On Sports and Leadership, or: Why A History Nerd Cares About the 1970s NFL

Like most Americans, sports are a part of my life. My father taught me how to throw a baseball when I was a kid, I played multiple sports in my childhood, and I became emotionally invested in events where none of the participants knew I existed and had minimal bearing on world events.

Sports are fascinating to me because of this. Sport has importance because we say it does. It changes the shape of cities and convinces civic leaders to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money because we decided an amusement, a simple competition, mattered to us. Do we need it? No, but we care about it anyway. This makes it fertile ground for legend building. We know Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, etc. because they had transcendent talent and the story built around it.

But behind the players are coaches. Fame as a coach is difficult. Most kids are not looking to the man holding the clipboard on the sideline for their heroes. There are some, of course. John Madden had a very successful coaching career before he lent his name to the Madden football series and ensured he would be a household name. Phil Jackson coached and won 11 NBA championships as the “zen master”. The passage of time still moves them into the background. Does anyone still remember John Wooden?

This makes the narrative surrounding the coach especially interesting to me, as what a coach does/values and what he does not do/value become key elements of their legacy. What makes a coach a good leader? And as someone who is always looking to learn, how does that translate into the non-sporting world? What is a coach, if not a manager in a very specific field?

Failures are easier to point to as a starting point, so let's examine three of the biggest ones I've seen in sports and life:

1.????? If nobody likes you, you will fail.

Mike Babcock is a hockey coach. Most recently, he was with the Columbus Blue Jackets from July 1st 2023 to September 17th 2023, about 11 weeks. He resigned without coaching a game. Why?

It may not surprise you to learn based on the title of this section that Mike Babcock is a jerk. In Columbus, he asked players if he could go through photos on their phone as part of a “character building exercise.” Players felt their privacy had been violated, the league and the players’ association investigated, and Babcock’s resigned.

This likely wouldn’t have affected him had he not already had a reputation. Some choice quotes:

• "He's a terrible person, the worst I have ever met." - Johan Franzén
• "A truly bad person." - Paul Bissonnette and Ryan Whitney
• “There was no respect at all. I would never treat anyone like that.” – Danny Lambert

Babcock won a single Stanley Cup with the Detroit Red Wings in 2008, his third year with the team. And every year after they got worse, from losing in the Stanley Cup Finals, to losing in the semifinals, to losing in the first round. The fact that so many players he coached have a negative opinion while his team regressed every year isn’t a coincidence. If you’re stressed out all the time and terrified about making a mistake, how are you going to perform well? Why would you take any kind of risk? And why on earth would you want to stay in that situation?

There are leaders who think that fear is a good motivator. I blame Machiavelli for this, a grievance for another time. But when you utilize fear as the motivator, you don't instill a culture of risk taking, of pride, of going above and beyond. You create a servile workforce that is motivated to de-risk as much as possible, hide problems, and decline to voice opposition even when your ideas don’t make sense. When you build a culture of fear, you are dooming yourself and everyone you work with, because nobody will want to give you an honest account of a situation or attempt positive change. It may not be tomorrow, or next week, but guess what? You’re going to deviate from the best path, and you’re only going to notice when the damage is irreversible, like the emperor and his new clothes.

The moral for this section isn’t just “don’t be a jerk”. It’s also knowing that for your team to succeed, they need to feel valued and supported. They need to feel safe in bringing alternative ideas, secure knowing they’re being judged fairly, and want to work for you. Because guess what? Just like other sports teams covet talent, someone else is always hiring.

2.????? Your actions and mentality should be relevant to your job.

Les Steckel was an assistant coach on the Minnesota Vikings for several years before being hired after the head coach retired. He was also a former marine, and he really, really wanted to tell you about it.

Documented to great effect in Jon Bois and Secret Base’s series on the Minnesota Vikings, Les Steckel immediately related and applied his experience in Vietnam toanything and everything. Why does he like discipline? His time in the Marines. Why does he want to make training camp a physical endurance test? That’s how the Marines would do it. How does he feel about a player leaving? In the Marines, they would buckle down and get the job done. Why does he make so many analogies using the Marines? Guess. Every decision Steckel made seemed to come down to whether or not the Marines did it.

Under Steckel, the Vikings went 3-13.

Were there problems that went beyond Steckel’s obsessive callbacks to his time in the Marines? Of course. Still, his insistence meant that he changed the Vikings’ football team that season into something focused on Marine concepts and values. Great in the sense of organizational culture shift, except for the fact that the Minnesota Vikings are an organization that exists solely for the purpose of football, not the military.

Leaders like to have their own approach, and that’s fine. Making or changing the approach to something that has nothing to do with your team or organization’s goal? It creates uncertainty, confuses your employees, and detracts from whatever you’re actually supposed to be doing. When you’re making decisions and changes on behalf of the organization, there should be explicit and understandable reasons why, and those reasons need to make sense in the context of your goals.

3.????? Talk is cheap.

Maurice Drayton was special teams coach of the Green Bay Packers for one season, and he preached getting better every day. He called his room “The Truth Room”, because they would be honest. He promised everyone was working hard and there would be no excuses.

Green Bay’s special teams was near-bottom of the league in every statistical measure. During the playoffs that year, the special teams unit made three specific mistakes that helped ensure the Packers lost their match. Drayton was fired. Before the match, he had praised his team, noting they were getting everything right in practice.

