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RANJAY GULATI: The fifth and final T is transformation.
If you look at some of these great coaches
and if you talk to some of their players, they will tell you
they have truly transformed by them.
I'll start with Pete Carroll.
Pete talks about coaching up, that every human being
needs to be coached, coached to really recenter themselves
about who am I as a human being, not as a player.
Who am I as a human being?
Why am I here?
What's my purpose in life?
And it's only when we connect into our own sense of life
purpose and find a way to then connect
what I'm doing in my work with my life purpose,
I can truly elevate myself.
The starting point for this is really
a place of caring and trust.
It's only when these people, the players,
feel that this person cares about me and I can trust them,
they have my back.
But at the same time that there is caring and trust,
there is also challenge.
Am I being pushed?
Now, remember, if you're only challenging and not supporting,
you're a demanding boss.
If you're only supporting and not challenging,
you're the unconditional lovey-dovey boss.
It's the ability to say, I'm going to challenge you
while I support you.
And that's the mastery of some of these great coaches.
Let me give you an example right here from our backyard.
Mike Way, the coach of the men's squash team here
at Harvard and Kathy Delaney-Smith, the coach
of the women's basketball team, retired now,
I had a chance to talk to players who
played for both these coaches.
Each of them was described to me as a transformational coach,
a coach who made them better, better players, better
human beings.
The lessons they learned from those coaches
stayed with the players long after they were no longer
playing for that coach.
And if you look at what Mike does and what Kathy did,
they are masters of understanding
how to provide intense support to the player
while also challenging them to do better.
When you talk about transformation,
you also dial into connecting them to their larger
purpose in life to understand, how
do I put what I'm doing in the context of my life?
To help somebody do that, you have
to have the curiosity and interest
to want to know that person beyond a worker bee
to do their job.
It's the ability to engage with that person
as a whole human being.
In a case I wrote on the Seahawks,
Pete Carroll coaches Marshawn Lynch,
who is considered uncoachable by a lot of other teams.
He says to Marshawn, I want you to be Marshawn.
I'm not going to try to change you.
But I want to support you.
He tries to understand Marshawn.
Now, Marshawn has some family constraints.
He says, I'm going to help you there,
but I also expect more of you, Marshawn.
And so one of the anecdotes was how Marshawn couldn't
come to practice on time.
And he said, I can't do it myself.
My uncle always has been in my life.
And he would always help me get organized, and I can't do it.
He says, well, where's your uncle?
He's in Oakland.
And he's unemployed.
He says, well, let's hire him in the Seahawks.
And he became the groundskeeper of the Seahawks grounds.
Marshawn was on time ever since.
So it's only when you understand the whole self of a person
that you are able to coach up and really support them
while challenge them.
You can't challenge if they don't trust
and you feel supported by you.
Now, let's think about this in the business of organization
as we think about how we can not only
help people elevate their performance in the workplace,
but also live their whole life's full potential.
How do we help them feel truly transformed
and ask ourselves how will they show up at work
when we have those transformed people?
I think sometimes what happens to leadership
is we fall into the bucket of either a demanding model
or a supporting model.
It feels almost contradictory mixed messages
to learn to challenge and support at the same time,
yet when you do, you truly know how to transform people.
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