Lessons for CEOs from the NFLs Greatest Quarterbacks

Stanford Swinton, CEO, CEO Coaching International

Championship American Football is upon us, and I recently finished watching Quarterback on Netflix.? Quarterback is a docuseries that charts the ups and downs of the 2023-2024 NFL season of three of the League’s leading quarterbacks - Kansas City Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes, Minnesota Vikings’ Kirk Cousins, and the Atlanta Falcons’ Marcus Mariota.

As a long time advisor of CEOs and Executive Teams, I couldn’t help but reflect on the parallels between a quarterback and a CEO. ? In football, the quarterback position is truly unique.? For quarterbacks, much of the team’s success or failure is attributed by the public, the media, and the team to that individual.? And it is inconceivable for a team to go a long way in a Super Bowl bid without a top performing quarterback leading the charge.? CEOs are in a very similar position and face similar challenges and responsibilities.

So what can we learn from the NFLs great quarterbacks on what it takes to lead as a CEO?? I took away three key lessons that I think any CEO can benefit from as they lead their companies to achieve something BIG.

1. It takes a team to maintain a star

The biggest take away for me watching the series is how many people the quarterbacks each relied on to stay in peak performance - multiple coaches, physical and mental conditioning experts, and significant others all played meaningful roles in ensuring the quarterback was at peak performance each week making the plays.

In the case of Super Bowl star quarterback Patrick Mahomes, he actively demonstrated how he fights the urge to attribute failure on a play to himself which can be a dangerous and self-destructive mental game for quarterbacks by regularly giving credit on the field to great defensive linemen for big stops and likewise to team members when making big plays.

Too many CEOs and senior executives I know have the false belief that they need to ‘do it alone’ given they are in the top job.? In reality, almost every highly successful person in business and in life has relied on coaches and mentors to achieve their success.??As a CEO myself, I have come to rely on my own panel of advisors to reach my top performance including my Chairman and CEO coaching guru Mark Moses, CEO Coaching International , and experienced CEO coaches like Sheldon Harris and Anne Wright .

Every CEO, just like every quarterback, needs a bench of business and personal coaches and advisors to help them achieve their full potential.? Boards have a duty of care to the businesses they govern - there is no better way to discharge that duty than to ensure the right team is in place supporting the CEO of the company.

2. Planning and preparation is the leader’s top priority

The series highlighted for me that not every quarterback can be great just by executing the play well or making the pass.? The real value of a quarterback on the field is providing complete clarity to the team what they need to do on each play in response to a dynamic and competitive defense.? Sometimes that even means making a call to run a play that wasn’t in line with the sideline consensus.??

The only way that quarterbacks can play that role is if they themselves know the plays, the competition and the strategies inside and out and that they can recognize when their current approach needs adjustment.

For many CEOs I work with, they are not prioritizing the essential deep thinking time dedicated each week to reviewing the company strategy and challenging themselves on whether the model is working or requires adjustments.? I once heard this aptly described as pulling your head out of the trench from time to time to see that you are still digging in a straight line.??

Not unlike the quarterbacks in the series who each dedicated weekly time to reviewing their ever evolving playbooks and reviewing game tapes from their upcoming competitors, every CEO should be blocking time alone each week to go deep on a single problem that if you made progress on it would move the needle.

3. Sometimes you have to be the one to make the play (but not all the time)

No matter how flawless the planning and play calling, sometimes, in order to get the first down or cross the end zone the quarterback needs to tuck and run to make the play. ? Just as a quarterback can’t always just sit back in the pocket, CEOs can’t always assume they can delegate and fly at 30,000 feet on every issue in the company.??

Similarly, while the greatest quarterbacks can make plays and also know who their stars are, they also activate everyone on their squads to create more options for the offense.? Likewise, CEOs who can be overly prescriptive and controlling or can come to overly rely on one star executive at the expense of building up the broader team never experience the team’s true potential.

The key is knowing when to hold and trust your team to execute the play (most of the time, and definitely more than most CEOs believe), and when it is time to take control and to make the play (on the occasion when the conversion is key to company success).

While all the quarterbacks in the series to some extent complied with these three principles, there was a clear correlation between the success individually of the quarterback in living these principles and the degree to which they and their teams succeeded on the field.