Kobe Bryant was a basketball legend, a LA Lakers hero and someone known for being hyper-driven. If you have ever seen Kobe play, you would have seen it from training, pre-game, during the game, to post-match press conferences and leaving the arena.
In one of my favourite leadership and management books; Eleven Rings, Phil Jackson former LA Lakers coach discussed how challenging it can be having such a brilliant and driven player, especially when he and the other star Shaquille O’Neal just didn’t get on for a number of seasons.
Being driven can be seen as a negative, however, the best colleagues and managers in my twenty-year career have been driven, had their own style of rules and deliberate in their steps.
Kobe was driven to be the best and is well know for having had ten rules he followed. This is similar to having shared team principles, the drivers of your team, department or company.
It is rare we see this sort of insight from the elite professional players.
Kobe Bryant’s 10 Rules Were:
- Get better every single day
- Prove them wrong
- Work on your weaknesses
- Execute what you practised
- Learn from greatness
- Learn from wins and losses
- Practice mindfulness
- Be ambitious
- Believe in your team
- Learn storytelling
My personal favourite is: Learn from wins and losses.
As a huge believer of rules and personal drivers, when offering c-suite mentorship and executive coaching and management team development I ask for leaders to write down five of their rules.
This is an exercise many executives struggle with.
Why? This is typically down to management teams and leadership teams never writing down their own rules, guides and principles, it is just something that is ever taught or developed.
How To Make & Use Your Own Rules?
The Exercise
- Set aside and dedicate thirty minutes to write down five of the principles or rules that guide you and your career
- Rewrite the list for clarity,
- Once as a list – A sentence, aka a short rule
- The second as something you expand into two sentences. The secret is explaining as a short sentence and why
- Use a design tool (Can be Word, PowerPoint, Keynote, Canva etc) and create the fives rules as one page with images to associate with.
- When you next have a team meeting ask the team to follow the same steps.
- Ask the team to share their one non-negotiable rule and consider how you could use these personal rules as team drivers.
- Sharing the individual rules are important, aligning these to their colleagues really help the team understand their drivers and what makes their colleagues tick or keeps them doing what they do.
Moving forward I strongly recommend you and your team get to know each other by replicating Kobe’s rules and sharing as a team. The most important element of this, revisit the rules, allow them to guide you and enable yourself to grow and update when you grow personally and professionally.