The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 543: Eric Musselman - Running Great Team Meetings, Developing Your People, Building a Championship Program (Head Men's Basketball Coach at The University of Arkansas)

Episode Date: September 3, 2023

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." Mindful Monday is a carefully curated email you'll receive each Monday morning. Eric Musselman is the head men's basketball coach at the University of Arkansas. Prior to his time at Arkansas, he was a head coach in the NBA with the Golden State Warriors and the Sacramento Kings. He's also spent time as the national coach for the Dominican Republic National Team and The Venezuela National Team. Learn from others. Muss shared many examples of times he's gone to other practices to watch and learn. He prefers to watch how and NFL runs practice and he's modeled his practices after NFL teams. And sends his coaches to do the same. This is something we should do in corporate America. Connect with leaders at other companies and visit them. Watch their meetings, their 1 on 1s, and embed yourself in their culture for a few days.  When Muss got fired as the coach of the Golden State Warriors, he was offered office space (from Mike Lombardi) at the Oakland Raiders facility. While there, he learned the ins and outs of running a professional program and has modeled a lot of his system from that experience. Leadership "Must-Haves" to be on his staff: Loyalty Will to win Specialty area of expertise Meetings: PREPARE a lot. Grab their attention. Keep them on their toes with surprises. All of these things can be done in business meetings… BUT it takes time and effort to do it well. Muss's life philosophy is to be a constant learner AND a great communicator. He takes pages of notes with him to the gym every morning and reads, takes notes, and highlights the entire time. Then he synthesizes what he's learned and shares it with his team. We all can do this. Again, it takes intentional effort, but it's worth it. At the beginning of each practice, he does a "classroom" session with his team. He teaches a life lesson or a lesson on basketball. Family Coaching Legacy – Musselman's father Bill was also an NBA head coach and they were the first father-son combination to become head coaches in the NBA. His sons work with him at Arkansas. "Muss is a magician with how he communicates with referees." He works to build a genuine relationship with them. His coaching staff has metrics they produce that help him engineer how playing time and combinations of players on the floor can produce a win. His practices are legendary. Like a well-oiled machine. Everyone has a role. And they are open to the public. If a player isn't in a drill, he better be on the sideline dribbling or practicing his game in some way. Always improving, always working. Muss has a reputation for being the college coach who can get you to the NBA. He is extremely well-connected in the NBA. If a kid wants to enter the draft, Muss will do his homework to see where he thinks he'll get drafted, and then sit down with the kid and his parents to give him feedback. He revolutionized the use of the transfer portal and is extremely organized when a new prospect pops up. On his blog, Musselman wrote about the importance of matching an offense to the "team's makeup." Depending on the roster, a half-court offense might make more sense. In other cases, a team may be better suited for an "open offense." According to Musselman, the idea is to allow players to "play to their strengths."

In any meeting and any interview, it's about preparation. It's about understanding your audience. And then what are your goals? What are the team's goals? What is the organization's goals? And how can you lay those out clear and concisely to your audience? Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk.

Thank you so much for being here. Text Hawk to 666-866 to become part of. of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book The Pursuit of Excellence will help you become a more effective leader. Text, Hawk to 6-6-866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader.

Eric Musselman is the head men's basketball coach at the University of Arkansas. Prior to his time in Arkansas, he was a head coach in the NBA with the Golden State Warriors and the Sacramento Kings. He's also spent time as the national coach for the Dominican Republic National Team and the Venezuela national team. By the way, two teams that do not speak English, which he shares a great story about. During this conversation, we also discuss how to use creativity to run better meetings. Coach Must shares some great stories about some of the skits they run during their. pre-game meeting is awesome. And then the leadership quality, quote, must-haves to get hired as a coach on his staff, super useful. And then coach shares a great story about when it's useful to use,

quote, external motivation to help your team perform at a high level. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy Coach Eric Musselman. Coach Muslman, it's great to have you here on the Learning Leaders Show. Welcome. Well, thanks for having me on, Ryan. Look forward to this. I'm curious. So I've got an immense amount of notes from a mutual friend of ours named Rob Kimball. He's helped me a ton to prepare. And he said, your practices are legendary. You live for your practices. So I want to go through them. But apparently at the beginning of them, you do classroom sessions with your team. These are usually life lessons beyond basketball. Can you take me inside what one of those life lesson sessions is like prior to a practice? Sure, Ryan. So, I mean, we have a thing called VC, which stands for voices and choices. And so we try to dive into whatever could be relevant in the world. It could be a history lesson about a player in another sport. For instance, the other day we talked about communication. And we showed what a quarterback, what it sounds like when a quarterback is in a huddle. And then how the quarterback voice is then taken to the actual pre-hike. And so just how we want our point guards to be able to deliver messages clear, concise, three times loud, clear.

So it's kind of a time frame for us to learn something either about life, learn something about being a better basketball player or slash just being a better athlete. And then we also try to try to do something fun as well. since we're out of season, we haven't started adding spliced movie clips, but we do try to do some really fun things. If we show 15 clips offensively or defensively, there'll be something in there to lighten the mood in those 15 clips just to, you want your guys to have interest. When you do that stuff, what ends up inevitably happening is you have players that are sitting there waiting with excitement. what's going to be our, what is he trying to throw us off on today that we can get a good laugh out of? Do you have like a grad assistant team that's just always searching for clips or what's the process like to make these meetings?

Because especially now, attention spans seem to be getting smaller and smaller. So the longer it goes, some may perceive it as like, when's the funny thing or where's the fun coming? So what's that process like to put all that together? Well, it's all encompassing. If I see a movie clip, if I read something, one of our graduate assistants will be assigned to Hard Knocks because they have such great content. So we'll pull some stuff out of there. We might have a grad assistant that's assigned to comedy movies.

