Coaching and team development seem to exist in at least two realms, in sports and in business. Are they connected? And what can one learn from one to apply to the other? Our guest today has Bridge that Gap and has tremendous insights for us all. Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast, where we are helping leaders grow personally and professionally to lead more effectively, to make a bigger difference for their teams, organizations and the world.
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Just go to remarkable podcast.com/facebook or remarkable 5.com/linkedin to get all of that. Today's episode is brought to you by my latest book. Flexible leadership navigate uncertainty and lead with confidence. It's time to realize that styles can get in our way, and that following our strengths might not always be the best approach. In a world more complex and uncertain than ever.
Leaders need a new perspective and a new set of tools to get the great results their organizations and team members want and need. That's where flexible leadership comes in. Hope that you will learn more and order your copy now by going to remarkable podcast.com/flexible. And with that let me bring in my guest. And her name is Sean Tao. By which I know I can't possibly say it as well as she does. She's originally from Quebec, Canada.
She is the leader Lancers women's basketball coach, and she transformed the last place team into a five time national champion. She was also the first woman woman worldwide to coach and manage a men's professional team at Hamilton. You can see a jersey over her head if you're watching. Guiding them to the finals in their first season. She is the coauthor of the book To Win the Blueprint Blueprint for Building Women's and Championship Teams.
She lives in Windsor, Ontario now, and she's our guest today. Chantelle, we have a little bit of feedback, but I'm so glad that you're here. Well, that's. And I'm Kevin, it's a pleasure for me to be here. So I'll try to not talk too much so we won't have too much of that feedback. Let's just start here. Your story is interesting, right? And I hinted at it a little bit in the short bio, but, like, how do you end up doing what you do?
Like, tell us a little bit more about the path to being a, women's basketball player. Well, like many, young boys and girls, I play a lot of sports. I enjoy playing sports and I came from a very rural small town close to Montreal. But as I grew older, there was no not enough a girls that wanted to be in sport and play basketball. And, I was very disappointed about this. I wanted to continue.
And so what happened is that, the city offered me to start some mini basketball teams and camps, which I said, okay, well, I guess if I can't play, I'm going to start coaching. And slowly this is how I started to to coach until this became a profession. And I've been a professional coach now for almost 20 seasons, 20 years. There you go. That's a that's a that's a great story in itself.
And some of you who are listening or watching know that I happen to be a basketball fan has come up on occasion. So I'm especially excited to have you here and for us to chat. What led though to a book? So like I hinted at this in the open. So let me just say a little bit about this. Like, so you're doing coaching and then you go to McGill and study leadership at the master's level. So I'm sure that has something to do with the book.
So, like, tell us a little bit about how you end up coming to to writing the book. Yeah. So, I was a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, and, and I was, wanting to research what makes coaching successful for me. I wanted to find the key. I wanted to get into coaching, and I didn't want to be mediocre. I didn't want to be bottom of the pack or middle of the pack. I want to win championships.
So I'm thinking I've got, you know, 2 to 3 years in grad school to really try to figure out what makes the best leader successful. And we really focus with my, supervisor, who's now the coauthor of this book. We really focus on leadership at large. And we we looked at business and military, healthcare, education and all the leaders and how they are able to transform companies or organizations.
And then for the research part of it, we really went specifically into coaches of team sports, and we look into the coaches and how to transform any team into a champion. And we really studied and research them through a research project. We're finding, for higher order categories of what those successful coaches do, which are also applicable, like you mentioned, given straight into business. And, we were able to prove this publish in terms of a peer review article. We actually wrote two.
And then I went and I became the basketball coach at the University of Windsor, a team that was last for several seasons. And, they had only had four winning seasons in about 50 years. And I applied the research that I learned. So I literally just applied it over a period of ten years. I recontact that my master's supervisor and I said, Doctor Bloom, I think we should write a a book. And he was just thinking the same thing.