As a leader, you can say all the nice things in the world. You can tell your team that they’re doing it better than anyone else out there, that it’s never been a better time to be at the company, or that the new changes are having an incredible impact. None of this matters if the reality on the ground is different than what you say.

Employees aren’t stupid. You hired them for a reason! And they know better than anyone else when you’re not living up to what you say because they’re the ones cleaning up the messes and fixing the things that you broke. When the reality on the ground doesn’t match the narrative they’re told, it’s not just demotivational. It’s unsettling. Because if this statement is an obvious lie, then what else can’t be trusted? Why bother doing your work properly if everything’s made up and the points don’t matter? If you can’t back up or follow through on what you say as a leader or an organization, then your employees won’t trust you or take you seriously, and you lose the power to accomplish anything meaningful. ?

I’d also note this goes both ways: if your results don’t match your statements, your boss won’t trust you either, and that’s a much more precarious spot to be in. This extends to corporate culture and values too; nothing breeds resentment quicker than obvious, crass propaganda.

These three things aren’t the only ways coaches can fail but these three complaints are the ones I hear about most frequently in the workforce, and have seen in the workforce. Knowing them, is there someone we can point to in sports that shows us how to do it a right way?

In the “Actions and Mentality” section, I mentioned in passing that Les Steckel was hired to replace a retiring head coach. That head coach was Bud Grant, who coached the Vikings between 1967 and 1985 (minus that pesky Steckel year).

The more I read about Bud Grant the more I admire him. For instance, Grant was never a workaholic and always left home in time for dinner. He frequently started the Viking’s training camp after every other team, believing that overworking his players early would negatively affect their performance later in the season. He rarely showed emotion during games, believing that he needed to be a figure of resilience and stability.

But how does he fit with what we already talked about?

“If nobody likes you, you will fail.”

The easiest demonstration of Bud Grant as a likeable person is that he never yelled at his players. “In seven years, I never heard him chew anyone out…” said one player in his biography. This is simple kindness. People expect their boss not to belittle them in most normal jobs, and it still happens. This aspect of Bud Grant does not do him justice.

Ahmad Rashad played for the Minnesota Vikings for seven seasons. Before that, he had played for St. Louis and changed his name after converting to Islam; he was originally known as Robert Moore. His coach and teammates refused to call him by his chosen name. He had the same experience on his next two teams.

When Rashad came to Minnesota, Grant called him Ahmad. Point of fact, he used Achmad, the traditional pronunciation of the name. His teammates shortened it to Ock. Ahmad played the rest of his career in Minnesota. Later, he would call Grant “…one of the most important people in my life.”

Grant also bucked convention by having white and black players share rooms and naming black players to leadership positions on the team, which in the 1960s was something approaching radical. ?John Henderson, who had played for a team that did not do this, mentioned this when talking with Grant at a reunion decades later: “You gained my respect as a good leader of men, and I respect you to this day.”

People remember how you treat them. Bud treated people with kindness, with respect, and that built gratitude and comradery that translated to on-field performance.

“Your actions and mentality should be relevant to the job you are expected to do.”

Grant, as mentioned previous, was considered a stoic on the sidelines. He almost never argued with officials, and generally refrained from any large show of emotion. He disliked the spectacle of the Super Bowl, noting that “…it’s entertainment to the Nth degree, but when it’s over, it’s over!”

Dress code is, funnily enough, how I think Bud Grant stands out. When he took over the Vikings, there had been instability throughout the organization. One of the first things Grant did was set a rule in place dictating that everyone needed to wear their socks the same way. “We have to look alike if we are going to play alike and be a team.”

I understand if that feels arbitrary. But making changes like this helps set the tone. It created a grounding point to build from, building the idea of a team having consistency in their day to day and being on the same page. Once everyone's doing that, you can move on to bigger and bigger things. Grant was explicit about why he was doing it, too, rather than simply making a decision and keeping everyone in the dark. He was good at finding the little things that could have a big impact. Even if that thing was just socks to start.

“Talk is cheap.”

Motivational posters have a negative reputation associated with them now, justifiably so. There are some managers who still resort to stock phrases and vague affirmations over helpful specificity.

Grant never gave speeches or hung up inspirational messages. He preferred to let the players do their own talking and motivation during games. He didn’t resort to clichés. More importantly, he got results without using them.

Bud Grant to this day is still the most successful coach in Vikings history, and the fifth winningest coach in NFL history. He remains the only Vikings coach to bring the team to a Super Bowl, and he did it four times. The Vikings are still talked about as one of the most dominant teams of their time. Grant also succeeded prior to his time with the Vikings as a coach in the CFL in the late 50s and 60s, winning four Grey Cups with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

I am forced to admit at this juncture that Grant never won a Super Bowl. That talisman eluded him and his teams and remains one of the biggest “What ifs” in the history of the NFL. The story isn't perfect. I’d argue that if you only care about leaders who won then you’ll have nothing prepared for the time when you yourself lose. And if you haven’t already, you will.

I asked the question "What makes a coach a good leader?" earlier. There is one final factoid about Bud Grant that I think serves as a fitting conclusion. He kept a quote from the Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu (aka Laozi) on his desk. “It is outstanding advice,” he wrote.

?“A leader is best when people barely know he exists. Not so good, when people obey and acclaim him. Worse when they despise him. But of a good leader who talks little, when his work done, his aim fulfilled, they say: We did it ourselves.”