Geno Auriemma is, simply put, the most successful college basketball coach of all time. Here’s a brief look at the stat sheet highlights he has compiled in his 40-year career coaching the UConn Huskies Women’s Basketball program:

Member of Basketball Hall of Fame (inducted in 2006)
3 Olympic Gold Medals
1250-165 win-loss record (best all time)*
12 National Championships (most all time)
6 perfect seasons (most all time)
A record 111-game win streak (best all time)

*He hasn’t had a losing record in a season since his first, in 1985.

During their unprecedented streak, the team won all but 3 games by more than 10 points. Geno could be heard on the sidelines during a lopsided victory yelling to his team “You guys aren’t good yet!”. The reason being, even in a winning effort he held his team to a standard that they were expected to uphold, no matter the score. His teams learned and understood those expectations and as a result are some of the most successful teams in all of organized sports. Here are some of the leadership tools that drive Geno’s success.

“Allow people to be successful”

After Geno Auriemma became the winningest college basketball coach this past season, UConn basketball alumni and WNBA star Sue Bird emphasized how Auriemma and long-time assistant coach Chris Daily “built something extraordinary out of nothing but belief.” What they built was an environment where people could come together and achieve more than they would have individually. Geno says his role as a leader is to “allow people to be successful.” Leadership is a relationship, and it starts with understanding the importance of the people around you.

People First

In building his coaching staff, Geno says, “I don’t hire good coaches, I hire good people. If they turn out to be good coaches, too, that’s a plus.” He seeks to surround himself with professionals; coaches who will exemplify the work ethic and dedication to the mission he aims to foster in his players. Geno believes the best workers are “talented, unselfish, and great teammates.” When recruiting players, Geno looks past obvious skills, instead observing “intangibles” such as effort (diving for loose balls), attitude (body language in difficult situations), and unselfishness (passing to open teammates). It’s not enough to have superb skills, team members have to put them to work to build something bigger than themselves. Assembling these types of teams requires building trust.

Questions:

Does this candidate have the character, values, and attitude that will help our team?
What questions can I ask to determine this?

Action:

Write out descriptions of the type of character, values and attitude you want a new team member to bring to the organization. Then come up with ways to adapt the recruiting and interview process to test for those.

Trust

Geno says, “Every group big or small—there has to be a high level of trust that what I’m saying is what I truly believe. And that you believe that what I’m saying is meant to help you.” Building a successful team requires individuals to understand and believe in a shared vision. This ensures they are moving in the same direction, with the same future in mind. Team members must also believe that their leader has their best interests in mind. Geno’s players, past and present, often talk about how they can walk into his office and ask him anything. By being open to his players and getting to know them in this way Geno builds relationships and, in turn, trust. When they know you’re looking out for them, they are far more likely to listen. By demonstrating care and empathy towards your team, you earn the trust and followership of individuals.

Questions:

Am I building and maintaining relationships by demonstrating my care and empathy for my team?
Does my team know what I believe and do they believe it too?

Action:

Ask a team member to describe to you what they think you believe. If they’re off track, have a conversation about what your beliefs are. Discuss their beliefs and how you align with one another.

Listening

Opening your door is just the first step. The opportunity to connect is meaningless without the essential skill of listening. “One of the biggest attributes that resilient leaders have is the ability to listen,” Geno says. “Listen more than you talk.” A leader will never have all the information. As an individual, a leader can also only have one perspective. By listening, we are able to gather more information and see situations from others’ perspectives. This leads to more effective decision-making. Listening is also the foundation of strong relationships. Learning about your team members, understanding their feelings and concerns, is the key to connection. It’s not always about advice or answers. Sometimes they just want to be heard.

Questions:

Am I listening more than I talk?
Am I listening to understand?

Action:

The next time someone approaches you with a problem, don’t immediately try to solve it. Instead, express to them how you believe they are feeling about the situation. Ask questions to check your understanding of their situation. See if you can go the whole conversation without offering advice.

Building Relationships

If listening is the stone from which the foundation of trust is built upon, then relationships are the houses that sit atop that foundation. Relationships require consistent effort and care. “If you want to be honest and truthful [with your] people that you work with, one, make sure you know them,” Geno says. “They know you… [That way] they know it’s coming from a good place. And that they know the only reason they would say this to me is ‘cause they want me to be better.” Knowing each other means reaching a mutual understanding of what your intentions are. If your team members believe you care, then your feedback is seen as helpful. Leadership is a relationship. Everyday is an opportunity to build those relationships.

Questions:

Am I working to know my team members?
Do I create opportunities for my team members to get to know me?
How do I show them I have their best interests in mind?