So what we did in the book is, is explain the theory so that everybody can pick it up and replicate, replicate it. But also it's filled with motivational stories throughout that make the book interesting, and motivational inspiring at the same time. So that's how we came about to, write the book.
So everybody Chantelle is not going to say this, but she's not only the coauthor of the book, she's the star of the book because a lot of the book is written from the perspective of the stories, from all of the, the, the basketball stuff building the teams and the challenges and all those sorts of things along the way. So we'll talk about some of those as we go.
But I really want to get into some of what you learned and then apply because I do think, you know, so often, as leaders in businesses who happen to be sports fans, we like look at sports teams, a lot of sports coaches, and we we tell stories about that, but we don't really think about how we can cross apply the lessons. And and you've lived that. So I want us to talk about some of those things.
You talk very early in the book about, three circles hooked together, that lead to talk about these three things. We'll put them on the screen. Individual growth, organizational skills and leaders attributes. And so I'd like you to talk a little. All of us know those words. But tell us about what you mean. And each of those subsets of your research individual growth, organizational skills leaders attributes. Talk about those just a little bit.
Yeah. So Kevin, at the end of it, when we had research, all the top coaches and what they had done to transform their organization, we had about, you know, 2000 pages of notes and research journals and data that we had to go in there and analyze. And what we did is just kind of take the main, every single little topic that was addressed. We put label into these topics, and then we say if we could group some topics and some labels together.
And at the end we found, you know, higher order categories, which those three are part of, of it to say, you know, these are kind of the three main areas of, the summarizes what coaches are successful coaches, how they are better in others and doing and in the middle of these three areas is the vision. So there was kind of these four higher order categories, if you wish, that were up there.
And so for the, the, the, the, the vision, since you have it now on the screen for a quick second division became kind of the central piece of what makes every leader successful. So without a vision, there was just work, but not in achievement of any kind of significant goal for the organization. With a vision that said, for example, we want it.
So when I took Windsor, I just took my research and says, well, I know we're lost in the country, but I want to transform this program and prove to be national champion in five years. That was a clear vision, and the visions have to be always on the verge of a little bit, seemingly not sure if it's going to be possible. And from there you then divide it into subcategories, where you put achievable goals and where you can put your KPIs and get to to target those.
But the vision has to be substantially kind of like grandiose in a way where the coaches did it all, did that, somebody that had never won anything would, would say, we want to win a gold medal. We want to get to this level. And then on the right side of the circle, then taking this organizational skills and that that in itself is all the planning, the management and administration part of the job of any leader. Leader isn't good at that.
It's not going to be as successful into implementing the vision. So it's really about learning to develop that side of of of leaders as well. On the left side of the model, there's the individual growth, which, the research showed that leaders that really invest in their subordinates or coaches invest in the players for the sake of their individual growth and not for the sake of winning, find that there are more successful and winning becomes a byproduct of this.
And so there's a there's a transformational process in the, the player or the subordinate that happens in that relationship and that, that that's search for help, individual growth that is very beneficial to the overall vision. And the last piece is the leaders attribute, which is that coaches tend to think or leaders tend to think that to be good at something you have a skill needs to be somewhat balanced, somewhat in the middle.
So if you can be tough or caring, you're going to be a little bit a little bit of both in the middle. But the research shows that you have to be all of these. So not just balance, but you need to be able to go absolutely on the left side of the spectrum, absolute the right side of the spectrum and choose the right moment to, really, embody that leadership trait when it's needed at the right time, which is very difficult to do.
Everybody is talking about the core idea in my new book, Flexible Leadership right there. It's not about it's not about either or. It's about both. And, 100%, I agree with that. I want to go back to the organizational skills circle or chunk of the model. Would it be safe to say. And I'm gonna try and I'm not trying to change your words, but to clarify, would it be safe to say that most of what we think of as management skills fits into that one of the circles? Is that a fair thing to say?
