Tag Archives: Lessons from Pro Sports

Leadership Lessons from the NBA – When Bold Moves are Required, Leaders Don’t Care About Popularity

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Leadership Lessons from the NBA – The Surprisingly Aware Richard Jefferson

Weeks after being acquired by the San Antonio Spurs, star NBA forward Richard Jefferson was scheduled to marry his redundantly named fiancé, Kesha Ni’Cole Nichols, last Saturday. As you’ve likely heard, Jefferson, late of the New Jersey Nets, got cold feet and called the wedding off just hours before he was scheduled to become Mr. Ni’Cole Nichols.




While most in the blogosphere have lined up to crucify Jefferson for his last minute email to Nichols calling off the nuptials, the editors of AskTheManager.com believe he showed great leadership in recognizing a bad decision and rectifying it before it was too late. (Of course, there are reports he spent more than $2 million on the wedding that never happened, so we’re not entirely sure he couldn’t have made the decision a few weeks earlier.)

Leaders Make Decisive Moves

While Jefferson spent more than $2 million on the ceremony, he likely saved himself millions more by avoiding the inevitable divorce from KNN. Many have called him a coward, though we call him bold.

A coward, you see, wouldn’t want to face his fiancé, her family, his family, their friends and the rest of the world with the embarrassing news that he made a bad decision in asking her to marry him. A coward, you see, would live with his bad decision and compound it with more and more bad decisions for the rest of his life. Leaders are bold enough and comfortable enough with their own abilities to say “I screwed up, and this is how I’m going to fix it.”

Leaders Do What’s Right

The popular move for Jefferson would have been to go through with the wedding and make the best of a bad marriage. Certainly millions of others before him have done just that. Jefferson, for whatever reason, stepped up and did what was right – that’s what leaders do. Leaders care about popularity only when it doesn’t get in the way of what is right, and marrying someone you just don’t love isn’t right.

Leadership Lessons from Fantasy Football

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Leadership Lessons from Fantasy Football

Tonight kicks off another season of NFL Football. To many, this is the most anticipated day of the year – especially to the millions of fantasy football players.

The editors of AskTheManager are fantasy football fanatics and we spent most of our draft last week discussing how fantasy football intersects with management and leadership.

Not surprisingly, we found correlation between a top fantasy football manager and great leadership and management skills.

The Fantasy Football Draft

While there are plenty of fantasy football cheat sheets available to the fantasy player, those who do the best in their league’s draft conduct an inordinate amount of research to fill their team with the very best players using the lowest possible draft pick.

Peyton Manning, LaDainian Tomlinson and others of their fantasy prowess are no-brainers and are gone in the first two rounds. Anyone can pick these guys. Only someone committed to total world domination is going to take the time to choose Justin Gage, Matt Forte or Steve Slaton in the later rounds.

While those who aren’t willing to commit to the research will choose players past their prime, like Edgerrin James, true leaders balance the right amount of investigation into each decision – and they smoke everyone else on draft day.

The First Game

The NFL is quirky in the first few weeks of the season. The problem, as it were, is that every team feels like they’re going to win the Super Bowl. This brings out some amazing performances from the most unexpected players.

To pick the right players for your first game in fantasy football requires more instinct and moxie than any other week. Often in the fantasy leagues, you see those who ultimately finish near the bottom winning in the first week.

Firm decision making – avoiding any second guesses – delivers victories in week one to the true leaders.




Week After Week

Fantasy football takes commitment. Commitment is something that separates the leaders from the laggards.

The week after week grind brings out the strong management skills and true leadership decision making in the best fantasy players. Setting your weekly lineup, reviewing the available free agents, using your waivers sparingly and understanding that the teams your players face in a given week have as much to do with their success as their own talent takes strategy and a certain acumen not found in the laggards.

Leaders really excel during the week after week grind, because they bring commitment and a desire to be the best.

The Trades

Throughout the season, fantasy players are faced with the possibility of trading players to other fantasy players. Knowing when you can get the most for a superstar and when you can pay the least for an up-and-comer is key.

Leaders who understand negotiation always make great trades. They understand win-win. A negotiation that ends in win-lose or lose-lose is a failed negotiation. Leaders live this.

Making certain you get the best of a trade is not as important to true leaders as ensuring that they helped their chances to win by making the trade. True leaders will give up a great fantasy tight end in week two, for example – if they’re stacked with two tight ends – in order to fill a running back void in the twelfth week of the season. Their decisions are made with the goal in mind – and they always focus on the goal.

The Playoffs

All good fantasy leagues have a playoff. Generally, these playoffs occur during the last few weeks of the regular NFL season. Great fantasy players manage their rosters for playoff success throughout the season.

Why can’t you just stick with the great players that got you to the playoffs? Sometimes, you can. More often than not, NFL teams will rest great players if they’ve locked up a playoff spot. Additionally, NFL coaches use late season games to test some of their bench players – hopeful that these players will be useful in the NFL playoffs. Fantasy football leaders might mix in some second-stringers to aid their march through the fantasy playoffs.

The strategic and tactical maneuvers employed by great leaders during the final few weeks of the fantasy season are sometimes beautiful. You can tell in the first week of fantasy playoffs who the strategic thinkers are and who will go home without a trophy. Leaders always cash in their fantasy leagues… and TheManager always cashes!