Issue 718 - "2025: Cooperation: Seven Levels of Collaboration (Level Three)"


Wooden's Wisdom - Volume 13	Issue 718
Craig Impelman Speaking \| Championship Coaches \| Champion's Leadership Library Login
"2025: COOPERATION: SEVEN LEVELS OF COLLABORATION (LEVEL THREE)" John Wooden Video Clip (2 min. 2 sec.): Coach Wooden is asked: "What are your thoughts at 96 reflecting on the past and future?" You will want to share this. In John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success, one of the foundational qualities he believed was needed was cooperation. Cooperation requires collaboration. Level Three: The Placating Non-Collaborator. The placating non-collaborator will ask for input to appease the group, but in the end, they almost always act on their own ideas. Over time, this creates an unspoken culture: why speak up, nothing changes anyway? Eventually, the team stops offering suggestions. On the surface, the leader looks kind and considerate but actual collaboration never occurs. Sometimes, this happens to leaders who have had success or held their role for a long time. They slip into the "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" mindset. Coach Wooden said: "Be interested in finding the best way, not in having your own way." A perfect example came in the 1970 National Championship game. Early in the game UCLA was trailing Jacksonville, and their center, Artis Gilmore, was dominating. Coach Wooden who was seeking his fourth straight national title and sixth in seven years could have easily clung to the status quo. Instead, he listened and acted when a player, Sidney Wicks, suggested a change in defensive strategy. The team adjusted. Gilmore went 9 for 29, and UCLA won 80–69. It is important to know that Coach Wooden didn’t agree with every idea Wicks had brought him in the past. Sometimes he said no. That’s not placating, that’s discerning. But when Wicks’s idea was the best way forward, Coach acted on it. That balance—listening seriously, rejecting when necessary, and acting when right—kept collaboration alive without letting it slip into empty appeasement. Coach Wooden said "What is right is more important than who is right." Do you act on the ideas of others? Click here for personal development exercise: Issue 718. Click here for Printable Poetry: Issue 718. Yours in Coaching, Craig Impelman www.woodenswisdom.com Follow @woodenswisdom	COACH'S FAVORITE POETRY AND PROSE The Making of Friends If nobody smiled and nobody cheered and nobody helped us along, If each every minute looked after himself and good things all went to the strong, If nobody cared just a little for you, and nobody thought about me, And we stood all alone to the battle of life, what a dreary old world it would be! If there were no such a thing as a flag in the sky as a symbol of comradeship here, If we lived as the animals live in the woods, with nothing held sacred or dear, And selfishness ruled us from birth to the end, and never a neighbor had we, And never we gave to another in need, what a dreary old world it would be! Oh, if we were rich as the richest on earth and strong as the strongest that lives, Yet never we knew the delight and the charm of the smile which the other man gives, If kindness were never a part of ourselves, though we owned all the land we could see, And friendship meant nothing at all to us here, what a dreary old world it would be! Life is sweet just because of the friends we have made and the things which in common we share; We want to live on not because of ourselves, but because of the people who care; It's giving and doing for somebody else- on that all life's splendor depends, And the joy of this world, when you've summed it all up, is found in the making of friends. Edgar Albert Guest (1881-1959)
For more information visit www.woodenswisdom.com

Issue 718 - "2025: Cooperation: Seven Levels of Collaboration (Level Three)"

Level Three: The Placating Non-Collaborator.