Yeah. So the management skill is, is interesting because I think there's been a long, confusion with leadership where people, confuse being a leader and being a manager and a two completely different things. And so you can have really good leaders that can inspire and say, we're going to do this, but a terrible manager of people, the terrible managers at the time. So, so there's some, some, some different there to make.
So in that particular circle, which is organizational skills, we what we did at the time is really put in, things that were more of organizational nature. We didn't really portray this as being managing people per se. So we talk about planning administrative tasks, preparing a season in terms of coaching, maybe the prioritization part of of of an athlete for peaking and things like that. So, you know, achieving targets. This was that category in terms of managing people.
It would reflect and reflect a little bit more, in the category of the individual growth and the leaders attribute where now the soft skill of a person is clearly demonstrated through these two categories of that, that research.
One of the things that, I really liked about the book is and it's early in the book, in the section that where you're talking about vision, is your five year plan, that you laid out for the Lancers when you joined them as a coach with a long history, as you just said, of not being very good. And and and a five year goal of being national champions. And so you, it's like a one pager, at least it appears to be from looking at in the book.
And one of the things that you said was, as you were, even as you were recruiting players, you were using that one pager, if you will, that plan, that long term, five year plan, as a part of your recruitment or, you know, yeah, your recruitment strategy to select the people that you wanted to have, join your team, talk a little bit more about the idea of that five year plan and then how you did, in fact use it, with your teams.
Yeah. So when I envision winning a championship, I realized I didn't have at the moment, the team capable of doing that. So we needed to go and recruit. Players were also graduating. So there was a there was going to be a change over in the the players that we had. And so when, when you shop so how we recruit is that, you know, we identify the players and we do home visits. So when I showed up to the home visit, I would bring a binder and I would explain, my vision.
So, I know we're not really good right now, but, you know, if you stick with us, if you decide you can play here in five years, here's where we're going to be and here's going to be your experience. So I was using this as a, an inspirational tool, but also a show of there is a vision here. We're not just coming to try to be the best and, do you know, go by the seat of our pants. We're we're intentional. We have an intention. We have a desire. We have, emotions geared toward this.
And when an application as well towards really transforming this program. So that was very useful because some recruits and some parents would say, now this is never going to happen. And others were really intrigued. And slowly, they would resonate with this vision. And now we knew we had a match, to come to come play for us.
And so when we actually, establishes two and you mentioned given it's important that it's not just we're going to be here in five years, but how are we going to be where are we going to be near four in year three in year two, and in year one. So for the player and the team, it'd be like, this is where we are. So this year we only want to get so far. And that is a big step compared to where we were last year. So this year we want to have a winning season. That is the first thing we want to do.
We're not talking about winning championship. We're talking about establishing great habit to help us to build this foundation so we can have a winning season. And then we get moving up like this every year. And this way the whole vision seems slowly, realistic. Whereas the overall part of it may seem unrealistic. Yeah, that's one of the things that struck me about it is that, yeah. I mean, yeah, you'd love to win a championship in three years.
But really, you say this, this is this is our process to get there in five years. And even though it's a very great year, were grandiose goal from the start, one that many people didn't really believe or buy into when they started to see the stair steps along that way, I think it made a big difference. I think that, for anyone who were to read this book, if that if all you got was that, that would be of great value, I would say, I want to.
You've hinted at it, and I just hinted at it to one of the things that you wrote, and I agree with wholeheartedly, and I'd like you to talk a little bit more about, is this phrase trust the process? Yes. I think that's so often. Leaders have trouble with this. And they have trouble helping other folks see this. So what does it mean to you to say trust the process?
And I want to say that throughout my career career, I have had trouble with that, that sentence, that slogan as well, which is why I talk about in the book. It was much easier for me at the beginning when there's no pressure, and the team wasn't very good to trust the process.
