Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Hall of Fame Basketball Coach Muffet McGraw

I recently interviewed Hall of Fame Basketball Coach Muffet McGraw on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is one of the greatest coaches in the history of women’s basketball. Muffet McGraw spent four decades coaching college basketball, including 33 years as the head coach at Notre Dame, winning two national championships, three consensus National Coach of the Year honors, and induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Muffet, thank you for joining us.

Muffet: Great to be here, Adam. Looking forward to our conversation.

Adam: I’m looking forward to it. You grew up in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and went to college a quick drive away at St. Joseph’s University, where you were captain of the women’s basketball team. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Muffet: Well, I started playing basketball way back before Title IX. When I got to St. Joe’s, it was the first year that Title IX had just come into play, and we didn’t have anything. We look at what people have now, and I say, you have no idea. We didn’t have practice clothes. We did our own laundry. We bought our own sneakers. We had to drive ourselves to the away games if somebody was lucky enough to have a car on campus. We all piled in, and that’s how we got to our games. I don’t think we left the state. We played everybody really pretty much in range of Philly, and we sat on the sidelines, waited for the men to finish practice. They could go as long as they wanted. They owned the gym, and then it was our turn. We would come on, and we drew very small crowds. Our coach used to joke, I’ve got to recruit players from bigger families so that we get a little bigger crowd at some of our games. And it was a great experience because we played for love of the game. We didn’t have athletic scholarships. We were paying our own way. It was very, very different than it is now. We didn’t get write-ups in the local paper. Forget a game being on TV. You were not going to see any games on TV, even the national championship. So I would like to consider myself a pioneer and say that we’ve definitely got things rolling for where we are right now.

Adam: I love that. And when you look at people who have been able to achieve greatness in whatever it is that they’ve pursued, a big part of it is having that love of the game, passion for what you do, love of your craft.

Muffet: For sure. I think just having that passion, as you mentioned, and the joy of playing with teammates, with some people that are still friends of mine. They come out every year for a Notre Dame football game. The starting five comes out. Our tallest player was five foot ten, and that’s not very tall in the basketball world, as you know, but it was just such a great experience. And the people that you meet, and really, that’s what sports gives you. It’s the experiences, the ability to travel, the people that you meet, lifelong friends, and certainly, I feel like they’re my sisters for life.

Adam: What compelled you to pursue a career in coaching, and how did you know that you were ultimately going to be good at it?

Muffet: Well, first, I was a sociology major, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I was going to save the world somehow. I just wasn’t sure which direction I was going to go in. But I didn’t find a lot of jobs, and a high school job opened right there in Philly. And I thought, you know what, I think I’ll give this a try. It was a part-time job. I remember coming home and telling my husband I got the job. And he said, how much do they pay? And I said, $1,200. He goes, wow, $1,200 a month. I think we could live with that. I said, no, no, it’s $1,200 for the year. And so I started my career there, and my first practice, I came home, and I said, I have found my passion. I have found what I want to do with the rest of my life. I absolutely loved coaching. I love the interaction with the girls. I love the competitive part of it. I just loved everything about it.

Adam: How did you know that you were good at it? So it’s one thing to know that you love something. It’s another thing to know that you excel at it. When was that moment that you knew this is it for me?

Muffet: Well, I would say I was really fortunate, because at that time, I inherited a really good team. I think we had four players go off to college and win a scholarship there, and so I really didn’t know. I knew our team was pretty good. I really still didn’t know if I was any good at this. I knew that I loved the game enough to be curious enough. I went to every practice around Villanova, men, St. Joe’s, anytime I could see another coach’s practice. I really wanted to learn. I’d go to clinics. I would do whatever I had to do. I went to one clinic. It was a Friday-Saturday clinic, and when I checked in, the guy said, oh, I see you’re not going to be here tomorrow. And I said, no, I can’t come tomorrow. I’m getting married. But Friday night before my wedding, I was at a basketball clinic. So I think my husband had a little bit of an idea of what he was in for. But from there, I went up to Lehigh, and I was there for five years. But the thing was, I got to make a lot of mistakes along the way, and nobody was looking over my shoulder. People had women’s basketball because Title IX said they had to. It wasn’t a situation where I was going to get fired. I wasn’t making very much money. They were just kind of having a program, and they thought that was enough. And for me, it was great, because as you know, failing, which in basketball, you lose, you make so many mistakes just in one game. You can learn and you can grow from all those mistakes that you made. So I was fortunate to kind of do it almost in the backstage, where no one was looking. So by the time I got to Notre Dame, I had learned quite a bit.

