Lead to Succeed: 10 Traits of Great Leadership in Business and Life

by Rick Pitino

Overview

Learn how to be a leader from one of sports' greatest teachers, Rick Pitino.

As Rick Pitino says, great leaders aren't born great; they learn great leadership along the path of life. From the time Pitino first became a coach at twenty-four, he has been a student of leadership in all its forms, studying how great leaders from legendary coaches to American presidents to world humanitarians are able to inspire and motivate others. He discovered that all leaders, on the court and off, in business, politics, or civil rights, have certain qualities in common; these leaders share key traits that make people want to listen to them and follow them.

Now, in Lead to Succeed, Rick Pitino shares the ten traits of great leadership he discovered and has cultivated in himself, and shows readers how they, too, can become leaders in their business and personal lives. As the former coach of the Kentucky Wildcats who turned the team around from probation status to a 1996 NCAA championship, Pitino relates stories of this experience, and other leadership lessons from his career.

When Rick Pitino joined the Boston Celtics in 1997, he took on the biggest challenge of his professional life, becoming not only head coach but also president of the Celtics. In addition to coaching professional athletes with multimillion-dollar contracts, he was assuming a leadership role of an organization saddled with salary cap problems, limited talent, misfortune in the draft lottery, and bombarded by adversity on all sides. Facing these adversities, Pitino has relied on a leadership strategy based on his years of learning from leaders around him and from his own mistakes and successes.

Leading isn't about being a dictator; nor is it about people-pleasing. As Pitino shows in Lead to Succeed, leadership is about communication, consistency, and selflessness. In addition to illustrating how these traits apply in a variety of business situations, Pitino addresses these issues:

How you can be an effective business leader and still be honest
When it's best not to delegate
How the past can hurt you
How to get your team out of a slump

While Pitino has had great success with his players, he has also convinced thousands of people in companies across America that his leadership message applies in the workplace as well. Lead to Succeed is for anyone who wants to inspire and motivate others--be it your employees or colleagues, or members of an organization you belong to, or your family. A perfect book for executives, managers, and sports fans, Lead to Succeed can make great leadership within reach.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780767908979
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/04/2001
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	408 KB

About the Author

The author of the New York Times bestseller Success Is a Choice, Rick Pitino is currently head coach and president of the NBA's Boston Celtics. Before coming to Boston, he was the head coach of the University of Kentucky Wildcats basketball team, leading them to a 1996 NCAA championship. Previously, Pitino coached at Providence College, taking the team from the bottom of the Big East to the Final Four in only two seasons. He was also head coach for the NBA's New York Knicks. A popular motivational speaker, he lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife, four sons, and daughter.

Bill Reynolds is a sports columnist for the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. He has written six books: Success Is a Choice and Born to Coach (both coauthored with Rick Pitino), Big Hoops, Lost Summer, Fall River Dreams, and Glory Days.

Read an Excerpt

1

HAVE A CONCRETE VISION

Back in the late seventies and early eighties at Boston University, even though I was a very young coach, I fundamentally understood the importance of a great work ethic. At the base of my coaching was always the belief that in order to do great things you must deserve them, and that you did that by being willing to put in the proper effort it takes to be successful at anything. It's the cornerstone of my philosophy, this sense that you must deserve victory.

I also understood the importance of team harmony and chemistry. I had been on teams all my life and had come to learn that teams that got along and helped one another -- teams that had a common goal -- had better chances to be successful than teams in which it seemed as if all the players were stars floating around in their own solar systems.

But as a young coach, I didn't understand the importance of having a vision, and I didn't understand the importance of being able to impart that vision to others. Eventually, I realized the people you are leading will have frustrations and failures, times when what they're doing is simply not working. When this happens (and rest assured it happens to everybody eventually), it's human nature for them to want to quit, either that or start to question what they're doing. Or else they look for people around them to blame, the inevitable finger-pointing that's so endemic in situations that are not successful.

What can stop people going through a tough time from taking these destructive, and self-destructive, actions?

Their vision.

All the great leaders have been people of great vision, men and women able to provide insight into what is possible. Vision is your view of the group's future, the place you want to be after the transformation is complete. For the people you're leading, vision is their belief in the overall game plan, their belief that this plan is in their best interest. Without this, all your dreams, all your ideas, can easily be derailed.