We might have somebody that's assigned to suspense movies. And their job is to kind of try to find something unique that we can pull a scene from that will possibly some way we can weave it into something we're trying to do either offensively, defensively, or most importantly, culturally. I also have heard that you're really good about connecting your players with leaders from outside of the sporting world, including, I don't know the name or I won't say the name in case I'm not supposed to share this and we have to edit it out. But the CEO of Walmart met with one of your better players because you want to

wanted to help him meet and learn from a leader outside of basketball. Can you share more about that story and why you do that? One, our practices are open when we're in season. To anybody and everybody? Basically, if someone calls our office, there's a pretty good chance we'll let him in when we're in season. One, I think the players like to perform in front of fans or boosters or other leaders, but we have had a lot of leaders come in for sure when I think about. Phil Nevin, the current manager of the Angels, he's probably spoken to our team four different occasions. We've had a former Kansas City Royals, Mike Mathini, come and speak to our team. We just feel like that's a way for our guys to learn, to understand that in Major League Baseball,

they're looking for a player from college or in the draft the same way that an NBA, for those same characteristics. And then certainly the story that you're referencing is J.D. Notay actually sat next to a Walmart executive and didn't know what his role or title was. And he just kind of asked what he did. And the next day I put a little presentation on who J.D. was actually talking to. And he was a little bit blown away because it was just a casual post conversation that happened and J.D. Notet got some really valuable leadership lessons from a two to three

minute conversation that just kind of happened organically. And then let's go to the actual practice because I think when you look at people who have sustained excellence over time, Coach, during those times of getting the repetitions every day, that really, I think, is the difference between the ones who do it and the ones who don't. So how do you design your practices? I've heard that everybody's moving constantly or they're always working and it's and it's scheduled down to the second. So can you walk me through how you design a practice and why it's so important you design it in the way that you do? Yeah, great question, Ryan. So when I was fired by the Golden State Warriors, I got a phone call within 48 hours of being let go.

And it was from Michael Lombardi, who was at that time with the Oakland Raiders. And Michael said, hey, look, coach, I've been around coaches that have been let go. I know that you don't want to watch film in your house. We all work better when we have an office to go to. It gets in the right frame of mind. So he said, hey, look, man, I got an office next door to my office. This is Michael Lombardi speaking. And anytime you want to come to our facility and use it for your workspace,

we'd love to have you at the time the Raiders were being run by Al Davis. And Al Davis loved professional basketball. And so I took Michael Lombardi up on that and thought that I was going to go there and watch basketball tape. And really what I ended up doing was sitting in his office and discussing leadership. And then he would bring me down to the practice field. And so what we've done is we've tried to take a NFL format for practice and incorporate that into basketball.

And we do that when you think about how an offense and defense works in football. we break our practice up in a very, very similar way. There's a lot of station work. Obviously, you go to football practice, and there might be wide receivers working on down and out patterns in their footwork. Well, we do the same thing with our small forwards. They're doing certain footwork drills, much like you would see in a station for wide receivers.

We do the same thing as a running back in football. They have certain things, whether it's blocking patterns, what hole they're trying to find. we're trying to do the same thing, for instance, with our point guards. What reads do they have? And so we try to do that on both sides of the ball, and then our side out of bounds, our baseline out of bounds, our jump ball. All those are special situations, which obviously football, it's punts, it's kickoffs,

it's field goal. And so we try to break our practice into that very similar format. And then we took it a step further, and our shootarounds are really tailor-made. Much like the two-minute preparation that they do the day before an NFL game. And we got a lot of those ideas. I spent time in Tampa Bay watching Coach Gruden and how they simulated the day before the game with an NFL team and then tried to incorporate much of those concepts. Because a lot of NFL teams, they'll have a huge board with the play pattern drawn

up when they get inside the red zone, what they're doing offensively, the other team, how they're going to defend that, and then they flip it. And it's a diagram, and it'll be color-coded. And so we have plays drawn up all over our gym on whiteboards that we use for our game preparation leading up to each opponent that we play. And that was stolen directly from what we watched NFL teams do. And I'm actually going to go spend some time with the dolphins when they have a joint practice with the Houston Texans coming up. And you're going to go watch in order to try to learn what you can take from these other NFL teams and implement it at your program at Arkansas?

Yep. It's been football coaches, in my opinion, are the most organized. Huh. Or than basketball? Without a question. Really? Why is that? A football practice, you've got to think about all the organization.

with so many bodies. To me, it's like we want one coach on our staff to really dive into, like, our baseline out of bounds, offense and defense. We want somebody to be an offensive coordinator, somebody to get a defensive coordinator. I think that when someone takes pride in an area on the floor, on the court, you're going to have a little bit more buy-in when there's accountability. It's easy to say, hey, we're going to have each coach divide up every third game. and do a game prep every third game.