Adam: I love that. So many great lessons there. First and foremost, we spoke a little bit about the importance of having passion, passion for what you do. It’s hard to be great at anything without having that passion. And you identified right away that this is something that I love. This is something that I could do all day, every day. This is something that I could do, maybe even on my wedding day. I don’t know if logistically I can do it, so I’ll do it the day before and maybe do it the day after. And when you have the room to make mistakes, when you have the room to fail, when you’re not going to be judged for every little thing that you do, that’s how you grow. That’s how you become better. That’s how you become great. I did an interview with Joe Maddon, another legendary coach, and he shared something very similar to what you shared, which is he spent decades managing on the backfields when no one was looking. He spent decades trying things out, seeing what worked, seeing what didn’t work, and having that experience when the lights were off gave him the understanding of what to do when the lights were on. And it was the exact same thing for you when you got to Notre Dame?

Muffet: Well, it really was, and then having a great staff around me. But I think women struggle with confidence. I think even as a coach, my team, my number one job was trying to build confidence, and I felt that way about myself. I don’t think I ever felt like I’ve arrived. I’ve made it. I got the Notre Dame job, and I was like, holy cow, what am I going to do now? And it’s like, we’ll take it a year at a time. We’ll see where it goes. But I don’t think I ever really got comfortable with where I was and the success that we had. I still would attribute it all to my team, and I think that’s something that women look at things a lot differently than men do. We talk in we instead of I, and I think I would look and say, I had a great staff, I had really great players. But I think always in the back of your mind, you’re like, is it me? Am I making a difference? And am I making the right things? Because you look at the film and you see, oh, why did I do that? Why did I play zone? I could have gone man. Why did I play her when I should have played her? Why did I do this? So I think you’re constantly growing, constantly looking at what you did wrong and trying to figure out how we’re going to get this right. And then winning a national championship certainly gives you the confidence. Just getting to the Final Four, I think, gives you that kind of confidence. But I still would say it was because I was surrounded by great coaches and great players.

Adam: If you don’t make it to the Final Four or if you don’t win a national championship, how can you develop self-confidence, and how, as a leader, can you instill confidence in others?

Muffet: I think giving it to others is a lot easier than giving it to yourself. And I think one of the things that I liked to do with my team was make sure that they had a voice. Make sure that I was asking their opinion. Make sure that I was saying, what did you think about this? How do you feel about this? Can you see us doing something a different way? As a leader, I would say I did a 180 in my leadership. I mean, I was Bobby Knight, my way or the highway. I am in charge. Don’t ask me any questions. When I started back in the 80s, that’s how it was. But I grew as the generations changed, and then I got to the point where I was trying to get a lot more feedback from my team. What do you think about this? How do you like the way we’re guarding the ball screen? Could we do it a better way? To the point where they would call and say, hey, are you watching this game? Why don’t we try this? So it was much more of a collaborative type of leadership. And I think that’s how you grow their confidence. When they know, wow, she’s listening to me. She is listening to my opinion. She’s asking me what my opinion is. And I think just constantly reinforcing when they do things well. When you ask my players after the season, what did you do well? What do you need to work on? The list of what they did well is very small. I did this, but I didn’t do it all the time. I did that well maybe 80 percent. But the list of what they had to work on was always just so super long. So I felt like it was my job saying, no, you were really good at this. No, you did this really well, and continually trying to do that. But I think the thing with leadership, it’s all about believing in people, but the hardest part of that is believing in someone after they fail. And that is true leadership, when you can continue to believe in them, and that’s hard. And it’s really hard when you lose a game and somebody doesn’t play well, and if you look and start blaming people, I mean, that’s absolutely the wrong way to go, and you’re going to lose your whole team. So I think to continue to build that confidence, and then you build on your success, and you hope that you have somebody in your corner. My husband was probably my biggest supporter, and having him there to just say, this was good. You did good. You did good. It really helps, even though in my mind I’m thinking of all the things I did wrong.