Action:

Go have a conversation with a team member you don’t know as well as you think you should. Learn one new thing about them, remember (or write down) that thing, and be sure to bring it up in conversation the next time you speak to them.

Leading by Example

Leaders are responsible for modeling behaviors. Whether you want them to or not, your team will emulate your behaviors, for better or for worse. Geno surrounds himself with coaches who are “professionals” so his players see everyday the effort they put in and how they go about their business. Renee Montgommery, 2009 NCAA Champion and 2x WNBA Champion recalls how Geno would say “You can’t hold other people accountable if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do.” From this she learned, “I had to lead by example…the first step was me.” Geno doesn’t just embody the philosophy of leading by example, but he fosters this mentality in his players. As a leader, your behaviors have an outsized impact. Model the right behaviors and you’ll get more of them.

Questions:

Am I being who I want my team members to be?
What behaviors do I want to see more of and how can I model those more clearly for others?

Action:

Pick an important behavior you want your team members to demonstrate that you struggle to do consistently. Set aside time each day for two weeks working on modeling that behavior for the team by doing it well yourself.

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“I brought you here for a reason– do it.”

Sherri Coale, former Oklahoma Sooners basketball coach, said “as keen as his gift is for X’s and O’s, Geno’s gift for affecting people is greater. The masses want to say he wins because he has the best players. He definitely has the best players. Geno wins because he makes the best players better versions of themselves.” Becoming that better player starts with expectations, and there is no one better at setting them than Geno.

Setting Expectations

Geno offers a poignant analogy for why he sets high expectations: “This is just another class for you guys, basketball is. If you just want to be average, then you do average work. If you want to be a little bit above average, then you do a little more work. If you want to get A’s in basketball, then you’ve got to do stuff that other people aren’t willing to do.” Geno, from day one, makes it clear to his players that if they want to succeed at the highest level they need to put in the work that others won’t. Geno doesn’t settle for what you think your best is. As Hall of Famer and former Husky Rebecca Lobo said, “he makes you do things physically and mentally you didn’t know you were capable of” (for an example, check out the $100 bill trick that Geno learned from Coach Bob Knight).

Geno points out that “too many times, [team members] stop before they hit that wall, so they never find out what their limits really are. And it’s my job as a leader to tell them, ‘There are no limits until you can’t do it.’” His belief in what they are capable of challenges players to achieve their full potential. Auriemma has a reputation of being tough on his players, being unrelenting when they fail to meet expectations. “I’m a hardass, but we wouldn’t have had all the accomplishments we have as a basketball program if that’s all I was. Players would have stopped listening to me, and I would have been run out of coaching if that’s all I was,” says Geno. The trust, listening and relationship building serves as a foundation upon which he can challenge his players with expectations they may not at first think possible. Geno adds, “so I think we win because I sometimes demand more than they can give. But I don’t know what that is until I find out you can’t give it.” Growing team members means continually raising the bar for them as their leader, showing them that we believe they are capable of more and are willing to help them get there.

Questions:

Do my team and I share the same expectations?
Have I provided appropriate challenges for each team member to achieve growth and move towards their potential?

Action:

Ask a team member “What are my expectations of you in your role?” Compare their response to what you want their expectations to be and work with them to more clearly communicate those expectations.

Get Better Every Day

When Geno is shouting “You guys aren’t good yet!” to his team during a lopsided rout during one of their 111 consecutive wins it wasn’t because he’s a “hardass.” It was because Geno’s team wasn’t playing against their opponent, and they weren’t being evaluated by the scoreboard. They were playing against the team they were yesterday and were being evaluated on their potential, based on the established expectations. Geno would ask, “we’re the best team in the country, however, are you satisfied with this clip when I show you this? These next five clips, are you happy with this? ‘No, but we just won by 30.’ Are you happy with this? Get them to say ‘nah, coach, I’m better than that.’ OK, then let’s go fix it. Let them decide that it’s not good enough.” This exemplifies Geno’s approach to obtaining buy-in from his players. By setting the expectations together, they are invested in meeting them.

Former UConn and WNBA star Sue Bird spoke of Geno’s coaching saying he “had a belief… a vision of what could be… it was never about any of this. It was so simple, get better every day… you push them to be better than they thought they could ever be.” This belief informed Geno’s approach to improvement. He knew that if he wanted his team to be great, they each needed to be “the kind of person that takes pride in the easy things.” Do the hard work in practice, so that when gametime rolls around it is automatic. And they don’t have to talk about it, because as Geno shares, “I’m always leery of someone who tells me how hard they work. Hard workers just work hard and let their results speak for themselves.”

