Servant Leadership Series-- Developing Others

NBC Basketball focuses on the ninth quality of servant leadership this month. Servant leadership is a specific philosophy of leadership. Simply put, great leaders make those around them better.
Servant leadership focuses on ten qualities of a great leader who makes everyone around them better. If you missed some of this series, here are the last eight qualities of servant leaders:

1. Listening
2. Empathy
3. Healing
4. Perception
5. Persuasion
6. Conceptualization
7. Foresight
8. Stewardship

The Ninth Quality is Developing Others
Another way to describe development is personal growth. What does growth mean?

Growth means to flourish, increase, and thrive.

Research has found five crucial areas that indicate a person is growing in a healthy way:

1. Social - connecting with the community in meaningful ways
2. Relational - building strong and long-lasting, loving relationships
3. Emotional - having an appropriate emotional response to situations as well as navigating those situations with insight, wisdom, patience, and poise
4. Mental - quality development of the mind to achieve life goals
5. Spiritual - building a dynamic personal faith that brings deeper meaning, healing, and wellbeing to self and others.

5 Ways to Help Develop People

Mentors—a quality mentor is a sign of good health. Pick your area of greatest strength; who are you mentoring in this quality? Pick your area of weakness; who is your mentor in this category?

Study – What are areas you could improve in or areas that you lack knowledge and what can you learn in those areas? Being curious helps you improve. Push yourself to learn new skills and added information. For example, one of our staff is working on memory retention and has over 4 hours of workable memory ready for the recitation of verses and poetry. Read, listen to audiobooks, experience new things, and then talk about what you are learning.

Serve together—find organizations in your community that is addressing local needs and volunteer for a day. Clean a room in your house as a family. Find ways to give back in your community and to serve those on your team and family.

Quality words—set an example for your friends and family to be committed to talking about noble, meaningful, uplifting, wise, or thoughtful ideas. Steer clear from gossip, slander, and negativity.

Write a note of encouragement—one staff member has a goal of writing a personal letter to every staff member who works at camp. A letter is something that can be kept forever. One former coach sends a kind text message to his wife and three daughters every morning. Words bring life.

Basketball Leadership
How to develop others on your team

Any athlete, employer, teacher, or coach understands part of their job is to help their people improve and develop. How do we encourage our teammates, employees, children, students, and family members to grow?

One of the ways to discuss the importance of development is by using the exciting new research area on the importance of having a strategic mindset. Researchers have discovered those who have this mindset are able to develop in all aspects more quickly and successfully than those who do not have a strategic mindset.

What is Strategic Mindset?
Those with a strategic mindset had greater success pursuing professional, educational, health, and fitness goals.

>Faster task performance
>Longer commitment to task development
>Creative strategies to problem solve roadblocks
>Greater implementation of effective strategies to achieve goals

A strategic mindset helped enable people to utilize grit, resilience, self-control, and self-efficacy with more insight and greater success.

What are the ways to gain a strategic mindset?

Planning
Spend time to know where you are and where are you planning to go. For example, great basketball teams set goals to become a championship program, months and even years before this comes to fruition. This means the will to take the steps necessary to be successful in the future.
This step is crucial for the servant leader who aspires to develop people. A poor leader will only see the deficit of a player. This negative fixation will call forth more of this deficit. Similarly, a teacher or coach who has a fixed attitude about a student or player will assuredly make that student or player worse. It is the coach with the strategic mindset who can thoughtfully see where a student is at and help move them intentionally toward greater growth and wellbeing.

Monitoring Progress
Those who have a strategic mindset know how to monitor progress. They don’t guess or leave things to chance. One of the tragedies of leadership is a leader who assumes they are doing an excellent job and he or she is discouraging, frustrating, or even harming those around them. Monitoring the progress of the development of people is imperative. Our unconscious bias as leaders can make us assume students are thinking like us, improving like us, and those who aren’t progressing are blamed as incompetent or recalcitrant. Servant leadership builds the strategic mindset by creating feedback loops that are credible and effective.

Flexibility to Change
Many people just get by with the strategies they have. But those with a strategic mindset are willing to try and find the most optimum way. When a poor leader discovers someone isn’t growing or improving, bad leadership doubles down. They dig in and do the same thing but louder, ruder, meaner. They force results from harshness, command, and control, and even threats and then wonder why it's so hard to parent, coach, teach or lead. Servant leaders create cultures where the team serves willingly, joyfully, fully, without frustration or bitterness.

Key questions a strategic mindset leader asks:
How can we help make this better?
How do I define success and what steps do I need to get there?
How tools could I use to help develop those around me to be better players and people?
How intentional can I make my day include developing people?

