Last season, my team missed the NBA playoffs. Again. The San Antonio Spurs landed in the lottery. And going into this year, most people had roughly the same group penciled in to barely squeak into the playoffs, at best. A young roster. Another rebuilding year. Manage expectations.

Then something turned. Same names, mostly. Different team. They’re now in The Finals, which start today (Go Spurs Go!).

The easy way to explain that is talent. A high pick arrives, a few pieces click, and suddenly the group is better. I felt the pull of that explanation, too. It's clean, and it's at least half wrong. Most of the talent was already in the building last year, when the team wasn't winning. Yes, it's chemistry. But there is something else going on here. Growth mindset. What isn’t sometimes fully appreciated is the role that growth mindset plays. Systems can allow people to lean into that. Get it running across the whole roster.

So what actually changed?

The system that expects you to get better

The players got better. Not in the offseason, gym-workout sense. In the middle of the season, week to week.

That part is easy to skim past, so sit with it. These are some of the few hundred best basketball players alive. People who have been the most talented person on every team they've ever played for. And they were still visibly improving in February and March.

I want to be careful here. I'm not pretending talent isn't real. I could practice ten hours a day for ten years and never become a top NBA guard. Body composition, mostly height, or lack of it, is my issue. And yes, innate ability is a real input. But it's an input we overweigh, because it's the one that's easy to see.

The thing we underweigh is whether the environment makes good people get better. We treat a growth mindset like a starter kit: something you use until you're competent, then set down. I think that's backward. The people operating at the very top are usually the ones still convinced they have room to improve. The mindset isn't what gets you to the top. It's what's still running once you're there.

This maps directly onto Operational Excellence. A culture of improvement isn't a poster or a kickoff event. Or a speech from a leader. It's an environment where getting a little better is the normal, expected, daily thing, even for your strongest performers. Especially for them. Whether that's a nursing unit, a plant floor, or an engineering team, most organizations are good at hiring talent but bad at building the systems that keep that talent growing. The talent plateaus, and we blame the people.

Why growth needs both pressure and trust

One moment this season stuck with me. A young Spurs player, Carter Bryant, made a bad mistake on the court. His head coach, Mitch Johnson, was hard on him, immediately and visibly. No softening it.

And then he put him right back in the game.

That sequence is the whole thing. The standard stayed high. The trust stayed intact. A lot of leaders believe they have to choose between the two, that holding people accountable and making them feel safe sit at opposite ends of one dial. They don't. Psychological safety isn't the absence of hard feedback. It's the confidence that hard feedback won't cost you your standing. You can tell someone they got it wrong and keep handing them the ball. That's the only version of accountability that produces growth instead of fear.

I see the failure mode constantly. Leaders who are too soft to say the hard thing, or who say it and then quietly pull the ball away. Both teach the same lesson: don't take risks.

What I'm actually hiring for

I think about all of this differently when I'm hiring now.

I recently interviewed someone who was clearly going to be excellent at the job. So I tried something a little unorthodox. I pulled up an email she had sent me, asked her to read it back to me, and then tell me if there was anything she'd change.

She read it slowly. She couldn't find anything.

So I pointed to one word. A single word that, to a native English speaker, could land as blame. She hadn't meant it that way at all. And I wasn't testing whether she'd catch it. English isn't her first language. There was no way she could have.

I was testing what her face did when I showed her.

It lit up. She leaned in. She wanted to know what else she was missing. That was the whole interview, right there.

Because I wasn't hiring for what she knows today. In a few years, the role will demand skills none of us can name yet. Ask anyone who staffed their teams before AI showed up how well their three-year skills forecast held up. I was wondering whether she still wants to get better, and whether feedback lands on her as a threat or as information.

Skills you can teach. The appetite to keep learning, it's harder, and sometimes in business we don’t have time.

The through-line

Same roster, different season. A hard coaching moment followed by trust. A candidate who lit up at a correction. They're the same idea.

Talent and skill get you into the room. What you do after you're in the room, whether you keep getting better, and whether you've built a place where people are expected to, decides almost everything that follows.

I don't have this fully solved at my own company. We get it right in stretches and miss it in others. But I'm increasingly convinced it's the most important work a leader does, and the easiest to neglect, because it never shows up as this week's emergency.

You can buy talent. You have to build the other thing.