And we've done it that way as well. But of late, we're getting back more to what I did in Golden State with the Warriors, where we had Tom Sterner doing our defense. We had Jim Boylan, who went on to become the head coach of the Chicago Bulls doing our offense, and Coach Keith Smart doing special teams. So we feel that to be a little bit more effective than just everybody doing a game prep every third game. That reminds me of Coach K. I had Steve Wojahowski on in Wojo.

was saying that what he loved so much about Coach K was how he empowered and trusted his coaches. So if you were the offensive coordinator or the defensive coordinator, whatever you were responsible for, you had complete ownership and responsibility in practice and in games during timeouts, everything. So that seems to be a shift, and I don't know if Coach K did that for a while

or if he was just a part of that, but that seems to be a shift that's being made as opposed to the head coach just being the ultimate dictator. You are empowering your staff to have, ownership in certain pieces of the game. Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that for sure, Ryan. I know that and maybe it's because of the people that I've worked with like Tom Tibido or I got a chance to work with Chuck Daly, who in my opinion, was the greatest

delegator for assistant coaches of anybody I've ever seen in my life. But when the games took place, there was one voice in those huddles and it was Chuck Daly. And I feel like the players, they need, they don't need multiple voices in a huddle. The way that it works best with us is one voice in the huddle. You know, late game situations, I think they just need to be looking at one play call or one visual from the sidelines. And I do think that there's different aspects. There's the practice aspect. And then there's these aspects of in-game.

And Coach Daly always talked about, Ryan, how many. meetings you have. Like think about this, the day of the game alone, you meet as a coaching staff, you pre-practice meet with your team, you practice, you have game day shoot-around, you might, in college you have a team meal, which is going to encompass some type of meeting pre-or-post meal, and then you have all these timeouts that happened based on TV timeouts, then you have a meeting at halftime. There's no corporation that has that many meetings with 13 staff members like we do in one day. And so you've got to be clear, concise with your message. And you've got to, in my opinion, you've mentioned detention span. You've really got to get creative in these meetings. Like our

pregame is probably unlike a pregame that many people would ever see. We do a skit. We have props. guys are on the floor dying laughing but it's got a theme for that game on what we're going to do a pregame skit like acting improv oh yeah yeah before a day of a game right before a game

it hits 40 on the clock 40 minutes before tip off it takes us about or it takes me about 13 minutes to go through the opposition so right around that 30 minute mark then comes the game theme which will be some type of skit.

Like I said, we'll have props. I'll dress up. An assistant coach will dress up. A GA will dress up. There's a great one online from our Halloween about competing to try to get as much candy as you can get. But our players love it. Past players or former players, they talk about it all the time.

I'll get a text the day of a game and they'll say, Coach, what are you got tonight? even though they're not playing for us anymore, they'll just want to know what we got coming. So it's a way for us to try to get one last message in in one way or a format that they've never, ever seen or heard leading up to them going out at the 20-minute mark and having their last pre-game warm-up on the court.

Do you want them to be, is that a way to help them become more loose? Is that part of this strategy or what is it? I would say there's a lot. One, we do want the message delivered one last time for sure. Certainly, when you're dealing with college age student athletes, and we draw pretty well on the road, play in front of a lot of big crowds away from our own building. And in our own building, we're sold out 20,000 with our season tickets even this early in the summer before we even get back for the start of the school year. So yes, I do think that, And I also think it gives the players confidence that their coaching staff is willing to have some fun.

I think there's a little bit of internal confidence building that goes on with that as well. So what's an example of a message and a skit to go along with a message or a theme? Yeah, I mentioned the Halloween where I had four different costumes on. and I would talk about filling up my Halloween bag and the houses that I would go to, and then I would sprint down the driveway. And my dad had delivered this message to me that you've got to kick the other neighborhood kids, but in collecting candy, like it's a competition. And I talked about how I would go to the same house when I was 10, 11 years old,

but I would have a different costume on, and then I would take off in our locker room, maybe a referee jersey, and then I would put on a different costume. costume. I had a Riesie's letterman's jacket from the Riesies Candy Company. So that's one example. We've used horse racing as an example, how you get out of a gate, how horses get out of a gate. We've used baseball examples. What a pitcher is going through in the ninth inning. What a relief pitcher, the pressure that a relief pitcher has to maybe come in with the bases load, have to get one out, much like if a player that we have fouls out and maybe we got to go to a guy late game who hasn't checked in a game. We kind of correlate that with a baseball relief pitcher.

So a lot of examples that I think our guys can kind of understand where we're coming from with the message. I don't know if this has happened or not must, but if you were asked to advise a Fortune 100 company, a company that runs lots of meetings, which they all do, and you're working with a senior leader, maybe even the CEO, and he or she said, you run some of the most creative meetings. The way you get your message across is so well done. And I want to do that because I think my meetings now are boring. What are some pieces of advice you would give that you've learned from coaching a basketball team that you think could work outside of the world of basketball into the corporate world?

Yeah, great question. A lot of the ideas, the marketing stuff, some of the stuff that I do on social media, is I'm fortunate that on my mother's side of the family, they were in the Pepsi business. And so I would hear my grandfather talk about marketing and what was important for Pepsi. And then obviously my dad, a coach, so he had his own thing. But he, because of my mother's background, my dad became an incredible marketer in the 1970s. They had a pregame warm up at the University of Minnesota, where, a player would ride a unicycle.

Everybody on the team was required to spend a basketball on both finger at the same time. The warm-up took about 18 minutes. Guys like Phil Flip Saunders was a star in this pregame warm-up. Obviously, Flip went on to be the head coach of Detroit Pistons, Washington, as well as Minnesota Timberwolves. Michael Thompson, Clay Thompson's dad played as a freshman under my dad. He came from the Bahamas and had a soccer, type thing that he utilized in the pregame warm-up. Dave Winfield played for my dad, the great Major League

