The Rise of a Culture of Contempt and the Demise of UCLA Men's Basketball

Work Matters reader and fellow blogger, Chris Yeh, sent me a link to a Sport's Illustrated story about the discouraging downfall of the UCLA basketball program.  And I don't mean the drop off in performance at UCLA in the past few years, I mean the loss of its soul and the rise of a culture of contempt -- with rampant lousy leadership, bad role models, asshole poisoning.  Chris summed it all up well:

It’s terrible.  Thank goodness John Wooden isn’t alive, or this would have killed him.  To trample on his legacy like this is atrocious.

UCLA's John Wooden, the "Wizard of Westwood" not only won more national championships than any coach of a male college basketball team, he fostered a culture of mutual respect and individual development that turned his players -- whether they were superstars like Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Bill Walton or bench-warmers -- into more confident, cooperative, and compassionate human beings.

It appears coach Ben Howland has had the opposite effect.  As you can see in this excerpt from the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback over at Fast Company on the power of subtraction, there is plenty of evidence that when leaders and peers display bad behavior and don't act swiftly and firmly to stop, the vile actions and attitudes spread like wildfire -- and the result isn't just bad performance, it is a culture of contempt that damages everyone involved.

Here is the upshot of the SI story about what happened the last few years under coach Ben Howland:

"Over the last two months SI spoke with more than a dozen players and staff members from the past four Bruins teams. They portrayed the program as having drifted from the UCLA way as Howland allowed an influx of talented but immature recruits to undermine team discipline and morale. Fistfights broke out among teammates. Several players routinely used alcohol and drugs, sometimes before practice. One player intentionally injured teammates but received no punishment."

The story offers many twists and turns, it is long and well-researched.  It provides many old but true lessons about how a bad boss can ruin a good team. If you are a leader of a group or organization of any size, it is worth studying and then taking a long hard look in the mirror and asking yourself -- am I doing that too?  Here are a few questions you might ask yourself:

1.  Are you focusing on strategy, but ignoring your team?

Strategy matters, but it is not enough.  According to the story this was Howland's general management style. He acted as if the human part of his job was a nuisance. As the article explains:

Other than during practices and games, he had little contact with his athletes, according to players. He showed up moments before a workout began and was gone before players paired off to shoot free throws at the end. Several team members say that his approach was how they imagined an NBA coach would run a team.

2. What behavior do you model? 

The SI story reports numerous examples of abusive and disrespectful behavior on his part:

Each of the players who spoke to SI said they found Howland socially awkward and disapproved of the verbal abuse they say he directed at his staff, the student managers and the weakest players. One player said if he saw Howland waiting for the elevator he would take the stairs.

3. Are you so focused on your own needs and wants that you insist that others indulge your little quirks? 

The inner focus that comes with power poisoning can cause leaders to indulge and bizarre and petty behavior that -- even if they are not aware of it -- conveys that they are focused on their own self importance and don't give a hoot about others.  For example, SI reports:

The players were puzzled by some of their coach's idiosyncrasies. Howland seemed obsessed with the temperature in the film room. If it was not exactly 76º a student manager was certain to feel Howland's wrath. The water bottles handed to him had to be just cold enough and not too large.

4. Do you apply different rules to "stars" than to other team members even when they take reprehensible actions? 

The story describes how star freshman Reeves Nelson was repeatedly physically abusive to fellow players in practice. Here is one of a string of such incidents:

Walk-on Tyler Trapani was another Nelson victim. After Trapani took a charge that negated a Nelson dunk, Nelson went out of his way to step on Trapani's chest as he lay on the ground. Trapani is John Wooden's great-grandson.

There are many other examples, but this one is symbolic as Nelson was literally trampling on a body that contained some of Wooden's DNA.  Here is how Howland was reported to have responded to such bad behavior:

After each of the incidents, Howland looked the other way. One team member says he asked Howland after a practice why he wasn't punishing Nelson, to which he said Howland responded, "He's producing."

5. Are you succeeding because the peer culture among your followers is hiding or offsetting your deep flaws? 

This is one of the interesting parts of the story, and something every leader should think about.  In many cases, teams and organizations succeed DESPITE rather than BECAUSE of their leaders flaws.  In Howland's early years at UCLA, when the team was winning and morale among the players was good despite Howland's quirks and flaws, it was apparently due in large part to the tight bonds among the team members, an unusually mature and low ego group (which began unraveling in about 2008):

 It was a team of prefects, the protectors of the UCLA dynamic, who looked out for each other, making sure that no one got into trouble, that no one threatened what they were trying to accomplish or what UCLA has always been about. They were a tight group. If they went out, to the movies or a party, they were 15 strong. That kind of camaraderie is not unusual on good teams, but Howland's former players say he had very little to do with instilling it.

