Episode 06 | Part Two: How Do You Make Them Thirsty

Gregory Shepard, an entrepreneur who's built and sold 12 businesses, a recipient of 4 private equity awards, TEDx speaker, and Forbes author. This is The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard.

Welcome back to my talk about leadership with Phil Weber, professional basketball coach and author of the upcoming book, How Do You Make Them Thirsty? Phil, you have such an impressive resume. You've worked with legendary Hall of Fame coaches, but is there a moment that impacted you the most as a leader?

Well, you know, I had arguably a paradigm shift. I lost my job at University of Florida, and I was literally— it was on Halloween. So my buddies— I'm 24, 26 at the time, I guess. I started coaching at the ripe old age of 22 at University of Florida. Lose my job. And I can tell you, Greg, I asked myself an empowering question. I said, how can I make this the greatest year of my life? My thought process went to, okay, well, I had developed relationships within the college coaching community of basketball, some of the best coaches around. And so long story short is I visited 16 different universities to learn. Let me turn this into a learning year. Okay, let me just— And connect and make You know, make contacts. And, you know, I'm early in my career, so let's go, right? Let's learn as much as I can, get to know as many people as I can with strong relationships. And so I'm actually at UCLA. A buddy of mine, Mark Godfrey, was an assistant coach there, and I watched practices there. And Saturday, I'll never forget it, you know, he gets me a ticket to the game, afternoon game in Pauley Pavilion, where they had won 10 national championships.

Wow.

The team is warming up to my left. I'm walking to my seat, looking at my ticket. 50 feet ahead of me is Coach Wooden. Phil, you idiot, just go up and meet him. That's— you're traveling the country to learn as much about the game as possible. And this is arguably the greatest coach in sports history. And I did. I went up to him. I introduced myself. And, you know, I said, Coach, I'm traveling the country to learn as much about the game as possible. It'd be the highlight of my trip if I could spend some time with you. And he says, sure, Phil, call me. He gave me his phone number on a piece of paper. That was Saturday. Okay, so on Monday— now Coach Wooden's nickname was the Wizard of Westwood, right? Just legendary coach. So I call him on Monday at 10 o'clock and he'd probably been up 5 hours. And I go, hey, Coach Wooden, Phil Weber. I'd love to talk to you and ask you some questions. Sure, Phil, come on over, 1 o'clock. The man, Greg, was the most articulate and learned man I've ever met. And in him, I saw someone who was so much more than a coach. I mean, he was really a teacher. And he would talk about adversity, and he had this way of simplifying very deep and meaningful facts into— and he was a student of poetry, I guess, because he would break things down like, With adversity, you know, no written word or spoken plea can teach the youth what they ought to be. When I look back, it seems to me all the grief that had to be left me when the pain was over stronger than I was before. You know, when you lift weights, there's tension there. You grow. He was so profound. And I'm like, this guy is a coach? That was on a Monday. I flew back to Gainesville, Florida on Tuesday. Greg, I had a card in my mailbox on Thursday from Coach Wooden, and it said, dear Phil, although it is often used without real meaning, when used with sincerity, no collection of words can be more meaningful or expressive Than a simple thanks, John Wooden. It just blew me away, the level of what he would do. And I think leadership is like that. People, people under your tutelage, under your leadership, know if you really care. They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. That is an absolute first building block right there. They have to trust that you trust them. And I collect these little golden nuggets of life, so to speak. And one of them is we teach people how to treat us. If you respect others, they will respect you.

That's true. You do teach people how to treat you. That's a very wise statement.

Yes. If you respect others, yeah. So, and there's so many ways you can take that, but yeah, he blew me away. He blew me away.

So, I mean, then leadership to you, In order to get leadership, true leadership to lead somebody, you have to have engagement. And, the engagement, the openness for the engagement is this concept of just respect, openness, like, trust, and respect in developing a relationship. So, leadership or the ability to lead requires a relationship.

No question. Absolutely. I think the relationship, number one is the relationship. I have 3 different things in my book in regards to development and my whole second section is the relationship. It's all about that. And then it's the plan, and then it's the process, to put it in big bold terms. But the relationship is the cornerstone with trust and respect. What one of Coach Wooden's, uh, lines I'll never forget is, you can never demand respect, you command respect with who you are, which echoes that sentiment. Mm-hmm.