Baseball Hall of Fame player was on my dad's basketball team and he had a part of this warm-up. And Tony Dungey, NFL coach NFL player also played basketball at the University of Minnesota for my dad. So marketing has been a big part too. But I would say that as far as meetings go, it's like how do you grab the attention of your audience and keep them on their toes so that they don't walk in and say all right this meeting's going to last exactly 22 minutes i'm going to start daydreaming four minutes in i think you've got to kind of jolt your audience and there's probably no better coach that i've been around than doc rivers doc was the greatest free game uh speech guy and he spent time pre-parent it's like when you watch a comedian on stage you've got to I I sit there and think like how many times did this guy rehearse this or this woman rehearsed this skit and how you look to your right look to your left look behind you look in front of you and how the audience is so captivated every time you get in front of your team whether it's a business whether it's a basketball team like you've got to you've got to

you've got to really be prepared for what you're delivering. And you've got to be clear, concise, you've got to have some fun with it. But like I said, they cannot know what's coming. And if they do, then you probably got a pretty stale message. That seems like a lot of work, a lot of effort. In all honesty, Ryan, I probably spend as much time on message delivery, pre-practice. what we're going to talk about at half time, what we're going to talk about in timeouts,

what we're going to do in our pregame preparation as I do X and O's. And that's evolved over time as well. I really think like the players are pretty smart if you give them a good foundation, but this message delivery and getting a team to play, everybody plays hard. But how can you play just a little bit harder than your opponent? how can the game mean just a little bit more than your,

those are, in my opinion, the difference makers. Who has a little bit higher care level of what's happening with your teammates, what's happening in the win and loss, Colin? Those things are, to me, more important than anything that a coach can diagram X and O-wise or even the fundamentals of the game. I think if you have a high will to win, you have a high competitive level, those things are going to supersede anything that you're teaching X and O-wise. One of the other groups of people that you need to regularly communicate with are the referees.

I watched the video this morning where you were described says must quote is a magician with how he communicates with referees. What's your strategy when it comes to communicating with the referees? I see you shaking hands, calling them by their first name in pregame. I see you saying, you've got to help him, you've got to help him. You're like telling one referee to help another guy. Like I've seen how you do it. It seems like there is an art to it. What's your overall philosophy on working with referees?

Well, I think a couple things. One, you used a great word, Ryan, on working with. I think that's a big key is. And look, this is, I've only got four years in the SEC, but I will say that referee relationship, I can't express how incredible the NBA referees were to me and taught me so, so much that, like, I know where the referees are supposed to be in an NBA game. I mean, I can tell you what slot every referee has.

Now, the slots and some of the responsibility in the college game are different, but I really wanted to know as an NBA, every little possible. detail I could that a referee was responsible for because you can grab the referee's attention if, hey, you're not in the right slot or, hey, that wasn't your call. That was slot two's call over there. And now all of a sudden you gain credibility. And you're not just somebody out there complaining. And probably I need to do a little bit better job of understanding personalities in the SEC with our referees. I thought I did a really good job. in the Mountain West. We had Mountain West, Pack 12 guys, Big Sky, they all worked those

three or four conferences. And I knew everybody, personality quirks. I knew which guys couldn't get back in transition quick enough. I knew which guys were great at getting back in transition. I knew which guys, you know, threw a crooked jump ball. And I think that the biggest thing is that the referee feels like, does this coach have credibility or not by what he's conveying in? in-game. And then how do the players on your team respond to the referees is also going to have a big part in your relationship with referees? But they're human. They're going to make mistakes. And three refs in the head coach, can you develop some type of rapport and most importantly, some type of respect? And I think it all comes down to this credibility piece. It's no different

and why is a coach in any sport really on that particular referee, and it might be a credibility problem, and some of the referees maybe that you don't get on as much, maybe those are the referees that have incredible respect for their play callability. Well, it seems like a lot of things in life, too, if you yell and complain every single time, that the call doesn't go your way, even if it's the right call, right? You lose all of your credibility so that when there is an actual time that you are right,

you lose that. It's like the boy who cried wolf, right? And so how do you manage that? Because basketball is an emotional game, you're a high, high energy coach. How do you manage to say, oh, I got to maintain credibility? I can't yell every single time. It doesn't go our way. Yeah, and I would say, right, that's something that I got to get better at for sure. I'm going to be 59 years old when we hit November this year. And I'm still learning and trying to get better because I say something every time down the floor to somebody could be our staff. It could be one of our players. It could be our entire team.

It's an offensive play call. It's a defensive play call. It could be the referees. But I do think that from a fan's perspective, sometimes they think it's all the referees. And it really isn't. My father had one great lesson. And it was basically what you just said. He said, hey, here's the deal.

You shouldn't really say anything of the referees. Wait for that one mistake. and you can get all over them when there's one mistake, and then they're probably not going to be a second mistake. And my dad's philosophy was you could even get a technical. If you wait and maybe it's seven games in, and that one mistake, words going to start spreading, hey, this guy really knows the play calls.

This guy understands spacing on the floor from a referee's perspective. But I do think as a coach, and I certainly think I have as well lost credibility, with certain referees by constantly being in their ear, and that's an area I want to try to get better at. I want to talk about fuel and motivation and inspiration. I watched the video clip of when you guys were getting ready to play Gonzaga. I believe this is 2022, Sweet 16.

Gonzaga was the number one ranked team in the NCAA tournament. Not only a number one seed, but I believe the number one overall team in the tournament, you're playing them leading up to the game, and you could share the story of how the game went. But leading up to the game, saw it. You said, well, yeah, we'll be showing our guys' clips of how people have no respect for us or how people think we're going to roll over and get crushed by the number one seed. Yeah, I'll make sure our guys see those clips. So can you first describe motivation and inspiration

and use of people talking negatively about your team as well as how that game went? Yeah, so I think external motivation can grab attention, can maybe get more focus. I don't think that you can externally motivate and that means a guy is going to go out and get more rebounds, but I do think you can externally motivate to get a guy to think about blocking out more. I don't think that there's motivation that's going to necessarily, hey, I'm going to give a speech and win one for the Gipper, and then they're going to go out and do it. It's, hey, externally motivate to get that box out or externally motivate to understand, hey, nobody runs the floor harder than Gonzaga. Like, their fast break offense, and that's why we put clips of the roadrunner.

