Coach K: In Touch With His Feminine Side

The New York Times unveiled its new quarterly sports magazine last Sunday and on the whole I think it will be a worthwhile investment of your reading time. There were a number of interesting articles, including a profile of Willie Wood by Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball. There was also a fair helping of less interesting articles, including a superficial look at Superbowl betting by the authors of Freakonomics, who really should know better.


One of the more interesting articles was a profile of Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski as a business leader and model for other business leaders. Coach K has carved out a very lucrative sideline giving speeches primarily to corporate executives on leadership. If the author's figures are accurate, Coach K is making as much from his speeches as he is being paid by Duke for coaching basketball.

Most interesting is the author's claim that his coaching and leadership is feminine. Coach K is a product of a masculine environment: all boys Catholic high school, West Point undergraduate, military, then head coach at West Point and now Duke. However, he is the only male in a household in which he and his wife raised three daughters. His leadership style is interactive not command and control, clearly relationship driven and, so contends the author, clearly based on feminine characteristics.

I don't know if I necessarily buy the indentification as masculine and feminine but I do agree with definition of interactive and command and control. All descriptions of Coach K's coaching style and relationships he has with his players that I have ever read, including this one, confirm that while he is clearly in control, he values relationships above all and seeks out opinions from everyone in the Duke family as the season wears on. That is clearly not the norm in coaching circles. Far too many coaches are total control freaks. Far too many CEOs fall into the same trap.

Today's business world is far too complex to believe that one person is capable of knowing all of the answers all of the time. A successful must keep its people engaged in the total endeavor and the only way to do that in this world is by soliciting their input and ensuring that they believe that they are a part of the process. If that is feminine management, so be it. Lose your macho at the front door and you will be a far more effective manager for it.