Positively Surprising!

As an alum of Virginia Tech, I was thrilled with the surprising Hokie run through the ACC basketball tournament last week. The entire Hokie nation was practically bursting with joy at the first ever ACC title and the first title since they won the Metro conference in 1979 (which was before I even started school there so you know it was a long time ago).

But this is a blog about positive leadership and thriving organizations, so why bring up the Hokies?

It started when I read an article written by Aaron McFarling that was reprinted in this morning’s Austin American-Statesman. If you didn’t know, the Hokies face off tomorrow against the Texas Longhorns, which the locals here take pretty seriously. Virginia Tech doesn’t come up in conversation too often around here, so our hometown paper had to find something from the Roanoke Times to help the fans here get to know their opponent.

“VT brings ACC momentum to bout with Texas” jumped out at me this morning and not because I was on my second cup of coffee. Austin has been my home for 27+ years – longer than any other home I’ve known. You can’t live in Austin and not become a Longhorns fan, unless maybe you went to A&M or (God forbid) Oklahoma. Who am I rooting for? More on that later, after the good stuff.

What really jumped out at me from the article was the picture of positive leadership and an organization that is thriving.

Since it starts with positive leadership, this paragraph stood out to me:

“[Coach Mike] Young has worked psychological wonders with this group, tapping into his inner Tony Robbins and Ted Lasso. His positivity was relentless and contagious. To him, finding success this season has always been just a matter of “when” and not “if”.”

During the ACC final against Duke, I recall one of the commentators saying much the same thing about Coach Young and his relentless positivity. And like Ted Lasso, I have to believe the positivity is genuine – it isn’t a psychological ploy to drive performance in the short run, it’s a deeply-held belief that he and his players could be better tomorrow than they were yesterday.

After VT started the conference schedule at 2-7, most everyone (including me) wrote them off. Maybe they might eke out a bid to the NIT this year if they pulled themselves together. VT’s senior star, Keve Aluma, said as much in the article by McFarling. Authentic leadership can work miracles. Authentic positivity is extremely hard to maintain when times are tough – which is one of the reasons it is so rare to find. I certainly struggled with it for my entire career.

The other paragraph that stood out to me from McFarling’s article was a quote from VT’s point guard Storm Murphy about his teammate Hunter Cattoor’s performance in the Duke game:

“I think the really, really cool thing about ‘Hunt’ is over the last month or whatnot, he hasn’t shot it so great, and he’s owned that struggle. He’s talked about that. He’s embraced it. He hasn’t hid from it. So we’ve all come around to him and continued to just tell him, my goodness, you’re the best shooter in the gym anywhere we go. So he’s believed that, and then pops off today like that.”

Cattoor is a great three-point shooter. In his career, he’s hit 42% of his threes. This season, he started out strong, shooting 48% in his first 20 games. Then he set a personal best with at Florida State by hitting 9 of 11 threes.

After that game came the struggle that Murphy mentioned. It was like he let all the air out of the balloon at Florida State. Over the next 13 games, Cattoor hit 22.5% of his threes. Murphy’s comment was a bit of an understatement – Cattoor was downright terrible during that stretch. But as Murphy alluded to, it turned around in the Duke game with Cattoor hitting 7 or 9 attempts.

During that stretch of woe, most fans probably were screaming for ‘Hunt’ to stop shooting. But his team never stopped encouraging him or believing in him. The authentic positivity of Young’s leadership had translated to the rest of the team.

But the really interesting example here is that Hunter owned his failure to perform. On many teams, poor performance is covered with excuses or blame. We’ve all seen this at work. How rare it can be for a teammate to own poor performance, talk about it openly and resolve to learn from it and get better.

It’s been widely reported that this is not a team of highly recruited show dogs. This is a team of mutts (in the case of forward Justin Mutts, that’s literal). What that also means is that it is a team based on humility that responds to Young’s leadership. After all, the core of the team was recruited by him before he left Wofford for VT.

In these tiny stories in a short article borrowed from the Roanoke Times, I see clear evidence that Young’s leadership has been built on positive practices. It drives resilience and a focus on process-driven performance over the long run. It encourages a development mentality. It drives a thriving atmosphere where the individual members serve the team before themselves. The joy the players showed when the confetti flew wasn’t just about winning – it was obvious that these teammates genuinely care about each other and their struggles together made the ending that much sweeter.

Of course, this is all me looking through a really small lens. Maybe someday I’ll get the chance to talk with Coach Young about positive leadership and thriving organizations, and I’ll be able to add some more meat to the bones of this blog.

Who am I rooting for tomorrow? That would be the team in maroon and orange – my alma mater. Though I have to say that I think this will be a close game. Texas Coach Chris Beard, in his first season here, has also assembled a team of mutts that will bring everything they got, guaranteeing that the fans will be the ones who are thriving on Friday.