Auriemma often points to athlete’s peers in the military, highlighting the critical nature of their work and the resulting care and attention it creates. “I say, ‘Kids your age all around the world are in the U.S. military. If they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, when it’s supposed to be done, it has serious consequences — not just for them but for their team, for their families.’ When you start taking every single thing you’re doing as serious as those kids your age take their job in the military, then you’ll understand what passion is and commitment to detail.” The combination of Geno’s high standards, belief in his players, and support for them enables the culture of excellence that has defined the program for decades.

Questions:

What are we doing to be better today than yesterday?
Do my team members know what better looks like?

Action:

Think of a task or skill development that is really important that you’ve been neglecting because [insert excuse here]. Identify a next step to take and go make progress on it.

Emulating Pressure in Practice

Practicing in and of itself isn’t enough. How you practice matters. For Geno’s team to be successful in high-pressure situations they needed to practice in a way that prepared them for those situations. While coaching Team USA in the Olympics, a Navy SEAL shared with Geno a common saying amongst SEALs: “You don’t rise to the occasion; you sink to the level of your training.” Meaning that in combat, you will only perform as well as your preparation. Geno adapted this mentality for his team stating, “we’re not gonna practice ’til we get it right. We’re gonna practice until we can’t get it wrong.” Geno has been known to create unusual situations during his practices to increase the pressure for his teams. For example, he’ll occasionally have them play 5 against 7, forcing them to improve their teamwork to defend or score successfully. Geno says, “if you aspire to be a championship team, you’re gonna be playing in high-pressure situations. So your practices and your training sessions have to prepare you for that kind of pressure.” It’s no use practicing in an optimal environment with low stakes. The reality of gameday will be very different from that experience. Instead, “you as a leader owe it to your team to have them experience what pressure feels like. They have to feel it; they have to handle it; they have to overcome it. You have to train them for that,” says Geno.

Questions:

Is my team preparing and training for reality?
How can we better practice executing in a high-pressure environment?

Action:

Work with your team to create a way to simulate or practice a challenging skill/task/situation in as realistic a way as possible. Find opportunities to include such exercises into regular training or development for team members.

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“Play hard, play smart, have fun.”

“Carrying things over from the process to execution is hard as hell. And the frustration that sets in, from not being able, ‘I do everything right and I still get it wrong coach, why?’ It’s a damn hard question to answer.” Geno sees his role as a leader to guide team members through those tough moments by delivering feedback that helps them evaluate their decisions, learn from failure, and appreciate what they’ve accomplished.

Decision Making

When it comes to evaluating decisions, Geno has a simple philosophy to help his players distinguish between their decisions and outcomes: “I don’t care about what happened. I care about how it happened.” This distinction between decision and outcome is important, and the first step is understanding what is within your control. “None of us has any control over things that are uncontrollable,” Geno states. “So it’s our job, as coaches, to make sure that we focus on those things that, absolutely, we have total control over.” He adds, “if we take the right shot, you have no control over whether it goes in or not. We take the wrong shot, I have a problem there.”

Too often people are fooled into thinking they made a good decision because it led to a good outcome. Geno says, “if you hit [that] shot, understand that you got lucky, because if you keep making that decision everyday, you’re going to lose.” Geno’s emphasis is on what led up to the outcome, the position you put yourself in to execute, the preparation to execute. Once during an NCAA tournament game, Geno had drawn up a play in the final moments of a game coming out of a timeout. Their star, Paige Bueckers was supposed to wait for a screen, and get open on the inbound. She didn’t wait for the screen and the play was a bust. UConn went on to win the game despite the failure of that play. When Geno approached Paige after the game she retorted “we won, what’s the problem dude?” Geno replies, “That’s what leads to the other stuff, when you think you can get away with taking shortcuts, make bad decisions, and we won anyway.” Eventually those bad decisions come back to bite you and the results match up with your decision quality.

Questions:

Ask yourself and/or your team members: “Are you happy with the decision you made?”
What was outside of our control in this situation?

Action:

Think about a recent decision that lead to a positive or negative outcome. Then assess your decision, separate from the outcome.

Failure

Whether caused by our decisions, influenced by luck, or some combination of the two, all leaders have to deal with bad outcomes. Failure is a natural part of learning, competing, or doing anything successfully. As Geno puts it, “True winning is understanding [that] failure is the first step towards winning.” This can be particularly hard for new leaders to grapple with. Leaders are often selected or promoted based on a their excellence in a previous role. They are then made responsible for a group of people who are doing what they used to do. However, leading is a completely different job that often requires a completely different set of skills. Geno says, “can you learn to be a leader? Absolutely, if you’re willing to put yourself out there and be the one that is responsible for failing.” You are going to make mistakes as a leader and it is your responsibility to take ownership of your behaviors. It is also your responsibility to ensure your team members take ownership of their own mistakes. “Here, you can make mistakes,” Auriemma said. “But if you accept making mistakes because it’s a game and nothing bad happens, then as you go on in the rest of your life, and the stakes get higher and things get tougher, the only thing you’ve learned is how to make mistakes and excuses. We talk about that almost every day.”

