NBA for those same characteristics. And then certainly the story that you're referencing is J.D. Notay actually sat next to a Walmart executive and didn't know what his role or title was, and he just kind of asked what he did. The next day I put a little presentation on who J.D. was actually talking to, and he was a little bit blown away because it was just a casual post conversation that happened. And J.D. Notay got some really valuable leadership lessons from a two to three minute conversation that just kind of happened organically. And then let's go to the actual practice, because I think when you look at people who have sustained excellence over time, coach, during those times of getting the repetitions every day, that really, I think, is the difference between the ones who do it and the ones who don't. So how do you design your practices? I've heard that everybody's moving constantly or they're always working and it's scheduled down to the second. So can you walk me through how you design a practice and why it's so important you design it in the way that you do? Yeah, great question, Ryan. So when I was fired by the Golden State Warriors, I got a phone call within 48 hours of being let go. And it was from Michael Lombardi, who was at that time with the Oakland Raiders. And Michael said, "Hey, look, coach, I've been around coaches that have been let go. I know that you don't want to watch film in your house. We all work better when we have an office to go to. It gets us in the right frame of mind." So he said, "Hey, look, man, I got an office next door to my office." This is Michael Lombardi speaking. And any time you want to come to our facility and use it for your workspace, we'd love to have you at the time the Raiders were being run by Al Davis and Al Davis loved professional basketball. And so I took Michael Lombardi up on that and thought that I was going to go there and watch basketball tape. And really what I ended up doing was sitting in his office and discussing leadership and then he would bring me down to the practice field.
Transcription truncated.