Questionnaire
Who are people that look to me for leadership?
What does healthy living look like in the lives of those I lead?
What am I doing to help them grow as people?
Are the current ways I relate to them achieving what I aspire for me and for them?

Basketball and the Development as Players
Most young people never walk into a gym with the idea they plan to help make those around them better. Most are thinking, what is this coach going to teach me, or how interesting is this lesson.

What if everyone in the gym walked onto the court with the mindset their mission is to help everyone on the court to improve in some way?

Could be a great situation- but not all leaders and teammates understand how to help others improve. Sometimes the tools we use to help people become better actually backfire because they are the wrong tools or we are using ways to motivate that are damaging or hurtful.

If you want to be a player that makes everyone better on the court, do these things.

a. Get your eyes off yourself. Selfishness may help motivate you, but it is unsustainable and alienating. When you walk in the gym, dedicate yourself to stop thinking or analyzing yourself and instead zero in on ways to build courage or ways to serve others on your team.

b. Words bring life or death. As you walk into the gym. Your words should give life to yourself and others. I can do this. I love this game. You are always hustling. I love your work ethic. We’ve got this.

c. Energy is contagious. If I am bored, others are bored. I need to help be a solution to the energy crisis. My energy will be contagious.

d. Eliminate what deflates a team. Some plays inspire a team, some plays bring teams down. A missed shot, turnovers, fighting/complaining, silly errors, all deflate a team. If you make a mistake, no problem, learn from it. For example, if a pass slides out of your hands out of bounds, as you transition the other way, briefly acknowledge the error without any emotion- my bad or my mistake. Don’t make an excessive emotional show or worse blame someone else. Next, speak to yourself—eye up, focus on the ball, you go this. Make sure your hands are warm and ready to catch. See and will the ball into your hands. Don’t be thinking of the next move until the ball is firmly secured. Burn off some of your nervous energy on defense. Become more mentally tough. Mistakes can snowball or they can make us tougher. Be someone who gets tougher under pressure.

Message for Parents and Coaches

Reactive parenting or coaching creates a poor character in our kids and frustration in our homes or gyms. Proactive parenting and coaching develop great kids.

Here are ways to know if you are being a reactive rather than a proactive parent or coach.

Blame and criticism: most people wrongly assume pointing out all the mistakes someone makes is the best way to improve. In fact, it is one of the worst. This “negative sentiment override” floods the brain with frustration, shame, and overwhelms us. Reactive parents or coaches often blame or criticize.

Praise without substance: Poor parents or coaches become cheerleaders instead of real parenting. Cheerleading is a great sport to rally energy, but it doesn’t correct problems. Great leaders as parents or coaches look for ways to encourage increase the energy rather than bring discouragement while they give their kids wise strategies to grow and improve.

Fixed mindset: One of the worst ways to parent or coach is with a fixed mindset. For example, this kid is slow and there is nothing that can be done. This kid is a terrible shooter, keep the ball out of his or her hands. My son is an athlete, but his teammate isn’t. The fixed mindset can’t imagine a new way to solve a problem. The problem is here to stay.

Great Coaches and Parents share the same ability to develop people in their lives. Players and children grow and improve with great coaches and parents. Here are a few effective strategies they use.

Encouragement is oxygen. Encouragement is different than praise or flattery. Encouragement is the right word to bring courage when someone is becoming frustrated, hopeless, or afraid. Encouragement sees the person as a person and says exactly what is needed at the right time.

Inspiring correction: Coaches, teachers, leaders can correct in a way that makes you ashamed or angry or they can correct in a way that is like getting a gift. If you have ever learned something that makes your life easier, immediately, your mind feels more hopeful and freer. This is the gift of inspired correction.

Positive Sentiment Override: Coaches and teachers who have a much higher balance of positive interactions with kids will have better relationships than those who have negative sentiment override. Picture your relationship like a teeter-totter. Every look, voice inflection, comment, a request goes into one of two jars—positive on one side, negative on the other. A task by researchers goes into the negative jar. You can see how quickly relationships can tip toward the negative sentiment without intentional work to keep positive interactions significantly higher than negative.

Feedback Loop: Parents and Coaches can tell if their strategies work with students and people by some of these markers.

You have a close, healthy, and meaningful relationship with them.
You do not use threats, anger, or punitive measures to accomplish goals.
Your kids are joyful, peaceful, and self-motivated.
Your kids develop those they lead to be healthier and wiser people.

About NBC Basketball
Since 1971, NBC Basketball has trained athletes to succeed on and off the court. Camps are dedicated to training the total athlete, mind, body, and spirit. Camps are in six countries and sixteen states. For more information visit www.nbccamps.com/basketball