One of the Center for Compassionate Leadership’s perspectives is that “Opportunities to lead abound in all arenas of life. We all have opportunities to lead.” A corollary to this principle is that compassionate leadership can be found in all settings. The National Basketball Association (NBA), the North America-based professional sports league, has shown that even within the hyper-competitive world of professional sports, they can be an impressive practitioner of compassionate leadership.
Compassionate Leaders Stay Aware and Empathetic During Times of Stress
On March 11, the NBA suspended play for the season due to the risks presented by the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. The NBA’s bold decision preceded any of the other professional sports leagues in North America, and led the way to a cascade of similar suspensions in its wake. The risk in taking a move like this cannot be understated. The NBA generated nearly $9 billion in revenue in its 2018-19 season. The economic cost of suspending operations would be enormous. If the decision to halt play turned out to be incorrect, the consequences for League commissioner Adam Silver could have been catastrophic.
In a recent Harvard Business Review article professors Michaela Kerrissey and Amy Edmondson highlighted the responses of the NBA and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden in the face of the early stage risks presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. They point out that in periods of uncertainty, the human instinct is to narrow one’s vision and hunker down until the situation becomes clearer. The NBA moved in the opposite direction and acted decisively. On average, 130,000 fans attend NBA games each day during the regular season. The NBA’s decisive action meant that an enormous number of people avoided the risk of exposure to COVID-19 at the time when infections were ramping up.
It would have been easy to look at the financial cost of shutting down the NBA and wait until the decision was unavoidable. But what the NBA did was exhibit compassionate leadership, described clearly by Kerrissey and Edmondson, “Leadership in an uncertain, fast-moving crisis means making oneself available to feel what it is like to be in another’s shoes — to lead with empathy.”
Compassionate Leaders Don’t Get Boxed In by Zero-Sum Thinking
A chance meeting between two NBA coaches led to an unexpected display of compassionate leadership. Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra ran into Utah Jazz coach Quin Snyder in the lobby of their hotel, and the result of the meeting was that the two teams discussed how they could cooperate in an upcoming exhibition game to support progress on specific aspects of the other team’s preparation.
All too often, leaders view the world as a zero-sum game, and nowhere is that more likely to be the case than in a major professional sports league. Only one team can win each game. At the end of the season, only one team can be crowned champion. This can easily lead to a very strong “for me to win, you must lose” mentality. This mindset isn’t limited to sports. It’s woven throughout the for-profit corporate world and can be found widely in the non-profit world where organizations often compete for funding and for customers.
What Spoelstra and Snyder showed was that there can also be win-win situations; situations that you might not spot if you are thinking in a zero-sum way. Spoelstra acknowledged that he had never collaborated with an opposing team like this before. In the case at hand, the two teams have almost no chance of meeting again against each other this season, so there was no reason not to help each other out. But they couldn’t have taken advantage of the opportunity without the mentality of a compassionate leader.
Compassionate Leaders Recognize the Value of Diversity
There is a false choice that frequently is presented around the challenge of promoting diversity in the workplace, “Do I hire the best talent, or do I hire for diversity?” Behind this question is an insidious and flawed implication, which is that the best talent isn’t diverse. Becky Hammon is the first female full-time assistant coach in any of the four major North American professional sports leagues. When she was hired in 2014 by the San Antonio Spurs, head coach Gregg Popovich was adamant that she was hired because he thought she would help make the team the most competitive. Her hiring was historic, and it was a breakthrough for women.
Since then, her career has been nurtured to groom her to eventually become a head coach. In 2015, she was given the head coaching responsibility of the Spurs Summer League team, leading that team to the League Title. Just last week, Popovich designated Hammon as the Spurs head coach and he served as one of her assistant coaches in their first exhibition game preceding the resumption of the 2020 NBA regular season.
The evidence is clear that diverse talent benefits organizations, but that talent won’t be found or developed using old means of operating. Compassionate leaders recognize that the experiences of diverse individuals may be different, and they aren’t afraid to adapt the organization in order to create the richness of diversity.