NBA Hall of Famer Joe Dumars on managing eclectic personalities
31:33 Share

Ted Audio Collective.

Quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.

These days, we're surrounded by photo editing programs. Have you ever wondered what something or someone actually looks like under all the manipulation? I'm Elise Hugh, and you might know me as the host of TED Talks Daily. This October, I am giving a TED Talk in Atlanta about finding true beauty in a sea of artificial images.

I'm so excited to share the stage with all the amazing speakers of the TED Next conference, and I hope you'll come and experience it with me. Visit go.ted.com slash TED Next to get your pass today. Hey, everyone. It's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Hall of Famer Joe Dumars. Growing up in Detroit, Joe was my favorite basketball player, a six-time All-Star and NBA Finals MVP. It was his job to guard Michael Jordan, who called him the best defender he ever played against, and praised Joe for forcing him to expand his talents. As much as I've looked up to Joe as a player, I admire him even more as a person. He was the team captain and quiet leader on back-to-back championship teams.

He was the first winner of the NBA Sportsmanship Award, and it's now named after him. It's called the Joe Dumars Trophy. He's been recognized time and again for his citizenship and community service. And he's been a remarkably effective leader off the court. Since retiring, Joe spent 14 years as president of basketball operations for the Pistons, where he built another championship team. And in 2022, the NBA hired him as one of their top leaders. Joe is executive vice president and head of basketball operations.

Hey, Joe. How's it going, man? Good. How are you? Good. I'm doing well. Doing well. The place that I have to start is to say one of the highlights of my childhood was my Aunt Paulette would take me to Pistons games a few times a year. And watching your Rainbow Threes was mesmerizing. You were like the early Steph Curry. It was a ton of fun. Yeah, I did shoot a long ball and did shoot rainbows. I...

I was thinking about that this past weekend and how much fun it was coming out onto the palace floor. It was incredible. Incredible.

Well, it was incredibly fun for me, too. And whenever I couldn't go to a game, I would fall asleep listening to the games on weeknights on the radio. And I will never forget the voice of the announcer. Starting two guard, go do Mars. And I would just wait for the do Mars, that's all. And then I'd run out onto the court then, Adam. Such a fond memory to the point that my wife, who also grew up in Michigan, when I was walking in for this interview said...

Are you going to mention Jodumars? So you've got some fans here, it's safe to say. Like I said, it was a beautiful time. You've led in every role you've played, from being a guard on a championship team to a general manager to now being one of the top executives at the NBA. So I thought we could approach that from all angles today. Are you up for it? Sure, let's do it. One of the things you're most famous for is shutting down Michael Jordan.

You were the guy that the Pistons relied on to stop MJ.

Jordan says he hated having to play against you. So how did you do that? How did you prepare to guard him? First of all, let's define stopped Michael Jordan. So that just means he probably didn't get 50, you know, or 40. It's all relative. I always start off like that by saying that he's the best I've ever seen. And I don't get into the debate of Jordan or whoever is the GOAT. He's just the best that I ever faced. And for me, it was the ultimate challenge.

It was mind, body, and spirit that you have to pour yourself in to try to slow Mike down. I always tell people this, simple as this, to defend a guy in the NBA is almost impossible. So you have to throw your entire being into doing it. I simply tried to throw everything I had in me into slowing him down, into trying to stop him, into trying to make it a tough night for him. So some nights I had some great success on it. Some nights he got the best of me, but

You can't go into it half-heartedly with a guy like him. Your success at guarding him must have made it that much harder because he was so competitive. What did you learn as he would adjust to what was working for you? It's chess match all night. There are some nights he came out and he'd go for everything in the first quarter. And then there are some nights he would come out and he would just pass the whole first quarter. And so I had to try to adjust whenever that game started. I had to have a read for him

early on into the game. So I remember timeouts going back into the huddle with Chuck Daly and saying, look, he's not going to be aggressive here in the first half. Everybody just play your own defense. Don't worry about him. He's not trying to be aggressive.

