The Score Takes Care of Itself (14 page)

On the field he was advanced. He conducted practice at a fast tempo, full-throttle delivery of information with extraordinary demands for precision in execution. If you were supposed to go twelve yards and you added an extra half yard, it was a big deal. You heard about it in no uncertain terms. Accuracy, accuracy, precision in execution of everything at all levels. No sloppiness.
Game
-level focus was the price of admission.

Obviously, the physical component is huge in football, but what Bill did was make the mental component even bigger. He taught what he wanted done, and he was a great teacher. He taught players, he taught coaches, he taught staff, he taught, taught, taught. And in that teaching he created belief in ourselves as a team, an organization, because it was apparent that what he was teaching was not only absolutely right, it was advanced. He cleared the deadwood dissenters out and taught the rest of us what it took to get the job done at the highest level.

I would tell you this: Bill’s gift for teaching created belief in him, conviction in us. Bill Walsh was the consummate teacher. With the naysayers gone, he had a team of talented people who were ready and willing to be led to the promised land.

Someone will declare, “I am the leader!” and expect everyone to get in line and follow him or her to the gates of heaven or hell. My experience is that it doesn’t happen that way. Unless you’re a guard on a chain gang, others follow you based on the quality of your actions rather than the magnitude of your declarations. It’s like announcing, “I am rich!” when you’re broke. After your announcement, you’re still broke, and everybody knows it. In a sense, Barry Switzer found this out in Dallas with the Cowboys when he took over.

As head coach at the University of Oklahoma, he had achieved tremendous results, including three national championships and one of the highest winning percentages of any college coach in history. Some consider him one of the best college football coaches ever.

When Switzer moved to the NFL and took over for Jimmy Johnson as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys (Johnson “retired” as head coach because of ongoing struggles over control and credit issues with owner Jerry Jones), he inherited a terrific football team that had won the previous two Super Bowls by a combined score of 82-30 (the Buffalo Bills were the opponent in both games).

Initially, Coach Switzer got results from the Cowboys on the momentum of what Johnson and Jones had built. However, in my opinion, Switzer’s continuing freewheeling lifestyle, habits, and behavior—he was generally viewed as a “good ol’ boy”—did not command the respect necessary to keep superstar quarterback Troy Aikman, Hall of Fame running back Emmett Smith, and other outstanding Dallas performers functioning as a cohesive, dedicated, and overpowering football team. Things gradually began to erode.

Barry Switzer’s off-field conduct (e.g., being detained while carrying a gun in his briefcase at the Dallas airport, reports of carousing, and other distracting activities) continually got him the wrong kind of publicity. Plus, he favored the “buddy system” approach to coaching; he had favorites among the players, and everybody knew it. Of course, those who weren’t “buddies” inevitably began to feel like second-class citizens, which usually leads to the creation of a second-class organization.

Additionally, his organizational abilities and attention to detail—painstaking attention to perfecting small but important issues—were relatively laid-back. This last item is important because if the person in charge is casual in these areas, others will follow suit.

The Dallas Cowboys’ intense focus, commitment, and consequent extraordinary performance results went down during Switzer’s four seasons there. His leadership skills at the NFL level may not have commanded the respect or generated the loyalty necessary for ongoing dominance from that extremely talented Dallas organization.

All of this contributed to the decline of the Cowboys—which had long-lasting effects: The Cowboys did not repeat as Super Bowl champions in his first season; during Switzer’s second season, Dallas won Super Bowl XXX, but two years later he was out following a 6-10 season and a fourth-place finish in the NFC East. He never coached again in the NFL, and during the five years following his departure, the Dallas Cowboys lost 60 percent of their games. Would this have occurred had Jimmy Johnson remained as head coach? I doubt it.

Declaring, “I am the leader!” has no value unless you also have the command skills necessary to be the leader. This is true anywhere. Barry Switzer had skills that made him a top college football coach. His skills and style were less effective in leadership at the highest levels in the NFL. It took a while, but ultimately what he did and how he did it caught up with him and the Dallas Cowboys.

