to the fact that when we’re out in public together, she doesn’t want
in any way to be associated with, or embarrassed by, any quirky behavior
on my part.
Apparently this is quite a common pattern. Peggy Baumgartner, head of our training division, recently asked her husband, Richard, to write a selfassessment, an exercise we use in many of our workshops. When Richard scored low on the “self-critical” scale, Peggy couldn’t understand, given his many and obvious faults, how he could be so blind. His response, she tells me, was that he had no need for such self-reflection, since she pointed out his flaws and shortcomings with some frequency!
Editor: I don’t know Peggy but I sure can see her point. At any rate, perhaps my way of pointing out my husband’s shortcomings could use some work. Let’s hear if there’s anything of value in what follows.
Author: Quit buttering me up . . .
You could have cut the tension with a knife. The finalists for the 100 meter hurdles at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens were in the blocks. The world champion and gold medal favorite, Perdita Felicien, was in lane 5, and the hopes of a nation were riding on her. The gun sounded, and Perdita shot out of the blocks toward the first hurdle. She hit the hurdle, went down onto the track—and in a second her dream was shattered, along with the dream of the woman in the next lane, who fell over her.
I was asleep in my bed in the Olympic village by the time my roommate, Gary Winckler, returned from the track events of the evening. He tried not to wake me as he fumbled around in the dark, but I rolled over and muttered, “What a bummer, Gary.”
“Yes,” came the reply, “but it will make us stronger.” Gary was Perdita’s coach.
In my role as a sport psychologist, I have worked with and coached hundreds of coaches. Gary, who is also the head coach for women’s track and field at the University of Illinois, is an example of one of the exceptional ones. A scant few hours after what could have been a careerdefining disappointment, he had already reframed the situation and was laying the necessary groundwork for recovery. His strong developmental bias—evident in his quest to ferret out the possibilities for growth in a bleak situation—was already in play.
Coaches come in all shapes and sizes, and with a range of personalities. But what the very good ones all have in common is that they operate on a similar set of beliefs and principles. Beneath the different personalities and the widely varying situations in which they work, the five characteristics of a developmental bias are very much in action. The same is true of exceptional business leaders and parents. A strong developmental bias underscores everything these people do. Their view of the concept of performance is much broader than athletic prowess, quarterly sales figures, or good grades. It is concerned with the whole person and that individual’s development as a human being.
I first heard this “bias” expressed by the famous UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, at a seminar I attended in 1971 when I was a university basketball coach. Over the years, Wooden’s teams at UCLA won 10 national championships—seven in a row at one point. (No one else has come close; the next highest is two in a row.) Yet despite his brilliant successes, Coach Wooden always maintained he would not know how good a coach he had been until at least 20 years after his last player graduated and he was able to see what they had done with their lives. As I write this, Coach Wooden is still observing—in his 97th year!
Let’s further expand on exactly what I mean by a strong developmental bias so you can begin to see how you could tap into the Third Factor of the performers in your world.
Developmental bias is a new term that juxtaposes what is often perceived as a negative term—bias—with a decidedly positive one—development. But one can be biased in a positive sense, as in, “He had a bias toward always being honest, no matter what the circumstance.” I could just as easily have used the phrase developmental prejudice, but the word prejudice has even more baggage attached to it. To be prejudiced toward a person’s growth, success, well-being or development is a very good thing for any manager to have, but I settled on the word bias because it suggests a kind of listing in a certain direction, like a car with steering that pulls slightly one way.
Good leaders are always skewed to the developmental side even while trying to produce “straightforward” results. They get the results, but they develop the person in the process, so that the achievement of those results—or even higher results next week, next month or next year—is possible.
Managers with a strong developmental bias are not mean or dictatorial. They are just very passionate about their people using all of their talents and abilities. They hate to see talent go to waste. They are like my high school English teacher, Mrs. Lockyer. She knew what you were capable of and insisted on holding you to that standard. This is the essence of the developmental bias. And in exceptional coaches, it’s like gravity—always there, exerting a pull, influencing everything a coach does. In good coaches, developmental bias supersedes everything.
I know that it was teachers like Mrs. Lockyer, who had a strong developmental bias, who had the most influence on where I am now and what I am able to do. I can also list the bosses and coaches I’ve had since my high school days who exhibited this bias with ease: they are those who have had the biggest impact on my abilities and beliefs. They are the ones who ignited my Third Factor, my desire to be more or better or different than I was.
In talking to and working with other exceptional coaches, I became more and more aware that this strong developmental bias was a major undercurrent in each and every one of them. It also became clear to me that there were five main principles at work in the service of developing their athletes.
In Search of the Developmental Bias
I can honestly say that until that 3 a.m. conversation with Gary, I really hadn’t given any thought to writing another book. But in the ensuing days, as the Olympics progressed, the outline for what you will read here slowly emerged. It was clear to me that there are some exceptional coaches, and that leaders of all types—managers, parents, other coaches— could learn a great deal from them.
This wasn’t a new idea in the sense that I’ve been teaching coaching skills for years. What Gary triggered in me was the desire to go beyond the obvious, to get beneath the surface and uncover what the coaches did. What was it about them or their style that made them so good for the people they coached, and so successful? Given all the experiences I have been fortunate enough to be part of—including six Olympic Games and numerous world championships—I felt I was in a unique position to identify and convey those lessons.
I also have one other advantage. As an instructor in the executive development programs at Queen’s School of Business in Kingston, Ontario, and as a trainer with my own company, Performance Coaching, I spend much of my time working with leaders in organizations. It has given me a clear understanding of the demands placed on everyday leaders. I could easily see that the leadership lessons from this “performance laboratory” called the Olympics also applied in the so-called real world.
In the process of writing this book, I first laid out the five characteristics of a strong developmental bias that I had observed in great coaches: that is, the five sets of behaviors they used to translate their developmental bias into results. Then I interviewed Olympic coaches and got them to comment on the principles and give their views. The coaches I selected were recommended to me by a few for whom I have had tremendous respect over the years. You’ll get to meet these men and
