Leadership: Developing a Team Culture
“A culture is weak when people work against each other, for themselves.”
- Simon Sinek
I had the opportunity to work in several diverse and interesting environments. From High School students, to Junior College athletes, College sports and finally the elite level, the National Football League.
One would think that my leadership practices would have to change at each level. Those who think that would be wrong. Maybe some find it necessary to change. Once I found my system of leadership and culture development it never had to change.
Coach Tom Landry put it best when he said, “My job is to get men to do what they don’t want to do so they can become who they want to be.” That is coaching in a nutshell. Athletes are humans and all humans have basic weaknesses. For most it takes someone or something to make them push past their self-imposed barriers so that they can become all that they were meant to be.
Work and Fun
This is how I went about my “work”. I put quotations around the word ‘work’ because it was never work to me. It was a pleasure. I asked a lot of my athletes and of the coaches who worked with me. We worked hard every single day.
We also had a lot of fun.
Hold on, how does “hard work” and “fun” happen at the same time? That’s where a Championship Culture comes into play. As a strength coach I would be the leader of the program through 16 weeks of the year. The eight weeks of training in the winter after the season was completed when the coaches were off recruiting for the next season. And then a second eight-week period that occurred during the summer when the NCAA rules prevented coaches from being around the players. During this time coaches would be running football camps in June and then on vacation in July, before the start of fall camp in August.
For those sixteen weeks I was the leader of the program. I would re-message the head coach’s philosophy. I would echo the nomenclature used by the assistants as we mirrored the drills that they would be asked to do during the season. My staff and I would push the athlete through their personal barriers and help them understand that they could be better than even they imagined.
That was the “hard work”.
The “fun” came in two ways. First, it was the fellowship that was developed with the athlete’s during these phases of the football cycle. We had a lot of laughs through the sweat and tears.
The second time came during the season when they finally understood why they had worked so hard. The drills that we did in the winter and summer gave the athletes the ability to move better than their opponent’s. In many games the difference between our athleticism and that of the opponent seemed unfair.
Time and time again during a practice or during a game, or after a win the players would walk by me, beaming, “That’s why we do what we do, right, CoachC?”
Establishing a Culture
The head football coach is responsible for setting the culture of any sports team. It isn’t the players or the front office. It is the head coach’s responsibility. If they don’t control the culture then it will go to the players who oftentimes have a selfish approach to getting things done. A “Throw me the damn ball” mentality will rule a locker room.
A front office made up of many people who have never coached and some who have never played the game at a high level. Leaving the culture to them is like trusting your “fantasy league” buddies to build a team. They only see the physical side. The players view the front office peoples as “the guys are trying to get rid of me”. To say the least there is very little REAL camaraderie between the two.
In my area of the building my culture was based on one word. TRUST.
In order for me to get my work done the athlete’s had to trust me completely. Once we had the common bond of trust set, we then could go about our work.
This was the same with the athlete and my assistants. Once they trusted me and my vision, they would do what it took to accomplish the task of getting the work done.
In order to do this, I needed to use all my tools as a leader. Not just once in a while but every single minute of every single day.
I had to have a philosophy. Mine was MOVEMENT. The game of football is based in movement. If my athlete moves quicker, fast and more explosively than the opponent we will win.
All my coaches and players knew this. How? Because it was a mantra that I preached daily in one form or another.
I had to make sure the people around me understood WHAT the philosophy was. So, I talked about it … a lot. Every day that we had a group, I would talk about the value of movement several times during each hour and forty-minute training group. They had to understand WHY it was important for them to move better. And finally, they had to understand HOW it would affect them in every phase of the game and their ability to move on to make more money playing a game.
This went for my staff also. It usually took a training cycle for my philosophy to make sense. But when they finally grasped the reason, I said what I said and did what I did, they made it part of the training that they did with other teams. And the teams they were working with also became champions. How? Because their athletes began to move better than their opponents.
It usually took a player one season to see, first, that, as a freshman all-American, they were physically behind everyone else that was on the team. And second, after a season of playing against other top teams and seeing how far ahead they were and how their game had changed for the positive, they couldn’t wait to get back into the off-season program after a successful season.
Consistency
Let’s swing back to the element of TRUST.
Once they saw that I had a plan, a vision and a philosophy, I had begun to gain their trust. The next part of building a culture was all about being CONSISTENT.
I needed to be the same person every single day. I needed to stress the little stuff, the fundamentals, every single day. I needed to hold them to the same level of effort every single day.
To hammer home the consistency I would dress the same way every single day. When they walked into the training area before we started their warm-up I was standing there. The same picture they saw yesterday and for the last how many other days. They knew they could depend on me being the same guy. The guy with a quick wit and the thick skin to take a scathing retort in stride. They didn’t have to “wait and see” or adjust to who I was going to be that day. I was CoachC on Monday of Week 1 and I would be CoachC on Friday of Week 8.
This consistency brought about a trust. They knew what they were going to get. There is a sense of security to having the same person working with you at the same effort level trying to accomplish the same goals.
Equal Treatment: Everyone is an Individual
The next part of setting a culture and being a leader is how you dealt with each person on the team, or in the office. I treated everyone the same … as an individual.
