Transition Lessons from Butler Basketball

If you’re in one of my coaching peer groups or are an executive coaching client of mine, you know that my wife and I have been Butler season ticket holders for more than two decades.

On July 3, Butler’s basketball coach, Brad Stevens resigned to take the head coaching job with the Boston Celtics. Stevens is regarded as one of the best coaches in the game today; many thought it would be difficult to fill his shoes. Butler looked within its coaching family and within 72 hours, replaced him with Butler assistant and former Butler player, Brandon Miller.

This is the fourth time in 12 years that Butler has filled the head coaching job from within and there are leadership lessons in this story that I shared with my groups and I think they’re also worth sharing on my blog. Here are my thoughts.

1. The reality is you’re going to lose talented people who are critical to your success. People leave for better offers; others move, some retire and once in a while you lose someone to illness or death. It’s inevitable that someday, you’re going to lose a key person in your organization, so it’s critical that you have a succession plan to cover these contingencies and, it’s critical that you develop talent and have a strong bench of talented people in the organization you can train and have ready to step up.
2. A powerful brand and mission will help you weather the storm. Losing a high performer can shake the confidence of the entire organization. A strong brand and a well defined, motivating mission that’s continually communicated and embedded in the company’s DNA can be the rallying point for the entire organization in tough times. Your brand and your mission must be bigger and more important than any one person.
3. Clearly define what you want the successor to accomplish. My peer groups and coaching clients call them Job Success Factors (JSF). They’re the 3 to 5 key things you want the new hire to do to make you “deliriously happy.” Define those JSF in advance and make them crystal clear to the new hire. Make sure s/he knows that these are the criteria you’ll use to evaluate their performance.
4. You can’t “replace” the high performer that you lost. Until we learn how to clone our top performers, you can’t “replace” them when they leave. Organizations are dynamic, they change as you hire and fire, take on new customers and launch a new product or service. Don’t expect things to be the same when the new person takes command. Change is good.
5. Don’t take sole responsibility for getting the company through the transition. McDonald’s founder, Ray Kroc often said, “None of us is as good as all of us.” I thought it was silly the first time I heard it, and over time, I came to agree with him. You shouldn’t have to shoulder all the responsibility to get your people through a transition. A strong team that believes in the mission should share the responsibility.

I’ll be using these thoughts in upcoming coaching sessions. If you have something I can add, I’d like to hear from you.