The Carrot Is Mightier Than The Stick

John Wooden might be the greatest craftsperson we’ve ever seen in coaching.

Wooden worked tirelessly to refine his skills over the duration of his career. But those skills were life skills; he was a teacher by trade and spent eleven years as a high school coach. He also served in World War 2 before beginning his college coaching career.

His consistent learning culminated in extraordinary achievement and acclaim, but it wasn’t until his sixteenth season at UCLA that the team won its first national championship. Wooden was 54 by that time, and had been honing his craft for 29 years when his team finally achieved the competitive excellence that he envisioned (that 1963-64 Bruins team went undefeated through the entire season).

The confluence of Wooden’s vast experience and high skill gave rise to one of the greatest juggernauts that elite sport has ever seen; ten national championships in twelve years, including a seven-year stretch where UCLA went 205-5.

And, as is required of any great craftsperson, he spent his latter years giving away all his knowledge, penning twelve books to pass on what he learned about the most difficult thing to achieve in sport: winning after winning.

Filled With Pride, Not Fear

Despite serving in the Navy and coaching through an era where fear-based motivation was prevalent, Wooden eschewed using the ‘stick’ in favour of a more skillful approach.

In his book Wooden on Leadership, Wooden uses a personal tale of being caned by his teacher at school to open his chapter on motivation. While getting a stick across the backside was a useful tool in getting young ‘Johnny’ to stop joking around in class, its impacts were short-lived.

Pride-based leadership was central to Wooden’s methodology, and his thoughtful use of ‘carrots’ rather than ‘sticks’ was a key element in UCLA’s sustained success.

He writes: “I came to the conclusion that when choosing between the carrot and the stick as a motivational tool, the well-chosen carrot was almost always more powerful and longer lasting than the stick. In fact, simply withholding a properly selected carrot can become a most forceful punishment and powerful motivator. Its denial creates desire; the carrot becomes the stick.”

Less skilled leaders resort to the over-use of conventional carrots; money, awards, statistics, status. Wooden, on the other hand, preferred to entice with the intangible. “There is perhaps no better carrot than approval from someone you truly respect, whose recognition you seek. Acknowledgment from someone you hold in high esteem is the most valuable carrot of all.”

Wooden also knew that the best person for you to seek approval from is you.

Not Knowing

Wooden wasn’t just keenly aware of how to persuade, he also demonstrated great skill at being able to dissuade.

At a fundamental level, the world works on incentives and disincentives. Human behaviour is guided by a mix of overt and covert stimuli that influence our decisions.

We have deep-seeded physiological incentives, like the drive to find food, and procreate. We have economic incentives, like tariffs on foreign products to encourage us to buy local. We even have interruptive incentives, like the impulse purchase section that urges us to buy a chocolate bar at the grocery store.

Over time, Wooden learned to use incentives to help him steer his players towards better decisions, both on the court and off it.

“When I was just starting out, I had lots of rules,” he writes. “The rules were spelled out in black and white, and so were the penalties for breaking them. When a player broke one of my rules, the punishment was automatic, enforced without discussion. And the punishment was often severe. I was very strict.”

As a high school coach, Wooden says he expelled a top player for breaking his non-smoking rule. He willingly ignored any extenuating circumstances. “At the time, I thought this was good leadership. The boy later quit school because of my actions and lost an athletic scholarship that would have helped him through college. To deprive a young man of a college education because he broke a no-smoking rule is simply inexcusable. I was too inexperienced to understand this.”

Lessons like this had Wooden move away from black-and-white rules and automatic punishments (ie. sticks). Instead, he began to favour making firm suggestions about conduct, with unspecified consequences for not taking his advice (ie. carrots).

He explains it this way: “An individual who knows exactly what the penalty is for a particular act can subconsciously measure the risk against the reward. That person may decide the risk is worth it. By keeping the specific penalty unknown, I may have kept a few individuals from making a bad choice. They couldn’t determine if the risk was worth the reward because they didn’t know what the penalty was.”

This is a subtle change, but one that only a skilled craftsperson can apply correctly.

Cody’s Notes

• It’s almost impossible to write a single blog about John Wooden’s craft. It always feel like you’re selling him short.

• I believe John Wooden to be what Dr. Suzanne Brown calls a ‘natural psychologist’; someone untrained in formal psychology, but arrives at psychology’s optimum use through observation and application rather than study.

• As teams move to process orientated and intrinsically motivated environments, we must be aware of the holdover incentives that cause misalignment. For instance, do you preach team-first behaviour but have an individual award as your pinnacle reward? (ie. MVP or top scorer)

• What other incentives (overt or covert) are there in your environment that are causing misalignment?

• Similarly, what disincentives are there in your environment that are stopping your players/staff from chasing their potential?

• One of the largest shapers of behaviour that I’ve seen is the design of your building.

• Rather than relying on strict punishments, can you more skillfully guide your players towards the behaviour you want to encourage?

• Players are often blissfully unaware about what actually motivates them. I’ve had players tell me that they want me to be harder on them, but then completely shut down when I coached them that way.

• Similarly, I’ve found psychological profiling tools to be quite poor at truly identifying what motivates high achievers — particularly given the age demographic of elite athletes.

• The best thing about psychological profiling tools is that they create conversations and standardize language. I believe, however, that you can do these two things without the tool, or labelling someone ‘red’ or ‘green’.

• Who can you acknowledge today to fill them with pride?