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109 - The Disease of Me: Pat Riley's 7 Sins That Destroy Teams
121 Plays17 days ago
Pat Riley called it the Disease of Me — and it doesn't start with losing. It starts with winning.
In this episode, Tex breaks down Pat Riley's 7 Danger Signals: the warning signs that individual ego is quietly taking over a team that's supposed to be chasing something bigger. From chronic under-appreciation to cliques forming in the locker room to players who are frustrated even when the team is winning — these signals show up on every team. The difference between good teams and great ones is whether anyone has the courage to address them early.
You'll learn how to spot each signal before it spreads, and get a specific action for each one — things you can actually do at practice this week, not just concepts to think about.
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Transcript
Introduction to Leadership and Team Dynamics
00:00:00
Speaker
Action, envy is the religion of the mediocre. Welcome to the Captains and Coaches podcast where we explore the art and science of leadership through the lens of athletics and beyond. I'm your host, Texan Koukkan, and today we're starting with a number, 140.
00:00:14
Speaker
Researchers at UC Berkeley ran a study with MBA students, putting them into teams of eight or more people for group projects. And they asked each person one simple question. What percentage of the team's work did you personally contribute?
00:00:31
Speaker
When they added up everyone's answers, the total did not equal 100%. It wasn't even close. Every single person believed they were doing more than everyone else realized.
00:00:42
Speaker
And here's the thing, they weren't lying. The lead researcher said people were genuinely surprised by how much they over claimed. They thought their reporting was accurate.
00:00:54
Speaker
And that's what makes this so dangerous. Because if everyone on your team privately believes they're contributing more than they're getting credit for, you don't have a team problem.
00:01:07
Speaker
You have a math problem that turns into a people problem.
Understanding 'The Disease of Me'
00:01:11
Speaker
And that people problem, Pat Riley, the great coach, he gave it a name. He called it the disease of me.
00:01:21
Speaker
We're talking about the thing that destroys more teams than losing ever will. Not lack of talent, not bad schedule, not effort, success. Because success is where the disease of me is born. And once it takes hold of your team, it's only a matter of time before that team breaks.
00:01:41
Speaker
Pat Riley didn't come up with this in a classroom. He lived it. Riley won five and NBA championships as a head coach. He coached Magic Johnson, Kareem, Shaquille O'Neal, Dwayne Wade, and he's one of the most successful coaches in the history of professional basketball.
00:01:57
Speaker
In his book, The Winner Within, one of my all-time favorites, he laid out something that most coaches don't want
Challenges of Balancing Selfishness and Team Success
00:02:05
Speaker
to admit. The most difficult thing for players to do when they become part of a team is to sacrifice.
00:02:12
Speaker
It is much easier and much more natural to be selfish. Let me repeat that. It is much easier and much more natural to be selfish.
00:02:25
Speaker
He's not saying players are bad people. He's saying selfishness is a default setting. We come wired for it. And the research backs him up. That Berkeley study wasn't done with professional athletes. It was done with NBA students.
00:02:40
Speaker
not NBA athletes, regular people, smart people, people who had no incentive to inflate their contribution. They just did it naturally. And so what does that mean for your team of athletes? And I'm talking to coaches, talking to captives, talking to leaders here.
00:02:57
Speaker
It means the disease of me isn't a character flaw. It's a human condition. And it gets activated not by failure, but by winning. Riley called the pre-success phase the innocent climb.
00:03:12
Speaker
When we're learning about each other, learning our skills, and we're coming together as a team working towards that common goal that we have not yet reached. The team is hungry. Roles are clear. Sacrifice feels worth it.
00:03:26
Speaker
because no one has arrived yet and we're sacrificing and working together on equal playing fields. Then the wins come, then the recognition comes, and slowly the math starts not adding up.
Identifying and Addressing 'The Disease of Me' Signals
00:03:42
Speaker
Riley identified what he called seven danger signals, the warning signs that the disease disease of me is spreading through your locker room. And today we're going through all seven. And for each one, I'm going to give you the captain, leader of the team, a specific action.
00:03:59
Speaker
So I meet with my team captains once a week. We give them a weekly lesson. Disease of me is one of those weekly lessons. I don't just teach them this stuff. I give them actionable steps. So with each sign signal of the disease of me, I'm going to give you an action step for you to step in as a leader and aiming to get ahead of this. Not a concept. It's not a vibe. It's something you can actually do.
00:04:25
Speaker
Let's get into it. All right. Signal number one, inexperience with success. This is the first crack. You get the big win. You get some recognition. And suddenly, someone starts believing the hype before they've earned it, before they've earned the right to believe it.
