John Wooden, legendary UCLA basketball coach, with 10 national championships passed away this week. There was an interesting tribute written about him in Businessweek by someone who interviewed him at a big leadership conference in front of a large crowd.
Prior to the speech, the interviewer tried to engage Coach Wooden in a conversation as kind of a warm up, but the then 97-year-old coach hardly said a thing. The interviewer assumed Wooden’s silence was due to his age, and basically went on yapping.
Yet when Wooden and the interviewer were brought to the stage, the interviewer discovered that, when he asked questions, Wooden sat up and gave long, thoughtful, insightful answers.
One of the questions the interviewer asked was about how to step into a new leadership role. Wooden replied that a new leader needs to interact with people in such a way that allows them to “command the respect of his followers.”
Wooden said, “They must know that the leader cares about them. Really cares about them. That he really cares about their families.” Listening to his former players like Bill Walton talk about their relationship with Coach Wooden, it’s obvious that this comes straight from the heart. Walton and other guys on the team had become Wooden’s dear friend.
When Coach was asked why more people weren’t better leaders, he said, “They don’t listen.” Wooden elaborated, “Listening is the best way to learn. You have to listen to those who you are supervising. I learned this from a poem I heard in grade school 90-years ago: ‘A wise old owl sat in an oak. The more he heard, the less he spoke.’”
Wooden said that instead of listening in a conversation, most people are just thinking about the next thing they are going to say. “Gulp,” the interviewer thought. “That’s what I was doing right at that moment! How did he know?”
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