Well, we're going to turn this around, and so we're going to we're going to engage ourself into it and go for it as, as the years go by and we're trying to stay on top, trust in the process becomes sometimes a little more challenging and difficult, and it's a reminder that it must be done. There's no shortcut. And so one of the example I give all the time is, and this is where all of us men come to have sometimes an issue with trusting the process is that we want results. Now.
We want to see the change now. And as society evolves and electronics evolves and we get so much faster in everything. So now having to wait for one of the things seems excruciating. And so in a trusting the process is having the ability to forego the now for something later is going to be better best. So it's forgoing the good to get the great. And that requires a whole lot of, self. You know, you have to, to, to be able to, to self-contained yourself. You have to be able to say, yes, we could.
I think a business example, I think a lot of people go for the small fish or the small kill, the small amount of money or the money now, as opposed to say, let's we might not make as much money now, but the goal is going to be here. To stay aligned with that is very difficult.
So in coaching, in basketball, I made some very difficult decisions along the way to sit out my starters, because I wanted to teach a culture and by sitting out the starter, I understood that we might lose the game, but we might gain a culture that's going to help us win a championship in 4 or 5 years. And that's exactly what happened. And so but losing those games are super difficult. And sometimes, thankfully, I made the hard decision. And we still while the game, which was amazing.
And then you go home, you feel really happy. But the ability to discern this and to say, I'm going to hold on right now because I really want what's great. I just want what's good, acceptable. That is what trusting the process means. I love that, I really do. You you talked we talked a little bit about your circles, and I probably should have said this earlier. We talked about organizational skills and individual development and leader attributes.
And, you know, everybody has a list of leader attributes, leadership skills, behaviors, competencies. We use all sorts of words for this. There's all sorts of lists. We can Google it and find all sorts of stuff. What I'd like you to share is what's one of the leader attributes that you've studied, that you've noticed that you think is perhaps a underappreciated? I think we can all make a long list, but like, what's one that you think people don't think enough about, pay enough attention to?
What would that be for you? So as a question, I had a meeting yesterday with my mentor, and we were discussing something that he shared with me, so I'll share it. And that is my the one that I know is of utmost importance and definitely overlooked everybody. Any session, I'll tell you somehow, you know, as you grow along the years and you get older and you get really good at your job, you haven't lost the ability of being adaptable or the intention to want to continue to learn.
And it is something that I think he said, he doesn't know this and most people and I was a little surprised. I just said, well, you know, everybody goes to continue to learn it. And no, people leave that I think behind. As they grow older, they get set in their ways. And for me, the, the quest for learning is, is one of the leaders at two of the address in the book that we found is super important. And all these very successful leaders and coaches and individual.
So that is something that I never wanted to lose. And so to go out there and to be able to say, okay, like, you know, I'm going to continue to learn and expand myself. And I think it becomes difficult sometimes because maybe our strengths or weaknesses are what they are, and we can only maybe improve so much in certain areas. And but we still say, okay, I'm going to continue to learn. And that's just that's just about our weaknesses.
But in general, opening ourself up to new concept, new idea, something that maybe we find challenging in life in general. I don't know how I feel about this to learn about that. That is a really, really important, factor of what makes good leaders. I want to I want to ask you about a couple of things you talk about in the book that, I think people will find really useful. And the first one is, is something that you have, and that's a council of advisors.
And I'm going to spell council different than you do. But, I'm going to have it with a C instead of an S. But, but the point here is and I should have said process earlier instead of process. Sorry about that. But you talk about having a council of advisors. You talk about you mentioned a mentor. You talk about mentors in the book. Yeah. This is slightly different.
And I think this is something that a lot of leaders in organizations, wherever they are, wherever you are, you know, you're you're a frontline leader. You're a leader of leaders. You don't have to be a CEO for this idea to to to bear fruit for you. What do you mean, Chantal? By the idea of a council of advisors.
So, the eve of winning our, first national championship, we're sitting in a room, and I've got my regular assistant coaches with me which have been along, all of them unbelievable people. And I also had, my mentor, I had somebody that helped us with stats, somebody to help me with the offense. And those were gentlemen that, you know, I just, receive advice every week throughout the season that maybe my coaches didn't really know about, but I had invited them to be part of it.
