Bob Bowman on winning: Show up and do your work

When Michael Phelps’s goggles filled with water in the 200-meter butterfly final at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he didn’t panic. He counted his strokes, just as he’d practiced for years, and broke the world record. The coach who prepared him for that moment is Bob Bowman, now director of swimming and diving and the head men’s coach at the University of Texas at Austin. In this conversation, McKinsey Senior Partners Kevin Carmody and Tiffany Burns talk with Bowman about how he defines winning, why he builds every plan backward from a “dream goal,” and how leaders can create a culture where people actually want feedback.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

The power of showing up every day

Kevin Carmody: Bob, you’ve written a master class in winning, and I wanted to ground us in the one simple rule you’ve used over the years, which is “Do your work.”

Bob Bowman: One of the things I think is most important in any endeavor is showing up day in, day out, consistently. That’s what really gets you where you want to go. If you wait on motivation or rely on motivation, it’s not going to do it for you.

I was getting back in shape at a training camp in Colorado Springs, working out every morning with my assistant coach, Logan. One day, I was tired, so I said, “I think I’m going to take tomorrow off. I don’t feel too good.” He said, “I’m just going to do my work.” What do you do when you’re feeling great, and the world is your oyster? Do your work. What do you do when you have no motivation and don’t know what to do? Do your work.

Kevin Carmody: Tell us a little about your story.

Bob Bowman: In 1997, I was in Baltimore with the North Baltimore Aquatic Club, which was the best club in America at the time. We changed the groups around, and an 11-year-old kid was assigned to my group, which was largely 13- to 15-year-olds. His name was Michael Phelps. They put him there because he couldn’t be challenged within his age group. He needed something far greater than that, and that really started this unique journey with Michael.

I became the head men’s coach at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, learned quite a bit, and had a tremendous training group there, which really helped Michael prepare for Beijing in 2008, where he reached his peak performance.

Then an opportunity came up for me to go to Arizona State University [ASU], and I took it. The year before I arrived, the team had not scored a point at the NCAAs, the national championships. But I wanted a project, and I wanted something that would challenge me after Michael was done. We had this amazing journey from the true basement to winning an NCAA championship at ASU in 2024. And right about the time we were about to win that championship, I got the call from the University of Texas. You don’t say no to Texas.

Winning is really about improvement

Kevin Carmody: It’s an incredible career: Michael Phelps, Arizona State, and now Texas. How do you define winning?

Bob Bowman: When I think about winning and try to come up with one word, it’s probably “improvement.” My job is to get everybody I have influence over to make as much incremental improvement as possible every day. If you’re doing that over time, you’re going to get from 45th place at the NCAAs to number one.

It’s really a process-driven system. I focus on process and leave outcomes out there because they depend on other people. We focus on the things we control: the process of how we practice and the attitude we bring to our work. If people buy into that and live the right way, they’re going to win.

On my first day at Texas, I told the team about the ASU kids who had just won a national championship. They had lived like champions for three or four years before they got the trophy. You won’t ever really hear us talking about winning a championship here, but you’ll hear a lot of talk about doing what it takes to become a champion. At the end of the day, if you do the right things and follow the right process, the winning will occur.

The right people and the nerve to make the call

Kevin Carmody: How do you bridge that gap from an individual sport to a team, and get the most out of everyone?

Bob Bowman: They want to be part of something bigger than themselves. At Texas, they’re part of an amazing legacy, probably the greatest legacy in NCAA sports, if you look at the level. We’ve won 17 national championships in the past 50 years.

Kevin Carmody: How do you think about evolving your roster and getting the right people to buy in?

Bob Bowman: It’s all about having the right people in the right positions. If you have the wrong people there, they’ve got to go. Over time, you start defining what you need to carry out the mission, which in this case is to compete at the top level: what events you want to cover and what qualities you want in the people you bring in. Then you decide whether the people you have can do that. If they can’t, they need to find a new place to be, and you bring in the people who can.

Kevin Carmody: What about when you’re deciding who’s going to swim in an individual meet? How do you make those tough decisions?

Bob Bowman: We have times in swimming, and we have practice performances, so you gauge all of those and factor them in. I saw a video of Dr. Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist. She encouraged people to spend less time stressing about making the right decision, and to instead go ahead and make it, and then make the decision right. Once I started living that way, things got a lot better, because you really don’t know all the possibilities, and you certainly can’t control them. I use the information I have, go with my gut, and make the call.

Beyond talent: What set Michael Phelps apart

Kevin Carmody: Of course, coaching talent gives you a leg up. What about critics who say you got lucky because you had Michael Phelps?

Bob Bowman: Clearly, I did get lucky. There’s no question about that. People would say, “Bowman can’t coach. The janitor could coach Michael Phelps to those medals.” And I’d say, “Yeah, but could he coach his mother?” It wasn’t just Michael. I had to work with Debbie. I had to work with a lot of people around him, so there’s a lot that goes into it.

