An important preamble to this piece is that I know very little about basketball. This is my first season following the NBA playoffs, and the last (and only time) I tried playing basketball, I twisted my ankle and had to wear a cast for 3 weeks (yep).

If you are wondering why I am writing about this, it’s simple: my husband is a big basketball fan and this season he enrolled me into watching the playoffs with him. The games are typically at 5am my time and so in my (many) extra waking hours I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on the similarities between managing an NBA franchise and managing an agency. 

It turns out that there is a lot to learn, especially from a team as unique as the Bay Area’s Golden State Warriors (they just qualified for the finals in a brilliant series against Dallas). 

Many of the NBA teams are brimming with politics, internal rivalries, egoistic leaders, cut-throat cultures – things that are just as common in corporate organizations and agencies. 

Yet somehow, the Golden State Warriors have set a completely different path for themselves, one that set them up to become team of the Decade, reach 6 finals and win three Championships. They are the new NBA dynasty in the making and on good track to win another title this year (fingers crossed). And they are doing all this while giving birth to a new way to play basketball and a new way to manage an NBA team.

Let’s look at the type of culture and leadership that makes this team truly unique and what agencies can learn from it.

Lesson 1: Create a culture that embraces change and risks

Unlike the Lakers and the Celtics, this is not a team that comes from a pedigree of champions dating several decades – for a long time they were last or second-to-last every season. 

The new path for the team started in 2010 when Peter Gruber and Joe Lacob led on a bid to purchase the franchise. They were executives with a background in business, communication and entertainment and they wanted to bring best practices from the corporate world to basketball, instilling a culture that supported risk, accepted failure and embraced uncertainty. Along with Bob Myers, their General Manager, they turned around this failing franchise, making unusual (and often contested) decisions. 

One of those, was the risky move of hiring Steve Kerr as a coach even though he had no prior experience as Head Coach. They hired him because he had a different vision of how basketball could be played as a team and they believed it would be transformational. When the news of his hire came out, the sports media went berserk and even the players thought that the appointment was “weird”. This was just one of many unusual choices they made over the years. 

This culture of experimenting, taking risks, trying things beyond industry norms is even more essential for agencies. Big challenges face our industry – from creating models with higher profit margins to ways to stay attractive to top talent, all of which cannot be achieved through incremental solutions only and all of which requires fresh ways of thinking. 

Lesson 2: Get smart people and trust them

The Warriors’ approach to selecting new players is also different. They draft players for their potential and their intelligence rather than only based on the traditional physical archetypes and statistics that dominate NBA recruitment. They look for huge untapped potential rather than limited proven results. 

Peter Guber says: “Resiliency, perseverance, optimism, creativity and flexibility are the qualities that are paramount over successes, past titles, and pretty resumes. Finding these characteristics gives me the confidence that this leader will likely exponentially grow and support the organization in sustaining its competitive advantage.”

Several All-Star players like Stephen Curry, Clay Thompson and Draymond Green came from the Warriors betting on homegrown talent. 

The way that the Warriors give players space to grow has allowed them to transform the performance of players who were considered failures in other teams  by making them shine once they joined Golden States. 

They now have one of the deepest benches in the League with so many talented players for each positions that it is almost an unfair advantage and this has certainly been a primary catalyst for their success this season. 

For agencies, talent is a critical part of the value proposition and an agency that can turn its environment into a forge where stars are made – like Golden State did – would be at a massive advantage.

Lesson 3: Keep hubris at bay (no pun intended) 

A basketball team, just like an agency, is about managing a collection of talented individuals. When there’s talent, egos can easily take over and it creates an environment filled with entitlement and self-serving behaviors. This is embodied by the All-Star player who takes all the shots himself and thinks everyone else is there to serve him. Or the agency leader who gives his best work only when there’s the chance for an award with his name on it. 

Bob Meyers, the General Manager for the Warriors, often uses this quote: “It is amazing how much can be accomplished if no one cares who gets the credit.”

At Golden State, selflessness and sacrifice are values observable in every game. Endlessly you see the players – whether they are scoring stars or ambitious rookies – decide to make a pass and create a better opportunity for a teammate rather than take the chance to shoot and increase their own scorecard. 

This is based on a dramatic cultural difference between the Warriors and other teams. 

In most NBA franchises, the star player is seen and treated as a demi-god, venerated by fans, given special treatment by coaches, obeyed (often reluctantly) by his teammates. In the Warriors culture, everyone is encouraged to not take themselves too seriously and that makes the team dynamics both healthier and more enjoyable for everyone involved. It also allows genuine connections to develop between the players instead of just power hierarchies. Sports Illustrated declared that the Warriors have “a degree of genuine chemistry and camaraderie rarely seen, or shared, in the modern NBA.”

Lesson 4: Get leaders with a growth mindset

Who hasn’t had a boss who promoted a “do what I say not what I do”? This attitude gets even more common the higher you look on the ladder of success. 

At Golden State, if anyone is in a position to think that he’s made it and he doesn’t need to put as much work, it is Stephen Curry. He was after all voted the NBA’s “Most Valuable Player” twice – once the only time in history it was unanimous among the several dozens of voters (NBA’s coaches and GM’s as well as specialized media representatives); and he already owns the NBA record in 3-pointers – so he has nothing left to prove. 

And yet he’s also the hardest working player of the Warriors. His workouts and pre-game rituals have become legendary. On a regular day, he takes another 300 to 500 shots after each training session, while his teammates take a hot shower. 