Adam: Was there a moment in your career that you’re thinking of when you shared that believing in someone after they fail is a huge challenge, and how did you confront that?

Muffet: Well, I think a lot of people think that if you lose a game because somebody misses a free throw at the end of the game, that that person lost the game for you. So I think going into the locker room after we lost the national championship because we missed a free throw, going into the locker room and immediately saying, that’s not how we lost the game. That was not it. What happened was the first 39 minutes, we all made a lot of mistakes in there. And I think earlier in my career, I might not have been quite the same in the locker room. I might have thought to myself, yep, you lost the game because you missed that free throw. So I think I grew a little bit to get to that point.

Adam: How do you get over a loss like that, a devastating loss, where it comes down to a free throw, comes down to a moment here, a moment there? How do you get over that and ultimately move on?

Muffet: Well, I still remember a loss from 10 years ago in a game to go to the Elite Eight, and I called a play with four seconds left that just was a disaster. And I’ve gone over that one in my mind quite a few times. That was 10 years ago. So I think you have to get to the point where you look at your team, and you say, here’s our potential. This is what we can be. And everybody knows what their potential is and their potential as a team. And so sometimes just to get to the Final Four, you got to feel like, wow, we were one of the last four teams standing. A silver medal is still pretty good, even though we lost the game. And I think there’s so many more important things than winning and losing, and it’s all about what you learn, the camaraderie you have with your team, the life lessons that you learn. Because the year before we won the championship, we had a player who took a shot at the end of the game. It got blocked. We lost that game. The next year, she hits the game-winner, and we win the national championship. So I think when you look at those things and you just say, you got to get over it. You got to put it behind you. You got to get up and start thinking fresh. And that was another thing. I carried losses with me for days. And I think the more mature and the older I got, I was able to put things behind me and just focus on how to get better.

Adam: And it’s hard, but that one day at a time mentality, what you did yesterday, if you lost a game yesterday and you’re dwelling on yesterday’s game, or if you won a game yesterday and you’re celebrating yesterday’s win, that isn’t going to help you with today’s game. It’s ultimately about being in the present, focusing on today.

Muffet: Yeah, having both feet where you are, and not getting too high or too low, and understanding that they’re just kids. These are just kids out there playing a game, and it’s supposed to be fun. And that’s where I would lose them sometimes. For me, practice is fun. Playing games, competing is fun. They really wanted to enjoy the whole experience a little bit more. And letting them have fun, allowing them to see the joy in their faces when they’re on the court after seeing somebody make a big play, that maybe she’s a freshman. She didn’t know what she would be. She didn’t know she could ever play at this level. And then you see her do something great, and you just see her whole demeanor change and how she stands up a little straighter and walks a little taller because she’s done something that she didn’t know she could do. And that is one of those great moments of coaching.

Adam: You made reference to your evolution as a leader, from a Bobby Knight leader to a leader who leads with feedback, leads with listening, leads through collaboration. What do you believe are the keys to effective leadership, and what can anyone do to become a better leader?

Muffet: Well, I think the four most important words a leader can say is, what do you think? And the trick of that is you have to let them answer that before you tell them what you think. And that’s another thing I learned. I would go into the office and say, oh, I saw this play last night. I’m going to put it in. It’s going to be great. Here’s what it is. What do you think? Well, I’ve already told them that I’m going to put it in, so they know that. So I have to go in and say, hey, here’s an idea. Let’s poke some holes in it. Tell me what you think. Is it going to work for us or not? And I think that’s kind of a really important thing, that everybody knows they have a voice. We’re collaborating. It’s more of a democracy. Everybody has an opinion. We’re going to argue it out. Conflict is good. Let’s argue. Let’s challenge each other. Let’s see how good we can be. Make sure this is the best product we have when we get out there and put it out on the floor. So I think having those things in your staff meeting, and then for me, communication. I mean, you’ve got your vision. It’s got to be compelling. It’s got to be something people want to say, like, that’s for me. I want to join that. That’s the kind of vision I see. And then have the plan underneath it for this is where we’re going to go. I think for me, transparency and communication. I told every one of my players, this is exactly what I need from you. Here’s three things. I expect this from you every day, every game. This is your job. You have to go out and do your job. You have to do your role. You have to know your role. You have to accept your role, and then you have to go out and do it. And I think a lot of people are afraid to be honest, and especially now, people just don’t want to be honest with each other. And I never had a problem with that. Probably went from brutally honest to now kind of gentler honesty. But I think people need to know. They want feedback. This is what I see, and this is where I think we can get to.

