The Great Coaches: Leadership & Life Mike Thibault
Mike Thibault is an American Basketball coach.
He started his career as a scout with the LA Lakers in 1978, eventually becoming an Assistant Coach. He was working with the team in 1980 when they won the NBA championship. He then moved to the Chicago Bulls where he worked as a Director of Scouting and Assistant Coach, and was in the room when the Bulls chose Michael Jordan in the draft. He has gone on to work with the Atlanta Hawks, New York Knicks, Seattle SuperSonics, the Milwaukee Bucks and the Connecticut Sun, as well as being part of the basketball staff for the USA women’s team that won the Olympic Gold medal in 2008. He was most recently the Head Coach of the Washington Mystics in the WNBA and led that team to the 2019 championship.
This is a master class of an interview and some of the take aways for me were:
- How honesty is the number attribute that a coach at any level needs. And how as the leader you needed to bring in people to be honest with you.
- How his time working at the LA Lakers when Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul Jabbar taught him that its never about you as the coach but instead how well the team work together.
- How you priority should be getting better at your current job not looking for your next job, and he talks about how he had to learn this early in his career.
- The importance of emotional control even if it is not something that you are particularly good at.
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