Rethinking Leadership in your Business & Why the Worst Player Often Time Becomes the Best Coach

The most dangerous leadership myth might be the one we repeat without thinking: “If you want to be the best, learn from the best.” That sounds right until you look at sports history and workplace reality, where elite performers often become painfully average coaches. We unpack why greatness isn’t automatically teachable, and how the curse of knowledge turns natural talent into a barrier when someone is responsible for training, onboarding, and developing a team.

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We start with a timely basketball story and a simple question that opens the whole topic: why are so many great coaches not the best players? From there, we break down the difference between executing and leading. Playing is an internal skill, built on fast processing and instinct. Coaching and business leadership are external skills, built on communication, culture, diplomacy, and the ability to deconstruct a complex task into clear steps. If your manager cannot teach the steps, their “genius” does not scale.

You’ll hear why role players and bench veterans often outperform stars as leaders: they study, they monitor, they understand the entire roster, and they get good at making other people better. We also call out a common failure point in practice management and team performance: naming someone a “lead” without leadership training, then keeping them so busy they never have time to observe, take notes, and coach. If you’ve ever heard “Susie isn’t trainable,” we challenge you to ask a harder question: is the system broken, or is the coach unprepared?

If this helped you rethink promotions, coaching, and employee training, subscribe, leave a five-star review, and share the episode with a leader who needs the bench perspective. What’s one role you’ve promoted based on skill instead of teaching ability?

In the end, leadership is the greatest form of marketing, sales and hospitality. The culture in your business (or in your practice) will determine all outcomes you want to achieve. The greatest entrepreneurs and the greatest businesses spend the majority of their marketing efforts on training leaders how to create great cultures. Are you? 

Transcript

Why The Best Cannot Teach

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We've been so often taught that if you want to be the best, you should go learn from the best. But in the world of high performance, whether that be in sports or business, that's so often a lie. Think about it. Why is it that the greatest players to ever play, the ones with the rings, the most talent, the best stats, why is it so often that they become the most disastrous coaches in history? Well, today we're deconstructing the curse of knowledge and why your next great leader is probably not the MVP, but the person who has spent their entire career sitting on the bench. So if you're ready, let's go. Congratulations to the University of Michigan for winning their first men's basketball national championship. For the first time since 1989, and most of my family went to the University of Michigan. I didn't. But during the game, my mom and I are texting, and especially towards the end of the game, we were texting. And one of her questions, she one of her texts, she goes, Why are so many great coaches in basketball? Why are they so short? Did they even play? And I looked at that text, I said, Wow, that sums up so much of what we talk about with leadership and how so many people don't even think about some of the things that we talk about. And what I'm gonna be talking about today. See, my mom's head, uh Dusty May, who is the Michigan basketball coach, when he was hired, I said, and and there's just something about the guy said, I think Michigan's gonna win a national championship within three years of him taking over. And it was just his second year. There's something about the guy. He knows how to make other people better. He's a great communicator, he's a great X's and O's guy as well. But the X's and O's are the least important job from a coach's standpoint, from a somebody trying to make other people better standpoint. You could be a genius at the X's and O's, but if you can't create the right culture, you can't communicate it, you can't teach it, the X and O's don't work. So as I'm sitting there listening to her text, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so what we teach. And most people, so you didn't even cross my mom's mind that just because he was short, just because he didn't play at a high level, right? Therefore, in her mind, it's like, okay, how can this guy teach other people that are actually better at playing than he will ever dream of? And that so much summarizes business, sports, life. And and it's the the curse of knowledge that that I talked about a little bit in the front is like elite players often operate on this unconscious competence, if you will. They don't they don't think about the mechanics the way many people do. They're not thinking about the crossover dribble or hitting a 95 mile per hour fastball, they just do it. And then when you add their work ethic to it and their their commitment to practicing, they're able to take all of those things and the mechanics of everything to a level very few can. And the conflict with this immediately from a coach's perspective or somebody that is supposed to be making other people in your office, your business, your practice better, is a coach's job is to deconstruct a skill into steps. If a player never had to learn those steps because they were born with it, or they had much more natural talent and then went and practiced it and were able to take it to a whole nother level, they typically can't teach a struggling rookie, right, how to fix it or a new employee that you're onboarding in in your office in your business. They become easily frustrated at the team member that won't pick it up as quickly as they did. And then this is when you get this, and all of you can relate this. This is when you get the old, hey, Susie isn't trainable. I don't think she's gonna make it. You've all heard that before. You've probably dismissed people from your practice when your office manager tells you that, or your lead clinical assistant tells you that, or your front desk tells you that. You end up buying into it and firing that person when the reality is it's most it's most likely it's not that person, it's not Susie. It's the person that's coaching her. You have the wrong people in the wrong spots. And this is so summarized, you know, it's so amazing to me how sports is able to summarize so many of these things and in such an easy way to understand it. And and it's really a role player perspective. You know, the the best coaches are often former backup catchers, you know, third string point guards that really never played, you know, career substitutes, or people that didn't even come close to making it to the NBA, right? Maybe they played in high school. That's as far as they've made it. Well, the advantage they have is these players spent their whole career on the bench watching the game, studying film to keep their jobs and understanding the psychology of the entire roster, not just the superstars. And an important point on that is that these people spent time monitoring. Right? I have a podcast coming up around this exact topic, but so many of you say, Oh, yeah, you know, Joe, you know, Joey, Susie, Mary, my lead clinical assistant, I immediately stop and I say, lead, huh? Okay, how often are they being trained on leadership? One, two. And and this is just as important is how often do you have time blocked in the schedule to where they can sit and watch? They can monitor, they can take notes, they can come up with a plan on how to make each individual assistant, your clinic, better. See, that's a leader, and that's not what any of you do, right? Your leader that you claim is a leader, you aren't investing in any leadership training, and you have them in the game all the time. They're seeing patients nine to five running the rat race, the chaotic race, and they have zero time to watch from the bench. And and that role player perspective watching from the bench is is so important. When I was still an umpire in professional baseball, and it's and it's not even about the pro game, it's it was when I was umpiring high school and NCAA as well, is that you know, I played baseball my whole life. And within one year of umpiring, I learned more about the game than I did my entire life playing all the way through high school. It is a completely different perspective than you have whenever you're playing the game. Sometimes you just have to be able to see it through other people's lenses. You have to take a step back and be able to just watch. And and it really a lot of this comes down to communication versus execution, or the intuition says greatness should be transferable. Like that, that's what we think. But history suggests that that is not the case, right? It says the more natural talent somebody has, the less likely that talent is gonna be able to make other people better. And you see, playing is an internal skill, right? Processing stimuli and reacting. Coaching and leading is an external skill. It's rhetoric, it's management, it's the diplomacy, it's breaking things down into steps, right? Being the best at doing it doesn't therefore mean you're gonna be the best at conveying it. And this is something all of you really need to take into account because many times you have the people in your leadership roles that don't want to make other people better. They're selfish, right? They were the good player, they were the good clinical assistant, they were the good employee. Now they're an office manager, but they are the problem. They're not leaders. You're not training them to be leaders, and they have no time to monitor, take notes because their role is to make other people better. That's the job. And you probably don't have that in the job description either. I hope everybody enjoyed today's quick tips edition. As always, thumb this up, make some comments on YouTube, spread the word about the Brian Wright Show podcast. I will put in the link below a way to schedule a free consultation with us with new patient groups so we can help grow your practice. Everybody listening on the audio experience channels, thanks so much for your support. Five-star review, wherever you're listening to, and spread the word as well. And until next time, I'm out.