Put your socks on properly

Lessons from John Wooden - the scoreboard is not the point

From about fourteen to nineteen, I played a great deal of basketball. A few of us had grown up watching Michael Jordan take the NBA apart on grainy late-night highlights, and we did what devoted teenagers do: bought the oversized Chicago Bulls shirts, laced up our Reebok Pumps, Patrick Ewing reds and original Air Jordans, and toured the growing number of courts around Sheffield, challenging local kids to pickup games. We were very good. Well. We thought we were very good.

In the mid-nineties a few of us tried out for the Sheffield Sharks, to play British basketball for actual money. My friend and I made it through the trials, and for a giddy week or two a season of professional basketball seemed genuinely on the cards. Then the ex-NBA players and American college athletes turned up to the same season. I'm six foot three, which had felt tall right up until they showed up. These men were enormous, and quick, and strong, and so far beyond me at the game that it settled the matter without anyone having to say a word. I grabbed my towel and headed for the door. And that was the end of my short professional career.

But basketball has never been far away and I played semi-professionally for a few years after. One basketball related book has stayed with me across my whole working life – the one I'd hand to every manager right alongside Paul Hawken's Growing a Business – is John Wooden on Leadership.

Wooden was an American college basketball coach with a record that reads like it missed the proof reader: ten NCAA championships in twelve years, and a run of eighty-eight straight wins that no one has come near since. The trophies, though, were never quite the point – and here's the idea worth playing with. What pulled me in had nothing to do with the winning. It was his near-obsession with behaviour, teaching and process; the daily, unglamorous work that happens for months before a scoreboard ever lights up and fans start shouting.

He thought each day should be treated as a small masterpiece. Not perfect – just honest, a solid attempt to bring your best self to the work in front of you. And he judged success by a standard that still feels suprisingly radical: if his players had given everything they had, he could accept the result, win or lose. He would genuinely rather lose knowing the team had played at its absolute best than win knowing it hadn't. Sit with that for a moment, because almost nobody actually runs their working life that way.

It's an ethic that lifts cleanly out of sport and settles down in any workplace you like. Leadership, stripped right back, is mostly about creating the conditions for people to do their best work, over and over – and Wooden understood that as well as anyone. What follows are ten things I think are helpful from his writing, less as rules than as points to orientate around. I've placed them on people I've actually watched, because a lesson only ever means anything once it's got a face attached.

Firstly, let's start where Wooden started, which is with himself. He never motivated with slogans or posh posters on the wall; he embodied the standard he expected and let people watch. Actions speak louder than words and leadership leaks through behaviours whether you intend it to or not – through how you listen, how you hold yourself under pressure, how you treat the people with the least power to do anything about it. The gap between what a leader says and what a leader does is visible to everyone in the building, especially at the moments they assume it isn't. It's why the smallest things carry such immense weight: the manager who has never once made the tea has told the whole team something about themselves, and the team heard it months before the manager realised.

Consistency is the engine underneath all that, and it's far harder than it looks. A leader's moods and reactions set the emotional climate of a team, and Wooden worked deliberately at a kind of calm, even steadiness – not because feelings are a problem, but because unpredictability is expensive. I think often of a manager who ran hot and cold: warm and present in a crisis, then silent for weeks once things settled, until his people learned to read his quiet as a storm gathering. Distance only sharpens this. A one-word "fine" on a screen feels like they've just closed the door on you, and trapped your head in it too. A leader who floods the channel through a crisis with rants in caps, then vanishes in the calm manufactures anxiety where there ought to be trust. Predictability, when it's built on fairness and clarity, is one of the most generous things you can do for people. They do their best work when they know what to expect from whoever's in charge.

And beneath even consistency, Wooden put character first – ahead of talent, ahead of nearly everything. Skill you can develop; character is slower to build and slower still to repair once it's cracked and inconsistent. He prized integrity, humility and perseverance over the flashier virtues, and he was right, because those are the things that outlast every technical advantage and every change of circumstance and every bravado act built on confidence and not much else. They're also, in my experience, simply what people remember. Ask anyone about a leader they had years ago and they won't recite the decisions – they'll tell you how it felt to be around them, and whether they were fair.

