I research organizations and culture. Here's a lesson the Knicks should heed

New York Times

16 hours ago

Editor's note: This story is part of Peak, The Athletic's desk covering leadership, personal development and success through the lens of sports. Follow Peak here.
Spencer Harrison is a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and an expert on culture. He is also an NBA fan who grew up in Salt Lake City during the John Stockton-Karl Malone era of the Utah Jazz.
In March, a story about the New York Knicks caught my attention. Mikal Bridges, one of the team's starters, said he had gone to his coach, Tom Thibodeau, and asked him to ease the heavy minutes Bridges was playing.
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'Sometimes it's not fun on the body,' Bridges told The New York Post.
What interested me is what happened next. Bridges said that he and Thibodeau had spoken about his workload. But Thibodeau told reporters the two 'never had a conversation about it.'
As someone who studies the cultures of businesses and organizations, I found Thibodeau's response telling. To me, it suggested a stubbornness and unwillingness to consider other options, as if the conversation wasn't even worth having. And it reminded me of leadership and organizational issues we see in the business world.
Thibodeau is well known for playing his starters heavy minutes during the season while limiting his bench players (four of the top 10 players in total minutes played this season were Knicks). One of the criticisms leveled against him is that while his players usually play hard and he often wins during the regular season, his teams can burn out in the playoffs, and he doesn't develop a reliable bench for the postseason.
We know that Thibodeau is really passionate about basketball and a really good defensive coach who has won doing things his way. But the question with him has always been: Can he be more flexible within his system? Can he use people with different skillsets in different ways?
I thought about Thibodeau's response again this week after the Knicks fired Thibodeau, the franchise's most successful coach in years, following the team's exit from the Eastern Conference Finals. It reminded me of interesting research on how leaders can get the most out of groups and could point the way forward for the Knicks.
One of my colleagues, Pier Vittorio Mannucci, a professor at Bocconi University in Milan, did a study of the creative teams on films in the animation industry — creative teams at Pixar and Dreamworks, for example. For each film, directors had teams of animators with varying levels of expertise and experience. Some animators might know how to work with many different technologies; others might specialize in one.
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The question Mannucci wanted to answer was: What makes the most creative team? Is it the unit where you just have experts? Or is it the team with more generalists?
What Mannucci found, in his words, was that you want a team that has a bigger expertise toolkit, or people who have been exposed to different ways of doing their job. It allows them to adapt as they're working on projects, and they're better able to come up with creative solutions to problems.
The study showed that the most creative teams are able to look at the full toolkit and then utilize it, so that when you get to a point where you need an innovative new strategy, you have the capacity to develop it.
It's an easy metaphor for an NBA team. We know that sometimes you have basketball players who are specialists. There are players who are great on defense. There are sixth-man microwave scorers. And then you have other players who are hybrids; they do a lot of little things.
But do you have a leader, a coach, who can use the whole toolkit?
Using the whole toolkit is a very common problem in business. People sometimes engage in what we call 'mythological learning.' The idea is simple: I've become successful, and as I begin to get promoted, I assume that my success is based on all the choices that I have made, rather than realizing that some of the choices I made might have led me to success in part by luck.
As a result, some of the lessons that you've intuited from your success might be the wrong lessons.
The problem is that what got you there is not necessarily going to get you over the hump in the next role. And if you're not willing to second-guess or expand your learning, to actually have the conversations to explore what other ideas are available, then it's hard to see your own blind spots. This might have been a key issue for the Knicks with Thibodeau.
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Even so, in moving on from Thibodeau, the Knicks are taking a huge risk. Thibodeau was their most successful coach in decades, and their track record prior to this recent era indicates that they have struggled to find a coach capable of maximizing the toolkit of talent that's available to them. Thibodeau was able to do that, to a certain level.
To use another business example, there was a study that showed how changing leaders can go wrong. 3M was always well-known as an extremely innovative, creative organization. Prior to the 2000s, 3M always promoted CEOs from within, because the feeling was that a leader needed to understand the culture to make the organization perform well. But then 3M had a couple of years of down performance, so company leaders thought: Maybe what we need is an outsider to shake things up and get us to the next level.
They hired James McNerney, who had been groomed to possibly succeed Jack Welch at General Electric. GE is all about efficiency, cutting waste, rewarding high performance — a totally different culture than 3M. McNerney came into 3M and tried to make an innovative company more efficient, implementing all the toolkits he had learned from GE. It didn't work. After five years and minimal gains, McNerney left and 3M largely reverted to the culture it had before.
This is the trick for all organizations going through this kind of change, including the Knicks: How do we leverage the value of the gritty, hard-working culture that Thibodeau built with a new coach who's going to want to implement new things?
In business and in life, we often overvalue and trust specialists vs. generalists. But there's a key way to succeed with this kind of change.
You want to make dead sure that the next person you hire is not a system leader but a learning leader. It's a coach who should say: 'I want to learn from the players on what made this team successful, and then I'm going to focus on expanding and maximizing the toolkit.'
As told to Jayson Jenks.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Dylan Buell / Getty Images)