00:04:45
Speaker
We've arrived. I'm that guy. Entitlement doesn't announce itself. It shows up in body language, in slight drop in focus at practice, in believing you don't have to show up to practice because you had a great game before.
00:05:00
Speaker
So you feel it's going to carry you. You don't need to practice. You played so well. and so And also see it in someone who's coasting just a little bit because the last last game, last play, last announcement, last something went so well for them.
00:05:16
Speaker
And the dangerous thing about this one, it happens to good people, people who worked hard to get where they are. They're not wrong that they contributed to success and had a great moment. They just realize that the standard, they have not yet realized that the standard goes up once you have that flash of success.
00:05:38
Speaker
The standard doesn't go down after you accomplish something. So here's our captain action for Number one, make the debrief boring after a big win. Celebrate, then recalibrate.
00:05:52
Speaker
Acknowledge that was amazing. That was a great play. Yes. And here's what we still need to fix. Find something, one thing. It doesn't need to be a crisis. crisis It needs to be a signal that we haven't yet peaked.
00:06:09
Speaker
that there are bigger goals ahead for us to accomplish. Because the team that stays hungry after a win, you're harder to beat than a team that thinks they've already won. All right, signal number two, chronic feeling of underappreciation.
00:06:26
Speaker
Now the inner mono internal monologue starts. I'm not getting enough credit. I'm doing the work no one else notices. This is one of the this is one the Berkeley study is describing. Every player privately believes they're contributing more than the team realizes. And when recognition doesn't match what they believe they deserve, the gap becomes resentment.
00:06:53
Speaker
against the coaches, against the teammates, against the program. And Pat Riley was very clear about this. This signal has to be caught early because unaddressed, it festers and grows and starts to pull people in.
00:07:09
Speaker
So the captain action here, build a recognition ritual. and make it a system, not a gesture. Don't just call people out sometimes when they're doing right or give a vague good job.
00:07:25
Speaker
Make it a daily habit. Be very specific. Pre-game, post-game, group chat, one teammate, one specific play, one sentence about why it mattered.
00:07:36
Speaker
And a highlight their, not their gap of growth, resentment, what they've overcome, the bridge that they've built across the gap of where they used to be when you first met them as a leader.
00:07:50
Speaker
Aim to get away from, hey, great job. be very specific. That screen in the third quarter freed up the whole possession. That's your goal. That's why we scored.
00:08:01
Speaker
Or if a defenseman makes an amazing play and he gets it to the offense or gets it to somebody that then executes, take it back to the guy that started the whole chain of events and give them recognition, not just the person that finished.
00:08:16
Speaker
When recognition is consistent and specific, players stop chasing it because they know it's coming. Shift the spotlight from me to we every single day.
00:08:29
Speaker
Make it habit. all right, signal three, paranoia about my share. This is where people start to get quiet and quiet is dangerous.
00:08:42
Speaker
Players keeping score internally, minutes, stats, touches, rolls. Am I getting what I deserve? Is someone else getting more than me? Riley talked about this as a comp consumption where paranoia starts to take over. And I love the movie The Replacements. Keanu talked about this as quicksand, that paranoia and the next bad play leads to the next bad play. And the harder you fight, the more it takes over.
00:09:11
Speaker
But what gets you out of the quicksand? It's a teammate. And sometimes for leaders, it's being that teammate. If you start to feel that paranoia yourself about my share as a leader, we'll take back to step two, start giving recognition.
00:09:27
Speaker
So when players get too locked into tracking their personal brand, that team success becomes secondary, and that's a problem. The tricky part,
00:09:39
Speaker
The player probably isn't saying this out loud. They're just thinking and feeling this and they're living it in their head and it's shaping then how they play. And like the quicksand, it only leads to worse and worse play, more constraint, more tension versus playing loose and and ready.
Promoting Positive Team Dynamics
00:10:01
Speaker
Shaping needs to begin in practice for this. And unfortunately, a lot of them create these invisible walls. So leaders, you're going to have really start to pay attention to when they they lose their focus, they lose that quiet, and they start speaking negatively. I can't do this. Dang it. Why am I so this?
00:10:21
Speaker
So listen for that. That's that internal paranoia starting to come out. And they're invisible walls. You've got to break them down. So the action, Captain, stepping in here, revisit your standard that you set in the beginning of the season.
00:10:37
Speaker
Pat Riley called this the covenant, standards, rules, things that we will allow and things that we won't allow. You've established them in the beginning of the season.
00:10:48
Speaker
Now when... people start to go against it and become that paranoia, that selfishness starts to creep in, call them out for it Make them aware. Have them hold up the mirror. Going back to one of our earlier earlier lessons of how they're truly acting here.
