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BUILDING YOUR TEAM

I want every one of my players to believe that he's the spark that keeps our team moving forward.
- KNUTT ROCKNE

Two schools of thought prevail about how to effectively manage a team. The older and more popular approach is the authoritarian one that sees the manager or coach as a cross between Moses and Atilla the Hun - an all-wise, all-powerful father figure whose every word should be graven in stone - and that sees the members of the team as underlings whose responsibility is to listen to those words and obey.

Some great coaches have made headlines by subscribing to the authoritarian model, not necessarily because it works but because it makes for quotable observations. There's Pittsburgh coach Fred Depasqua's comment that "Football is not a democracy. If the players want to debate, they can do it in political science class." Or Ohio State basketball coach Fred Taylor's snap at what he saw as the troublemaking players of the 1970s:
"You could put the brains of three of those guys in a hummingbird and it would still fly backward." Or, for an all-time high in managerial chutzpah, Vince Lombardi's supposed quip to his wife when he got into bed and she complained, "God, your feet are cold." As Lombardi's great running back Paul Hornung tells the joke, the coach's response was, "Around the house, dear, you can call me Vince."

But the authoritarian modal is a going concern not Just in sports. It's popular in every arena where groups of people are managed. You've heard the clichés a thousand times. "I pay him to do his job right, not to think." "It's my company and I'll run it any way I want." They're all spin-offs from the "enlightened despot" attitude of the nineteenth-century robber baron era. Whether you work for a company with ten or ten thousand employees, you've come across this attitude. There are still plenty of good old boys in the boardroom and the shop floor who think that being a manager means being 100 percent in charge.

The second school of thought about team management is the "democratic" or "participative" approach, where leadership is taken as the art of getting the best out of your people by encouraging them to talk, to give their opinions, to work solutions out in joint fashion. There aren't a hell of a lot of professional coaches who subscribe to this school of thought, at least publicly, partly because it doesn't make good copy, and partly because most coaches start out working with very young players, and get used to bossing them around. Most of us, after all, learn how to play sports in high school, and in high school, where there's an enormous gap in experience and maturity between coaches and players, it's not reasonable to expect the democratic approach to be effective. So everybody involved in the game starts by subscribing to the authoritarian model, and they carry it on into college and even into the pros, and it never gets reexamined.

The same is true in business. A kid's first job might be raking up leaves for a neighbor or delivering papers or wrapping hamburgers down at McDonald's. There's not a lot of opportunity in those situations for "participative management" or discussion, and I guess not a lot of need either. So the pattern gets set very early. As they say in the military, "You can't give orders until you've first learned to take them."

But does the popular, in fact nearly universal, authoritarian model work? Sure, it's comfortable, it's expected, it's the way things have always been arranged. But does it get the job done?

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