Bobby Knight Style Employee Motivation

For those of you under a certain age, Bobby Knight was a legendary, controversial, and very winning basketball coach.  He is best known for throwing a chair across a basketball court and getting ejected.  Did the stunt fire up his team?  Damn right it did.  He threw histrionics, got into the face of his players and seemed emotionally unhinged most of the time.

But this style of coaching is a form of play-acting.  The emotions are real and raw, but it is a performance calculated to push a team or the people you are leading to an emotional edge, and from that edge get everyone motivated, or get a different perspective of things.

This style of management and coaching is pretty much dead in the US as it won't really work with snowflakes and the fragile millennials swamping the system.  Today's millennials are all like Peggy here in this clip, who just want a pat on the head.  For those of you not familiar with the show Mad Men, this is Peggy's manager Don going over the emotional edge trying to get Peggy to accept business life as it is, not as a play-date with participation trophies and thank-yous.  But both the lesson and the coaching style are lost on her.

 

 

I'm old enough to have witnessed this style a couple of times.  Back when I had football coaches, I was at a halftime team meeting when the coach hit a wall saying we were messing things up, then pointed into the locker room and said "You're smiling, this isn't funny!".  Everyone froze wondering who was laughing at the coach, then he went totally off the rails ranting on how this was another example of us not taking it seriously, to the point it was sort of scary seeing that much anger.  We were all shaken, full of adrenaline and fired up after that, then went out and kicked butt in the second half.  Later everyone on the team talked about it and we decided no one was smiling - it was all an act to fire everyone up.

I also have seen this technique in the business world, more recently, but with a very powerful CEO of a public tech company, so maybe this style does exist in small pockets very high up in high-performing companies.

In this case I was in a senior meeting with my boss, CEO of a small tech company, and he pretty much started lying about what our company's technology could do.  I sort of sat there sort of quietly gasping, but this other CEO knew bullshit when he heard it and started leading my CEO down a path of questioning, and with each bullshit answer this CEO kept going louder and louder with each succeeding question until he was yelling at the top of his lungs.  I did not see this a true anger, but actually thought this guy was actually trying to help my CEO by going through an object lesson, a sort of play-acting.

But my CEO wasn't getting it, not because he was a snowflake and upset, but because he was literally oblivious to the lesson.  He basically shrugged it off and didn't take anything away from the encounter as if lying about tech is just what you did and if people got angry, so what.

So like Don is finding in this clip, this is an old technique that maybe has a very limited place in sports coaching, but less and less effective in the business world.