Other nights I'd come out there and early on I'd say, look, I need help early here because he's trying to go for it all right now. We ran a lot of stuff for myself on offense to try to wear him out on defense. It was just a chess match back and forth going up against Mike. I think one of the most interesting features of that chess match to me was called out in the last dance. I remember it sort of stopped me in my tracks when Phil Jackson said,

you're only successful in the moment you perform a successful act. On the one hand, what an impossible standard to say. Never mind the three-peat and then the second three-peat. If you are not succeeding right now, you're failing. But on the other hand, I thought it was such an insightful way to define performance so that people wouldn't rest on their laurels. You were in the middle of all that. Tell me how you viewed success at that time. Yeah.

I love that statement by Phil as well, because you have to live in the moment. You can't be somewhere prior to that moment or somewhere after that moment mentally. That's what I mean when I say you have to pour everything into it, Adam. What it takes with that is discipline, because in that moment, you're going to have to be disciplined enough to stay focused, to stay locked in. Because if you don't, then it's a slippery slope and it slides and it gets away from you. And quite frankly, Adam, there's nowhere to hide.

There's 20,000 in the building and millions watching. And so if you're not in that moment, you know, it can go left really fast. You mentioned discipline. And as a leader on the court and off the court, you had some challenging personalities to deal with. Dare I say even some players who weren't always perfectly disciplined.

And one of the things I've always admired about you, Joe, is you were a master at setting boundaries and helping these players bring their best to the game as opposed to the worst. So let's start with Dennis Rodman. How did you manage him? As a teammate, he was incredible to play with. I loved playing with him. You talk about in the moment, he would be there, right? But what he taught me was that you have to give people their space.

There are different personalities and different ways to success. And so what he really taught me is that you really do have to be open, you have to be accepting, and you have to be willing to embrace a different way to success. If you try to make 12 guys all the same, that's never going to work. And he was the first player I ever played with

That really taught me that because I realized early on with him, he's different. He has a different way of seeing things, a different way of taking things in, of expressing himself. But at the end of the day, he's right where he's supposed to be on the court every time. He never misses an assignment. He's always there. And his end result was incredible. But his process to get there was a lot different than mine. He's just an eccentric person. And so you have to accept that.

from him. The only thing really you want to know is make sure you constantly touch base with him to make sure he's in a line with everything that's happening, because sometimes he may not appear to be listening or paying attention or locked in like you are or someone else is. And so as long as he's aligned, you have a winner on your hand. And we did. We had a winner with him.

This reminds me of something that psychologists have captured really well in trying to explain personality. When we talk about personality, we talk about personality traits. One of the interesting findings in this research is that as we get to know people better, we see them less in terms of fixed traits.

and much more in terms of if-then signatures. Rodman is not always distracted, right? There are situations where he's focused and locked in, and there are circumstances where he's distracted. And if you can learn what his triggers are, what sort of pulls him away from the game, then you can manage it better.

And the same is true for his emotional outbursts, right? That brings me to Rasheed Wallace as well. Very similar though. Very similar though. What was the biggest challenge with Wallace? Was it the technical and flagrant fouls? Not so much the technicals, Adam. It was keeping him focused in the game. Now here's the difference between he and Dennis. Very intelligent guy. But he would get distracted in the games and could drift.

Whereas Rodman would stay locked in for 48 minutes in the game. And so Rasheed, if you saw him drifting, the coaches knew then, Larry Brown and those guys, they knew then they may call the next four out of five plays for him to make sure he's engaged in the game because otherwise he would drift. So you have to pull him back into the game by forcing him into the game, by calling plays for him and making sure he's directly involved.

This reminds me of an incredible story you told me a few years ago about how you set some boundaries for him. Can you tell me that story? Yeah. Look, I think with guys like Rasheed, I think with guys like Rodman, if you try to put the typical boundaries on those guys, Adam, you're making a mistake. So you acknowledge that their boundaries are different. And so with Rasheed, I go, I do not mind technically except for one. What's that, Jody?

Fourth quarter, especially late in the fourth quarter when it's crunch time. Any other time, fire away. But that last five, six minutes of the game, Rasheed, we can't have it, man.