00:11:05
Speaker
At the start of every season, we've established great standards. Great teams establish great standards. This is what we do. This is what sacrifice looks like. This is what the mission is.
00:11:17
Speaker
When someone starts to keep score and they don't need, they don't, when someone starts scorekeeping, they don't need a speech. Just pull them aside.
00:11:27
Speaker
Ask them one question. What did we agree on the start of the year? And stay silent. So you're having them acknowledge and seeing if there's an awareness gap. if they're If they don't truly remember, we didn't do a good enough job setting the standard.
00:11:45
Speaker
If they're saying, I don't know, well, now they're they're getting defensive and this is and a deeper conversation that we need to have. So reminder, ask them, what did we agree on to start the year?
00:11:57
Speaker
What's our standard? And stay silent. We're not accusing them out of anything. We're not giving them a lecture. We're just giving them a reminder. and the standards, the covenant, it does the heavy lifting so you don't have to.
00:12:12
Speaker
All right, signal four, resentment of teammates' success. Now it shifts from me not getting enough to why is my teammate getting what I want or what I deserve?
00:12:26
Speaker
This is cancerous. As Riley put it, one person quietly rooting for a teammate to fail can take a team from the top to the bottom faster than any opponent can.
00:12:40
Speaker
But here's what coaches and captains miss. It usually doesn't start like hatred. It starts like silence. A loud, happy-to-be-there player, now they are shut off, confined. Their body language is closed off.
00:12:55
Speaker
No reaction when a teammate scores. No energy on the sidelines. And that know that lack of energy energy starts to be contagious.
00:13:07
Speaker
And when somebody makes a mistake, then you start to see the body language of who they're trying to pull down. They grab somebody and be like, look, I told you.
00:13:18
Speaker
Extremely dangerous. So
00:13:23
Speaker
hollow hollow clapping as well. I love the motivation drill. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know exactly what that is. But it's ah a cue, a direction during a game. Yell to the sideline. Yell motivation drill. It's something we do in practice.
00:13:37
Speaker
And they're trained to get loud and be obnoxious and hoot and holler and be silly on the sidelines. So it creates momentum from the sidelines for the field. So now when the cue comes to motivation drill from me to the sideline and you get hollow clapping or only one person involved, the rest is silence.
00:13:56
Speaker
That's the signal. Time out. Observation, new coaches getting into the field are really smart and intelligent when it comes to programming or understanding practice plans and their sport and really bad at people.
00:14:11
Speaker
They have high IQ and low EQ. I spent the past 14 years traveling the world teaching people how to teach people lifting weights, understanding sport, but most importantly,
00:14:24
Speaker
connecting with people. I've taken all those lessons from all over the world and put them into a new course, Why They're Not Listening, Coaching Today's Athlete. If you want the first lesson free, head to the website, listen.captainsandcoaches.com to learn more.
00:14:40
Speaker
And now back to the show. Ready, ready and break. Now for the captain action. Be first every single time. This is about speed, not sincerity.
00:14:51
Speaker
Everyone eventually feels happy for their teammate. Captains just do it first. The first to clap, the first to speak, the first to post. First, a share in the group text, a highlight from the film.
00:15:05
Speaker
When you're already moving toward a teammate on the sidelines before anyone else, that behavior is visible to teammates, to coaches, to parents watching in the stands. It gives everyone else permission to do the same.
00:15:21
Speaker
Culture is built in what gets celebrated. You set the pace. Signal five, personal effort to outshine a teammate.
00:15:33
Speaker
This is sneaky because it still looks like hustle. The effort is real, but the intention is wrong. I'm working hard so I stand out, so I get noticed, so I take his spot.
00:15:50
Speaker
Riley distinguished this between competition that lifts everyone and competition that's rooted in tearing someone else down. One fuels the team, the other slowly poisons it.
00:16:04
Speaker
Captain action, redirect the why. If you start to sense this, if you start to feel this, if you start to hear this, you don't want to kill their effort. You want to aim it, redirect it, use it on the field.
00:16:18
Speaker
Ask this question, who benefits when you do that? Stay silent, let them answer. If the honest answer is me, Help them find the version of that same effort that makes the team harder to beat.
00:16:35
Speaker
Same energy, different direction. Because great teams compete against a standard, not against each other. Signal 6. Leadership vacuum from clicks and rivalries on your team.
00:16:52
Speaker
now the team really starts to fracture and split position groups friend groups social groups who eats together who who doesn't who refuses to do something with another teammate off the field that's going to show up on the field riley identified that when individuals feel disconnected from the group when no one is actively pulling them in they start building their own circles And once those circles form, you don't have one team anymore.