There’s nothing within the rules that Michael wouldn’t do to reach his goals, in terms of effort or attitude. That’s what separated him. He went six years without missing a day, 365 days a year, because we were convinced that if we did that, every year we’d pick up 52 days on all the people who took every Sunday off. There are a lot of things we taught Michael that had nothing to do with his arm length or wingspan.

Kevin Carmody: There must have been days when he didn’t want to swim. As a coach, how did you deal with that?

Bob Bowman: What I observe in great performers like Léon Marchand, Michael, and Allison Schmitt, people who have won gold medals, is that they’re not amazing in practice every day. But they have a high average level most days. On a scale of one to ten, where one is terrible and ten is as good as you can be, they’re an eight most days. Every now and then they’re a three, and every now and then a ten.

Fifteen percent is better than zero. We equated it to money in the bank. Some days you put a big deposit in the bank. Some days it’s a couple of pennies, but you’re doing something every day. Your effort and your attitude are the two things you control all the time. So when you don’t feel like doing something, don’t let that be a limiting factor. Just do it anyway. Do the best you can.

Preparing for the moment things go wrong

Kevin Carmody: There’s a famous story about you breaking Michael Phelps’s goggles, and how that translated to the Olympics.

Bob Bowman: In 2003, we were at some international meets in Australia. The swimmers had their goggles and caps strewn all over the deck. I saw Michael’s goggles, and I just stepped on them. He swam a race in the preliminaries and swam well. He came back and said, “I don’t know what happened, but my goggles filled up with water.” I said, “Well, you did a really good job. You counted your strokes.”

At another meet, he went to swim a backstroke final, reached up to pull his goggles down, and they weren’t there. He looked over at me like, “No goggles.” And I was like, “Just swim.”

He learned to deal with some adversity and learned that he could meet the challenge. So when he dove in for the 200 fly final at the Beijing Olympics, which was a very important race for him, I noticed he didn’t look right. He broke the world record, but right after the race, he tore his goggles off his face and chucked them on the deck. What he told me afterward was that his goggles filled up in the first 50 meters, and he reverted to what we do in training: counting your strokes. My first thought was, who in the world, under that kind of pressure, can even do that? But that’s where the talent and the preparation come in.

Kevin Carmody: What separates people who can overcome adversity from those who can’t?

Bob Bowman: No one has a straight line to success. Everybody who has done anything meaningful will have failed many times. I encourage people to embrace failure. If you’re going to fail, fail big. That means you’re trying. Go for it.

Sometimes things come up that you didn’t plan for. In the fall of 2007, before the 2008 Olympic Games, Michael had been swimming amazingly the entire year. We were at the University of Michigan, and he had swum brilliantly on Saturday afternoon. Then I got a call on Sunday that he had walked out to his car, slipped, and broken his wrist. This was about ten months before the Olympics. I went over to his place, and he was distraught. He said, “I just gave away three gold medals.” I said, “I don’t think you gave away anything, but lesson number one is to figure out what we’re going to do.”

So we went to a hand specialist. Surgery was scheduled quickly. Michael was able to come out of that, do fine, and have the greatest performance in history. When you have something like that, try to take the emotion out of it, focus on what you can do, and control the controllables.

Start with a dream goal, then work backward

Tiffany Burns: How do you take a very big goal and break it down into the small steps needed to reach it?

Bob Bowman: First, I want to have a very long-term goal that isn’t very specific but has an emotional component that drives the whole process. I call it a “dream goal.” For swimmers, it’s easy: to swim in the Olympics. Then we start working back. When are the Olympics? If you want to make the US Olympic team in 2028, you’re going to have to swim a certain time at the US trials. It’s very objective. Michael and I always worked off of times. If you’re going to swim this time in the summer of 2028, then in 2027, you’re going to have to be within five-tenths of a second of that time. In 2026, you want to be within a second and a half. That’s how you keep on track.

Working back, we get to the most important goal, which I call the immediate goal: What am I going to do right now? The most important decision any of us is going to make is: What are we going to do in the present moment to carry us through these other goals?

Tiffany Burns: You write the next big meet and the countdown until then on the whiteboard. Why make it so visible?

Bob Bowman: I want them to know that time is moving. When I went to Michigan, I put up a countdown clock to the 2008 Olympic Games, four years out. It showed how many days, hours, and seconds remained, running continuously. One of my assistants asked why I put it up, and I said, “That thing will run out in no time. One day we’ll look up, and it’ll say ten days.”

Tiffany Burns: How do you think about breaking down performance in a meet and in a race?

Bob Bowman: We’re fortunate now to have race analysis, which gives us all sorts of data on every race: split times, times to 15 meters and 25 meters, and stroke rate and stroke length for each increment.

Tiffany Burns: Is that done from inside the pool, or are they wearing something?