Like we interjected that. We'd show Gonzaga running the floor and then we'd show clips of the road run. And so, and anything else that was fast, it could have been a speedboat. It could have been a race or it. It could have been whatever to try to just, hey, guys, we can't simulate how hard Gonzaga runs the floor and transition. But along those same lines, like our guys started feeling like, wow, the coaches, like, they expect us to win. They don't think we can win. They expect us to win.

And that game, we came out, and much like we talked about, their speed was way more than we could handle. Like their commitment to running was more than we were willing to accept coming into the game. But we had some little themes like, how do we get Ched Holmgren, who ended up being a top three draft pick? How do we get Chet Holmgren in foul trouble? We knew he was a great shot blocker, so one of our themes was you got to get into his body. Every time he leaves the ground, anytime he leaves the floor, you have got to get into his body. And then at the other side of the floor, we made a decision to put a much smaller player on Shed Holmgren and try to use his leverage. So just a couple little themes that we thought would get us a little bit of buy-in and then trying to get one to two players.

take a little bit more pride, like, hey, here's where Chad Holmgren is on every mock draft. Your name's not even in the top 100, man. Like, you got to go guard him. Can you do it? And so that played in. But we did show every either NCAA bracket that had Gonzaga advancing to the championship or winning the championship or making a final four. And then we pulled as much audio.

And it would happen for every time. we met, they heard a different expert talking about how Gonzaga was favored and would win the game. And I do think that it had a little bit of an impact. They had a little bit more of an edge in their preparation leading up to that game. And you came away victorious, which was pretty cool to see. Your career is incredible when I was looking just through. You've coached all over the world and basically every league, national teams, teams that don't speak English. You've been everywhere. I am amazed at your coaching journey. Could you highlight some of those inflection points or maybe some interesting moments of teams that you've coached and maybe a

key learning or two from some of them? Yeah, I think every team teaches a coach something. My career, one I got, I was, I was fortunate that I was raised in a house. I wasn't watching cartoons when I was young. I was watching game tape with my dad. Some of my father's friends were Ballard Smith, president of the San Diego Padres, Billy Martin, New York Yankee manager. When we moved to San Diego, my dad had Paul Brown, one of the most creative coaches in the history of the NFL, obviously coached Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals. And my dad met with Paul Brown for over two hours about what his first team meeting was going to be like because my dad was going from Minnesota college coach to the ABA professional.

And Paul Brown talked about the players in tennis at the pro level and how the first five minutes they were going to decide whether they were willing to play for you or not. So I've heard all these things growing up. When my dad was a coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, I was a ballboy. And I'll never forget asking my mom every time Boston came into play, Cleveland, mom, you got to get me out of school early because Larry Bird's going to get to the arena so early and I want to be the first ballboy there to rebound for him. So a lot of advantages that I had growing up for sure because of my father's job. So I recognize the fact that

I got my start at a young age because of maybe my dad's history of being a coach. But I also knew that if I didn't take advantage of it, it would end really quickly. He's got a great opportunity coaching the CBA, which is like the G-League equivalent now, at 24 years old. My dad gave me a great lesson. Here's what you need to do, son. Go get as many Bobby Knight players from the University of Indiana, and go get as many Jerry Tarkhanian players from UNLB as you can.

And he said, one, Jerry Tarkanians, guys, they're junkyard dogs. They play so hard. They compete. They hate to lose. Bobby Knight's players are as tough as they come. And that's what we did. We had Jarvis Bass Knight. We had Sudden Sam Smith from UNLV, Keith Smart, Jimmy Thomas from Indiana.

And my dad told me, you do not know what you're doing as a coach at 24 years old. So you better surround yourself with players who can self-coach the team. So I learned right away, I'm 24 years old. And I learned that players dictate the game way more than a coach. And the quality and character that you have on your roster become very important. But you mentioned the international experiences, Ryan. I don't speak Spanish. I can get by enough, having grown up in San Diego.

I can speak enough to get by, but I really don't speak the language. So when I'm coaching Venezuelan Dominican Republic, I had to learn how to demonstrate. I had to learn how to slow down my delivery in timeouts. So I changed how quickly I diagram a play. I learned coaching players that don't speak the same language, how the diagram has to be so clear. You can't have 12 lines all over the place because they're not understanding maybe what you're saying. So demonstration, in timeouts, I had to become much clear, more concise. And then when I was an NBA assistant, I would ask players like, hey, man, who's the best timeout coach you've ever been around?

I kept getting the same name, Pat Riley. I said, why is Coach Riley so good? When Coach Riley diagrams a play, he'll say, Ryan, here's where you're going. He'll diagram that line. Then he would say to the next player, hey, Joe, this is where you're going. Hey, Bob, and he would go all the way down the line. Again, I'm getting this from former players of his. And so we've changed how we sit on the bench.

sit one, two, three, four, four, five, to my right is our point guard, to my far left is our center. Next to the center is the power forward in the middle of the small forward, to the right of the point guard is our off guard. And that allows me, while we're subbing and stuff to look up. I know, this guy to my right's my point guard, guy to my left's my point. So it makes our timeouts a little bit more efficient as well. Wow. And then you become an NBA head coach. and that is a, I mean, it's an amazing job, but it's also one that they will fire you in an instant. You know how hard that is. I mean, that's kind of all coaching, but especially in the NBA.