Then there's the way he paid attention. Wooden was a permanent student of the game, forever watching and adjusting, noticing where one player needed a quiet word and where the whole team was starting to come apart. That kind of alertness is most of the job of management and leadership – noticing.

I once sat in a meeting beside a woman who closed her laptop about forty seconds in and murmured, "this one's already decided — we're just here for the paperwork." She was right; the real decision had been made days earlier, in a corridor. She wasn't psychic. She'd simply been paying attention for longer than the rest of us. Leaders who catch the friction early, who feel the change in a team's energy, who widen their awareness before it ever reaches the numbers on the dashboard, are doing at work what Wooden did on the court.

He also, at heart, thought of himself as a teacher rather than a manager – and this is the one I'd underline twice, or dip it in highlighter fluid. Leadership and management isn't about holding all the answers; it's about helping other people grow – a find their own answers. Teaching sharpens your own thinking as much as anyone's, because explaining a thing out loud exposes, at speed, every place your understanding was lighter than you'd hoped. It's the same loop that sits at the end of any decent learning system – you capture, you test, and then you contribute what you've learned by handing it on. Wooden lived in that loop his whole career, which is why his real output was never wins. It was more good coaches.

His teaching, famously, began with socks. On the first day of a new season he would show his players – grown, gifted college athletes – how to put their socks on properly, smoothing out the wrinkles that cause the blisters that cost you practice time and sent you to the physio. The socks were never the point. The point was that fundamentals of basics compound, and that nobody is ever too good for the basics. At work the fundamentals are less charming but no less decisive: clear communication, sound process, kindness, respect, doing what you say you will. It's mastery of the dull, simple things that buys you the space and time to be excellent at the hard ones.

For all that, Wooden never believed greatness was reserved for the stars. He thought it was available to anyone, in any role – not by beating the person beside you, but through effort spent in service of something shared. In practice that means shaping the work so people can bring their real strengths to it, and holding the bar high enough that clearing it feels like it mattered. Greatness wasn't rationed to the talented few. It's cultivated daily, right across a team with each person using their strengths, and mitigating other's weaknesses. Team spirit for the win.

And teams, he knew, are made rather than bought. Talent alone wins nothing, so he poured himself into relationships, trust and shared responsibility, understanding that chemistry and team spirit is never an accident. It doesn't arrive on an away-day with a branded lanyard, some logs, a treasure hunt and a reluctant trust-fall. It's built in the ordinary moments in the work itself, over a long time – which is, not coincidentally, exactly where momentum and real change get built too. The good stuff nearly always happens in the unglamorous middle of the mess of turning ideas into something valuable.

He prepared his teams for difficulty as a matter of course, training them to expect adversity rather than flinch at it, to treat a hard game as part of the work and not an interruption to it. Oh how that one travels well: build a little resilience into how you operate, treat problems as information rather than threats, and make sure the first time a team meets real pressure isn't the first time it's thought about what to do. Preparedness rarely makes a day go to plan – nothing does – but it lets you keep hold of the thread to value when it doesn't.

And in the end, the thing Wooden cared about most was the thing that outlasted him. His legacy was never the eighty-eight straight wins; it was the people – the players and assistants who carried his thinking into their own teams and their own lives long after he'd stepped away. That's the truest test of leadership I know, and the most demanding: not what happens while you're in the room, but what keeps happening once you've left it. If the whole thing wobbles the moment you step back, you haven't really led it yet. The job was always to leave people more capable, more clear, and more themselves than you found them.

Which brings me back to a Sheffield basketball court and a teenager in an oversized Bulls shirt and Reebok Pumps, who was quite certain he was great. He wasn't – the ex-NBA players settled that quite quickly. But the thing I actually took from the game, years later and by way of a coach I never met, is that the scoreboard was never really the point. Leadership isn't performative; it's cumulative. It's built daily, out of behaviour and consistency and teaching and care – out of choosing people and process, designing the right climate, putting character above applause, and out of the daily discipline of bringing your best self to the work. Not because it guarantees the win. Because it's the only right way to go after one.

We get better, mostly, by learning from the people who walked the path a little ahead of us, and then applying what they knew with some patience, some humility, and a bit of intent. That, in the end, might be the whole lesson here. And happily, you don't need to be six foot three to apply it.