Like any multimillion-dollar business, the leaders at the top of a professional sports organization create the culture. There’s plenty of evidence in the current news about NBA leadership. Closer to home, most Golden State Warrior fans were relieved when former owner Chris Cohan sold the Golden State Warriors to Peter Guber and Joe Lacob. Cohan, known for suing colleagues that crossed him, had created a toxic culture in the business operations and the public (fans) disliked him so much he quit coming to the games; he was booed whenever he was sighted. Guber and Lacob seem to work from a higher ground and understand the importance of relationships, with all of their stakeholders, and from the start sought to turn that culture around. Joe Lacob was visibly hurt when fans booed him the game after he traded Monte Ellis. Long-forgotten for the room it made Stephen Curry as the team’s, now there’s still questions about the firing of coach Mark Jackson.
Jackson was fired for his performance off the court, not on it. He wasn’t a fit in the emerging new GSW organizational culture. Shortly after he dismissed Jackson, Lacob said in an interview, “I think Mark in his next job probably needs to do a better job managing up and sideways.” He believes that a coach has a wider range of responsibilities and interactions with team staff that extend beyond the locker room.” But one staff member, quoted in a Sports Nation article, commented that Jackson had “a way of talking right past you, honestly. You can talk to him 100 days in a row, and on the 101st day, he still won’t know your name. That’s something that everyone picks up on.”
Many argue that Jackson had been hired not to make friends but to inspire his team and win games, which he did, and that is what makes his removal rather controversial. Some sports writers have questioned if Jackson’s blurred lines between his role as GSW coach and pastor of a nondenominational church in LA was the issue. One (non-sports) author went so far as to suggest the firing was the result of a society “increasingly intolerant of Christians” and their sensibilities (after all Warriors President Rick Welts is openly gay) and wondered if Doc Rivers was next. Jackson and Rivers are an apple and an orange, IMHO. Doc Rivers didn’t hire buses to take players to his church when a game in LA fell close to a Sunday – among many other differences. But, still, this gets close to the underlying dissonance that can occur when strongly religious leaders allow those beliefs and values to impact how they show up in business, dismissing the protocol and expectations associated with furthering the organization’s values, goals, and objectives. Jackson wasn’t a whole team player.
