Changing the Culture: Cursing Football Coaches, Attacking the Change Agent

“Coaches should be held to same standards as teachers“

John writes, in part:

My 8-year-old son is obsessed with college football, watching games with me every weekend. On several occasions he was able to lip-read everything coaches screamed at players and officials. It started a conversation.

“Dad, why do coaches yell at the players with the f-word?”

“That's a good question.”

“Do you yell at your students like that?”

“Absolutely not. I respect them, and they respect me. That respect is not based on fear and intimidation.”

“Fear and what?”

Dr. W. Edwards Deming wrote about driving out fear from the workplace. I think that's a really important concept for our organizations today. There's so much dysfunction that results from fear and intimidation. Fear leads to people hiding problems and covering things up… which prevents improvement.

As I've blogged about (including here), the culture of fear and intimidation that I experienced at General Motors 20 years ago wasn't productive. It didn't lead to improvement. Yelling, screaming, spitting, and cursing didn't help improve anything.

I've written about this before in the context of college football:

Coaching, not Berating, when Mistakes are Made

In this article, John adds:

“I never speak to my students in any other way than with deference, even when I might be upset. If I were to act like many of these coaches do, I am sure I would be fired. And rightly so.”

Like said, John, at times, yelled at us… but that was almost 25 years ago. We've all grown and matured since then. Like I said before, I never thought John was abusive or at all out of line. He acted like we were all part of team, rather than being our superior.

He adds:

“I think we can do better.”

He's right.

I think he also raises a good point that yelling and screaming often occurs in high-pressure settings. That's not an excuse, but it's an explanation. When I was at GM, leaders there would explain their bad behavior as something they were taught (through experience… that sort of bad behavior tends to get passed on or flows downhill, as they say).

Now, I've rarely seen people yell and scream in healthcare settings. It probably doesn't happen as much in modern factories. It's not a Lean behavior.

Hospitals often make excuses for surgeons or others who behave badly. They look the other way. They rationalize why harmful and disrespectful behavior isn't that bad. They too often don't want to lose the surgeon and the revenue they bring in. Thankfully, some hospitals are cracking down on that.

It's interesting to think about the need for other types of culture change and how organizations react when the issue is raised.

People resist and get defensive when somebody speaks an ugly truth (such as the fact that too many patients are harmed by preventable errors). There's often a backlash that occurs when somebody pushes, say, the need for a better patient safety culture in healthcare.

In this video, John reads some of the, um, feedback that he received from his piece. He has a good sense of humor about it:

If you read the book Leadership on the Line by Harvard professor Ronald Heifetz, he writes about how organizations will often turn on a change agent. Those invested in the status quo will often attack the messenger, as I think happened with John. They aren't debating the point (that football coaches shouldn't scream and curse)… they're attacking him personally. At least he can laugh at it.

What do you think? I should blog it again… BETTER?