You know what? That's fair enough, Jody. And so I didn't go to him and say, hey, we cannot have any technical fouls out of you. You can't try to corral a free spirit. You have to let them be who they are with some boundaries. And if you let them be who they are, Adam, and you give them one or two boundaries, they will run through a wall for you. If you try to completely stifle them and corral them and take away all their freedom, I think you get nothing out of guys like that.

One of the great lessons about discipline that I was taught was with my father growing up at home when he and my mom, and I remember my dad said, no such thing as curfew in my house. You have the freedom to stay up all night if you choose to. We were kids. You do not have to go to bed at a certain time. You do have to get up at a certain time. No questions asked. And you being tired will not do. So what you learn real quickly is I better go to sleep because I'm

He's not given us any leeway on what time we got to get up, get going, do your chores and get ready for school. He gave us that freedom. If you want to stay up all night, that's fine. But when I wake you up at 6 a.m. or when your mom wakes you up at 6 a.m., I don't want to hear anything. So he's giving you the choice, right?

You learn real quickly, I'm going to bed because I know I got to get up at 6 o'clock. And I learned that at a very early age. And I think that's a part of my leadership style as well, is that I'll put some boundaries in, but I'm not going to micromanage everything you do.

You want people to be able to make good decisions themselves. That's when people are really growing. And I always think about him in that situation and how he did with me and my siblings. One of my mentors, Richard Hackman, would often say after spending half a century studying leadership in teams that a leader's job was to be really clear about the end goal.

and then let people figure out the best path there. This then raises the contrast between the '89 and '90 championship teams, which were known as the Bad Boys, which you were a central player on and an all-star on, and then the 2004 championship team that you were the general manager of, which had a very different reputation and culture. I feel like the Bad Boy image was gone. What was it like to be a good guy among the Bad Boys?

And then secondly, how did you change that dynamic 15 years later? That part of my career is about being your own person, being your own man, being comfortable in your own skin. I never felt any pressure, any peer pressure to be something that I wasn't, to be a loud talking, boasting, guys getting in fights every other night. I never felt pressure to be that.

My teammates understood my toughness. They understood my focus and dedication to it. And they embraced that with me. So I just never felt pressure to be anything other than who I was. And my teammates and my coaches and the organization, they all really genuinely appreciated who I was and how I brought it every day. The only thing that I tried to take from the bad boy era to 2004 is...

That I wanted our guys to have the same type of outsider mentality. We're not the Darlings. At the time, you got Shaq and Kobe in Los Angeles. And those are the marquee guys. And we are not that, guys. We are Detroit, Oakland County, tough, hard-nosed. We got to go and take it.

And that's the only thing that I carried with me with the 0-4 teams. Just try to implore them to embrace being the outsiders. We're not picked to win. We are the underdogs. That's who we are here, guys. Embrace this. Before you know it, Adam, they were foaming at the mouth. They were all in on embracing being the underdogs. It's such a contrast, too, because you won the first NBA Sportsmanship Award, which is named after you. Yeah.

As a guy who played on the bad boys, the team that was known for an elbow when the ref wasn't looking and a bunch of fouls that would have today gotten players thrown out of games and maybe suspended. So did you ever try to get your teammates back then to reform? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. You know what, Adam? The reason I love that group so much is because it was the most eclectic group of guys that you could ever bring together.

And to see all of that come together and flourish on the court was really incredible to me. So for anyone to have tried to change any parts of it would have been a mistake.

Jack McCloskey, who was the general manager, didn't. Chuck Daly didn't. Bill Davidson, the owner, didn't. Myself and Isaiah, we were the captains. We didn't try to change anybody. We just embraced everybody. We have a coach who's dapper dress guy and they call him Daddy Rich because of the way he dressed. I mean, we have a GM who's a Marine who's like hard charging every day. We had all these different personalities and

And they were embraced. And I really do believe that's become a big part of my leadership since playing on that particular team, seeing how well that can work together. I want to transition to a lightning round. Can you weigh in on the debate about who's the GOAT? Is it Jordan or LeBron? I have never weighed in. I'll be different than a thousand other people who've weighed in. I will simply say this, is that whoever you pick as the GOAT, you're right. Because it's an opinion.