Still, he does not rage at other players or bully them at practice, instead setting the example and celebrating other players when their own efforts pay out.

Seeing day in, day out, your biggest star working this hard to get better will motivate anyone. 

Imagine when the most senior designer, strategist or writer in a team is constantly working on his/her skills, instead of cruising based on existing knowledge or status. It sets the tone for everyone and inspires the entire team to get better. The opposite is also true, and complacency is the first step to irrelevance. 

Lesson 5: Orchestrate the game 

The Warriors are what you call a “small ball line-up” – essentially they are built to stay mobile and for agility, while many NBA teams invest in big, less mobile players who have more limited if strategic roles.

This means that while every Golden State player has specific areas of expertise, all work at being versatile and all play a role in both offense and defense. No one says: “this is not my job”.

Beyond having the right talent and developing more holistic skills, the Warriors haveplayers like Stephen Curry or Draymond Green who have such an intelligence of the game that they are the conductors to the team’s moves, making sure that everyone is in the right place and can play to their strengths. These orchestrators lead from the front with Curry being the offensive spark spearheading the team’s attacks and Green being ready to plug the holes and do whatever it takes to make the defense hold. 

Similarly, in agencies – as the complexity of ecosystems, technologies, touchpoints, audiences and messages increases – it is a must to have those orchestrators who speak fluently the different languages, can see the big picture, translate the ask for the different experts involved and then assemble the moving parts into a cohesive and impactful narrative. This is how the sum becomes bigger than its parts. 

Lesson 6: Protect the joy (because a lot of it is not fun)

You might think (especially if you don’t watch basketball) that players who make it to the top and join NBA teams must love what they do – after all they followed their passion and succeeded (and they make big money!). 

But the reality is that the training routine is hard, the media pressure is crushing, the stress to perform is relentless, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Then there’s social media comments, trades where you don’t get a say, fighting for playing time, the unknown expiry date, the omnipresent risk of injuries; and when they happen the painful months of rehab. 

Making any job fun is not easy but that is what Steve Kerr, Golden State’s coach, does. 

This is anchored in the type of game that the team plays. For many teams in the NBA, their strategy can be summarized as: throw the ball to the superstar and get out of the way. 

At the Warriors, everyone is involved, the ball gets passed around until it finds a team member who is in the ideal position to shoot. This way of playing is inclusive of all the players, and so it is more fun as everyone gets to shoot and be part of the success (it also has the benefit of making their offense harder to defend against).  

This more than anything else defines the Golden State’s way for me – it’s a team who enjoys playing together and it shows. 

Agency life is often looked at by people in other industries as endlessly fun. But of course, the reality is that like professional basketball (and any job really) it is also hard and relentless, somaking sure that everyone feels engaged and finds the joy in the work is truly essential. 

Lesson 7: Make compassion a critical skill 

We’ve seen that the Warriors ask a lot of their players – passion, commitment, selflessness but they are also aware of the sacrifices it takes, the pressure, the amount of adversity. Compassion helps to make it easier because the players know that they are not alone in this, that they are understood and supported. 

Just watching a game with this team, you can easily see the connection between the teammates, celebrating shots with high fives or giving a helping hand to a fallen player. But it is more than great chemistry, it is about being there and supportive even when it would be easier to be mad because someone missed an easy shot. 

You see the compassion in the face of expectations and of mistakes; for instance, when the superstars like Curry, Klay or Green give a high-five to a rookie team member who just made a crucial mistake. 

The light-hearted culture, the sense of humour and the playful attitude make it easier to feel connected to and support one another. 

During these playoffs, we’ve seen Golden State again and again retake the lead and win a game after being behind by 10 or even 20 points. I truly believe that this sense of security and assurance in their team allows the players to not doubt themselves and instead stay focused on the task at hand during those moments of crisis. This resilience is just as valuable in the demanding environments of agencies and we should do more to cultivate the empathetic culture that makes it possible. 

If you follow basketball or have watched popular shows on basketball like “The Last Dance” or “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” (both of which I recommend), you know that teams like the 80’s Los Angeles Lakers or the 90’s Chicago Bulls were built on values very different from today’s Warriors but still have had incredible successes. So why does it matter then? Isn’t there as much to learn from those other teams? I would argue that no there isn’t, and this for two reasons. 

First, today’s talent has different aspirations. They are not ready to put up with dysfunctional, cutthroat, self-serving cultures. Agencies who want to attract and retain the best talent should make sure their leadership style is aligned with progressive models like the Warriors rather than dated ones. And it matters even more for agencies, as NBA teams can count on the NBA Draft, lotteries, trades and multiyear contracts to nurture their talent pool, meanwhile agencies must convince top talent to join them while contending with what other agencies, tech firms, consultancies and start ups offer.

Secondly, it is not easy to create enduring success. The Lakers after winning 5 championships in the 80s were out of contention for almost a decade.  Meanwhile, the Bulls are still struggling to find their way back to the top since Michael Jordan left in 1999. These teams were built on a handful of star players and when they retired, all that was left is a black hole. Meanwhile, the Warriors are enjoying continued success with their core nucleus of proven stars but they are also building for the future with the next generation of players. And they can do that because their stars allow others space to shine. And so, following the Warriors example is also a way to future-proof an agency’s talent pipeline and thus its success. 

If you want to see the Golden States Warriors in action, the final series against the Boston Celtics is starting on Thursday 2nd (Friday 3rd early morning in the UAE). 

PS: Thank you to my official NBA expert (also voted best husband) for editing this piece. His predictions on the Finals? The Warriors winning in 5 games.