There is no one perfect or even preferable style of leadership, just as there is no perfect politician or parent. Bill Gates is different from Steve Jobs; Vince Lombardi was different from me.

We have, however, seen a move away from the dictatorial type of leadership, an approach that didn’t fit me and that I do not think is conducive to long-term success, especially in a corporate setting. You may get results for a week or a few months, but the cumulative effects of bullying people, creating an environment of ongoing fear, panic, and intimidation, are a situation where employees become increasingly tuned out and immune to all of your noise. And, of course, the talented ones look for a job with a better outfit.

The tyrant still exists in leadership, in both sports and business, but is in retreat. The strong-willed personality, however, is not disappearing anywhere anytime soon, whether in sports, nonprofits, or corporate America.

The leader who will not be denied, who has expertise coupled with strength of will, is going to prevail. Here are three people, head coaches I know personally and whose abilities I respect, who are dissimilar in many ways but exactly the same in one area—strength of will. They
will
not be denied:

Mike Holmgren’s Green Bay Packers won Super Bowl XXXI, and he’s been very successful as head coach of the Seattle Seahawks; before that he was one of my assistant coaches at San Francisco, so I know him pretty well. Here’s my capsule description of Mike: He is thoughtful, intelligent, and assertive—an excellent teacher who, beneath his surface appearance of being amenable and open to everything, absolutely knows what he wants and gets it; and everybody in his organization understands that.

Mike is unswerving in moving toward his goal.

Tom Landry won Super Bowl VI and Super Bowl XII as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. Almost as impressive is his streak of twenty consecutive winning seasons. Here’s my description of Landry: Tom had a tremendous mind for technical football and was inordinately well organized and very strong mentally—a no-nonsense guy greatly respected for the exemplary standards he demanded of himself and those who worked with him. Tom didn’t like to show emotion. (Walt Garrison, a former running back for Dallas, was asked if he’d ever seen Landry smile. He replied, “No, but I was only on his team for nine years.”)

And, like Holmgren, Tom Landry was unswerving in moving toward his goal.

Jimmy Johnson won a national championship as head coach of the University of Miami Hurricanes and two consecutive Super Bowl championships at Dallas. Here’s my description of Jimmy: a smart guy with an exuberant personality who brought in outstanding people and delegated well. He was not the technical football expert that Landry was, but a better salesman. (Landry was a good salesman unintentionally. Jimmy
intended
to be good at selling himself and his system, and he was.)

And, like Holmgren and Landry, Jimmy Johnson was unswerving in moving toward his goal.

I pick these three because they’ve all enjoyed the ultimate success in football—a Super Bowl championship (or two)—and because they are so different in many ways, Holmgren seemingly amenable and flexible, Landry stoic and stern, Johnson like Robert Preston in
The Music Man
—exuberant and lively.

What they share beyond expertise and great success, however, was their indomitable will. They simply would not quit in their effort to install their own system, to push forward with their plan, not someone else’s or a committee’s. Keep in mind that all three of them were handed tough jobs, teams in trouble (e.g., Dallas was an expansion franchise and went 0-11-1 in their first season under Landry).

Some leaders are volatile, some voluble; some stoic, others exuberant; but all successful leaders know where we want to go, figure out a way we believe will get the organization there (after careful consideration of relevant available information), and then move forward with absolute determination. We may falter from time to time, but ultimately we are unswerving in moving toward our goal; we will not quit. There is an inner compulsion—obsession—to get it done the way you want it done even if the personal cost is high.

It is good to remind yourself that this quality—strength of will—is essential to your survival and success. Often you are urged to “go along to get along,” solemnly advised that “your plan should’ve worked by now,” or told other variations that amount to backing away from a course you believe in your heart and know in your head is correct.

