Changing the Game
Over the last few months of isolation and doom scrolling, there have been moments of inspiration that have broken through the clouds of despair and given people reason to hope.
We’ve seen people do right by one another. Go the extra mile for their employees or communities. Stand their ground. Speak up.
When so much feels as though it’s going off the rails, it’s more important than ever to look at those who are steering in the right direction, their hands planted firmly on the wheel.
For me, few organizations have risen to the occasion like the World Champion Toronto Raptors.
Leadership is often discussed in its component parts: executive behaviour, results and revenue, employee development, brand engagement, marketing savvy. The Raptors are leading on every front simultaneously, and have seemingly infused their entire organization with a commitment to boldness, intelligence and compassion that is making them great on and off the court. And people love them for it.
In the past few weeks alone, the team has put up an endless barrage of leadership Ws. Raptors President Masai Ujiri and GM Bobby Webster are the only team execs to be inside the Bubble: a strong message of solidarity and support for their players. The team rolled into Disney with Black Lives Matter on the side of their buses, setting the tone for the NBA to use its return to play as a platform for change. Kyle Lowry and Fred Van Vleet have both posted record games, one through balls-out tenaciousness, the other through rock steady smarts. Team members have committed to bringing interview questions back to Breonna Taylor and the myriad injustices being committed against Black communities, politely refusing to let stand the suggestion that racism is confined by US borders.
There are months to go before we know if the Raps will take another championship (Reader: they will) but regardless of who holds the Larry O’B, the team has already shown that leaders always win.
Lessons learned
You can’t feign leadership with empty or stand-alone gestures, nor can you rely on a couple of star players to pull you through. The best organizations weave leadership through every facet of their approach, invest in a foundation of good, smart, motivated people and encourage them all to be champions.
Success Metrics
2018-2019 World Champions.
4th most popular team merchandise despite having 0 of top 15 player jerseys.
10th most valuable NBA franchise, with their value rising 25%, from $1.675 billion a year ago to $2.1 billion this year following their first NBA championship.
Clinched the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference with a 50-19 season and a Sunday 108-99 win over the Memphis Grizzlies.
Coach of the Year: Nick Nurse (come on, it’s inevitable).
Showing Balls
The Raps aren’t the only ones using fashion as part of their approach to making bold statements. Our Instagram Age has amplified the impact that images can make in raising awareness and making a strong point without saying a word, and two examples of T-shirt diplomacy stand out this week.
WNBA players for the Atlanta Dream showed up to their game last Tuesday wearing Vote Warnock tees, promoting the politician running against one of their team’s owners: Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, who publicly denounced BLM.
In Poland, a group of MPs showed up in rainbow clothes and masks at the swearing in of President Andrzej Duda, who had stated during his campaign that the promotion of LGBTQ rights was “an ideology more harmful than communism.”
Lessons learned
You can make a statement by wearing leadership on your sleeve. Whether you’re on stage, on line or on Zoom, think about how to use imagery to send a message to your audience.
Defining Leadership
I sat through an executive search once where a personality test was used to suggest that the two female candidates did not exhibit the tenets of leadership, despite already being leaders in the organization. When asked what those tenets were, the recruiter explained that leaders are motivated by ego and personal achievement, and rely on instinct and experience rather than consensus building. This bullshit take has been effectively challenged by the performance of female world leaders and their effective handling of the global pandemic, as documented through a new study by the World Economic Forum.
To see how female leaders performed in the containment of coronavirus, Economists from the University of Liverpool and the University of Reading “matched” female-led countries with their closest neighbour based on socio-demographic and economic characteristics.
“Nearest neighbour analysis clearly confirms that when women-led countries are compared to countries similar to them along a range of characteristics, they have performed better, experiencing fewer cases as well as fewer deaths,” the study’s authors declared. “This is true whether we consider the nearest neighbour … or even five neighbours.”
The authors concluded the world would be better off if more leaders exhibited what we have been trained to think of as “female behaviours,” in these cases characterized by early response to mitigate risk and the acceptance of expert guidance.
Lesson learned
Leadership shouldn’t be seen as gendered, but it’s time to rethink the behaviours we associate with power and accomplishment, and dig into the question of what has actually worked when we’re elevating people to positions of power.
Dereliction of Duty
Continuing the Big Tech approach of punishing employees who challenge corporate behaviour from the inside, Facebook reportedly fired a senior engineer who collected internal evidence that showed the company was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.
Only the Brave
The best way to make news is to be interesting
The World Economic Forum profiled 21 Civil Rights Leaders who are leading the way in the wake of John Lewis’s death.
In her new podcast, Michelle Obama articulated her own struggles with mental health during the pandemic, accentuated by racial injustice and the ongoing failures of the current US administration.
Filmmaker Bryan Buckley introduced the Trump Statue Initiative to critique the US President through live monuments created by actors. The first “statue” used actors to depict federal law enforcement officers pulling a Black Lives Matter protester into an unmarked van while the President takes a selfie.
New York Attorney General Letitia James announced she will attempt to dissolve the National Rifle Association, accusing its senior leadership of violating laws governing non-profit groups, using millions from the organization's reserves for personal use and tax fraud. Weird, cause they seemed like such good guys.
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