Film Room: Angela Taylor

Brian Johnson (00:21.728)
Hey listener, welcome to Talent Chasing.

real world stories from the fields, courts, and pitches of Major League sports and offices of corporate talent. It's our job to amplify those hidden stories in finding, retaining, and motivating the best talent in the world. Because we know no team exists anywhere without great talent. My name is Brian Johnson, former Major League Baseball player and scout.

Chad (00:47.68)
And I'm Chad Sowash, recruitment industry veteran. And this episode is part of our film room series where we actually break down our favorite parts of our big interviews, kind of like breaking down big plays in the film room after a game. Right, Brian?

Brian Johnson (01:02.796)
Yeah, and this week we're gonna talk about Angela Taylor. Angela Taylor was a guest on our show, amazing background, walk on Stanford University basketball, earned a scholarship, became a captain on two national championship teams, then went on to in the early days of the WNBA, be an executive in the WNBA, be a GM of two different teams. She was part of the -

Chad (01:08.277)
Yeah.

Chad (01:20.886)
J E

Chad (01:29.184)
Mm -hmm.

Brian Johnson (01:33.304)
trying to gain traction for this potential league, right? The Women's National Basketball Association. What we're seeing today in 2024, it's booming. It's got Caitlin Clark, we've got Angel Reese, we've got all kind of great things going and an appreciation for all the talent that's there. But our question was, take us back to the early days. How was it? What could have been done better and how was it during those early days and trying to get this business?

Chad (01:49.203)
yeah.

Brian Johnson (02:02.22)
that is a sport off the ground.

Chad (02:04.47)
Yeah. Here we go. Here's the clip.

Brian Johnson (04:15.021)
Thank

Brian Johnson (06:09.378)
So much in there. Let's take the last part first. That maybe as far as finding the league's footing, figuring out what makes them unique, a little bit different from the NBA, I can definitely see being falling into that trap, not trap, but falling into that early on because you don't know what your identity is. The NBA is this monstrosity. You're trying to be the little sister of it.

Chad (06:11.029)
Yeah.

Chad (06:22.528)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Chad (06:31.562)
there's a trap. It is. Yeah.

Brian Johnson (06:39.348)
And trying to take a little bit of energy and then eventually get to where you want to be. What we've seen this year and the last two years maybe with the college basketball game for women really taking off as far as popularity and really appreciating anew the talent that's within both women's college basketball and professionally is that they really do have their own identity now. One thing I think about before I throw it to you is that

Chad (07:04.473)
Mm

Brian Johnson (07:08.886)
David Stern is the guy she talks about in here and I'll talk about him in here in a minute. He was a genius. He was the one he was the commissioner of the the the NBA and therefore had a big hand in the WNBA as she mentioned. But if you remember David Stern did a controversial thing. He wasn't afraid to take risks. He told the NBA players they need to have a dress code and they had to have a dress code because they weren't looking professional. They were kind of all over the place and wearing different things. A lot of feet a lot of

push back on that because David Stern, hey, this is, you know, there was racial things being thrown out of my, hey, this is just our cultures, the way we'd like to dress, who are you to tell us what looks professional or not. But it was just the beginning of that. Now, fast forward to 2024. Now the players are on a runway when they walk into the stadium. When I used to walk in the stadium and the bowels of the stadium, no one was paying attention to us. No one's paying attention to me 25 years ago. But now that's a runway. They are fashion.

Chad (08:04.806)
huh.

Brian Johnson (08:08.18)
Models now both the NBA and the WNBA are doing this and they're building their brand every day just by what they wear even before they get on the court and I think that's a big deal.