Sure, I had rules that everyone lived by. I made it simple by only having two rules: 1) Be Early. 2) Communicate. I learned this from Jerry Welch, my college football coach at Chadron State College, that the more rules you have the more you have to enforce. When you have too many rules you have no grey area. This is where the “Art of Leadership” falls … in the grey area.
To treat my people as individuals I would need to know who they were. What are their strengths and what are their weaknesses?
I am a “Professional Watcher”. I have the ability to continue to watch and measure people in the good times and the bad times. Pete Carroll once told me, “If you continue to watch someone long enough, they will eventually tell you who they truly are.”
Because we worked hard, I saw how an athlete or a coach would respond to hard times. Who could you trust to step up, and who would fall back and complain. If they did it on the training field in the summer when no one was watching, they would do it earlier when the game was in a hard spot and there was a lot of pressure on them to make a play.
This went for my staff also. We worked long hours and there were a lot of stressful moments which enabled me to learn who, on my coaching staff, I could trust and who were not cut out for the profession.
Because I took time to understand who they were, I was able to help them see where they were and how far they had to travel to get to where they wanted to be.
Some people need to be pushed, some need to be pushed HARD. While others needed to be led. Some needed just to have me point and it got done. Some needed for me to give a dissertation on why it was important that they did the movement. They weren’t fighting me, they needed to understand the WHAT – the WHY – and the HOW on everything we did.
I didn’t get defensive and yell, “Just shut up and do it, because I said so!” I understood the roots of everything that we did. A lot of it was different than what they were used to. But once we found common ground they bought in and benefited from the work that we did.
Learning the Learner
In the NFL I had to deal with billionaires, millionaires, thousandaires and guys who would sleep on a teammate’s couch (until the teammate’s wife told them that was enough). I dealt with guys who grew up in the lap of luxury, I dealt with guys who lived on the streets, I dealt with guys who had health issues from the game, and I dealt with guys who had mental health issues that could flare up at any given moment.
At every level I coached in, and I coached at every level, I had to deal with these same issues always swirling around me.
But when the player or coach found that I was there for THEM and not the ownership or the front office or to make money off of them, they leaned a little closer. I didn’t coach the top players more than the third teamer. I treated everyone as an individual. It was hard work for me to learn and have my radar up for when things were spinning off balance. But that was the “job”.
I read an article about a set of twins. They had the same parents. The same household. The same advantages. The same disadvantage. The same rooms. The same meals. The same clothes. One became an executive of a Fortune 500 company. The other went to prison.
When asked why, they gave the same response: “With a mother who did this and a father who did that, how could I not end up this way.”
This proves my point of treating each as an individual. It’s not how we are brought up but how we collect the information and how it fits into our mind and how we absorb the environment around us.
If I treated everyone the same. I would hit on some. But I would, tragically, miss on too many. When I understood how they learned and how they would view assistance or pressure I could help them find success.
One of the greatest examples of my leadership happened at USC.
As we came into the winter workouts, after winning a national championship, our first group started at 6:00 am. I chose this time because no classes were held at 6:00 am. This removed the problem of, “I can’t come to workouts because of my class schedule”.
If you came late, remember my two rules, Be Early and Communicate, without letting me know that you were going to be late you would have to do 50 Up/Downs. (This is where you drop to your stomach and back up fifty consecutive times. There is very little positive in doing this, hence it is a punishment).
A couple of weeks into the training cycle our quarterback Matt Leinart, who had been named the Heisman Trophy winner (the top college football player in the country) at the end of the previous season, came to the 6:00 am workout late. He had not communicated with me.
Being the Professional Watcher that I am, I watched as he jogged across the practice field towards that training area. I wanted to see how much of a leader he was.
I watched as he stopped and began doing his Up/Downs. I didn’t say a word to him. My assistants didn’t tell him to do them. Matt was brought up in a better than average lifestyle. But he understood that at that moment he was just another member of a team. He was conditioned that when you are late you do Up/Downs, because I did this consistently, to do the punishment. He finished and joined the warm-up that was in progress.
I didn’t say a word about it. The actions spoke louder than I could yell. If a national champion, Heisman Trophy winning athlete would do Up/Downs for being late, then nobody was above the rules.
Matt was a true leader!
He trusted the system and had seen the benefits of being part of the program. I did not need to embarrass him, because he didn’t respond to that. That’s because I knew who he was as an individual. And he knew what my expectations were because he had understood the What – the Why and the How.
When we set a culture, we need to consistently stay connected to it through our actions and our words. Being part of a “team” is all about learning to work for the good of the whole. This will start on top and will trickle down to each individual. Those on the bottom will watch how those above them act and speak. When there is no difference between what is being asked and what is being done, the culture will move along at full speed.
The problem is when there is a disconnect. When those on top tell those below them to always be early and they consistently start their meetings late, what message is being sent?
Culture is only as good as those who message the culture throughout the building. If the leader speaks it and no one else repeats it then the message will not get past the board room. When there is no cultural direction from the top, those on the bottom will develop their own culture.
Because they don’t see the “whole picture” this divergent culture can cause the top of the leadership pyramid to tumble.
Communication will always be the main element of any great culture. Lack of communication will be the downfall of even, what is viewed as, the strongest of all cultures.
Have an amazing day!