So I never played against LeBron. Played against Mike. Mike's the best I've ever seen. But for all those young guys now who say LeBron is the GOAT for them, I look at them and go, yep, I can understand why you would say that. And that is Jody's leadership style in a nutshell. Yep. Right here. Love it. Yep, yep. There it is. Who would you say is the most underrated player, either during your era or currently? I would say...

Mark Price of the Cleveland Cavaliers. You remember him, Adam? I do. I remember him and Doherty. He had those great no-look assists. Man, I just think he was just an exceptional guard playing during an era that he got a little bit overshadowed. But man, was he really good, Adam. I really like Mark Price's game. Great choice. And not at all expected. I love it. Tell me, what's your favorite lesson you learned from a coach? Assistant coach.

Ronnie Rothstein, who coached with the Pistons during the bad boy era, and then he went on to Miami. Don't look at the big things, Jody, he would say. Look for the small things. Look for the little things that are going to give you an edge. I'd watch tape of guys and just see little things that they're doing, and I would point it out to him. He'd say, exactly. And no one else is pointing that out, and you see it. And so that's where you can attack that guy. So he was a really first coach player.

Adam, that really showed me how to watch and look for the slightest advantage that I could get. Because that's all it is in the NBA. It's a slight advantage. Because everyone's so good, that's all you can get is a slight advantage. What is the worst advice you've ever gotten? I would say in high school, when I stopped playing football, the principal and athletic director and the football coach, they all came to my house to talk to my mom. Your son has a chance to play big-time football. He has a chance to play on Sundays.

This is the worst mistake of his life if he quits football. I think that might be the worst advice I ever got right there. And they actually said that. So, well, I guess I have to make this basketball thing work out then. I'm really glad you did. I think you were underrated when you came out of college. You were drafted 18th. You went on to become an All-Star and a Hall of Famer. What did scouts miss in you?

It was just a different era of scouting and exposure at that time. If you think about this, Adam, Karl Malone and I were on the same AAU team. We started playing together around 14 to 15 years old. We grew up maybe 45 minutes from each other. We won a couple of national championships on AAU. He went to Louisiana Tech. I went to McNeese State.

I don't think that would ever happen today. You know what I mean? Like the way things now, social media, 24-hour TV, I just think during that era, it was just a lack of exposure. And we had played in all the big tournaments, but it never turned into he and I being nationally recruited everywhere. Okay, favorite sports movie? Brian's song.

You remember that movie? I do. Yeah. Okay. That was kind of the first sport movie I remember as a kid. I thought you were going Hoosiers, but no. No, no, no, no. Football, you know, that was early on for me.

Is there a book you think we should all read? I read all kinds of books. So I read this book that was really interesting to me, a book called Stassi, about the secret German police. Have you ever heard of that book? No, I haven't. Yeah, it's a great book. It's just fascinating, just that whole world and that life and all. It really is.

I would love to see a co-ed three-point contest at a future All-Star game. I want to see the women compete against the men. Should I pitch that to Adam? Are you on board? You and I should put something together and send that to Adam Silver because I think that'd be a heck of an idea. I think that'd be a heck of an idea. Is there something that you've rethought recently that you used to believe but now don't? Okay, so this is a general statement. I don't think that every norm...

that people tell you you have to believe and you have to follow is true. I think it's really important to follow your own path. And I think I just grew up in an era of you just kind of follow the path that's been laid out for you. I kind of grew up in an era where it was kind of a gatekeeper era of certain people allow you. And I just am of the mindset now, Adam,

I have two millennial kids, and I'm sure they have a tremendous amount to do with this, is that you find your own path and you pursue that own path on your own time. And as long as you're not disrupting or doing something out of bounds, I'm all for that. I'm all for forget all these old rules that people told you you had to do and find your own path. I'm a big believer in that now.

Do you have a leadership role model either in or outside sports? The best leader I saw was my father. I'm telling you, man, he raised six boys and one girl. He's passed away now, but he was disciplined, but he was also fun and funny and laughed. But you always knew the boundaries. He allowed you freedom. He allowed you to make decisions. And then he expected you to make the right decisions.