Let me ask you another question that I'm curious about. If you were to give advice to somebody, right? You were to say, listen, and let's say a young guy like you approached you. They said, listen, I've never led anything before. And based on your experience, what would be the advice you would give me as a first-time leader?

That's an interesting question. The number one thing of leadership is knowing what direction and where you're going. So you have to learn about what you're leading to. And second, it's understand leadership is different because it's going to be based on your personality and how you can maximize and make that the best version of yourself to lead others. I mean, Lincoln, to me, is one of my favorite presidents because of his style of leading. He was infamous for You know, writing all these scathing letters never to send because he didn't want that. And he knew he had, he had a feel for where we were in our country and what that would do to the generals if those were sent. But he had to get it out of himself. The human component, the emotional component, the inspiring component, I think is important, but it's overrated some. I don't think you— because you can't motivate every single day. By example, you can, but not necessarily by rah-rah, you know, because that gets old.

Yeah.

Cheerleading is overrated. Yeah, it really is. And, you know, half the battle for if you have leadership of companies, get good people, get people you can lead, is half of it. Mike D'Antoni and I would talk about this all the time that If you have great— because we were part of so many teams together— that if you have great guys, you don't need rules. And if you, if you have bad guys, rules don't matter.

That's true.

So, so, so, so what are rules?

Generally, if, if I were to ask you, you would say in order to be a leader, you have to choose the right team, and then you have to work with that team in such a way that you enable a relationship that Gives you the engagement that's necessary to lead them?

Yeah, I would think there's a lot of that, yes. I think that what you also have to do with what you just said is treat everyone differently. You can have certain guidelines that everybody will follow, but everybody's different.

So like individual leadership, individualized leadership?

Yeah, well, some guys need more attention. Some guys need more to get them. I mean, I touch on this in my book in that every single player is different, and it's the leader's job, it's the coach's job to be mindful of that and to analyze daily what works, what doesn't work. We all learn differently. So some are visual, some are auditory, some— they're all different. So how do you do that? With each and every one of them. And it's understanding and knowing that they are different and that you need to lead the same as a group, but treat everyone differently.

Let me back up to something. So the book title is How Do You Make Them Thirsty? Let me ask you that question in closing. How do you make them thirsty?

It's taking the time to find what works for that particular player. Person, employee, and what buttons can I push in order to make them realize that I believe in them? And sometimes that's all a person needs.

That's what I was gonna— I was gonna ask. So, you know, because you said, you know, finding what buttons to push, how do you find what buttons to push? And I think you partially answered that by saying, you know, Figure out what makes them feel good about what they're doing?

Yes. Yeah. And I mean, I'll tell you, there, there are legions of people that will, that will say that there have been people that in their lives have touched them in such a way that changed their life. For those people who take the time to really understand the person and how and what buttons That they can put— and it's not even buttons. Buttons almost cheapens it. It's, you know, how can I, how can I touch this person in such a way that they believe in themselves more and they see their true potential? To me, a coach's job is always to understand. If you're looking at me and I have one— my right hand is way above my head, And my left hand is, you know, about 8 inches below the player or person, employee, whatever. They're the left hand. They're the lower hand. Now, the coach sees the potential, and that's the right hand. And all my job is, is to bridge that gap.

To get them to their potential.

Yes, that's all it is.

Got it. So I wanted to ask you one final question so that we can kind of close out on something. specific. As a leader, and you were to think of one word that describes leadership itself, like the key to leadership, what would that one word be? Because you brought up things like engagement and involvement and mentorship and all these different things, friendship and family and that sort of stuff. What would be one word that describes the secret to your successful leadership pattern?

I would think love, because you will love what you do. People will feel that. You will have the ability to give away. You know, we can never give away what we don't have. If I don't have a dozen oranges, I can't give them away.

Yeah.

So that's one reason why we should always learn and try to grow and become the best version of ourselves so that we can give that away.

Phil is the author of the upcoming book, How Do You Make Them Thirsty? And we really appreciate the time. Thank you so much, Phil. I, I can't tell you enough, it's been an honor to talk to you.

Greg, thank you so much for your time. This has been, this has been great.

Thanks for checking out the BOSS Podcast with Gregory Shepard. Get more on Greg's business operating support system, BOSS, at GregoryShepard.com. This has been a production of Forbes Books Radio.