00:17:24
Speaker
You have factions. And here's the thing about clicks. They rarely start with the dude, the guy, the player, the person that has the ball at the end of the game.
00:17:36
Speaker
They start with the team members on the edges, the per the peripheral players, the ones who feel invisible and not acknowledged. Guess what our captain action is?
00:17:50
Speaker
We own the middle by going to the edges. Not your friends, not the starters, the guy eating alone, the freshman who hasn't found the footing yet, the one who isn't in the text chain.
00:18:05
Speaker
Go find them, sit with them, ask them real questions about themselves. Pull them into the circle before they start to build their own and pull other people into that black hole.
00:18:19
Speaker
You can't hold the middle if you're only spending time at the top. Okay, last signal here. Number seven, frustration even when the team is winning.
Addressing Deep-Seated Team Issues
00:18:33
Speaker
This is the final stage, and it's the one that requires the most courage from the captain and the team leaders. The team is winning. You are having success, and someone still isn't happy.
00:18:48
Speaker
Someone's still pouting about playing time. Someone's still, yeah, but... versus yes and, they're still unhappy.
00:18:59
Speaker
that's not a performance problem that's a me over we problem and it's it's the most exposed this is the moment where riley's framework meets roadhouse one of my favorite movies of all time name my dog after the main character here yes patrick swayze dalton he comes in and out he probably just heard his name he'll be in here in a minute so the rule from row how the captain action is be nice Be nice until it's time to not be nice.
00:19:32
Speaker
As a captain, lead with patience. Lead with relationships. You give people the benefit of a doubt. You give them grace because sometimes frustration is just frustration and it passes.
00:19:46
Speaker
But when a player's attitude is actively hurting the team, while the team is winning, you need to step in.
00:19:56
Speaker
So have a conversation no one else will. One on one, not in front of the group, no speech. Ask him this, I need to talk to you about something because it's starting to affect our team.
00:20:10
Speaker
So we're not pointing the fingers. We're not saying, hey, you do this. Hey, I'm going to talk to you about something. I feel it's affecting our team. We're including them. We're direct, we're respectful, and we're specific.
00:20:23
Speaker
That's it. That's the whole conversation. Bring up what you're observing and stay silent. What separates a team captain from a team cheerleader is the willingness to say the hard thing to the right person at the right time.
00:20:38
Speaker
That takes courage and why our role matters as team leaders. All right. So some some closing down thoughts on culture and sticking with Pat Riley here. Here's what here's what Riley understood about most teams that others don't understand.
00:20:58
Speaker
Every team gets exposed to the disease of me. Everyone. The difference is what happens next. some teams ignore it some they hope it passes hey we're winning let's ignore all this stuff they avoid the uncomfortable conversations they protect relationships at the expense of standards because they're getting one stat that they believe matters and ignoring others they they they could correct great teams confront it early directly and consistently
00:21:35
Speaker
So here's the question for you this week, lesson I handed off to my team captains with introducing the disease disease of me. Where is the disease of me showing up on your team right now?
00:21:50
Speaker
Where is the disease of me showing up for me? I asked them to hold the mirror up. They asked me for examples, and I gave them examples and observations of words they've used, decisions they've made that are in line with seven of these signals.
00:22:09
Speaker
And props to them. They've shown a lot of growth over the season. They acknowledged it, owned it, and now they have experience to grow upon. They did not get defensive. So excellent, excellent job on them showing growth in these natural human tests and tendencies. They will show up.
00:22:28
Speaker
So, because you can't eliminate it in the room if you're tolerating it in yourself. Weak leaders protect ego. Strong leaders protect the team.
00:22:43
Speaker
Disease of me, it's always there. Waiting. And great captains don't ignore it. They don't avoid it. They step in. They hold the standard. And they choose every day in small moments and big ones, we over me.
Conclusion and Invitation to Engage
00:22:58
Speaker
That does it for this episode of the Captains and Coaches podcast. Thank you for tuning in. If you like what you heard here today, i encourage you check back to past episodes and the lessons that I handed off to my team captains. Like and subscribe to the show so you get notified when we release more of these.
00:23:15
Speaker
AIM is always two episodes a week, one lesson from my team and another from an interview, an amazing coach out there. So like, subscribe, follow along. encourage you also to get these notes. Sign up for my newsletter. Super easy, free, comes at you twice a week. That's newsletter.captainsandcoaches.com.
00:23:35
Speaker
dot com Thank you again for tuning in and helping us raise game. And see you.