You look around the room and find yourself with only a few supporters. Or perhaps not even a few. Heads are bowed, everybody’s eyes are lowered, looking down at their hands, embarrassed to look at you. You may be standing alone. This is when you find out if you’re a leader.

In my years as a head coach, I wanted a democratic-style organization with input and communication and freedom of expression, even opinions that were at great variance with my ideas. But only up to a point. When it was time for a decision, that decision would be made by me according to dictates having to do with one thing only, namely, making the team better.

And once the decision was made, the discussion was over. My ultimate job, and yours, is not to give an opinion. Everybody’s got an opinion. Leaders are paid to make a decision. The difference between offering an opinion and making a decision is the difference between working for the leader and being the leader.

I was never a screamer, but everyone knew not to buck me when I’d decided what we were going to do. Just like Mike Holmgren, Tom Landry, Jimmy Johnson, and many others, I was unswerving in moving toward my goal. Once I had accumulated and evaluated the available information, I did it my way. And so should you.

Now, let me address a problem this prerequisite leadership trait—strength of will—can pose, namely, the problem of determining when “my way” is the wrong way.

Coaches, like leaders anywhere, often try to force a plan past the point of reality. In football we may want to establish a passing game and persist too long because we’re preoccupied with it, determined by our own will to make it happen even when it’s ill conceived or ill timed. This is no different from a corporate leader who imposes a plan of action beyond the point of no return, the point where continuing makes no sense and becomes destructive.

It’s a delicate balance: You must persevere to achieve anything of import, but at what stage does perseverance become pigheadedness? When does your unswerving determination to do it your way—what you deem the “right way”—take you and your organization over the cliff?

Years ago, when I was head coach at Stanford University, we played Tulane University in the second game of our season. In my pregame preparation, while watching hours of game film, I had determined that we could—and would—rely on our running game against a mediocre Tulane defense. The previous week in the season opener we had lost by only six points to number one-ranked Colorado and had run the ball successfully.

Now we were in New Orleans for the Tulane game, and I announced in the middle of a press conference that I
challenged
Tulane to deal with Stanford’s ground game, dared them to try and stop us. Well, they did.

It took me into the middle of the third quarter to realize I was a victim of my own mistaken assessment, rhetoric, and subsequent stubbornness: We were behind 17-6 and on the verge of losing because I was determined to show that our “unstoppable” running game couldn’t be stopped.

Somehow it dawned on me: I was staying with a bad plan because my ego was committed to the stupid challenge I had made while boasting about our running game to the media. Tulane’s defense was stronger than I had concluded after watching their game films. However, I didn’t want to be proved wrong in front of sixty-five thousand spectators in the Super-dome who had read my boast in the sports section of the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
or heard it on radio or television.

When I recognized the mental trap I had set and stepped into, I abandoned our ground game and allowed quarterback Guy Benjamin’s passing skills to get us going. The results were immediate, and Stanford won 21-17. However, I had jeopardized the game by locking my ego into a strategy that was failing. I did not allow logic or the reality of the game to pierce my veil of pride. It was my ego and strength of will that had almost killed us.

I had all but lost that game for our young team because I didn’t want to back off something I’d bragged about. I was caught up in my own rhetoric about Stanford’s running game when I had a quarterback who was one of the finest passers in college football. Even now I’m a little embarrassed to think about the level of immaturity I demonstrated during an important game. Obviously, this was not my best moment as a leader.

Here’s a similar example, away from the game of football, that you may recall. Years ago, the executives at Coca-Cola decided to replace classic Coke with a new version of it. Tests seemed to suggest that the new flavor was favored by potential buyers over the time-tested Coke that had become a worldwide brand and a proven phenomenon. Coca-Cola went ahead and replaced it—took the classic Coke off shelves worldwide—amid great fanfare. The sales results were not good. In fact, it was a fiasco. But those same executives, committed as they were to the new product and having spent tens of millions of dollars on it, recognized “their way” was the wrong way. New Coke was introduced in April and taken off the shelves in July.