Technique or Attitude?

I stumbled upon a clip of UMass Men’s college basketball coach, Frank Martin, recently. The clip is from a while back, possibly when Martin was the coach at Kansas State. I remember Martin vividly from his time at K State. First, because he was a great coach and his players would walk through fire for him. But second, because Kansas State is located in Manhattan, Kansas and was often referred to as “The Little Apple.” As a native New Yorker, this always gave me a chuckle.

Martin is at a post-game press conference and he’s asked a question by a thirteen-year-old reporter from Sports Illustrated Kids named Max.

Here’s their exchange.

Max: Coach, congratulations on the win tonight. Your team clearly won the defensive battle tonight. When you coach and teach your team defense, what’s more important: technique or attitude?

Martin: First of all, lotta respect to you. That’s a heck of a question. I’ve been doing this a long time, and that’s the first time anyone’s ever asked me that. That’s a heck of a question.

Attitude comes first. We gotta have guys that are gonna believe in our mission. That are gonna believe in what we want to do. Once they believe, then we can teach them the technique. It all starts with our mindset. And we’ve got guys that are completely bought-in to what we do.

Back in the early 2010s, I was working with a school in Delaware. Their assistant principal was as smart as they come. She’d forgotten more about instruction than most people know. And, she complained almost constantly about her bosses, argued with (and almost physically fought) one of her colleagues, and was caught being dishonest multiple times.

On one occasion, she was complaining to me about her principal. I urged her to communicate her concerns and that I’d support her in scripting that conversation.

She snapped at me, “I thought this was a safe space for me to vent!”

She was a total nightmare, and despite this being an admittedly extreme example, so, so many teams are holding on to people who aren’t aligned. People who think about themselves first. People who get defensive and even nasty when feedback is delivered to them. And worst of all, people who just don’t believe in what everyone else believes in.

Now, a few things: first, unlike a college basketball team, especially a high profile one, you may not have hundreds of people lining up to work for you. So don’t go firing everyone tomorrow. Secondly, a nineteen- year-old kid likely has much less life experience and is less willing to push back than your forty-eight-year-old sales’ manager. So I get that it isn’t exactly an apples to apples comparison. And finally, for a team to agree on a mission or vision or whatever you’re trying to accomplish, you had to have created those things, messaged them during the hiring process, and are now messaging them relentlessly in team meetings, 1:1 meetings, and emails. Otherwise, you can have zero expectation that people will operate in an aligned way.

But if you’ve done those things, ask yourself if you’re holding on to people who have really bad attitudes. Are you ignoring their bad behavior or are you coaching them up? Do they even know you think they have a bad attitude? Truly, give yourself a score from one to five. One is, you’ve never explicitly named their misalignment, expressed your concerns about their effect on the culture, or coached them up. Five is the opposite. What’s your score?

You can’t have a great team if there are people who don’t believe what you believe. Period. So coach them up or see them on their way. But just like a plane can’t halfway take off, you can’t work with someone who is halfway aligned or halfway committed.