I mean, the coach of the year, I feel like multiple times gets fired within a year or even the same year. He wins that award. It's wild. What are some of the things you learned in Sacramento and Golden State from being a head coach in the NBA? One of my best friends is Tom Tibino. And it's really interesting because Tom and I were both assistant coaches with the Minnesota Timber. wolves under my dad. I got a much, much earlier start as a head coach than coach Tibodeau. I was, I hadn't even hit the age of 40 and was head coach of the Golden State Warriors.

I probably was not ready. I bring this up because I tell Tom this all the time, hey, you're really lucky, Tom. You got your first head coaching job when you were 50 and you were mature. You had all this experience. You work for all these great coaches. And you were really, really ready to cease your opportunity. Chuck Daly, if people look up, when was Chuck Daly's first time being a head coach? He was really old. He was really experienced. And so I got a job probably too young.

Our first year, I was runner up to Greg Popovich for coach of the year. And then eight months later, I was fired. You're right. That's a very, very tough league to coach in. it's a league that you're dealing with players that are really, really smart, and you've got to really be prepared, you've got to have great talent. But it's an 82 game grind, but I will say I do think that the best coaches in the world are professional coaches because they have to be managers of personalities.

They're much more partners with the players than lower levels. And I think pro coaches at all levels, whether it's major league baseball, the NFL, the WNB, the NBA, I think those coaches are far superior to other coaches at other leagues. You mentioned Pat Riley, and the coach of his team is Eric Spolstra. And I think when you talk to anybody who knows the NBA, it feels like most of them will say Spolstra is either the best or one of the best professional basketball coaches. What makes Spolstra so good with the Miami Heat? A couple things. One, coach Spolster's coaching in an environment where the boss or upper man.

is not going to flinch. Yeah. So if a player, 15 years ago went to Coach Riley and said, hey, Coach Riley, we'd love to have you come down here and coach our team and replace Spolstra, Coach Riley is going to tell a player, no, that's our coach right there, Eric Spolstra. And he'll probably be here longer than you will. And when you have management back a coach up like that, that alone changes the complex. That's a game changer for a coach.

And you see it with Bill Belichick and the Patriots. They're not flinching on a down year. Ownership has a great belief in Bill Belichick. And that allows him to coach the team the way that he sees fit. He's not coaching for fans. he's not coaching for the media. And Coach Daley said it all the time. He's like, hey, some coaches are going to have practices

just so they can tell the media they practice. If you have great backing by ownership, in college, if you have great backing by the school president or the chancellor and the athletic director, it allows you to coach and for your true personality to come out. And that's when I think teams can have their greatest success. You mentioned your dad called Paul Brown when he got a new job to talk about that,

first meeting because players and people are going to make a judgment within five minutes. So, coach, there's people all over the world listening that just got hired either at a new company or for a new job and now they're leading a team and they're getting ready to walk into that room for their first team meeting and they're leading up to that moment. They're obviously preparing and thinking about what, what should I say? What should I do? What are some pieces of advice you'd give to that person as they're walking in to their first meeting with their new team and now all of a sudden they are the one in charge, they're the leader.

Yeah, great question. Ryan, while you were asking that, and I was actually thinking about what it's like for a job interview. When you're walking down that hallway, maybe of a hotel and you're getting ready to walk into a hotel room and maybe an NBA owner is there with an NBA general manager and an assistant GM and the angst that you can go through. I think, number one, in any meeting and any interview, it's about preparation. It's about understanding your audience. And then what are your goals? What are the team's goals?

What is the organization's goals? And how can you lay those out clear and concisely to your audience? If I'm meeting with an owner, say the Orlando Magic when Rich DeVos, maybe an older type owner that is a family-owned organization, as opposed to maybe if you look at Mark Cuban 10 years ago and maybe a younger marketing type, like the way that you go into those two meetings is going to be much, much different based on who you're talking to.

And then once you earn the job, what are some of the things you say to your team? Do you remember the first meeting you had with your team in Arkansas or even the first meeting in Golden State when I'm guessing you were a much better coach when you got the job at Arkansas than you were when you got the job at Golden State?

Yeah, so again, sometimes you don't know the format that you're going to be put in. My first encounter with the Arkansas players was a dinner at the athletic director's house. And all the players were downstairs. Myself, my wife, my sons, my daughter, we were all upstairs with administrators. And I decided to kind of go down and get with these guys. and it was very, very casual. And we started chopping it up. What's it like for you guys when you lose at the University of Arkansas, how's the fan base react?

That was one of the things that I wanted to know. And they kind of conveyed, hey, man, you got to stay off social media. It's brutal. And so I said, hey, maybe this is how we react to that type of, if you guys are telling me that's how it's going to be, let's come up with a plan on how we react to that response. And we had a formal meeting then when the athletic came down and formally introduced me and everything. But I got an opportunity to kind of just casually go from table to table,

ask those guys what was important to them, what their goals were, where they saw our team currently and where they thought we could get in the next nine months. So I think there's a lot of different ways that you can get in front of a team or get in front of a group the first time you're with them. I watched a video of your morning routine, Coach, I think this is a recent one.

Saw you with your wife, you're with your daughter, and then you're immediately to the gym. And as you're walking to the gym, I see you carrying like this big stack of papers. And then I see you on a treadmill with a highlighter running and walking, depending on what part of the workout it was, highlighting and throwing papers on the ground. I'm thinking like, this guy's crazy.