Adam: You shared a lot of great information, and something you shared that I love is having clarity around what you need to do is essential for anyone doing anything, whether you’re a basketball player, whether you’re working in any company. And as a leader, if you can clearly define, clearly lay out, these are the three things that you have to do. You have to do this. You have to do this, and you have to do that. It makes things a lot easier.

Muffet: You know, it really does. But the other thing I did, I did it in front of the whole team. So you knew what your job was, but you also knew what everyone else on the team what their role was going to be. So they knew who the best three-point shooters were, who was going to be maybe shoot a little bit more, who was going to be in charge of rebounding, who was the best defender. Everybody knew what to expect from each other, and then they could kind of compete for those jobs. So I would never say you need to be the leading scorer. I would say you need to be top four in scoring, or you need to lead the team in steals. But I would tell three people that, so there’s some competition for what they had to do at the same time as here’s your strengths. We’re going to play to your strengths, and we’re going to work on your weaknesses so that maybe next year you’re going to have a different role.

Adam: You brought up a word that I would love to dive into, and that’s competition. How, as a leader, can you create a culture of both competition and collaboration, where people within your organization are motivated and incentivized to compete and to fight, but at the same time view the people who they’re competing with as collaborators, as teammates, as partners, to try to get to that collective goal?

Muffet: Well, I think creating a culture of belonging is another job of a leader. You have to have that culture where everybody feels safe to say whatever they want. They know that we is more important than me. That’s the biggest thing: that you teach how to be unselfish, how to give up a little bit for the group to do better. And I think having that competition, most players, they love competition. We don’t try to pit them against each other too much. It’s more of a friendly competition to see who’s going to lead the team in steals or who’s going to lead the team in a different category. But we do do that at practice, and we put them out there and throw the whistles away and say, we’re just going at it, and it’s one-on-one. Blood is not a problem. Just play till you get the ball in the basket. Then, when we play against another team, you can see the unity that we have, that we’ve built up. So I think really engaging in that competition at practice is really important, but we saved the real competitive part for the games.

Adam: What does a culture of belonging mean to you, and how can you cultivate it?

Muffet: Yeah, I think all everybody wants is to feel like they’re a part of something and that they are contributing to whatever the success of the team is. Everybody connected with my program, whether you don’t play at all and you’re a sub, or you’re in marketing, or you’re in sports information, or it doesn’t matter what you do, everybody wants to feel like their job’s important, and it’s my job to make them feel that way. So the last person on the bench and the best player need to know that I care about them off the court. They need to know that they belong here. They’re helping us. What they’re doing at practice is helping us in the game. Even though you didn’t play in the game, you did some things at practice that really helped us prepare for the game. So, trying to make sure that everybody feels like they’re a part of it. And we do different things where we give out kind of like gold stars for different reasons, for community service, for academics, for all kinds of things that are important to the team. And so you can take time to praise people and value them. And we didn’t talk about, oh, you’re the leading scorer. You’re the best on the team. I’m going to treat you differently. Everybody is following the same rules. We’re all here for each other. And it’s about that selflessness, I think, that really can make the team successful.

Adam: A lot of great advice. The most successful leaders care. The most successful leaders love people. The most successful leaders aren’t faking it. They’re showing up every day with deep, genuine concern about the people around them and demonstrate it. And the people who they lead understand that their leader or leaders care about them, and that makes all the difference in creating this culture of belonging, recognition, praise, something that you shared, which is so important, creating a culture where everyone is treated the same way, whether you’re the star player or the last person off the bench. There isn’t going to be a special set of rules. And when you start treating one person with this set of rules and another person with that set of rules, it’s a very easy way to blow up what might otherwise be a successful culture.

