The Jackson Eleven applied to Dev Teams : 1.- Lead from the inside out
Probably lots of basketball fans have already watched The Last Dance, last year’s Netflix documentary about Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls and their road to success and winning six NBA championships. Watching this documentary has inspired me to learn more about Phil Jackson, the Bulls coach in that moment. I already knew him as the coach of the winning 90’s Chicago Bulls and L.A. Lakers of 2000's, but I didn’t know a bit about his philosophy or even that he wrote a book about his vital experience and his learnings coaching these teams. I read the book (Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success) and inside it I found several interesting concepts that could be mapped to my everyday job, so I decided to write an article series about it, covering each one of its eleven insights.
Although right now I lead a team of people (or at least I try to), I’m not nearly as experienced as Phil Jackson is, but I thought these articles may be a good way to ponder about his vision and how I could apply it to my everyday management. So please, don’t take them as expert advice or coaching(as I don’t consider myself an expert manager) but as a personal reflection to order my thoughts and consider new ways of leadership and how to improve it. I hope it proves useful to anybody that reads it and please feel free to leave any comment for further discussion!
Without further ado, I start the series talking about the first principle of Jackson and my view of it applied to dev teams.
1. Lead from the inside out
Phil Jackson tells us that lots of coaches find themselves spending much time looking at their competitors, studying how they do things and creating new and so-called innovative plans to apply within their teams based on this information. This is what he calls and outside-in strategy. In the end, following this kind of strategy may work at the beginning but it can become counterproductive as it encourages doing what everybody does in fact, changing only little bits here and there. This type of strategy may fail soon. It forces you as a leader to follow what other people do, forgetting about yourself and your own style, and it may also cause rejection in the team in the mid-term, as they get bored of continuous changes to accomodate features and procedures to the standard way of the market and its products. Eventually, this is the path to what is considered a red ocean in market strategy, where everybody’s solutions are quite similar.
In my opinion, this insight can be easily summarized in two words: be yourself. Your team will follow you with higher chances if you lead from the heart. People tend to listen more to our opinions if we show ourselves as we are (provided that you are not a jerk of course, keep that in mind!). Building trust with your people is crucial and trust is earned only if you act like yourself. I think that we all can agree that everybody dislikes working with someone who is fake and doesn’t show clearly his/her intentions, paving a road to failure sooner than later. Leading a team doesn’t consist in ordering them to do things to achieve some goal. Care for them, help them to achieve sucess and always be there as a guide, not a bossy jerk, letting your team also being themselves. This is surely a better path to differentiate from competitors, an inside-out leadership style where everybody contributes in their own way and feelings, supported by an honest leader and guide. Creating this kind of environment encourages the creation of new and innovative product ideas and features supported by the experience and knowledge of the group.
Time for history
However, this inside-out concept is not new, as we can find several examples in history where leaders that showed and applied their true beliefs achieved their goals and those of their people. Scipio Africanus comes quickly to my mind regarding an inside-out strategy, probably due to him being one of my favourite historical figures. During war with Carthage, as we all know Hannibal crossed the Alps with his army and spent several years hostigating Rome and the Italian Peninsula. A young Scipio, at the age of 31, achieved consulship and firmly believed that Rome should attack Carthage in Africa in order to force Hannibal to retreat from Europe. However, the Roman Senate opposed to this idea saying that roman armies should stay in the Peninsula to guard the capital, an approach that has been maintained for several years and it caused quite important defeats for Rome. The Senate and previous generals kept doing the same as others in the past. Despite the position of the Senate, Scipio stood true to his ideas and built a volunteer army and recruited several disgraced Roman units disaggregated after the big defeats in the past such as the Battle of Cannae. Without a clear permission from the Senate, Scipio embarked his newly trained army from Sicily to Africa and attacked the heart of Carthage, forcing Hannibal to retreat from the Peninsula. Later on, Scipio would defeat Hannibal in the Battle of Zama and he saved Rome from destruction. He stood firmly on his ideas and his team (the legions) followed him without hesitation.
Wrapping up
Returning to the present day, Phil Jackson applied this concept through all his career as a coach and it helped him building great teams that in the end, but also after lots of effort, achieved the NBA championship several times. He tried several techniques and ideas, and eventually he “arrived at a synthesis that felt authentic to me”. From my point of view this is strongly related with the process of knowing yourself better. As Lao Tzu said in The Art of War, “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power”. Everyone of us should take this path towards true leadership and self knowledge. You can take bits and tips from other people to start your journey but you should apply them with your own ideas and visions. Incorporating methodologies, concepts or tools used by others is recommendable, but adapting them to your leadership style and the needs of the team is what I think will make all of you stand out from the competition.
