The Big Three
(This is the second in a four-part series of ideas about leadership…from the perspective of a basketball point guard.)
A point guard runs the show. In Basketball Land she is the floor general…the play caller…the leader of the charge. She is the apex of the defense, the instigator of the offense, and the talker in the huddles that happen at the free-throw line. Her responsibilities start before the ball is tossed and continue long after the final buzzer sounds. Like leaders on every landscape, business hours do not apply to her.
The task list for the point position is long and gnarly, however, three simple skills (I didn’t say easy) anchor almost all that is demanded of the one bringing the ball up the floor. These common traits form a thread that girds leaders across the topography of Leadership Land. If a point guard can master these, she has a chance to be effective. If she can’t, despite all her other gleaming traits, the people she is responsible for leading will simply not hitch their wagon to hers. There are just some things the leader–on the court or off– must be able to do.
See the Floor
A point guard’s most important job is to see. It’s not enough to look. Her eyes must always be surveying. Taking stock of opportunity. Identifying threats. Squinting past her own assumptions. Seeing big and seeing small. She has to notice.
Things within her purview? The position of a backside defender, a teammate ahead on the break, the shooter who has hit three in a row, lagging morale, the long game and the short one, the why behind the what. In essence…all the things. Both the hidden and the in-plain-sight are required reading for her. Recognition is her je ne sais quoi.
A point guard’s super-power is her athletic eyes.
John Stockton, by Steve Lipofsky
Athletic eyes are lenses (not confined to sports’ fields) that roam and dart, informing at every turn. What leaders see determines what they do, so accurate intel matters. The best ones watch for things. The subtle lean of a shoulder, a defender’s dead feet, the outstretched hand of a post player calling for the ball. They also identify clues that are often shrouded such as cascading confidence, latent skill sets, and who best compliments whom. In addition, a leader must also know where she is on the floor. Without that keen awareness, sight lines become skewed. Her job is to uncover information, and scattered breadcrumbs lie everywhere for those who are inclined to search.
Leaders must be.
Regardless of the arena, they have to be able to spot what others miss, what could be just around the bend, what wasn’t and what isn’t-- no matter how badly they might want it to be. This is how they build a road map for their team. They look hard and unrelentingly until they see.
Value the Ball
Stephen Covey, best-selling “7 Habits” author, tried to tell us to keep the main thing the main thing—probably because he knew we wouldn’t. It’s a chink in our human armor to get mired in trivial things. But never in the history of ever, has anyone scored a basket without the ball. So, for a point guard, taking care of it is paramount. The better you hold on to it, the greater the chances of winning. The sloppier you are with it, the greater the chances of losing. It's not much more complicated than that. Unfortunately, consistently valuing what’s most important is harder than it seems.
So many things can get in the way. The sheer magnitude of areas, endeavors and tasks a leader is charged with overseeing can easily disrupt the most intentional priority list. Busyness distracts. Both failure and success distort. Bottom lines are loud.
Our on-court term for handling our most valuable treasure was “sureness.” We wanted our point guards to protect possessions. Creativity was encouraged, recklessness was not. Being sure about the positions we put the ball in lowered the likelihood of our giving it away. A leader must preserve the thing that matters most.
Main things, however, can be sometimes slippery and hard to hold. Especially when the pace is crazy fast. It’s so easy to get caught up in who is going where—when and why they’re going, who is in the way—that we get careless with the thing we’re supposed to be protecting at all costs. The thing of greatest value must be valued all the time.
Hard to Guard
A point guard doesn’t have to be the best shooter, but she does have to be a continual offensive threat. Whether the pressure she puts on the defense comes in the form of a strong first step toward the rim or the way she dictates the movement of the ball around the floor, it’s her responsibility to not let the defense relax.
This means she can’t be predictable. She can’t be passive (unless she does it on purpose, of course, to throw her opponent off.) She can’t be limited by a tactic or thwarted by a scheme. The best point guards are probers. They poke around with a dribble, pull a defender with a fake. They check and re-check, always looking for holes. They sniff for weak spots to expose. Opportunities to grab. Avenues to explore. And they do not go away. If a door is closed, they find a window. The best ones refuse to be denied.
Effective off-court leaders do the same things without a ball in their hand. They manage pace and lead the break--smart enough to know when to gear down, bold enough to know when to gear up. The rhythm of the game rests in their hands and they know it, so they keep moving-- trying new things, testing new angles. They artfully build a tempo in which their team can thrive.
They also know that a switched up delivery can make all the difference in the world. So they bounce a bit. Not so much that they disrupt, but enough to keep the thinking stirred. That, fueled by insatiable curiosity, makes them curators who are constantly upgrading their bag of tricks. They keep the competition guessing by always being a step ahead.
Point guards don’t come pre-packaged with signature design. Like leaders on their own respective turfs, the way they look and work is definitively unique. And yet…their structural cores are so similar that if you close your eyes it would be hard to tell the impactful ones apart. Their traits—founded on intention and sculpted by circumstance and situation—move seamlessly across boundary lines. You can smell an impactful leader from a mile away.