Muffet: You’ll absolutely lose your whole team if you start to do that and give people preferential treatment. I think we’ve seen that in toxic cultures on different teams, where a star player gets star treatment, and that’s something that I don’t think ever works.

Adam: The role of a college basketball coach has evolved dramatically from the time you were coaching to today. And when you coached, your job wasn’t to pay players. Your job wasn’t to worry about NIL, worry about the transfer portal, but you were responsible for building winning teams, and you did. What were the keys to building winning teams? What did you look for in the players who you brought in? And what advice do you have for anyone listening on recruiting talent and building winning teams?

Muffet: Well, I think first of all, I see myself as an educator. We are teachers, and what we’re teaching is life skills. We’re teaching kids how to persevere, how to be determined, how to focus, how to be hardworking, make sacrifices, all the things that you learn from playing sports, all these great life skills that are going to help you down the road. Those are the kind of things that we’re trying to teach them about, commitment and loyalty, and then those things are so important. And when I would go recruiting, I looked at kids that were going to fit into our team. I didn’t look at how good of a player you were. I would go to see a lot of really good players. They were ranked in the top five, top ten in the country, and I would come back and say to my staff, we’re not recruiting her. She’s not going to fit. She only cares about herself. She’s not somebody that’s going to be a team player. Or she’s looking up the stands at her parents, and her parents are telling her what to do. They’re not looking at the coach. I looked at so many things when I went to see kids play. How do they react when the ref makes a bad call? How do they react when the coach is going to yell at them? How do they react when they throw a great pass to a teammate who misses a layup? Are they rolling their eyes? Are they gathering them up? Are they encouraging? What kind of person is she? And that is what I based most of my recruiting on. Yeah, they’re all good players, and they’re all really good students, but it’s the person that’s going to fit in with that team, that unselfish player that just wants to win more than anything. You have to be able to compete every single day. You have to be relentless in pursuing that goal. If you want to be an All-American, I’m going to help you be an All-American, but you’ve got to do the work. And we’re really trying to build this team. It’s all about team. It’s never about, oh, who’s the leading scorer. That’s all we care about. We cared about the little things off the court and on the court. One of my core values is accountability. I am so big on people saying, that was my fault. I made that mistake. And that is something that you really have to teach because so many people are blamers. Oh, it was the refs. It was this. It was that. The coach didn’t like me. It’s always somebody else’s fault, and I cannot tolerate that. So I really look for people who are going to be accountable. And so you have to reward them for being accountable. When we’re in the huddle and say, whose man was that just got the rebound? If you don’t say it was me and I watch the film and I see that it was you, you’re going to be a lot more trouble than if you would have just said that was my fault, and I’m not going to take you out of the game for that. So I think you have to build on that accountability. It starts with me. I can’t go in the press conference and talk about, well, the players didn’t do this, they didn’t do that, and I told them what to do, but they didn’t do it. I have to be accountable too. So I think it starts at the top. I think you have to show them that we know we’re all going to make mistakes. It’s not about that. It’s about the team that makes the fewest mistakes maybe is going to win the game. But accountability, honesty, trust. I mean, we got to have all those things. That’s a championship culture. If you have honesty and trust, you can give them feedback, and they’re going to accept it. You can be harsh with them sometimes because they know you care about them and you want them to be successful. And I think that’s really important because if you don’t have that trust, which is the basis of every relationship that we have, you’re not going to be able to coach them because they’re going to always think, oh, she just wants to win. She’s just using me for that. It has to be that genuine feeling of I really care about you, and I know you can be better than this.

Adam: How can you build trust as a leader?

Muffet: It starts right at the first time that they come into your life and your relationship, and you’re asking about them. But I think listening is number one. I mean, you have to be able to listen, not just to hear the words that they’re saying, but kind of read between the lines, kind of thinking about what do you mean by that. By having your body language, your eye contact, all those things that we know make a good listener, and just encourage them, tell me more. I might not like what you’re saying, but I want to hear what you have to say. I think that’s really important, just valuing them and making sure that you let them know all the time how important they are to the job that we’re doing. But trust, it takes a long time to build, and it’s so easy to lose it. You have to really work at it all the time. But it really comes down to just, I trust what you’re going to say. I know you care about me, and I’m going to do everything I can to help you.

