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In lockdown, inspiring sports leaders have become huge hits on television. Series such as last year’s Cheer, about a Texas college cheerleading team led by Monica Aldama, a nurturing coach with an MBA, are great viewing.
More than that, though, these series offer something useful we can take into our lives and work. And the best example yet is a new incarnation of the Netflix reality show franchise Last Chance U, created by the same team as Cheer. The action has moved on from the previous five series, which were set among American football teams. This time we follow John Mosley, coach of the East Los Angeles College Huskies, a junior college basketball team, over the 2019-20 season.Â
Mosley, the first African-American coach to feature in the series, is a former college and professional basketball player. He is also a man on a mission, his Christian faith central to his coaching ethos. Mosley wants to secure the California state championship, and to redeem young lives through sport.
His methods are firm, fair and consistent. It’s great television, and while the parallels between sport and business are well-trodden, the elevation of positive management examples such as Mosley has taken a long time to become mainstream.
Cath Bishop, an Olympic silver medal winning rower, is now a leadership development coach and the author of The Long Win, a book on how to help organisations succeed. Her work shows that collaboration and co-operation works far more effectively than competition: “Both sport and business have traditionally had a rather macho narrative, but if you want good decision-making and high performance over the longer term, then it’s not sustainable to work on the basis of fear.â€Â
The Last Chance U franchise delves into the world of junior college programmes. These are a refuge for those with talent, but perhaps lacking the grades, the work ethic, or the composure to make it as a college star at what are known as “Division One†schools, from which future NBA or NFL stars are plucked.
While the aggressive style of the American football coaches of the show’s first few seasons often got results on the field, it came at the expense of the welfare of the players. There was an uneasy sense that the system we saw — often majority white colleges in small towns which offered scholarships and a shot at the big time — was exploitative, leaving the teams, overwhelmingly made up of black players, burnt out mentally and physically.
It’s not that Mosley isn’t as hard a taskmaster. He is full of bluster — excuses are, he says, “tools in which incompetent individuals build monuments of nothing†— and makes the team train relentlessly. What sets him apart is his ability to instil a sense of purpose.Â
This is not the world of The Last Dance, the Netflix series about Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls team that dominated the NBA in the mid-nineties. There is no glamour in East LA, just a windowless court with bright lighting. Yet by understanding what makes each player tick, Mosley makes them all buy into his vision and put together a record-breaking winning streak.
When it looks like Joe Hampton, possibly the best player and certainly the moodiest, will go off the rails, Mosley stands by him, saying too often energy is put in the game, and not the players. “They need love the most when they deserve it the least,†he says. As the season ends, Hampton tells us all he needed “was someone to stay with meâ€.Â
It’s a technique that translates well into management. “You need to mix being a benevolent guardian with a ruthless streak,†says Rob Goffee, co-author of Clever, which deals with how best to manage gifted employees. “Talented people can be flawed and difficult, you need to show you understand them, while balancing that affinity with discipline.â€Â
Businesses have long looked to the likes of former football manager Sir Alex Ferguson to show them what it takes to achieve greatness. But winning on the pitch requires more than the angry reprimand — the “hairdryer treatment†for which the Manchester United legend was well known. Mosley shows it needs humanity off it, too.
As Bishop says: “The pursuit of gold medals left a lot of elite athletes without balance. In sport there is now more of an understanding that winning without meaning doesn’t feel like winning at all,†she says. That shift is coming to business: “Some banks and law firms are increasingly aware that they need to have more of a sense of purpose too and that making people work long hours without it is going to lead to problems in attracting and retaining talent.â€Â
Mosley’s coaching makes his team better players — all of them secure offers, many from top schools. And, whether they make it in basketball or not, his compassion will stay with them for life.
Andrew Hill returns next week
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