Can you walk me through your process of your morning routine and how it seems like you're constantly, constantly focused on self-improvement in learning? So every day when I leave the office, I'll Google search head coach or I'll Google search press conference or I could Google search leadership and I print articles. And then I do an hour and 10 cardio every day, seven days a week, regardless of if it's travel, it does not matter. And then what I do is I highlight stuff that I want to share with our team, mostly the

stuff I'm highlighting is stuff that I want to share with the staff. And then I'll have a staff member, take that article, highlight it, email it to our staff. We call it daily staff notes. And then anything that's pertinent for our team, I'll hand to the video coordinator. And the video coordinator will either just put it on a graphic so that we can look at it, talk about it, or it could be a video clip that we want pulled and show our guys that way. Or it might be an article for a player that I want to try to just send to one guy. It might be maybe a Chris Paul article about how he plays pick and roll, and I just send that to our three-point guards.

Without doing that, I don't know how I would survive. It adds creativity to things we do. It's a enhancer for the staff as far as staff development, for sure. And I love reading about other sports as well. To me, the greatest way to learn and get better. It feels like you, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it feels like you approach leadership that it's about learning and communicating with your people. It feels like a big focus on that. I'm learning constantly and I'm going to communicate with my people and that's like priority one.

Is that right? There's no doubt because we have some guys on our team like Devonte Devo Davis that have been here three years. Well, I got to give him something new, man. He doesn't want to hear what he heard last year or the year. year before. So even when we meet on drills as a staff, I'll say it happened this morning. I said, we can't do that drill. We did the drill last year. Devo Davis, he can do it in his sleep. We got to give him something new. We got to give him something fresh. We got to alter the drill and come up with something new. And that's why we, in September, we send as many people on staff as we can to

NBA training camps to try to learn new drills. And we're on the phone. Like Summer League, we don't just go to Las Vegas and watch our players play summer league games. We're going to summer league practices. One of our staff members, Caleb Klein, went and watched the Chicago Bulls in Vegas at their summer league. We got two great drills that we're doing here quite frequently just based on the July summer league that the Bulls did. And my son, Michael, got to work to Cleveland Cavaliers, the six days leading up to them going to Vegas for the summer league. What a very valuable tool for us to have a staff member in all the Cleveland Cavaliers meetings and for him to be on the practice floor for their summer league and see how they implement new drills with

the young group of players. Moving to the business world, must. It feels like it would be a great idea if a CEO he or she sent their team members to other businesses. Why not? Maybe not direct competitors, but to other businesses. Watch how they run a meeting. Watch how they run a one-on-one. Watch how they organize their day. Watch how they, when they show up, what they do, how they bond as a team. It feels like that's a really good idea that I don't know if it's done much, but it seems like you embrace this big time. There's no question.

I think like for where I work out every day, we have a neighborhood gym. It's at the Blessings. And Mr. Tyson, John Tyson, the Blessings is kind of his deal. And I get an opportunity almost five days out of the seven days where Mr. Tyson comes in. when I'm working out and we talk. And he is my coach. He is one of my mentors. Now, he's in the chicken business, right?

And I'll ask him, Mr. Tyson, we had this instance with a player. How would you deal with it? And the perspective and the outside the coaching box way of thinking that he lends to me, it's mind-boggling how many different situations from a leadership standpoint he has helped me with just off casual conversations and I'll go home and I'll tell my wife like I never thought that somebody that's the king of Tyson's food I never thought that I would be going asking about player roles and how do I maybe take away a role from a player and how do I convey that and getting input and feedback on how to communicate messages.

You can learn from so many different people, but certainly people that are in leadership position can help other leaders really well. A newer part of college athletics that I've read you are really good at is recruiting from the transfer portal. This just became a thing recently where I think there's a lot of people that are college athletic fans don't love the fact that players can transfer, basically all the time, any time, and do it as much as they want.

However, as a coach, this is the world that you live in now, and so it pays to get good at it. What's your overall philosophy and strategy when it comes to recruiting out of the transfer portal? Yeah, so when we got the job at Nevada, which was nine years ago, I felt like we could not get five-star players at the University of Nevada. And I went back through their history. They had never had a McDonald's All-American. And so I said, well, we want to make the NCAA tournament. We want to advance. We want to play in Sweet 16s.

And so I said, we're going to take the long game, meaning at that time, transfers had to sit a year. It's really, really hard to be coaching a team at the University of Nevada and have Cody and Caleb Martin sitting out for a full year. two guys that are having a big impact in the NBA. But that's what we did. So I developed a philosophy, spent two years at Arizona State as an assistant, and one year at LSU as an assistant trying to learn the college game. I knew what I didn't know. I didn't know how to recruit.

I didn't know anything about college scheduling. My whole life had been basically at the professional level. So as I sat back as an assistant coach, I said, there's 13 guys on scholarship. I only need seven or eight guys to play because we only play two games a week. Again, Ryan, you've got to think I'm coming from a world where you play 82 games.

You have five exhibition games. You make the playoffs. That's a whole other phase and a whole other set. And I'm thinking, man, we play three games a week, four games a week. Travel in college, it's two games a week. And these guys are in the prime of their career. you're not dealing with the 13-year NBA vet who maybe has had two knee surgeries, shoulder surgery, has a wife and kids to deal with it.

So I thought, like, I don't need to play 13 guys. So the transfer thing, we always had four guys sitting out. It helped our team chemistry. Everybody on the roster was playing while the four guys were sitting out. And it allowed us to really have a long view of, hey, the following year, we got four guys that now understand our culture, our system, how we do things. The automatic eligibility is, you know, it's kind of thrown our philosophy off because obviously now you've got 13 players that are all eligible and you're not going to have four guys that

are willing to sit out or redshirt. But the transfer thing, we looked at it, one philosophically that we couldn't get the five stars. And then the other part was when you're in the NBA, you have a choice. And your choice is draft picks or free agents. Well, there's a lot less risk with free agents. There's a body of work. So we felt the same way, especially like I knew, hey, I've never been a college head coach nine years ago. I knew if I fail in year one or year two, I'm gone because there was a lot of skeptics.

