Three Leadership Lessons
What basketball can teach us about leadership and teams
I was at the Storm vs Valkyries basketball game Friday night, watching my now home team nearly beat my hometown team. Sigh.
(The Seattle Storm is definitely my WBB team but I will forever be a San Francisco 49ers fan. Sorry not sorry, Seahawks.)
As I moved from despair over our third quarter meltdown to screaming my lungs out during a remarkable fourth quarter comeback that put us within one point with 50 seconds left in the game, I marvelled at two things:
First, how I’ve become a huge WBB fan over the last three years. I seriously love going to the games and now watch way more basketball than I do football, which has been my one sports love since I was in my early teens. Go figure.
Second—and far more relevant to this blog—is how fascinating it is to watch a game through a business and leadership lens. There are so many lessons we can learn from WBB players, coaches, and the way the game is played.
Here are three I took away from last night’s game:
You can have a superstar player, but they still need a strong team around them for magic to happen. Take Paige Bueckers and the Dallas Wings. Paige was last year’s number one draft pick and is by all accounts a generational player. Now in only her second year, she ranks in the league’s top 10 for points and assists per game. Last year the Wings went 10-34 (22.7%)—Paige alone couldn’t carry the team. This year the Wings are off to an 8-4 (66.7%) start. The difference? Paige is now complemented by another first round draft pick, Azzi Fudd, as well as veteran players Jessica Shepard and Arike Ogunbowale.
Lesson: You can’t put all your eggs in one basket, or one great hire. Not only can your superstar not do it alone, they’ll also become frustrated when they don’t have a team of equals who will help make them better.
The best players will do what it takes to win—even if that means sitting it out. I assume most professional athletes have a healthy ego. Yet every game I see some of the best players pass the ball when they could have easily taken the shot themselves. And then there’s the near-constant player rotation. Coaches move players in and out of the game like they’re moving chess pieces around a board. This combo of players isn’t working? Let’s try someone else. Too many fouls in quick succession? Take a beat. Having a bit of a shooting dry spell? Out you go. The best coaches make adjustments quickly to change the arc of the game. For the players, there’s (mostly) no ego attached, it’s all just part of doing what it takes to win—because the team winning is what really matters.
Lesson: Although we use “team” language, as individuals we rarely sacrifice our own “stats” for the good of the team, and as managers we generally don’t make decisions quickly enough—or at all—to impact team performance. We could learn a lot from how sports teams function and the speed at which they make short- and long-term personnel changes for the good of the team.
Coaching matters more than you think. With world-class athletes, you might wonder why they even need coaching. These are elite competitors who know the game inside and out—so why not just let them play? Because, as it turns out, these athletes still need someone to take really strong individual competitors and turn them into a high-performing team. I’ve seen what happens when this doesn’t happen (2025 Storm team 😳). Even the game’s most experienced players need someone who’s thinking about the game strategically and considering:
How to put the right combination of players together on this particular night to beat this particular team.
Who needs a little motivation and who needs to sit this one out.
When to use a time out, and which one to use. When to double down with a challenge. When to throw up their arms and yell at a referee.
What play to call that will put some points on the board and, hopefully, shift the momentum in the game.
Lesson: Good leadership matters, a whole lot. You cannot simply hire a team of top talent and expect the ship to steer itself. Your top performers need coaching too, and your whole team needs someone at the helm setting strategy and calling the plays—but trusting them to make the plays on the court.
Perhaps the biggest lesson of all, though, is to find joy in all that you do. Like we all do when my favorite player, Dominique Malonga, executes the perfect pre-game alley-oop. Enjoy.
Cover photo credit: Lorie Shaull from St Paul, United States - Basketball, CC BY-SA 2.0
Bonus read: For more leadership lessons from the WNBA, here’s a piece I wrote about the Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase.
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