Adam: There’s no substitute for listening. There’s no substitute for caring. There’s no substitute for showing up and being a good, genuine person. That goes a really, really long way as a leader.

Muffet: You know, when I started coaching, I was not that way. I mean, I was like I said, I was a little bit like Bobby Knight, very transactional. You’re not doing your job, get out. Get somebody else in here that’s going to do their job. We didn’t have a great relationship off the court because you were the player. I was the coach. That was our relationship. And I learned through so many years and the generations changing that I kind of liked having a better relationship with them. Kids would say one of the things I’m looking for in recruiting is to have a good relationship with my coach. And I thought, wow, I’ve got to do better. And then having a son who played sports, every time he came out of the game, I was watching like, what’s the coach saying? What’s the coach doing? And I thought, oh my God, that’s what these parents are looking at me. When their daughter comes out of the game, they walk down the sideline. What am I doing? How is my body language when they come out of the game? I learned a lot from just watching my son and how he interacted with coaches and things to say, I’ve got to be better. I have to be a different person. I can’t be transactional. I want to be transformational. I want to help these players, and it’s not helping them to just cast them aside if they’re not playing well.

Adam: As you were listing the things that you look for in the people who you want on your team, in addition to talent, which you can find, one of the things that you shared is you want someone who’s competitive. You said you want someone who’s team-oriented. You want someone who’s honest, who’s trustworthy. You also said you want someone who is growth-oriented and someone who’s accountable. And as a leader, you have to be growth oriented, and you have to be accountable, and that’s how you’re going to evolve as a leader, when you’re continually focused on trying to get better, when you’re honest about where you are as a leader and doing the work, looking around, asking the hard questions, reflecting, asking yourself, what can I do to become a better leader? What are other people who are in my profession doing? You’re a coach. What are other coaches doing? What am I doing right? What am I not doing right? What am I doing right that can be even better? When you look at your success as a coach, you enjoyed great success, but then you were able to get to that next level. And we can be successful in what we’re doing, but we can unlock an entirely different level, and a lot of it comes down to having that growth mindset, continually being focused on getting better and holding ourselves accountable to getting better every day.

Muffet: No question about it. And I read something about the Navy SEALs. They have an after-action report, where they go through here’s what happened, good and bad. And we do that every game. We look at the film. We say, here’s what we did well. Here’s what we need to improve on. But the ability to look in the mirror and say, you know what, maybe that was my fault. Maybe I was the reason. Let me look back and see what we’ve been doing at practice. Maybe I was the one that should have been more prepared for that. But I still, up until my last year, went to the Boston Celtics and watched their practices. I went to Tom Izzo at Michigan State and John Beilein at Michigan. I would go anywhere, WNBA, NBA. It didn’t matter. I just wanted to learn. I think being curious as a leader and knowing that it’s a lifelong process, we can continually grow. Some people think, well, I made it to the top. I’m done. I know what I have to do. But you have to keep growing because even if you’re on the right track, you’re going to get run over if you just sit there. You got to keep moving.

Adam: Four decades of coaching basketball, four decades of coaching all different kinds of personalities. What are your best tips on the topic of motivation?

Muffet: I like to recruit kids that want to be good, that have some self-motivation, but trying to inspire them, I think, is another job as a leader. And you don’t have to give these big talks and do all these inspirational things, but you have to be able to show them the path to success, of what they need to do, how they’re going to get there, and to believe in them and to keep telling them. And especially for women, I say your motto should be expect more, because we never do as women. We never expect more. We always take what we got, and we try to make it work. Always sitting back waiting for people to call on us and say, hey, how about if you want to take this job? We don’t want to apply for jobs. We want to wait and see what happens if somebody will come calling and ask us to do the job. So I think for women, we need to step up more. We need to have the courage, and that’s a big part of leadership. You know, we don’t talk about courage enough. You have to have the courage to use your voice and to advocate for yourself, which men are really good at. Men are really good at networking. Women, not so much. We need to do a better job of going out and applying for the job, going for the job, letting the boss know this is the job I want. I think we can’t sit back anymore.

