Winning with Pat Riley

NBA coach Pat Riley led the Los Angeles Lakers to the World Championship by developing a team so confident, competent and cohesive that it functioned like a 12-cylinder Ferrari engine in fifth gear.

As coach of the Miami HEAT he took a team that was faced with early adversity and turned it into the Eastern Conference’s top team by regular season’s end. In this brief article, Pat Riley shares his thoughts on how anyone in business and sports can win.

Eliminate Your Fears

You should not allow other people to determine your behavior. Pressure (to win) should come from inside and then you transform that into a feeling of excitement and exhilaration. Fears and pressures that most people experience are usually external. They worry about how they are going to be perceived, or what people will think of them if they lose, or if they fail. When you can shed those apprehensions you will find that competition is something to embrace and look forward to.

Fears for your family’s welfare and security or personal injury or death are natural. But when it comes to a job, or when it comes to basketball, all of the fears that hold you back should be eliminated. They are of no use.

Work On Your Attitude

When I speak before a business audience or talk to my team, I don’t talk about success, failure, or winning and losing because I don’t want to paint that kind of picture. I’ve always believed that anybody can be successful. If you’re a competitive person, and you’re striving to be the best, then you’ll be that one winner who will somehow find a way to shoot up out of the pack.

I’ve found that the people who each day apply themselves, learn the proper techniques, understand the philosophies, plans, systems and strategies of their organization, and take pride in their work are the people who will become skillful and maximize whatever talents they originally brought to the job. The difference between people who are skillful and merely successful, and the ones who win is in attitude. The attitude a person develops is the most important ingredient in determining his level of success.

Help Other People Win

When you are part of an organization, your primary objective and focus should be on helping all of the people who work for or with you to get out of this business, or this game, or this life, what they desire. To me, that’s essential. You have to take the focus off yourself, and stop worrying about what you can get. Get out of what I call the disease of "me" or the disease of "more" and simply try to help other people become successful. That’s the attitude that really makes a difference between championship teams and just successful ones. Everybody has the natural desire to take care of "me." People are primarily selfish individuals. They don’t really care about the team. They will voice a lot of insincere platitudes about wanting to help the team, but they really want to help themselves.

Managers Must Motivate

When managers or coaches are looking to motivate individuals, they either do it through incentive, fear or intimidation…or they try to teach self-motivation.

If you lay carrots out all the time and create incentive programs and keep dangling money in front of people, you may get a sense of production or success. We have to pay people for what they do, but you can over-incentive anything. When people play or work just for the money, after a while they really don’t care about the product or the philosophy.

People have to be accountable and responsible for what they are hired for and they must know that if they don’t get the job done there can be consequences. But don’t debilitate people’s creativity by threatening them. It can backfire.

If you can find people who want to be part of something significant and not always worry about "What are you going to give me for this?" then you’ve got people who are special.

Strive For Excellence

When you define the word "excellence" in reference to people, you’re talking about those who understand how to go above and beyond and how to surpass. Those are the people who simply want to be part of something significant that wins. Those are the people who can understand and define the word excellence. Excellence is not about having things, or about having recognition, or about having money or power or position. It’s about being part of something worthwhile — where people can go above and beyond.

You’ve got to keep developing more reasons to go above and beyond. Anyone who is successful has a natural motivation to be successful. But the ones who achieve consistently, year-in and year-out, and those who constantly keep breaking records, keep winning, keep topping themselves, are those people who keep doing inner research, and develop attitudes and different themes about what it takes to go above and beyond. That’s the job of a manager or coach.

Improve By One Percent In Five Areas

I’ll never forget 1987. After we lost in 1986 to the complacency that set in after the championship win over the Celtics, we spent that whole summer researching exactly why we had lost and then defining the areas where I felt we had to improve.

I came back to training camp and said, "We’re going to challenge you to try to improve one percent. That’s all. One percent in five areas that we feel are the most important areas of our business. We want you to improve one percent in these five areas above your career best." If you take 12 championship players and everybody improves one percent in five areas, you can get a 60 percent overall efficiency improvement in your game. So we did that.

The players took a look at this one percent and said, "Oh, I can improve one percent in anything." We had players who improved not just one percent, but 5 to 15 to 20 to 50 percent. And it’s not a coincidence that in 1987 we won 67 games. It was the easiest year we had in the decade. So it shows me that if somebody can develop themes to keep challenging people, then people can go above and beyond.

Accept Tough Times

Everyone is going to have tough days. Whether you’re on top of the mountain, or down at the bottom looking up, people have to understand that life is a tough, hard struggle every single day. When problems arise, if you face them as a victim — neurotically or traumatically — you’ll be paralyzed by events. When people understand and accept that problems and difficulties are normal and that life is not fair, then tough times don’t become problems for you. You’ve got to teach people that adversity really is the seed of equivalent benefit. If there is a problem, grab on to it, seize it, and move on from there. Don’t let it debilitate or paralyze you.

Avoid Complacency

Complacency is one of the most insidious diseases that can affect a successful organization. Players will come into the NBA with five-year, multi-million dollar contracts through which they’re guaranteed payment even before they produce. So a player may not have any incentive for playing well or working hard because he knows he’s got the money and the security. If your life is based solely on money and security then you will fall flat somewhere.

Teaching players that being a team is more significant than money alone is what it’s about. Forget the money. You hope you can get players, sign them to long-term contracts, and take care of their careers, and take care of their security monetarily, but when you know that they don’t give a damn about that, then you know you’ve got the makings of a great team, a winning team. You know that all they want to do is continue to win because that’s what it’s about. That’s what makes them feel good. It isn’t because they have the money. It’s because they are part of something successful.