Ever since I was at Boston University, I've always been very conscious of creating a grand vision wherever I've coached. You simply cannot show up as the new leader and just wish everyone good luck. You must come in with a plan, a dramatic statement.

I remember the first meeting I had with the booster club when I got the Providence job. It was in the spring of 1985 at the Providence Civic Center, in a large upstairs banquet room that overlooked the court. Providence had been one of the bottom teams in the Big East since the conference had started six years before. There were limited talent, facilities, and resources. There also seemed to be a pall of negativity that hovered over everybody, this sense that they were never going to be successful in the Big East, and that had become one of life's sure things, right there with death and taxes. Everyone seemed to believe it. The players. The boosters. The fans. The media. It almost seemed as if there was "losing" water everyone had been drinking.

Still, my job was to get the people in that room to believe in a better future. During that meeting I tried not only to get them excited about the new era starting, but also to get them to contribute more money to the program and be more emotionally committed to it. In my mind, I was the new CEO of Providence College basketball and I had to get everyone to believe in the future.

The next day, a local sports writer compared me to a tent evangelist. He was right: That was my intention, to have the people in that room feed off my energy, my excitement, the tremendous passion I had for this new job and its potential. I wanted them to not only see my vision, but feel it, too. I wanted them to walk out of that room believing in possibilities.

"And when you go to bed at night," I finally said at the end of my speech, the energy in my voice, "I don't want you to count sheep. And I don't want you to worry about how much you owe on your Visa card. I don't want you to worry about your bills. I don't want you to worry about your troubles. I don't want you to think about your problems. When you go to bed at night" -- my voice rising now, almost shouting, I looked out over the court and said, "when you go to bed at night I want you to dream about cutting down the nets."

Overdone? Probably.

Overstated? Maybe.

But that was my vision and I wanted everyone to know it. Just as Phil Knight had a vision of the future, back when he was driving up and down the West Coast to track meets, selling sneakers called Nikes out of his trunk, long before the clever television ads and the incredible success of his corporation. Just as all those people in those little computer shops talking a language nobody understood except them had a vision. Just as anyone who has a dream of one day building something greater has a vision.

What no one knew that day in the Providence Civic Center -- even me -- was that in less than two years we would cut down the nets in Louisville's Freedom Hall after having just qualified to go to the Final Four.

BE DIRECT

The message of a leader's first meeting with any organization is that the leader's vision is going to be their new reality, and the people in the organization are going to have to want to be a part of it. It's not a "yes" or "no" vote. It's not a democracy. In fact, they don't really have a choice at all. The bus is about to leave the station and they better be on it. But they are being invited to be part of the ride, and that's important.

In this first meeting you must not only seize the moment; you also have to take control. Right from the start. Like a general must take control of his troops, a leader must lead. Not in some undetermined future. Not in some fuzzy, unfocused way, but instantly, and in clear language that has a sense of urgency about it. Because if people do not believe that you believe in your vision there will be increased anxiety, doubt, cynicism, bad morale -- all the things that poison a group and ultimately destroy it.

There always are going to be people who say, "I don't like this," or "I don't understand this," or "Why can't we do things the old way?"

They cannot be tolerated.

Editorial Reviews

On court or off, NBA coaching legend Rick Pitino knows how to motivate people. This crisply written bestseller is among the most appealing leadership books we've ever reviewed or read.

"Great leaders are not born great; they learn great leadership along the path of life," says Pitino (Success Is a Choice), currently head coach and president of the Boston Celtics. Sadly, Pitino's life dependence on sports results in an overhyped, near histrionic leap from dunking basketballs at the buzzer to winning the game, something that is supposed to be awed. The tired topics covered include the author's perspective on key leadership traits: having a clear vision and strong communication and building a team ego, all of which we have heard many, many times before. Issues addressed include how to be an effective leader and still be honest, how the past can hurt you, and how you can get your team out of a slump. A slump? Whatever in the world does this have to do with today's business reality? Pass on this, and instead be proud of the leadership collection built on the ageless wisdom of such stellar writers as Stephen Covey and Peter Drucker.--Dale Farris, Groves, TX Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

"So much more than another Armani suit, Pitino has done a job of psychology and salesmanship that should serve as a how-to manual for his profession."
—Chicago Sun-Times

"Pitino is a proven winner."
—Boston Herald

From the Publisher