Hey, the guy's never coached in college, was only assistant for three years. NBA, doesn't understand how to recruit, doesn't understand how to recruit, doesn't understand how schedule. So I wanted to have veteran players and wanted to try to win immediately. And then we've kind of carried that philosophy, although now we know at Arkansas, we can get five stars. We had three McDonald's All-Americans last year, three players that are won and done draft picks. So we're kind of trying to marry both philosophies now. Well, one of the elements that you said earlier in our conversation was about building a great staff. And this also relates completely in the business world where a senior leader needs to build a great team of leaders.

I'm curious must, when you are hiring for someone to be a part of your staff, what are some of the must have qualities in that person to get hired to be on your coaching staff? I would say will to win, loyalty, and then having a specialty. It was much easier for me at the pro level to hire a staff because I had had longevity in that business. I look back at the assistant coaches that I had that I was fortunate enough to work with. Scotty Brooks was with me in Sacramento and obviously went on to coach a couple different NBA teams and a great coach. David Fisdale was an assistant for us in Golden State, and David went on to coach the Knicks and Memphis Grizzlies. Jim Boylan was an assistant coach, went on to coach the Chicago Bulls.

Keith Smart worked for me, played for me, went on to coached. three NBA teams as an assistant. And Keats now with me here at Arkansas. But in college, I didn't know. I didn't have as many resources from years and years. But I will say, like, support staff at the college level. Your graduate assistants are so, so important. Your graphics guy is so important.

Your video coordinator, it's not just about the three assistant coaches in college because you got to wear a lot of hats, you've got to understand how to market your program, you're recruiting, you've got to have great recruiting coordinators who are incredibly organized. All those things become really, really important. But I will say, if a young guy can come up with one skill set, it really, really can elevate your career quickly.

Obviously, you want guys that can do a lot of different things, but no different than a player. If a player has one great skill, whether it's shooting, rebounding, defending, those players usually figure out a way to get to the next level. I think it's the same way in our craft of coaching. If you're a great offensive mind or a great defensive mind or a great player development mind,

you're going to figure out a way to climb the ladder pretty quickly. What's some unique value you bring that others don't? That works, again, that translates into the business world. What's something unique you bring that others don't? Develop that skill, work at it, get the reps. I think that'd be huge. I must have got one more question. When you think about all of the amazing leaders you've come across over the course of your career,

coaches both in athletics as well as not in athletics because you're learning from everybody, what have you found to be some of the commonalities among leaders who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time? I would say experience that the people that are lending wisdom are guys that have great experience and been through a lot. I think leaders that have been fired have a perspective that's a little bit more unique and more relatable as well. When you've been fired before, I think you have a little bit more compassion for the coaching business or the leadership business. If you've sat in that chair before, I know that when I was an assistant with the Grizzlies, I had a much different feel for what it's like to be in that head coaching chair because I was just let go from Golden Street.

state. But I do think leadership with guys that have experience really think things through. A lot of the smartest people I've ever been around are low-level talkers. They watch their words carefully. One of my great mentors, he tells me he'll get back to me the next day. I'll give him an issue, a problem, and he'll say, I'll call you back tomorrow. And I'm like thinking like most of us would just start rapid fire talking. And I think about the patience of this one guy. And I'm like, wow, that's pretty special. Oh, man, I love it.

I really appreciate you investing over an hour of your time with me today, Coach Month. This was just phenomenal. I got pages of notes. Really appreciate it. I'm grateful for Rob Kimball for connecting us. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both across. Maybe I can even, when I come to Arkansas, I can check out of practice. It would be awesome to see you doing your work, man.

Ryan, thanks so much for having me on. You have the open invite to a practice and maybe more importantly, a pregame speech at the 30-minute mark before tip-off. Take me up on that one, Ryan. I want to see the skits. That's what I want to see. You're going to 30-minute mark, man.

You get a skit. Love it, man. Thank you so much, Coach. Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate it. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note.

Ryan at learning leader.com, let me know what you learned from this great conversation from Coach Eric Musselman. A few takeaways from my notes. I love how he learns from other teams and other sports as well as from leaders in corporate America. He shared so many examples of the times he goes to practices, especially NFL teams, and watches to learn, see how they run things. Then he sends his coaches to do the same thing for other teams practices. I, think this is something we should do in corporate America. Why don't we send our leadership teams and we ourselves reach out to leaders within other businesses and see how they run meetings, see how they run one-on-ones, see how they manage their calendar. This could be really useful

if there's some best practice sharing around how leaders within other companies are doing it. And we do the same for them. Maybe something to think about. And then how he runs his meetings, how he's so overly prepared, how he works to grab their attention. He keeps them on their toes with surprises. They use clips. They make it funny. They do skits. Think about all of the work that goes into his meetings. It's intentional. And when I said to him, man, that sounds like a lot of work. He said, yeah, it is. But think about how important it is, because we're always having meetings with our teams. It's worth it to get really good at having great meetings. And then his life philosophy on being a constant learner and a great communicator. He takes pages of notes with him to

the gym every morning, and he reads, takes notes and highlights the entire time he's on the treadmill. And then he synthesizes what he's learned and shares with his team each day. We all can do this. Again, it takes intentional effort, but it's worth it. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Coach Eric Musselman. I think he will help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that, you continue to go to Ryanhawk.net, which launches you to Apple Podcast.

And once you're there, you write a thoughtful review and you rate the show hopefully five stars. And by doing that, you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.