John Maxwell (20:27)
Well, John Wooden was the great coach for ULCLA, and he was a mentor of mine for 14 years. In fact, the last thing he did before he passed away was write the foreword for my book, Sometimes yous Win, Sometimes yous Learn. Just a great. A great coach, very wise person. And one day we were talking and he said to me, he said, you know, every day as a coach, I asked myself the same question. I thought, man, I gotta write this down. If he does it every day. I said, coach, what is it? And he said, I ask every day the question, how can I make my team better? Because he said, that's my responsibility, to make my team better. And we had dozens over the next few years conversations about how you make your team better. And I thought we had A breakthrough moment one day when we were talking about, how do you make a team better? And I said, coach, I've been thinking about it because it's such a great question every day, how can I make my team better? I said, I think I've got another question that maybe could get into that, be as important as every day. And he was so humble. He's ready to learn himself. I mean, he's in his 90s, and he leans into me and gets that John Wooden smile. And he said, john, he said, well, what's the question maybe I should ask every day? I said, well, coach, you don't need to ask it every day because you've already excelled. But I said, I ask it every day, and it's not, how can I make my team better? The question really I'm asking myself is, how can I be a better leader? Because you know what? If I could become a better leader, my team will get better. I think sometimes in leadership roles, we kind of put a little bit too much on the team, and the best way to make your team better is for me to lead them better. If I lead them better, they get better. And if I don't lead them better, they don't get better. And then I remember. Talk about fun experience. One time, John, Rick Hendrick asked me to come up. Of course, he's known for automobiles. He's got, I think, like a hundred automobile stores around America, but he's also nascar, so he's kind of got two games going, selling cars. He's got race cars out there, and he's very successful in both of them. Very, very successful. And he called me one day on the phone. He said, john, I want you to come up, talk to my racers. And I said, okay, so what do you want me to talk about? He said, well, he said, you know, he said, we have three different groups race, and they're kind of like they're all on the same team, but they're three different groups. And he said, they're competitive. And he said, I want them to share ideas, but sometimes they don't share ideas because they're wanting to beat the other team. And he said, your speech has to be, how can you be a competitor on the same team and make each other better? I said, you're asking me to do something impossible. I mean, I don't think. I. I'm not sure I can do that. And I. I really went up there. I went up to Charlotte, and there he had all. He had not only his. His drivers, but he had all the pit crew, he had probably, I don't know, maybe 150 people in the room. And I spent two hours with them on. On. How do you. I mean, there's a, there's an edge there. You know, I, I want to win. And yet really, if we win, it's a victory for, for Hendrick Motor. And that day I talked to them about characteristics of winning teams. And I'll have to say I worked hard on that lesson. And, you know, just let me just. There are six points, in fact, maybe on the day of our day to grow when we're together, if I could have, because I don't have time on this podcast, maybe I can have 10 or 12 minutes and really work them through that. Because when I got finished, I'm watching competitive drivers high fiving each other and Rick's look at me says, that's never been done before. That's never been done before. But, but one of the things. And I said, I said several things, but one of the things that I spoke about that day is that winning teams collaborate together. You know, and his teams were cooperating, but they weren't collaborating. See, when you cooperate. Okay, let's sit down. Okay, let's do some things together. But when you collaborate, you want to do things together. It's not like this is. Well, we got our meeting. Okay, we got to go to the meeting here. It's like, let's get to the meeting because we're going to make each other better. And I talked about the fact that it is impossible to have great thinking without collaboration. That, you know, Mark, the three of us are on this podcast. Let me tell you something. If you have a good idea and I have a good idea, and John has a good idea, and we get in a room and we share those ideas, we just say, here's what I'm thinking. This might make us better. Here's what I know. If Mark, you have a good idea and you bring John and myself into that conversation and say, help me improve that idea within 30 minutes, we'll improve the idea because we have different perspectives and we're trying to aggressively help one another. Same with me. If I throw out an idea, you two are going to make a. Here's what I know. In collaborative, shared thinking, I have never, and I've done this hundreds of times, by the way. I've never gone into a meeting with something that I wanted my team to think about and give me feedback on. Not one time have I ever walked out of that meeting with a worse idea that I Came in. It's always a better idea. They always, always, always uplevel me. And I think that's a big miss so many times in teamwork that we just don't understand the incredible value that each one of us, we can bring something to the table, that if we don't bring it to the table, the other two of us aren't going to get it and we're not going to quite be all that we possibly get. So shared thinking, I think is so important in team and the willingness, the ability to, to share those thoughts to make the team better.