And he didn't want to have to stand over you and tell you over and over again. And as I think back on him, I look at that now and go, that's my leadership style. And I realized I got that from him without ever knowing it as I was growing up. It's abundantly clear that you've carried on that legacy. And I can only imagine how proud he would be of you now. I noticed after hosting a podcast for a while that I'm kind of a ball hog.

in that I ask all the questions and I don't give the guests a lot of space to do that. So I'm trying to turn the tables a little bit. Is there a question you have for me about leadership or teams or anything in that realm as an organizational psychologist? Yeah, is there any common trait

that you see among some of the better leaders? Any one or two common traits that they all have? Probably the most frequent ones I see really have to do with character. The best leaders I've had a chance to study and learn from, they're there to make the people around them better as opposed to just feed their own egos. And they are...

humble as opposed to arrogant. They're acutely aware of what they don't know. And they're constantly seeking to collect new knowledge so that they can improve their game. Have you seen a bad leader have tremendous success long term? That's actually a really interesting question. I think it's a hard question for me to answer because

Part of the way that I measure leadership is by the results you get. And so in the long run, if you achieve success, by definition, you're no longer a bad leader. But I think, yes, I've seen leaders with qualities that I would consider bad achieve success. The obvious example is Steve Jobs, who by all accounts had moments of extreme narcissism, arrogance, selfish taking as opposed to generous leadership or servant leadership, and

And I've watched a lot of Silicon Valley learn the wrong lessons from Steve Jobs and say, well, Jobs was that way. So you have to be to be a great leader. And Joe, I look at that and I look at all the research that's accumulated on effective leadership and I say,

Well, how do you know he succeeded because of those qualities and not in spite of them? Right, right. Do you think he would have been kicked out of his own company if he had been a little bit more generous and more humble? Probably not. And I've talked to a lot of people who work closely with Jobs, and my favorite observation was from Walter Isaacson, who wrote the biography, who told me, look...

The one piece of feedback I would have given to Steve Jobs is he could have been kinder. It wouldn't have cost him anything to treat people better, and he would have inspired tremendous loyalty and motivation, and in fact...

That seems to be one of the shifts he made when he came back to Apple in the late 90s is I'm not going to say he was the biggest giver on earth, but he was a little bit more decent in the way that he treated people. And I think it actually worked for him. I've always said to people, Adam, when people say, well, you have to be that way. Now, I always go, no, you want to be that way. You don't have to be that way. There are other ways to be successful and successful.

People have to choose their own route. And so I'm always interested in how people choose what type of leadership they're going to provide for an organization. That distinction between you have to be this way and you want to be this way, I think it's extremely powerful. A lot of my early leadership models were in sports, and I saw a lot of coaches on TV who would scream at players and throw chairs. Mm-hmm.

And it was only much more recently that the evidence came out. There was a great study that my colleague Barry Stahl led of basketball teams where he showed that if coaches gave an angry halftime speech, the teams were more likely to win. But that was only true if number one, the coach wasn't usually angry. And number two, he or she wasn't too angry.

So it had to be rare anger and moderate anger in order to get a rise out of the team. And I thought that was such a clear example of if you've got a coach who's extremely aggressive and flying off the handle, people are going to tune that out. But a coach who normally is calm, cool, and collected and is now pissed off, okay, we screwed up. We really better get our act together. Absolutely. I've learned so much from leaders who I would never emulate. I've learned so much from them about what I would not do.

I've learned from as many people that I would not emulate as the ones I have.

Let's not take that as an excuse to be a bad leader, just to teach people what not to do. Right, right, exactly. So Joe, let's talk a little bit about your current role. What are you doing at the NBA? It's a little bit of everything. Right now we're making preparations for the draft combine, making preparations for the draft lottery, summer league penalties, fines, suspensions. All of that falls under basketball operations.

You're dealing with all of those. I can tell you this, Adam. You walk in, you sit down in the morning. There's something different on your desk every morning. If you hadn't seen it the night before, and let's say it's a West Coast game and it ended at one and you didn't catch it at that point, the next morning I get in at 7.30, 8 o'clock, it's on my desk and it's waiting. And so it's something new every day. It's a lot, and I enjoy it. I enjoy a big workload. I think I work better like that.

