Index | Parent Index | Build Freedom: Archive

MYTH: SUPERSTARS CAN CARRY THE TEAM

One of the greatest myths in sports is that superstars can win alone. In such individual sports as golf and tennis, this may be true - yet even Tom Watson and John McEnroe have their coaches, trainers and even their caddies.

But business is not an individual game. Business is a team sport. Every CEO, no matter how brilliant, is utterly dependent on the commitment and teamwork of his players to win his games. No football player ever became a superstar without ten other guys on the field to make him one. Even during the years when I was regarded as one of the star quarterbacks of the National Football League, I was dependent on my teammates in far more ways than most fans imagine. I learned early that the most important things a quarterback does are not the physical ones of passing and ball-handling. On the contrary, what made me a star was teamwork. I discovered that the critical factor in generating teamwork is to gel everyone involved.  All of us together, in business and in sports, are smarter than any one of us alone.

Involvement is not an automatic thing. It is easy enough for a quarterback or running back to get excited every time he handles the ball, but how do you get the involvement of the lineman who can't point to his pass completions or rushing yardage at the end of the game?  How does an offensive guard or tackle know what his contribution is to the final score? How can you involve your lineman, in the factory or on the field, in winning on a minute-by-minute basis? After all, the points go up throughout the game, not simply at the end of play.

I wondered about these things when I returned to the Minnesota Vikings in 1972. I wanted ways of making the game more manageable. Otherwise, it becomes bigger than you can handle. As University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith used to joke, "If you make every game a life-or-death situation, you're going to have problems.   For one thing, you'll be dead a lot." So I found the ways.

Maybe more than anything else, I concentrated on the small plays and made sure they were executed correctly.  I told Homer Jones why he had done a good job on a certain pass play. If my right guard, Darrell Dess, was going nose-to-nose with mean Bob Lilly, I let Darrell know it every time I saw him keeping Lilly out of my face on a passing play.  Just as a manager has no job, no product and nothing to manage without his staff, I had no chance of throwing a pass - no chance of even being a quarterback - without Darrell doing the job of protecting me from Lilly. After a critical play involving a rush by Lilly,
I would go up to Dess and tell him specifically, "Darrell, that play worked because you kept Big Bob off my rear end. Thanks."

Whether we won or lost, Darrell helped win that minute for us. Realizing that would help him add another winning minute to the score.

But praising performance after the fact has its limitations, too. Sometimes you might  have to wait a long time for just the right performance to reinforce. That's when involvement becomes important. It brings your players into the action before they have made the outstanding play. It sets them up to make that play.

It's one thing to involve your people in a quality circle where they set common goals and can watch one another's performance in attaining them - especially if most members of the group work at the same job. But every member of a football team has a different job on every play and has to come up with individual performance.  The traditional structure of a football offense puts the coach and quarterback - the managers - in charge and expects everyone else to do his job on command. Vikings offensive coordinator Jerry Burns and I decided to change that a little bit.

The great unsung heroes of any football team are its offensive linemen. They are the hod carriers, the engine room crew, the dog shift of the team. On the Washington Redskins 1983 Super Bowl championship team, its celebrated front line was known as "the Hogs" because they were always "rooting around in the mud." These guys expected to get into those trenches and wage unrewarded warfare for sixty minutes every Sunday afternoon without complaint - and without much praise. But how do you give these "hogs" a sense of participation in the whole slugfest?

Burnsie and I began giving jobs to the linemen. Mick Tingelhoff, my center and one of my best friends for thirteen years, used to joke about "Fran making a fortune with his hands up my ass." The good news, Tingelhoff always added, was, "I liked it." Anyway, Tingelhoff had the job of setting the huddle. Nothing could begin toward the next play until Mick decided where to line us up behind the line of scrimmage. This is the center's traditional job and it gives him a sense of participation in running the offense.

Then we took Ron Yary, our right tackle, and made it his specific job to break the huddle. It was Yary's job to get us right up to the line of scrimmage on every play. Now Yary wasn't just another hunk of meat beating up on another hunk of meat every Sunday, but he was actually in charge of something. He was involved m running the offense.

We put right: guard Ed White in charge of getting us properly aligned on the line of scrimmage. This had the obvious effect of helping to avoid offsides penalties and of making sure we lined up as a single wall, but it also got Ed involved in the production of every play. It gave him a responsibility.  If the Monday films showed a ragged lineup, or that we got off the ball in an irregular fashion, Coach Burns would remind White that this was his job.  That's accountability.