Chad (08:20.394)
Yeah, I agree. So there are so many learnings. This is a longer clip and I'm glad that you actually took this because there are so many learnings in this from a business standpoint. First and foremost, David Stern, she said it many times, unrelenting leader. She didn't say that he wasn't fair, just said that he was unrelenting. He hired great people and then he held them accountable. I hear so many companies today, so many leaders today.

talk about, well, you can't just hire great people, right? And then just let them go do what they want to do. Nobody ever said that. You don't just hire great people and say, Hey, go, go do your thing. Right? You've got to hold them accountable. They've got to stay within the corporate vision or the company vision. Right? And that to me is a perfect, a perfect point to say, look, as a leader and a CEO, whether it's a big company or a startup, you have to be able to ensure

That's your job that everybody is still in line and accountable, right? They're responsible and they have accountability. and be that unrelenting leader. You don't have to be, you don't have to be an asshole, right? But you can hold people's feet to the fire. and I also think that as we take a look at, how she was talking about David Stern looking down the road, right? today,

Many companies look quarter by quarter and that's how they manage. They manage people quarter by quarter. They don't manage them long -term. So therefore they don't keep that great talent, right? Because they're managing them in the moment, which is good. Don't get me wrong, but you also have to think long -term because that, if you want that individual to be there long -term, you have to be transparent with regard to what their career path is, what they should be doing from an up -skilling standpoint. They should have mentors.

You should be fueling their fire as opposed to dousing it all the time. Right? So that was another great learning. The pivot in this to me is, is really, on the startup side because the WNBA was a startup and they were trying to be like big brother, just pretty much exactly what she was saying. You cannot think that you can just replicate a business model because it worked. And I'll give you a great example.

Chad (10:45.226)
I was with Monster .com when we launched way back in the day and we got big, we got powerful, we got popular. What did we do? We tried to replicate the exact same model and take it to Europe, all over Europe, take it to China, all over the place. Didn't work. It didn't work because those communities are different. Those individuals are different. That culture is different. And in this case, the people that you're selling to...

Brian Johnson (10:57.528)
Hmm. Hmm.

Chad (11:10.54)
WNBA versus the NBA, they're different. They have different wants, different needs, different connections. So to me, that was huge. And one last point, when she's talking about support, we're seeing a lot of startups today fail because they got too much money, because they weren't gritty enough. They didn't have to, right? They were drinking champagne instead of drinking Bud Light, right? They should have been scrappy.

And sometimes in this case, think possibly the WNBA was a little bit more looking toward that champagne. Hey, we've got the model. We know how this works. It's all going to be good. that support, sometimes when you have less support and you have to manage the budget year by year, right? As opposed to thinking 10 years ahead, that's a startup kind of thought process.

and they weren't in a startup process. So all of those, those, those, those learnings within that one clip, that was just amazing for me. I listened to it like two or three times.

Brian Johnson (12:17.014)
Yeah, I love it. And I love the blips on the screen. The obstacles that came across were blips on the screen for David Stern. And I love that piece in the business sense because so often in my work, right, the human capital work and the DEI world, right, is where leaders are not able to communicate with everyone on their team or people who are, you know, amongst their company. So it's hard for them to cascade their vision because they don't know how to communicate with people who are different from them, who are in different language or a different country or a different

Chad (12:29.611)
Mm -hmm.

Brian Johnson (12:46.648)
culture or a different color or whatever it may be, different age group. And so those obstacles pull the organization down because they're going from crisis to crisis to crisis. And like you said, they don't have an overarching goal and they're not because they can't communicate, they can't disseminate responsibility. So they're having to put their hands in everything and it just becomes a mess. just there's so many, like you said, so many different things.

Chad (12:57.942)
Mmm.

Brian Johnson (13:15.426)
that Angel talked about, but I think that was gigantic that a leader that had a vision that knew what they were doing got them where they needed to go, made some mistakes, could have done things earlier, but still stayed with it and empowered his people and hired great people. And it was just, it was just an impressive clip overall. What do you got?

Chad (13:20.78)
Mm -hmm.

Chad (13:32.864)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going go ahead and set up my clip. I was born and raised in North central Ohio. And I remember when employee employers were a part of the community and you know, Angela talked about that in being with the WNBA. So, so I asked her about that and, and, here's a, here's what she had for us.

