Get Off The Merry-Go-Round:

Hiring the right head coach isn’t an amusement park ride.

I remember watching game three of the 2018 Eastern Conference Semifinals, between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Toronto Raptors, with nightmare clarity. A soul-stealing buzzer beater from Lebron James ended that game, and put the Cavaliers within a game of sweeping the Raptors. Game four was that final push of the broom. It marked the third consecutive year Cleveland dumped Toronto’s championship aspirations in the trash. Very bad dream, indeed.

Following their ouster, Toronto Head Coach Dwayne Casey said of James and the Cavaliers, “We want to be the organization that knocks the gate down. For whatever reason, we got the unlucky draw every year of going against him.” It was the summation of a compounded frustration felt throughout the entire franchise.

In the spring of 2018, I was hired by Masai Ujiri, President of the Toronto Raptors, just 3 weeks before the team entered the playoffs. What I didn’t know, and what only Ujiri knew at that time, is that as soon as the post season ended, he would fire Dwayne Casey. Conversely, what I did know was that Ujiri is an exceptionally intelligent, very methodical and highly evaluative thinker. His decision to fire Casey would not have been a rash, irrational, emotional response. Those words don’t describe Masai Ujiri.

Though he had won the NBA Executive of the Year award in 2013, Ujiri had never fired a head coach before. Despite being unable to coach the Raptors to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2018, Casey was awarded Coach of the Year by the NBA and the NBA Coach’s Association. To sack a coach who had just earned that honor, was a decision that invited much eye-brow raising assessment from fans and sports pundits alike. My first task in supporting Ujiri was to explore how to deliver this tough message.

Casey’s dismissal launched a multi-month search for a new head coach, another task new to Ujiri. Masai asked me to talk to the hiring committee — — him, the GM, the VP of Ops and the Head Scout, to prepare them for conducting the best possible head coach interviews.

Once Ujiri began learning the interview techniques and understanding how each question revealed the candidate’s character, he began considering a wider range of candidates. Using these techniques gave Ujiri the freedom and flexibility to interview historically unconventional candidates such as former NBA and WNBA players with limited men’s coaching experience, and former women’s college coaches, and lesser known assistant coaches, because the candidates are revealing not only their coaching aptitude and experience but also their leadership and professional growth potential.

The 2023 off-season is upon us, and like every off-season in the past, head coaches have already been fired, and new head coaches will be hired. The process I introduced to the Toronto Raptors hiring committee was very detailed and extensive beyond any oversimplified summation to be presented in an article. Still, there are two guiding maxims and five key considerations I employ that can greatly enhance the ability of any franchise (in any sport), to evaluate a coaching candidate with more depth, purpose and discernment.

Two Guiding Maxims

1. If you want a different conclusion, you need a different beginning.
2. Range is directly related to scope.

The first maxim follows the concept of Maslow’s Law: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This speaks to the over-reliance of a familiar tool. The hammer only does one thing. The hammer only produces one result. When it comes to the standard, established, customary evaluation process of conventional interviewing techniques, conventional assessments (bang) will yield conventional judgments (bang-bang), which lead to conventional decisions (bang-bang-bang) and the selection of conventional coaches (bang-bang-bang-bang!).

Conventional interviewing techniques tend to reveal only three things: a. The candidate’s coaching ethos. b. The candidate’s past experiences. c. The candidate’s skill at being interviewed (canned responses). None of this is revelatory of a candidate’s social resourcefulness, communication effectiveness or interactive proficiency — — all key attributes for creating a high-functioning, mutually supportive, productively collaborative matrix for team building. More importantly, conventional interviewing does little to give insight into the core principles that are foundational and fundamental to the candidate’s character and conduct. Professional attributes and personal principles are what any candidate will bring — — or not bring, into the organizational environment of the franchise. The character and conduct of everyone will define and determine the culture and identity of the team. The leading example must come from the head coach.

Very simply, remember this. The one thing conventional is not is different. So if you want to have a different conclusion (i.e., championship) for your new season, and a different outcome for the trajectory of your franchise (i.e., dynasty), consider doing things differently when making a decision about who is to be your head coach. Be unconventional.

The second maxim speaks to how capacity determines destiny. Consider this. Edwin Moses is the greatest 400-meter hurdler the world has ever seen. Conventional wisdom dictates that hurdlers should run 14 steps between each hurdle, to maximize speed. The problem is that by so doing, runners need to switch their lead leg for each hurdle, and most runners run faster using the same lead leg. This is why hurdlers often times vary the number of steps they take from 13 to 14 and even 15 between hurdles.

Moses figured out that taking an odd number of steps between each hurdle allowed him to use the same lead leg. He also determined that by taking only 13 steps between each hurdle, he would be faster than his competitors. However, it was close to impossible for runners sustain a long enough stride to do this, for an entire race. It was a feat that proved too taxing for any runner to maintain. Moses trained himself to do so. He had a range for mental tenacity, training discipline, technique improvisation, competitive determination, physical endurance and unyielding perseverance that exceeded his competitors and consequently, led to his very distinguished destiny. For that reason, the scope of achievement for Edwin Moses had an inevitable conclusion — — to become the greatest hurdler to ever race.

When interviewing for your next head coach, gauging that individual’s range/capacity for creativity, problem solving, interpersonal engagement, innovation, motivation, inspiration and leadership will directly impact the scope/destiny of the team. As a very close friend of mine has said, “Don’t expect to pick a cherry from a 30-foot branch with a 3-foot step ladder.” Don’t expect to win a championship in the post-season, with someone who can only win on a whiteboard in the locker room.

Five Key Considerations

1. One aspect of the interview is as equally important to the questions asked and the answers given. That is listening. If you don’t know what to listen for, you are guaranteed to miss it. To safeguard against this, take verbatim notes or video the interview. This way, everyone on the hiring committee can bring their frame of reference and listening perspectives to the evaluation process. This will create a more comprehensive listening opportunity for discussing the pros and cons of a potential hire. Relying on a fuzzy memory of a candidate’s comments will not give you the clarity for making the best decision to hire.
2. The axiom, “It takes one to know one”, is applicable to job interviews. The people best able to identify someone with leadership qualities are people who have leadership qualities themselves. Keep this in mind, when choosing who will make the choice for your head coach.
3. Turn on your BS detector. Higher quality questions will yield higher quality assessments, and higher quality candidates. There is benefit to having doubt, so don’t give it away. Be what I call “judiciously skeptical”. Be more dissecting and probing of the reasoning and perspectives being presented by the candidate.
4. Position the candidate to tell stories. Human brains are wired to understand stories better than any other format. Storytelling will reveal insights and nuances about the candidate that will give greater details for critical appraisal of character and conduct. This will enable you to check for how consistent a candidate is to an adherence of stated principles. It will also allow you to ascertain how authentic a candidate is the persona being projected.
5. Ask specific questions about identity and culture. The X’s and O’s of the game determine the ball’s movement on the court. The identity and culture of a team determine its place in history.