You certainly have something in common then with your colleagues. I feel like the leadership team that runs the NBA is about as hardworking as any group of people I've seen anywhere. Absolutely. 100%. I've been here for about a year now, and I'm telling you, man, this is the hardest working, smartest group I've ever been around. It's a pleasure to work with everybody here. It really is. I enjoy it a lot. What's the impact you hope to have in this leadership role?

There's somewhat of a disconnect between what happens here and what happens with teams. And so I'm the person kind of the conduit that has run a team, but also is working here now and just trying to make sure that teams work.

All the guys I know from all the teams that they fully understand, look, here's what really happens here at the league office. Here's the process. Here's what goes into it. And also from the league office side to say to all the people here, okay, let me tell you how teams are thinking about this. If we do this, this is how teams are going to react to this. This is what GMs are going to say. This is what players, this is what coaches, owners, I think kind of bringing those two together, Adam, is going to be a big thing.

is what I hope to bring here over time. I thought it was a brilliant move by the NBA, as I told you when we talked right before you took the role. Yeah, yeah. There's an Amanda Goodall study showing that NBA teams that are coached by former all-star players actually win at least slightly more games. It's not a huge effect, but it's a meaningful difference. There's an advantage of being coached by somebody who is not just a player, but a great player.

And I remember reading that research and wondering, okay, how much of this is that the all-star is actually more knowledgeable versus how much of this is the trust, the symbolic value of players really listen to somebody who is better than they were.

You have an interesting vantage point on that because you're a version of this now, right? We've got a superstar who's now playing a big role in running the league. How much of your contribution there is your knowledge and expertise that you built versus the built-in trust and familiarity that players have with you? There's no question that the trust that players have

is huge. I almost put that tops because if they don't trust you, it really doesn't matter what information you're bringing. You ask, could the all-star coach, is he smarter? I wouldn't necessarily say smarter. I would say this though. He's more intuitive and instinctive and the players, they can detect that because you can't script a game for 48 minutes. And when things shift,

They have great instincts when they see momentum. It could be the slightest thing. It can be one play that they see that changes the moods of the game, and they know it right then and there. And they may call a timeout when no one else would. And I think that's why the players look at those guys. During that timeout, that guy can stop and go, we've got to stop it right here.

That's a big play that just happened. That's interesting. So you think where the knowledge advantage lies is really an expert intuition, that pattern recognition almost instantaneously without even being able to explain what you're seeing. That's exactly right. Okay, Joe, before we wrap, is there any closing leadership advice or perspective that you want to share with our audience? The end goal is where we want to get, but there is no cookie cutter solution.

ABC way of getting there. Allow people to grow into their roles and grow and become successful together as you get there. And I'm a big, big believer in that, Adam. Big believer in that. Well, you've walked it your whole career. It's been a privilege to watch you do it and to get to talk with you about it. Thank you, Joe. Thanks, Adam. I appreciate it, man.

There's a lot of wisdom in this conversation, but the line that keeps echoing in my head is, you don't have to be that way. You want to be that way. It reminds me of what systems dynamics theorists call equifinality. Say that five times fast. Equifinality!

I definitely just nerded this concept to the extreme, but what equifinality is about is knowing that in any complex system, there are multiple paths to the same end. You don't ever have to be one way. You get to choose the way that you want to take. And that's ultimately a question of what you value and who you want to become.

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Asia Simpson, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quint, Ben Ben-Chang, Hannah Kingsley-Mah, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington-Rogers. This episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Original music by Hansel Su and Alison Leighton-Brown. I think I'm hearing a little tapping sound. Is there a desk or a table in front of you? That was me tapping on the desk. There we go. That was me making a point. I'll stop making points and watch.

Support for the show comes from Brooks Running. I'm so excited because I have been a runner, gosh, my entire adult life. And for as long as I can remember, I have run with Brooks Running shoes. Now I'm running with a pair of Ghost 16s from Brooks.

incredibly lightweight shoes that have really soft cushioning. It feels just right when I'm hitting my running trail that's just out behind my house. You now can take your daily run in the Better Than Ever Go 16. You can visit brookscrunning.com to learn more. PR.