6. Is your boss letting YOU get away with toxic and incompetent leadership?

I was pretty stunned to read this:

UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero, who through a spokesperson declined SI's interview request, told ESPN.com in January, "I need Ben Howland. Why would I even think about looking at someone else?" He added, "By his own admission, [Howland] made some mistakes. But I'm going to work with him. I'm not going to crucify him for those mistakes. Because Ben Howland is a hell of a coach, and anyone who understands basketball, anyone that's been around him, that knows the game, has the utmost respect for what he does as a coach. ... We need to turn it around, and we all get that. But we will."

The above quote is quite discouraging as it suggests that, well, so long as he goes back to winning, all is forgiven. As far as I am concerned, if the SI story is accurate, Howland suffers too deeply from power poisoning, committed too many selfish sins, and has demonstrated so much incompetence in dealing with people he is hired to look after and motivate to be allowed to continue in any leadership position. 

The problems I've listed only begin to scratch the surface of the damage done under Howland's apparently flawed leadership. I haven't even got into the partying, the players who came to practice still stoned from the night before, and the bench-warmer who couldn't enter a game during "garbage time" because he didn't bother wearing his jersey under his warm-up jacket (the same player now says he can't believe, in retrospect, that he did it -- but bad leadership and bad team dynamics cause people to do weird and dysfunctional things).

Apparently, there are signs that Howland is doing a bit better this year and is taking steps to deal with bad behavior.  Last year, Howland finally stopped putting up with Reeves Nelson's awful behavior -- for example, last season, he finally showed the courage to call fouls on Nelson in practice (in the past, "[Howland] always gave Reeves the benefit of the doubt on foul calls in practice so Reeves wouldn't lose it and be even more disruptive").  Nelson finally was kicked-off the team last November.   And now even Nelson and mother believe Howland should have been nipped the bad behavior in the bud.  As Nelson told SI:

"I'm not trying to make excuses for what I did, but I got into some weird behavior patterns, and I think my mom was saying that if instead of one big punishment at the end, what if there had been smaller punishments along the way."

Perhaps Howland will change his ways.  People do get better and perhaps he will learn to be less of a jerk, be in tune with the people he leads, to avoid letting superstar run roughshod over others, and to do the little bits dirty work when necessary.  I am not especially optimistic, especially after smelling the "winning is the only thing" attitude from Howland's boss.  Regardless, I believe this is a useful cautionary tale for any boss, and in particular, I  think of this guideline in Chapter 1 of The No Asshole Rule:

The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know. 

P.S. Note that Reeves Nelson did an interview where he disputes many of the bad things said about him in the article and his law firm is demanding that SI retract the article.

Comments

[Angela]

Hi Bob! I've really enjoyed reading your blog in the past year or so. This story made me think about Jim Harbaugh (who seems to be kind of the polar opposite of Howland) & the effect he's had on the teams he's coached. Do you know anything about his style relative to the topics you've covered here & in your books on leadership? I really, really hope he writes a book someday that goes into more detail than he's shared openly about his philosophy of leading & running a team!

[Entrep_thinking]

Showing my age, but I was at Caltech during the end of the Wooden era (and played basketball)

Telling point?
Howland's offense allows more freelancing (er, everybody gets to shoot) than Wooden's (IIRC) Wooden's system focused on his superstars but within a disciplined structure.

However, Howland and too many other coaches are paradoxically hard on mistakes. I remember one of Wooden's young players had 10 assist and 0 turnovers. Wooden's only-half-joking response was that the player didn't make enough mistakes. No turnovers = insufficient risk-taking.

Freelancing + extreme risk-avoidance or highly structured + risk-acceptance? I know which system I'd prefer (and in no universe would I be a star, LOL)

[OK, and how many coaches were happy that his team would go to Grateful Dead concerts ;) ]

p.s. If he can get superstars to gel (at one point, he had EIGHT 1st team Parade All-Americans on his roster) now that's a great discussion in and of itself. Thoughts?

OTOH...