Questions:

How did the failure happen?
Did I get unlucky or did I make a bad decision?
Did I put in the effort beforehand, or did I not prepare well enough?
How will we learn from this failure and what can we do differently/better next time?

Action:

Reflect on a recent failure. Determine what parts of the outcome were driven by your decisions and what parts were outside of your control.

Feedback

The most important way to learn from failure (or from any experience) is through feedback. A leader’s approach to delivering feedback is crucial to a team member’s acceptance of and willingness to take action on that feedback. As Geno puts it, “the idea is to be critical of someone’s actions without them thinking you’re being critical of them as a person.” Feedback must be specific, timely, and target a particular behavior. Team members need to get a healthy mix of reinforcing feedback (keep doing that!) and constructive feedback (that could be done better/differently). Feedback, especially of the more critical variety, must be delivered empathetically and be based on a relationship founded on trust. Acknowledging the feelings that arise is important. “I think the number one thing you can do with a player, an employee… is say to them, ‘I understand,’” Geno says. “Sometimes that’s all you have to say, ‘Listen, I understand what you’re going through. I understand why this is hard. I understand what a struggle it is. I can see you’re frustrated.’ Acknowledge it, and then [say], ‘Here’s how I can help.’” If a team member feels heard and understood, and believes you have their best interests in mind, they are more likely to be receptive of that feedback. While Geno doesn’t hold back from delivering critical feedback, even during a lopsided victory, he’s careful to also deliver reinforcing feedback when things are done well. Otherwise, we can become too focused on only finding the problems, he cautions, “players start to think that winning isn’t enough. You need to be very careful that you don’t send that message.”

Questions:

Do I have a well-established relationship and trust this team member knows I have their best interests in mind when I deliver feedback?
Have I acknowledged and addressed the feelings, behaviors, and impacts at play while delivering this feedback?
Do I provide enough reinforcing feedback to build team members up so that they don’t think I’m always looking for problems and to tear them down?

Action:

Give a team member feedback on something they did really well recently. Be specific!

Impermanence and Appreciation

Despite his tremendous success, Geno demonstrates incredible humility and understanding that nothing is a given. Sometimes players get hurt or you just get beat, and those seasons end in losses and coming up short of a national championship. The fact that only 1 of the hundreds of Division 1 Women’s Basketball programs will hoist the championship trophy at the end of the year is not lost on Geno. “We’ve won a lot of national championships and we’ve never taken any of them for granted. Every one is special.” He is always the first to express his gratitude and his appreciation for his team and coaching staff who make such championships possible. And that taste is only so sweet because of the heart-breaking defeats, the disappointments, the going home early.

After a stretch of 17 years where Geno’s teams won 10 national championships, the Huskies had gone 9 years in a row without one. A drought, by UConn standards, Geno expressed the doubt he struggled with as a leader during this stretch saying, “Being brutally honest, there was so many times where I would go home and I would say ‘I don’t think I’m as good a coach as I used to be. I don’t think I’m as able to do what these players need in today’s world. I don’t know that I can do that.’ Which is crazy, because we were going to the Final Four every year.” Up until 2025, the Huskies under Geno actually had a losing record in the Final Four. That goes to show just how incredibly difficult it is to perform consistently at the highest level against the toughest competition. Geno said, “It really, really, really, made me question ‘Am I still the right person to be doing this at this time in my career, at a place like UConn, where a championship is the standard?” Of course, in typical Geno fashion, he answered that question by bringing home UConn’s 12th national championship this April. Geno’s humility is one of his greatest skills as a leader. Forged by the countless struggles and losses, the fears and disappointments of coming up just short, he leans on his humility to drive his own learning and improvement. He understands how much thought, energy, and work goes into a championship season and he helps instill that desire in his team. Regardless of the outcome, Geno is always grateful for the opportunity to lead, and expresses his appreciation for the relationships he shares with his team and coaches, because one day this won’t be here, and tomorrow this might all be different. As Geno says, “Everything goes in cycles. There isn’t anything that lasts indefinitely.”

Questions:

Who and what am I most grateful for and how can I show and express that gratitude?
Have I taken a pause recently to appreciate where I am now, who is on my team, and what we have accomplished together?

Action:

Celebrate the wins, because each one is special.

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