What the First Twelve Years of Writing About Sports Taught Me About Leadership
I've been pulling together a slightly updated edition of my eBook collecting the sports-related posts from this blog. The earliest post in it is from October 2005. The most recent is from January 2017. Going back through twelve years of my own writing was a strange experience. Some of it I don't remember writing. Some of it I'd write differently now. And some of it surprised me by holding up better than I expected.
What surprised me more was the pattern. I didn't set out to write a book about leadership. I set out to write about sports, because I like sports, and because I kept seeing the same dynamics on TV that I was seeing in factories and hospitals. But when you read the posts in sequence, the same handful of themes keep showing up. So I want to talk about a few of them.
The default response to a mistake is to find someone to blame. This one came up over and over. The Washington Nationals showed up to a game with their team name misspelled on every player's uniform. ESPN's Tony Kornheiser, on Pardon the Interruption, gave what I called at the time “the typical traditional management response that somebody MUST be fired as a result of this.” I asked then, and I'd ask now: Does firing someone undo the problem? (See “Washington ‘Natinals' Error”.)
A few years later, in a piece about Stanford kicker Jordan Williamson missing two field goals to lose the Fiesta Bowl, I quoted Dr. Deming: “American management is quick to assign blame to an individual when the problem, is in fact, a fault in the system.” Williamson was the obvious goat. He was also one of the top 20 college kickers in the country, kicking with a low snap that put the laces facing him in overtime. A field goal involves eleven players. Nobody yells “blame the snapper.” (See “Blame the Stanford Kicker! Blame the Kicker?”)
The pattern repeats with the Cubs' Junior Lake wearing the wrong jersey on a road trip (“Was it Lake's fault? Did he pack incorrectly for the trip? Of course not. His job is to focus on baseball. The team has a support staff who is supposed to take care of this – a system.”), with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones blaming a punter for hitting a scoreboard Jones himself had hung too low, with the Texas Rangers fans accused of being thoughtless jerks for piling beer cans around a memorial statue (when there weren't enough trash cans outside the stadium).
I don't think the urge to blame is going away. It's human. But the leaders who fight that urge tend to win more, in sports and elsewhere.
Yelling is not the same as accountability
I wrote a piece in 2007 about Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith, who happened to be coaching against each other in that year's Super Bowl. The Wall Street Journal had described them as the calm exceptions in a profession full of screamers, and made the point that calm didn't mean soft. Dungy's grading system tracked what he called “loafs” – any play where a player didn't run at full speed or eased up on contact. As I wrote at the time: “Respect doesn't mean being easy on people. Respect means being tough and holding people accountable to themselves and to the organization.” (See “Learning from Super Bowl Coaches”.)
Four years later, I wrote about Notre Dame's Brian Kelly turning purple on the sideline during a nationally televised loss. I quoted a column on now-former Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald:
“Instead of berating guys and getting down on guys we look at it as a teachable and coachable opportunity.”
That's not a soft coach. That's a coach who knows that public humiliation makes the next mistake more likely, not less.
In 2015, the WSJ ran a piece on the Oregon Ducks under Mark Helfrich. The headline was “Why the Oregon Ducks Don't Believe in Yelling.” Helfrich's quote:
“It's not about who can scream the loudest. We have excellent specialists in their field, great leaders of young men that need to teach guys what to do, to show them and tell them and find a way to bring that home. There's hopefully way more talking than yelling.”
Their quarterback, Marcus Mariota, added:
“Those guys already understand that they did wrong.”
I'm not against intensity. I'm against the assumption that volume is the same thing as standards.
The people doing the work usually know what's wrong
The clearest example of this in the book is the NBA's introduction of a new synthetic basketball in 2006, without consulting the players. Players complained that the ball was sticky when dry, slippery when wet, and gave them paper-cut-sized gashes on their fingers. The league dismissed it at first. Commissioner David Stern said in October that “as the players get more used to it, it will become less and less of an issue for us.” By December, the league was switching back to leather.
What I found interesting was Stern's eventual response, in a Wall Street Journal interview I quoted in early 2007. Asked what the lesson was, he said: “The management lesson of that is listen to your employees. Our players have played with a composite ball in high school, college, and international leagues. Maybe it wasn't sold as well as it could've been. The public has spoken. We have misstepped. We didn't listen to our employees, and we have owned up to our own failures.” (See “NBA's David Stern on Listening”.)
I gave Stern credit then, and I'll give him credit now. When the NBA introduced new uniform fabrics a few years later, they tested them with more than 200 players over four years before rolling them out. The lesson got learned.
The opposite example comes from a Detroit Lions story I wrote about in November 2007. ESPN announcers asked whether the offensive linemen had ever suggested running the ball more, given how lopsided the offense had become. The response:
“The atmosphere's not one that's real conducive to suggestions right now.”
The Lions started 6-2 that season, finished 6-7, and didn't make the playoffs. I wrote at the time: “Maybe bad times are exactly when you should be asking for suggestions, or at least creating a ‘conducive' atmosphere.” That still seems right. (See “Not Conducive to Suggestions”.)
The right process gets the right results – eventually
This one is harder to write about because it's slower. It's not the lesson of any single post. But it shows up in pieces.
It shows up in the Northwestern football turnaround under Gary Barnett, where the team's win totals went 3, 2, 4, 10 over four years, and the Rose Bowl trip in year four was completely predictable to anyone who'd been watching the games get closer over time. Barnett used the metaphor of priming a well – you pump and pump and don't see water, and you have to keep pumping, or you lose your chance right before it starts flowing.
It shows up in Nick Saban's “process” obsession, which I wrote about after Alabama's 2013 BCS championship win over Notre Dame. ESPN's Tom Rinaldi asked Saban before the game what he had to do to win. Saban talked about process. As I wrote then:
“I've been taught (and seen first hand) that traditional management mindsets would say, ‘All I care about is the results. If the results are good, then everything must be good.' Lean thinkers realize that ‘the right process brings the right results.'”
And it shows up in a piece I wrote about Bill Belichick and the Patriots, quoting a WSJ piece:
“Mr. Belichick sees excellence as a process, not as an acquisition. He constantly sifts for players who are teachable, rather than perfect, and then tries to meld them into a unit.”
Whatever you think of the Patriots' history with the rules – and there's plenty to think about there – that quote is worth the time.
A team built around teamwork improves over the season. A team built around talent wears out. The same is true in workplaces.
So why does any of this still matter
These posts are old. Some of the coaches I wrote about as exemplars later disappointed. Some of the cautionary tales turned out fine. The NBA's basketball is no longer controversial. Brian Kelly is no longer at Notre Dame. The Stanford kicker had three more seasons to redeem himself, and I never followed up to see if he did.
But the patterns underneath the news cycle don't go away. Organizations under pressure default to blame. Coaches who yell tell themselves they're being tough. Decisions get made in rooms without the people who have to live with them. And every so often, a leader does it differently, and the results are interesting enough to write about.
That's what twelve years of writing about sports taught me. Mostly the same things, over and over.
If you want to read the posts themselves, the updated 2017 edition of https://amzn.to/4cN0iWEPracticing Lean in Sports is available on Kindle and in paperback. The book has been freshly edited, with updated links and new reflections added at the end of many of the posts. It's organized by sport – baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and a miscellaneous section for tennis, golf, and stadium operations.
What patterns have you noticed in your own organization that keep showing up no matter how many times you think you've fixed them?