Brian Johnson (14:50.701)
Mm.

Chad (14:51.68)
Yeah, so yes, companies are not sports teams, but I remember when companies were a part of the community. Why? Because they understood the community was their main source of talent. And somehow corporate America in general, we've forgotten that. we used to have vocational training in high schools where someone can learn a trade, graduate from high school and go directly into a good job in the job market.

And companies participated in that system, in that framework. So that framework could still work, but unfortunately it's that most companies, not all, they're just waiting for the right talent to show up on their doorstep or apply for a job instead of growing your own talent from the community you live in. using the high school system, the local colleges and tech schools, think of the vocational training system.

Brian Johnson (15:37.592)
Mm

Chad (15:47.752)
if they were training developers, IT system admins, that kind of talent. And don't get me wrong. I'm not yearning for yesteryear here, just a system that focuses on the people and the community and understands that is where their profits come from. and last but not least, know, running a business like a team. We haven't done that in years. Again, I was in the military.

You have to be cohesive. You have to be a team. It doesn't matter. Just like she said, doesn't matter if you like the person to your left or to your right. You depend on them for your life. Now in this case, you're depending on them for your livelihood, but on corporate America, we really feel that the individual is the key. We talk a lot about team, but there's not really a lot of team that happens, right? And then you've got to run your team like a business. I just, I love those two pieces.

Brian Johnson (16:34.55)
Mm

Brian Johnson (16:41.494)
Mm

Yeah, I thought they were fantastic. And building upon that, right, is that she's right. If we get into sports teams, they are running more like businesses. Why? How does that look? What does it look like? It used to be family run business, right? The Pittsburgh Steelers are owned by the Rooney family. That's one of the only ones left over. But they have transitioned into the different way of looking at it as a business as well.

Chad (16:48.426)
Mm

Chad (16:52.544)
Mm -hmm.

Brian Johnson (17:10.54)
because now they have analytics in there. And we talk about analytics all the time. Analytics has taken over the world and it's a good thing, right? We're better able to evaluate where we're doing well, where we need to pick it up a notch, whatever it may be. And that's a great thing. But what happens in that our analytics takeover, like you said, where we're not building up our leaders locally, we're getting distressed by, the internet is taking over. These people come from all over. I'm losing people.

Chad (17:12.679)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Brian Johnson (17:38.488)
I'm losing my workers here or there, but we forget, as you mentioned, that you still have local folks. You still have people there to build up, to build your own leaders, to build your client, your, not clientele, but your employee base there, and then add to it supplementally elsewhere. And I think that's just a big piece of it because the analytics world, where the pendulum has swung so far, we're so into this new thing, this analytics stuff, which is great.

Chad (17:40.864)
Mm

Brian Johnson (18:05.794)
But we have to swing the pendulum back and forget about the and remember about the human capital and that these human beings, we're not talking about widgets. You can't predict or communicate with a widget like you can with a human being. And I think that would be a great piece, a way for our both our for our business community to improve.

Chad (18:26.06)
Yeah. And you talk about family, family teams. about Jerry Jones and the Joneses who have an $11 billion franchise down in Dallas and they haven't won a Superbowl since when? The nineties. Well, listener, thanks for listening to us in this, this breakdown of our film room session.

Brian Johnson (18:40.792)
Forever. Yeah.

Chad (18:51.808)
Look for more amazing interviews and play -by -play breakdowns coming to your favorite podcast platform soon here at Talent Chasing. Brian, thanks again for bringing Angela on. She is a tre... She's a damn treasure, man. She is a treasure and I wouldn't have her on again because it just seemed like she had a bounty that she could give.

Brian Johnson (19:04.824)
Cheers.

Brian Johnson (19:12.226)
Good stuff.

Chad (19:13.48)
Excellent. See you soon.