Adam: Do you have any other tips for women who are in leadership roles, or aspiring to be in leadership roles, on how to get to where they want to be? And any advice for men on how to help women get to where they want to be, how to be great allies?

Muffet: I think for men, it’s about asking questions, and it’s about having that talk about where do you want to get to. I always tell women, go in and ask the boss, what am I doing well? I want to move up. I want to be a leader. What am I doing well? What do I need to work on? And again, that thing about honesty. People don’t really want to let you know that, but you have to let them know this is what I want, and how can you help me get there? What are some things I can work on? Are there different things in the organization I can do so that I can kind of grow and have a little bit more knowledge on different things that I have to do? So I think being not afraid to go into the boss’s office and say that, and for the boss to look and say, hey, here’s somebody that is doing a really good job. The thing I read in the Harvard Business Review is, why do we promote incompetent men? Because they win the interview. They win the interview. They have more confidence. They go in, they say, I’m going to take you to a national championship. I’m going to do this for you. I’m going to do that for you. Women go in, and we say, well, we did this at my last job. We were successful because we, we, we, and it’s always about we. And so you give the job to the person that’s saying, I can do this for you. So I think people expect different things from women. I think they expect different things from women leaders. They’re expecting us to be all empathetic and sympathetic, and they’re not understanding that it’s different. We’re trying to collaborate. It’s not that we can’t make a decision. We’re asking people what they think because that’s how we lead, by collaborating. Men might come in and just make the decision and say, well, wow, what a leader. He’s making all the decisions. We’re just going a different way, and so don’t expect a woman to lead like a man.

Adam: If more women and more men led with empathy, led with collaboration, we would be in a much better place.

Muffet: For sure. I think just look around and see all the problems that we’re having in sports. It’s like a microcosm of society. We’re a good place for you to see women leaders. But you know what? When you go out, and your kids are playing soccer at five to six years old, it’s always somebody’s dad that’s coaching the team. And so these kids are growing up going, men are coaches. Men are leaders. You look on TV in Hollywood, the man is the star of the show who’s doing the work behind the scenes. It’s always a man. And so we never get to see women lead. And so I think we need to get out there more. We need to do more in sports. Why not coach your son’s team, coach your daughter’s team at the very least? But get out there and get off the sidelines and get into the game so that these kids can look up and see women leading.

Adam: I love that. Representation matters. Get into the game. And what you might perceive to be a weakness, being empathetic, being collaborative, that is a strength. That is how leaders need to lead.

Muffet: I think empathy is one of those things that nobody talks about. And I asked my class, I teach a class at Notre Dame, and I said, if you had to share some emotional time with somebody, you just needed to get something off your chest, think about the person that you would talk to. And then I said, raise your hand if it was a woman. And every single person raised their hand because that’s how people look at us. And I’ve never been someone, like, I think that my compassion level is not quite there, but it definitely, you know, it’s good. But it’s also that stereotypical thing. Men can be empathetic, too, and women can be strong leaders.

Adam: Muffet, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful, personally and professionally?

Muffet: Well, I think first you have to be self-aware. Know your strengths and weaknesses, and know what you got to fix in order to move up. Know what you want. Go into your boss’s office. Tell them what you want and ask them for help, and how to get there. I think sometimes women are reluctant to ask for help. But if you really want to move up, don’t use anything as an excuse. I think it’s so easy to say, well, I have kids, or I’m going to have kids, so I’m not going to try to go for that next job. I’m going to have that work-life balance, which is such a myth anyway. There is no such thing as work-life balance. And you know, men can struggle with that too, but that’s a whole different thing. When men go out and support their kids, people are like, oh, look at that. The boss is going out to see his daughter play soccer. When a woman leaves, they’re like, oh, of course, they’re leaving early because that’s family. So we have to get to that point where we’re looking at men and women a little more equally. My motto in coaching was, what you allow is what will continue. So if you wonder why you’re in that same rut all the time, it’s because you’re allowing that kind of behavior. You’re allowing that to happen, and you’re not doing anything to change it. You have the power to change.

Adam: Muffet, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Muffet: I really enjoyed it, Adam. Thanks.