But there was more. I involved my offensive linemen in actually calling the plays.  Though I had the reputation in the National Football League of being a good play-caller, the truth is that my teammates called 70 percent of the plays. Tactical decisions on the playing field or in the boardroom are normally the job of management, right? As quarterback, I had the right to call all the plays and expect every man on the team to keep his mouth shut and run whatever I decided. But instead, I got them involved in management. After all, each player knew what was going on at his position better than I did.

If I needed short yardage, I might turn to Yary and say, "Okay Ron, can we get it?" He might say, 'The guy's playing me hard on the outside shoulder. I can get it for you on the inside." Snap, bam, 2 yards. Thank you, Mr. Yary.

I learned not to be the macho manager who thinks he has all the answers. I could have told Ahmad Rashad, my wide receiver, "Okay, Ahmad, run a twenty-yard out pattern and let's get a first down." Of course, Ahmad has been running out there all afternoon and he knows the defensive back is playing his outside and there is no way in the world he can run a 20-yard out pattern successfully.  But I have told him to because I am the leader. I am the quarterback. I am the boss. "You go do it!"

Ahmad might be thinking, "Okay, you dumb ass.  You're making me run this pattern. I'll go through the motions, but I am going to be defeated. "

How often does that happen in business because bosses are unwilling to involve their people calling the plays?  Or because co-workers won't share responsibility?  Wouldn't it be a little bit smarter if I said, "Okay, Ahmad, what have you got?"

Ahmad might say, "I can run a twenty-yard curl-in."  Now, this guy has better input than I do. I'm back here being chased around by these Bob Lillys and Too-Tall Joneses.  Things get kind of confused back there. But Ahmad is downfield on every play - he knows what is going on. He can call that play better than I can - and he does. Boom, 20 yards, first down. Thanks, Mr. Rashad.

Letting Ahmad call those plays never guaranteed their success, of course. But at least I knew that on that play I had his involvement to the hilt. I knew he wasn't just doing what management told him to do. By involving him, I had gotten his commitment to the plan and I knew he was going to do the best job he could. I was simply doing what Jack Welch, chairman of General Electric, calls "breaking down the barriers of corporate protocol so that anyone with a good idea feels that he or she has the freedom to communicate it with anyone else." That's involvement - sharing the play-calling. Roger Smith, the chairman of General Motors, has had to learn the lessons of not involving the work force in corporate planning the hard way - by loss of market share to imported cars. Now he puts the situation quite bluntly: "Encouraging worker ideas and participation in decision-making is no longer just an option for American business - it's a necessity"

But back to football. You remember how we posted charts beside the spinning frames to give the doffers a scorecard? Well, we decided to do the same thing with our offense in Minnesota. We broke successful offensive football down into its component parts by examining the four top play-off teams in the League over the previous four years. Here are some of the specific areas we concentrated on:

We found that the winning teams had always averaged 4 yards per carry on the ground.  They had always gained at least 100 yards rushing and 200 yards passing per game. We figured out how often they had scored after getting inside the 15-yard line without turning over the football. We found that our chances of being scored against after punting from inside our own 20-yard line were much greater than if we punted from beyond our own 20-yard line. By working up a chart on each of these specifics of the winning game, we were able to concentrate on each small component of success, not simply on the overall goal of winning.

At first, some of the coaches didn't believe the chart would work. They said, "Hey, these are big grown men making seventy thousand a year. Why do they care about a Mickey Mouse chart on the wall? What are you going to give them for making each of these goals?"

My answer was, "Nothing. All we give them is feed- back and reinforcement."

The chart became a great reinforcer. Every Monday morning, the offensive players went to this great chart on the locker room wall, saying, "How did we do?" We got a point for every box that was checked off. Out of twenty categories of winning, sometimes we had 18 points. Those were usually games that we had won. Sometimes we made only 4 or 5 of our checkpoints - and usually had lost those games (or the defense had won them for us).

Because my teammates were working for achievement of specific and attainable goals which they knew would, lead to victory most of the time, they became intent on performing better. And so did I! Now I knew not to go for a 15-yard play on third and long inside our 20.  I knew just to get the football out beyond the 20 so our punting team could give us some good defense and we might get the ball back without being scored against. All of us began concentrating on performance in ways that we could see, feel and measure. And we did it not for money, but for performance! What we wanted was success, and we knew it came in the so-called small plays - the plays that everybody on the team could measure.

There are great players but there aren't any superstars. Superstars you find somewhere out beyond the moon.

FACT: It takes a team to make a superstar.

Previous | Contents | Next

Index | Parent Index | Build Freedom: Archive

Disclaimer - Copyright - Contact

Online: buildfreedom.org - terrorcrat.com - mind-trek.com