[MUSIC PLAYING]
RANJAY GULATI: So the fourth T is tenacity.
And at one level, there are many close cousins
to the word tenacity.
People have talked about grit.
They've talked about resilience.
What exactly is this?
The point over here is helping your team build the muscle--
mental muscle-- to really deal with the highs and lows
of sports.
Sports has winning and sports has losing,
and so it can be an emotional roller coaster.
Part of a coach's job is to keep the players centered.
How do you preserve that sense of equilibrium on the team?
Now here's the counterintuitive part.
Don't get so high on the wins because you're going
to have equally lows on losses.
I talked to Pete Carroll, actually,
about an infamous moment in the Super Bowl.
When there's a little more than two seconds left
in the game and Seattle has the ball on the 2 yard
line of the New England Patriots and they're
going to win this game.
Everyone thought the game was over,
even the New England players.
And instead, what happens is Russell Wilson
decides to pass the ball--
that was a called play--
instead of running the ball, and it gets intercepted
and they lose.
And so I asked Pete.
I said, what did you do when you went back to the locker room?
Because you got all these players,
and they're calling it on you saying you called the play.
We lost because of you.
So part of what happens in losses
is you want someone to blame.
Either it's the coach or another player
who may have made a mistake.
What did Pete do?
First thing is he made sure they didn't
blame the players involved.
There were several players involved
who together should have not allowed
what happened to happen.
He took it.
He said, I'm the leader.
It's on me.
I called the play.
So deflecting it onto yourself, avoiding
that blame to set in, helping people realize and say, look,
let's focus not on winning.
Let's focus on how well we played.
We had an amazing season.
We have a lot to feel proud of.
Now it's easier said than done.
This is really, really hard, but winning coaches
say we're building mental muscle for the long haul.
Nick Saban has a 24-hour rule where they win the National
championships, and he's back at work the next day
saying time to plan for next season.
What did we learn from last season?
And they're like, come on, we need to celebrate some more.
It's like, no, onward.
So how to build that mental muscle.
If you really want to understand tenacity,
one place to look at it is the legendary Michael Jordan Nike
advertisement where--
what does Michael Jordan say?
He said, I have missed 9,000 shots over my career.
I've lost almost 300 games.
And 26 times, I was entrusted to make the game-winning shot,
and I missed.
I have failed over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.
Keeping that focus.
Yes, I have lost, but I have succeeded.
We got to give Phil Jackson credit over here
to really helping his players put the game in perspective.
By putting it in perspective doesn't
mean becoming indifferent to the game.
You want to win, so don't get me wrong.
It's easy to take this and say, oh, he was just
saying come on and chill.
No, it's not about come and have fun.
It was about saying come and have fun in a way
where you are at your very best self.
The competition is not out there.
The competition is you.
And Jordan said that, too.
I'm not here to compete with anybody else.
I'm here to compete with the best possible self I can be.
We are in extremely tumultuous times.
We have a pandemic.
We have a war, economic uncertainty,
technological uncertainty, regulatory uncertainty,
supply chain uncertainty.
I can go on and on.
In these tumultuous times, how do we
hold that collective tenacity for our team?
You might think that tenacity is all about coping with losing.
That's what people think.
I've come to realize tenacity is about also
about coping with winning because what happens to winning
teams sometimes, and there's Nobel Prize winning research
on loss avoidance, is when you've won,
you start to play not to lose instead of playing to win.
You're so fearful of losing because you
have this reputation and you're the National champions.
That's why you see very few back-to-back national
champions.
Winning organizations get complacent.
They get arrogant.
They get indifferent.
They get lazy.
They ignore their customers.
They become internally focused.
They become siloed, and bureaucratic, and slow,
and risk averse.
And a leader's job is to maintain focus on winning.
Tenacity is as much about keeping
people's mental equilibrium after winning
as much as it is after losing.
How do we have that forward-looking mindset
in the face of ups and downs that are natural part of life?
[MUSIC PLAYING]