So as we have, this roundtable, I invite them to sit at the table. And here I am with about, you know, 9 or 10 different individuals. And my mentor is just watching from afar. And for me, I'm listening to everybody's feedback, my assistant coaches, but also this one, a gentleman that knows nothing about sport is not an athlete, never coach, but looks through data and stats analytics.
I listen to this one to them and it helped me figure out an offense better and and you know, and I'm making decisions in my head based on the feedback. And when I leave the room. First I could tell that some assistant coaches were a little uneasy because this is just a smaller group of us. And also, I had brought more for the table and and that was easy for them. But for me, that was very important because I always say, you know, there is no room, there is no ego.
We need to be able to make the best decision for the best of the team, the best of the program, the best at the organization. And I'm the person in charge and the directly responsible individual to make that decision. So I need that feedback. And my mentor, we were walking back to the hotel. He said, wow. Boy, I don't know how you, you know, assistant coach feels about this. And I said this, okay. Like, you know, it's we as a group need to win.
And he says, I really seeing somebody sitting with so many people and and you handled it very well and he was very complimentary about this. But that's where the council of advisors come from. It's having, more than just, the group that you felt comfortable with. It's having other people that might give something completely different, a different viewpoint that then we must consider if we're to make sure that we left leave.
No, you know, rocks unturned, so to speak, before headed into some big decisions. I love that I think all of us can think about having that group of people and you being conscious about choosing them and and what, what role they bring to and what perspective that they bring. What what I heard you saying, and of course, I read in the book as well, is that each of those people brought a different perspective and perhaps helped you see something that you might not have otherwise have seen.
You tell a story, in the book that you can tell as much of the back story as you want, but I but I think the, the idea of doing it is incredibly useful. And it's the story. The story is about putting our burdens at the foot of the hill. So talk to us about what you were trying to accomplish and how it helped your team to do what you did. Yeah, we had lost the game to qualify for the second national championship. And, we were only very fortunate that year that there was a behind tournament.
We could go to another tournament to try to win the tournament, to go back to National, which was a format that wasn't used before. So, and I feel that, you know, as a potentially repeating national champion, there was a lot of, stress on the players and a lot of me, too. I mean, we've never we had never repeated and we want to do it two years in a row.
And basically what I did with them is I brought them at the foot of a hill, by, in Windsor, and I had them carry, some weights, in their, in their arms and, you know, we talked about, how we felt about, you know, having just lost the game. And, Kevin, if you remember in the book, we lost that we were ranked number one in the country and we lost that game for 49 points by 49 points, which is like unheard of. And it was unheard of in my career.
And I thought, oh my goodness, and we were slaughtered. It was ironic to we play that same team in that play in tournaments. So that team had, wanted to host it because it never thought they were going to beat us. So they wanted to get the back door and they sent us into the back door. Anyway, we had three days to refocus. And, it wasn't that much strategy. There was maybe a small adjustment on our ability to attack with contact. But apart from that, it was all in our head.
It was our inner emotion. And I had to then defy that. And so I brought the bottle to heel. And so now here they are, back with a weight. And I tell them to start going up the hill. And one player looks at me defiantly and says, how many time, coach? And I said, 49, you know, really changed the the points and that sounds crazy. And I wanted to make sure everybody knows that we didn't do it.
We didn't, you know, my point was just to as I started to do it, I wanted to feel the guts and the chest start to go. And I said, stop. And I said, let's drop your weights. I ask you to go up the hill, but I never ask you to carry those weights with you. So why are you carrying those in? It's all and then really knowing. And it was this, this image to just like release your burden.
If you want to achieve a goal and you want to climb, you want to peak, you got to release all the burdens that come with this. You get to release the idea that there's so much pressure. It's just never going to get there in this easy way. We just went up this small hill one time, and there was a lot of freedom and liberation, and a lot of pressure went off and we went back and won the game and end up winning the National.
