Wooden On Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization

Wooden on Leadership explores the ways in which teamwork and collectivity can be harnessed to amplify success. Wooden’s treatment of this theme emphasizes the principle of whole-team inclusion over the heroization of star players and suggests that this approach has a deeper moral purpose for equality and shared worth.

Collaborative teamwork became strongly associated with Wooden during his nearly three decades as a college basketball coach. Teamwork and collaboration are deeply embedded in Wooden’s pyramid of success, the iconic diagram he created early in his career, consisting of 15 characteristics required for success. At the very base of the pyramid, the building blocks of friendship, loyalty, and cooperation provide a strong foundation. Regarding cooperation, he writes that “cooperation—the sharing of ideas, information, creativity, responsibilities, and tasks—is a priority of good leadership. The only thing that is not shared is blame” (29). In Chapter 1, Wooden establishes this principle, commenting that the “assist” in basketball—a pass that leads to another player scoring—epitomizes cooperation. He argues that “the assist is valuable in all organizations, helping someone do his or her job better. It makes producers out of everyone; it makes everyone feel ‘we did it ourselves’” (29). This theme therefore supports the leadership principle that niche or elite techniques can be applied—practically or metaphorically—by the reader in any area of life.

This theme is underpinned by a selfless virtuous circle, in which the sublimation of personal ego and competitiveness leads to improved team success and therefore a greater personal sense of value and achievement. In Chapter 8, “It Takes 10 Hands to Score a Basket,” Wooden emphasizes the importance of this to his leadership style. He argues that the unexpected failure of Team USA to win the gold medal at the 2004 Summer Olympics was because the US sent “great players” to compete, whereas nations like Argentina, Lithuania, and Puerto Rico “sent great teams” (117). Wooden uses this nationally recognized moment of disappointment as a lesson in selfless teamwork, writing that “in basketball, it is the ball itself that must be shared, quickly and efficiently, in order for the team to achieve success” (119). In order to get team members into a mindset of “team first” rather than “me first,” Wooden stresses the importance of making each member feel valued and comprehend “precisely how his or her own job performance is linked to the team’s welfare and survival” (120-21). Thus, in Wooden’s model, enhanced personal worth is created through the purposefulness of a role within the team.

This theme is further elucidated when Wooden discusses how he feels about awards and honors. In Chapter 12, “Make Greatness Attainable by All,” he explains that he always refused to answer the often-asked question of who his greatest player was because it ran “contrary to [his] bedrock belief about success” (178). To Wooden, outward comparisons and competitiveness are destructive to the positive process of collaboration and can also lead to reductive value judgments on individual players. This belief is shown in Wooden’s opposition to the practice of retiring players’ numbers as a means to encapsulate their value and in his statement that UCLA alumni groups and booster clubs should give awards based on “personal qualities, characteristics, and contributions that [a]re less prominent” (266), rather than a narrow focus on points scored. This shows the inclusive, holistic way that Wooden views collaborative teamwork.