The Culture
The experience of getting to meet your heroes in person is something most people dream about. Even if you won’t admit it there is a person in your head that you have actually thought about what you would say if your ever meet them. I got to experience that when I got drafted into the NFL. I not only got to meet some of my heroes, I got to play along side them. Meeting Derrick Brooks and Warrick Dunn, who I always played with in Madden Football on my PlayStation, was like pulling your favorite cartoon character out of your t.v. and and sitting them right on the couch right next to you. I might as well have been playing on a football team with He-Man and G.I. Joe.
Overtime you get to know a lot of great people. People from all over the spectrum, from every walk of life. You get to know why they are who they are. You get to learn how they sustain success. You learn what makes them a winner.
Sustainable winning in pro-sports requires talented people performing at a high level consistently. Front offices, medical staffs, coaches, trainers, and players all have to find the chemistry to work together year after year to produce a consistent winning outcome for the organization.
Having elite talent on the field is important. But it’s the NFL. All the teams have talented players.
So what are the 4 elements of creating a sustainable winning culture.
Wise Ownership
The cliche’ goes “it starts at the top”. That is very much true when it comes to NFL football teams. Team owners set the direction for a franchise. They ultimately decide the type of leaders that will be in place to do the day to day work of building and sustaining the culture of the franchise. Most team owners are self-made billionaires that understand the value of the right people leading the various departments of a football team. More importantly, they can recognize if a person has the necessary character traits it takes to lead and lead effectively. Picking a GM is like picking a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The front office is an extension of the ownership. The character of the owners and front office will show up in the players and coaches they pick to represent that franchise on the field. The life experience and wisdom of a seasoned NFL owner can be the bedrock of sustainable winning culture. Robert Craft for example is a self-made billionaire that has the life experience of selecting talented people and empowering them to help him build a successful company. The foundation of the Patriots winning culture is the wisdom and leadership of Robert Craft. The wisdom of a seasoned owner can be a strategic advantage when it comes to selecting to right leadership for the organization.
Football Character
The environment of a football team is a very unique place. It is sanctioned and strategic violence. Controlled chaos. It is a violent chess match that joins the brilliant strategic minds of front offices and coaches with the brilliant and explosive talents of some of the best athletes on the planet. The competition is fierce. The pressure to perform is constant. You need a collection of people who are mentally tough and driven to be the best. You need people who are arrogant about their ability. People who have an ego. You need people who are not only arrogant about there own ability but people who are arrogant about their team’s ability to dominate every opponent. You need people who believe in the culture of the team. People that will do everything within their power to live up to that culture, to hold others accountable to that culture. What you need is football character.
Football character is not about personality. It’s not about being a perfect gentlemen. Some of the best teammates and co-workers in the NFL are total ass-holes. You may not want to have them over for Christmas dinner but you absolutely want them by your side when it’s time to go to war on Sundays. You need people you can trust to fight with you until the final whistle blows. People that you know will fight with everything they have to do their job. People you can depend on. The NFL is an extreme environment. You need players with an extreme belief in themselves and the team. People with an unshakable swagger that want all the smoke every single week.
There can be a thin line between extreme confidence and the toxic behavior that can poison team chemistry. Teams have to find the balance between allowing players to be who they are while making sure they are committed to the principles that govern a winning team. Football character is the thread that ties it all together. It boils down to this. Can I trust you to make choices in your life that will allow me to depend on you on Sundays. Football character doesn’t require you to be a perfect human being. It requires you to embrace the responsibility of being apart of our team.
Systems That Define Roles!
Football games may look like a bunch a guys running into each other and slamming each other on the ground, But every play in a football game is a strategic battle. A violent chess match. It is man vs man. But it is also system vs system. Offensive and defensive systems define roles and responsibilities for the players in those systems. The clarity and soundness of the system allows the players to play with confidence, to be definitive in there movements. Belief in the system gives players the confidence that if they execute their responsibilities then the team has a chance to be successful on every play. Belief in the system inspires players to fight with all they have to do their job. You don’t want to be the guy that let your teammates down because you didn’t do what it took to maintain the integrity of the system. Every play is designed to be successful. Players bring the play design to life with their ability and passion to succeed.
Systems keep all 11 players on the field on the same page. There will always be negative plays in a game. Some are a result of player error. Sometimes players just loose one on one battles. Sometimes they they just slip and fall. It happens. Some can be strategic failure. You can be out leveraged by alignment or out numbered by a formation. Coherent systems help minimize negative plays by providing a framework to identify, diagnose, and correct negative plays when they happen in the games. Within a system you can have answers for the strategic problems you face within a game. A run play you haven’t prepared for keeps gashing your defense? You should have an adjustment within the system that solves the problem and keeps all 11 players on the same page. A blitz you haven’t prepared for is terrorizing your QB? You should have an adjustment in your protection scheme that allow you to put out that fire. Well designed systems allow teams to live in attack mode because great systems have built in responses to attack any scenario.
Great systems give players perspective about how important their role is to the overall success of the group. Great systems are the frame work for consistent performance that eventually will lead to consistent and sustainable winning.
Mutual Respect
Everyone that is apart of the organization must feel respected and valued. From the security guard at the front gate to the GM, everyone must feel like they are apart of making the organization successful. Their are obviously roles within the team that carry more weight and responsibility than others but everyone must feel respected and have a sense of pride about what they do for the organization. Players being able to have open, honest and real conversations with the front office and coaching staff is very important. The physical and mental burden that players must carry for winning organizations is huge. The commitment and sacrifice it takes for an athlete to give everything they have to an organization can not be bought with a pay check. Great players are going to get paid regardless. Money is irrelevant when it comes to winning. Players have to believe in the organization they play for. They have to have a reason to come early and stay late, to play through pain, to inspire others to do the necessary work it takes to win every year. There has to be a connection between the people in the organization that inspires everyone to do all they can to help the team be at its best every time they take the field. Making sure everyone feels respected and valued has to be apart of the culture.
The NFL is an amazing platform that gives some of the worlds best executives, doctors, coaches, and athletes a chance to display their extraordinary abilities. 32 teams compete to become Super Bowl Champions every year. The competition is not just on the field. Every department within the team is competing to be champions. The culture of the organization binds there efforts together. Finding the right mix of people, systems, and purpose is the key to building that culture. No winning culture is ever identical to another. The culture takes on the personality and character of to people that are apart of it. Finding the right mix is a challenge. But when you find it, it’s football nirvana.