On the outside of the bubble looking in.

This week is one of the best weeks of the year for college basketball. Conference tournaments lead to Selection Sunday which leads to the opening rounds of the NCAA men’s and women’s tournaments. It’s a beautiful week of school pride, bracket busters, and back-to-back hoops.

This week is also St. Patrick’s Day – a day branded in luck. On Thursday I came across the video of Coach Williams (Texas A+M) reading a prepared statement about his Aggies not being selected for the NCAA Tournament. They were not lucky this week and they “were devastated” to use his words.

Coach Williams shared his message after the Aggies won their first round NIT game. He stated he won’t take any questions on this topic, and yet his point runs deeper than basketball. This is a story about how hard work and strong results are often more influenced by systems and people than data or luck.

Here’s the short. After not being selected on Selection Sunday, Coach Williams shut off his phone and TV for two days. He did his homework, crafted his message, and used his platform to position his point. Coach Williams exercised self-awareness beautifully, and as a leader pointed out three key themes:

·????????Data doesn’t make decisions. Data helps build a story that leads to a decision. People build those stories and people are the decision makers.

·????????Biases exist everywhere. We all have them, and we all need to care for them. Those biases influence not only how decisions are made, but who gets to make the decisions.

·????????Self-aware leaders advocate for their team and those who support their team. They fight for what’s right in a way that fuels their mission and helps their team.

But this is not about basketball. Listen to his choice of words. There are many leaders like Coach Williams that run sales teams, or teams of nurses or teachers, or another group they call a team. They pour their heart and soul into their work and sometimes, they aren’t lucky, and they can’t control it all.

The work many of us do in leadership development and diversity, equity, and inclusion is about a movement. The movement is needed to create change in these pivotal moments of influence. These moments are about the presence or absence of awareness, access, fairness, and principles.

This is not about everyone deserves a trophy. There must be winners and losers. Individuals need to get cut from teams. Teams need to lose. While Coach Williams’s message was directed to the NCAA, the lesson is much broader. It applies to every team than is managed by an organization.

The bubble is a term used to visualize the teams in and out. That bubble applies to the NCAA tournament as well as organizations and society. Power is defined and assigned by people. Those people decide the rules of who are inside and who are outside of any bubble. These bubbles create segmentation. That’s the difference between inclusion and exclusion. That’s what creates or erodes any sense belonging.

Some luck happens by chance. Much of luck is influenced by things around us. Those things are part of the system. Those systems have flaws because they are created by people who have biases.

The next time you feel a ‘bubble” moment, pause, and notice who is on the inside and who is outside. Then take two days or two hours or just two minutes of self-awareness and think about what your role is to make your own statement.