Bob Bowman: It comes from video. Now AI takes the video and just spits it right out, so you can get their turn times. We also use video to see what the swim looks like, so I can say, “You need one less stroke going into this turn,” or “Don’t breathe going into this wall.”

On the deck, I try to be hyperaware of what the swimmers are like before they go to the race. How do they look in their routine? Are they in a routine? Do they look like they’re in the right mindset? How are they behind the blocks? At big meets, like the Olympic trials, for many of the races I won’t go out into the venue to watch. I’ll watch on a huge screen in the warm-up pool because you can see everything. I watch them walk out of the ready room to go to the blocks, and I look at their faces and figure out how they’re going to swim. I’ll think, “He’s ready.” Then I’ll see if what I think matches up.

Coaching people who want to get better

Tiffany Burns: How do you build systems, rituals, and habits that your swimmers actually want to follow?

Bob Bowman: We try to sell them on “why,” which is the key element. I tell anyone who comes into my program, “You’re welcome to ask me why we’re going to do anything we do here, and I should have an answer.” One out of every 50 times, the answer is going to be, “I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and I think it might work.” We do experiment, but most of the time, I should have an answer for why we’re doing this exercise, at this time, in this way. Once they understand that and buy into the “why,” it’s easy to get them to do it.

Tiffany Burns: You’ve said that being coachable is the most important attribute for mastery. Can you tell early on how coachable people are?

Bob Bowman: You can tell by how much they pay attention and how invested they are in what we’re doing. I’ve had some people at this level who I think are coachable enough. The best part about a college team is that I get to pick the people. That’s one of the first things we look for: Are you coachable? Do you make the people around you better?

Tiffany Burns: How do you create a world where your athletes want feedback, both real time and consistent? Often in the professional world, it’s not something people look forward to.

Bob Bowman: In any sport, the people who do it at a high level want feedback because they know that’s how they get better. When I give them feedback, they know I’m doing it to help them get better. I also try to present it in a way that isn’t hypercritical. I’m saying, “If you want to swim this time in the 200 breaststroke, you’re going to have to hit this split. You’re taking ten strokes right now, and it needs to be eight. You decide. But you won’t get where you want to go unless you make these changes.”

Tiffany Burns: How do you work with individuals who have different personalities and dynamics and bring them all together?

Bob Bowman: Everyone is different. Everyone learns differently. I try to find out how people process information best. I’m an auditory learner: If I hear it, I really remember it. I tell coaches I have a toolbox of things I use for coaching. When I first started, the only tool in my box was a hammer, so everything looked like a nail. But now I have a lot of tools. I have empathy. I have logic. I have pats on the back.

That’s the key to learning how to motivate a big group of diverse people: Get in the weeds on what each individual needs to be motivated. There are a couple of people in my group who need to hear, “Are you going to do this or not?” to get them to change. That’s what you learn over time—how to approach each of them.

And I think at competitions, it’s the same thing. We talk a lot about process and outcome. If you have outcome-based goals, or outcome-based thoughts like winning a gold medal, your physiological activation is like you’ve received a threat. Your palms get clammy. Your heart rate goes up. Your breathing rate increases. If you have process-based thoughts, like “I want to make sure I nail my first turn” or “I want to have a 1.1 tempo on the first 50,” your activation state goes down.

Tiffany Burns: You’ve also talked about Team Phelps, the broader system of coaches. How do those roles all come together?

Bob Bowman: I once told somebody that when this whole thing started with Michael, it was me, Michael, and his mother. There were three people. By the time we ended, there were an agent, doctors, physical therapists, and lawyers. A whole army.

If you’re a biomechanist, you think a swimmer is a stick figure, with angles. A physiologist sees the heart and lungs. A psychologist sees only the brain. My job is to take the best from all of those and make sure none of them is the whole pie; they’re pieces.

Tiffany Burns: There’s something about getting feedback as fast as you can. How do you think about that?

Bob Bowman: You want to give feedback as soon as you can because the situation is fresh in their mind—and so is the motivation to change. One of the things my coaches and I work on is distilling the information into a sound bite. So I might just say, “fingertips toward the bottom,” or “right elbow up,” or “take two more kicks off the wall.” But that’s all they get. It’s enough that it’s real time. They can understand it. I can watch and see if they do it. Then the next time they come around, I might say, “That was a lot better” or “Keep working on it.”

Where leaders should start

Tiffany Burns: Say a leader wants to do exactly what you did: create a system, build a feedback culture, and put a customized plan in place. Where do they start tomorrow?

Bob Bowman: Find somebody in your field who’s doing it and learn how they do it. Don’t try to put your spin on it yet. Learn exactly how they’re doing it. I study music, and when you see people performing music, their bios always say they “studied with” so-and-so. I wanted to study with the coaches who were the masters and learn their way of doing it.

You just have to show up and give yourself a chance to be great.