John Wooden On Leadership

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John Wooden is best known for his success as a basketball player as well as one of the greatest coaches of all time. As a coach, he won ten NCAA national championships in a twelve-year period with UCLA, seven of which were in a row. His teams won a record 88 consecutive games, and Wooden was given the honor of being named national coach of the year six times throughout his career. Wooden was also a very successful player; being the first to be named basketball All-American three times and he won a national championship with Purdue (Wikipedia). He was also the first person ever to be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player as well as a coach. Wooden was notorious for his inspirational messages as well as his desire to succeed, making him a great leader. He created the “pyramid of success”, which is still widely utilized by individuals today. This consists of philosophical building blocks for winning at basketball and at life. First, I’m going to analyze and interpret Wooden’s style of leadership and discuss which styles I believe that he has possessed throughout his life. In my opinion, Wooden has practiced multiple styles of leadership, among them being: visionary, coaching, affiliative, and democratic, all of which are considered to be resonant styles of leadership. Resonant leadership occurs when leaders drive positive emotions from their followers (Primal Leadership). A visionary leader moves people toward shared dreams and our text describes it being appropriate to use when changes require a new vision, or when a clear direction is needed. He is a visionary leader because he took a UCLA team that had a losing record and transformed them into conference champions in his first year as head coach. This took a lot of innovative techniques to turn the team around and put them on the track for success. In relation to Wooden’s pyramid

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