We never lost again. That you're not willing to second national championship. I just love I just love that the imagery of it. But I appreciate you sharing the story because I think that often times our sort of back to where we started, you as a leader aren't probably coaching a sports team unless it's your kid's little league team. Right.
And yet we can all we can all recognize the situation, Chantelle, that you just shared in terms of our teams feeling stress and pressure and why do we need to carry that? And how can we as leaders help people let that go enough to help them move forward? I really love that. Thank you for sharing that. I've got a couple of more things I want to ask before we finish, Chantelle, but is there anything that you hoped I would ask or thought I might ask that I didn't? You did.
You did a really good job. Really good overview of the book. You mentioned at the beginning I had the opportunity coach, men's professional basketball team and and maybe one of the anecdote of this part is that in the book as well. So there's a whole kind of sequence about how we transform the program in five year with a women.
But my challenge for me, when I was hired to, to be the GM and the head coach of a men's team, which I didn't know the product better than the market, I didn't know the players. It was very challenging for me. But should I then reapply the theory? No, no, that was more experience in applying it into a shorter period of time.
And so why it took me, you know, six years to change a women's basketball program from, from zero to first, from a franchise that did not exist entering a league, could I, in the first year replicate something so much faster? And we had six months to to sign the players, do the draft. You know, building a team, hire the staff, even help with preparing the uniforms. You know, like what the uniforms look like.
And in six month, we did that and we went and we brought the league to the the team to the league final and our first show, the franchise. And so to me was, I became more skilled in terms of knowing how to transform organization. And that's really nice. I think, caveat at the end and we call this the overtime in the book, showing that in a completely different market with a completely different, product, I was, you know, this still worked and transferable and can be used in another way.
So, you have made your profession something that you grew up loving to do, playing and now coaching the game. But I'm curious, outside of basketball, what do you do for fun? I love to read and I continue to read, and I read all the time. And, in order to to even give an example of how I like to be challenged, I picked up a book that I had heard about that I knew was going to challenge me in a different way and in terms of, mental and scientific and all that stuff.
So I picked up, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Doctor Joel Dispenza. And, that is, I'm still reading this book. It is really challenging in all kinds of beautiful ways. And, taking a, a scientific approach on the changes that our thoughts can have on our feelings and the result the feelings have on our, balance and within our body and within the environment around us.
So, you know, just a really I mean, for somebody who has a master's degree in psychology and that also in my undergrad did some physics, you know, that the science approach is really good and I think really helpful, to even continue to better me as a leader. So that is what I'm currently doing, and I, I highly recommend it.
But it is challenging read because it's going to challenge our, our thoughts, you know, and, and but what a better place to be than the one where you miss that to have our suffering challenged. I love that, and I don't think that Chantelle can hear me. So we will end this differently than we normally do. Let me tell you, everybody will put all of the links to get to Chantal's book, which is titled Dare to Win the Blueprint for Building and Leading High Performance and Championship Teams.
We'll put the link to that in the show notes, as well as a link to the book that she was just talking about. And, we'll also give you a link to her social media. So if you want to connect with her, you can do exactly that. So I'm going to close by asking you all the question that I ask you every single week, which is this. Now what what are you going to do now as a result of what you've just heard and learned? Because hearing it is one thing, applying it is something very different.
So it's my hope that you will think about what you took from this conversation, whether you're a sports fan or not. Thank you so much, Kevin, for really having me on the show. It's always, such a pleasure to discuss with somebody that is as knowledgeable as you. On leadership. And that has also taken the time to read the book. I really appreciate that. And, wish everybody this and all the best. All right. So all the best, from both of us to all of you. It has been a pleasure to have you.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe wherever you're watched or listened so you don't miss any future episodes, including next week when we'll be back with another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. Thanks, everybody.