The Score Takes Care of Itself

by Bill Walsh

  Be a Leader—Twelve Habits Plus One

  A defining characteristic of a good leader is the conviction that he or she can make a positive difference—can prevail even when the odds are stacked against him or her. A successful leader is not easily swayed from this self-belief. But it happens.

  When you fall prey to the naysayers who eagerly provide you with all the reasons why you won’t succeed, why you can’t win, and why you should quit, you have lost the winner’s edge. When that happens, the game is over, regardless of your profession.

  In addition to expertise and knowledge of the specific competitive environment, I believe a leader must also have certain habits (to use a word popularized by Dr. Stephen Covey) that contribute to his or her effectiveness, that create and cement his or her winner’s edge. In my view a truly effective leader must be certain things. Here are twelve habits I have identified over the years that will make you be a better leader:1. Be yourself. I am not Vince Lombardi; Vince Lombardi was not Bill Walsh. My style was my style, and it worked for me. Your style will work for you when you take advantage of your strengths and strive to overcome your weaknesses. You must be the best version of yourself that you can be; stay within the framework of your own personality and be authentic. If you’re faking it, you’ll be found out.

  2. Be committed to excellence. I developed my Standard of Performance over three decades in the business of football. It could just as accurately (although more awkwardly) been called “Bill’s Prerequisites for Doing Your Job at the Highest Level of Excellence Vis-à-Vis Your Actions and Attitude on Our Team.” My commitment to this “product”—excellence—preceded my commitment to winning football games. At all times, in all ways, your focus must be on doing things at the highest possible level.

  3. Be positive. I spent far more time teaching what to do than what not to do; far more time teaching and encouraging individuals than criticizing them; more time building up than tearing down. There is a constructive place for censure and highlighting negative aspects of a situation, but too often it is done simply to vent and creates a barrier between you and others. Maintain an affirmative, constructive, positive environment.

  4. Be prepared. (Good luck is a product of good planning.) Work hard to get ready for expected situations—events you know will happen. Equally important, plan and prepare for the unexpected. “What happens when what’s supposed to happen doesn’t happen?” is the question that you must always be asking and solving. No leader can control the outcome of the contest or competition, but you can control how you prepare for it.

  5. Be detail-oriented. Organizational excellence evolves from the perfection of details relevant to performance and production. What are they for you? High performance is achieved small step by small step through painstaking dedication to pertinent details. (Caution: Do not make the mistake of burying yourself alive in those details.) Address all aspects of your team’s efforts to prepare mentally, physically, fundamentally, and strategically in as thorough a manner as is humanly possible.

  6. Be organized. A symphony will sound like a mess without a musical score that organizes each and every note so that the musicians know precisely what to play and when to play it. Great organization is the trademark of a great organization. You must think clearly with a disciplined mind, especially in regard to the most efficient and productive use of time and resources.

  7. Be accountable. Excuse making is contagious. Answerability starts with you. If you make excuses—which is first cousin to “alibiing”—so will those around you. Your organization will soon be filled with finger-pointing individuals whose battle cry is, “It’s his fault, not mine!”

  8. Be near-sighted and far-sighted. Keep everything in perspective while simultaneously concentrating fully on the task at hand. All decisions should be made with an eye toward how they affect the organization’s performance—not how they affect you or your feelings. All efforts and plans should be considered not only in terms of short-run effect, but also in terms of how they impact the organization long term. This is very difficult.

  9. Be fair. The 49ers treated people right. I believe your value system is as important to success as your expertise. Ethically sound values engender respect from those you lead and give your team strength and resilience. Be clear in your own mind as to what you stand for. And then stand up for it.

  10. Be firm. I would not budge one inch on my core values, standards, and principles.

  11. Be flexible. I was agile in adapting to changing circumstances. Consistency is crucial, but you must be quick to adjust to new challenges that defy the old solutions.

  12. Believe in yourself. To a large degree, a leader must “sell” himself to the team. This is impossible unless you exhibit self-confidence. While I was rarely accused of cockiness, it was apparent to most observers that I had significant belief—self-confidence—in what I was doing. Of course, belief derives from expertise.

  13. Be a leader. Whether you are a head coach, CEO, or sales manager, you must know where you’re going and how you intend to get there, keeping in mind that it may be necessary to modify your tactics as circumstances dictate. You must be able to inspire and motivate through teaching people how to execute their jobs at the highest level. You must care about people and help those people care about one another and the team’s goals. And you must never second-guess yourself on decisions you make with integrity, intelligence, and a team-first attitude.

  Sweat the Right Small Stuff: Sharp Pencils Do Not Translate into Sharp Performance

  Coach George Allen was a demon on details. As head coach of the Washington Redskins, he was preparing to face the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl VII at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. A few days before the game, he sent a staff member out to the Coliseum for an entire afternoon to chart the movement of the sun during the hours when the game would be played. George wanted to know exactly where it would be so he could calculate the “sun advantage” if the Redskins won the coin toss. This is an example of sweating the right small stuff.

  Later, in a turbulent and brief tenure as head coach of the Los Angeles Rams, George supposedly took time off from his coaching responsibilities to design a more efficient system of serving food, a way of reducing the amount of time players spent in the lunch line. He took time out of his jam-packed schedule to personally draw up a schematic for those players wanting soup with their meals: One line was designated for those wanting crackers with their soup; the other for those who didn’t want any crackers. This is an example of sweating the wrong small stuff. Owner Carroll Rosenbloom fired him before the regular season even began. (I should note that while George wasn’t fired for designing a “crackerless” line, it may have been symptomatic of what he was doing—sweating the wrong details.)

  While it is critically important to concentrate on the smallest relevant aspects of your job without losing sight of the big picture, it is easy to become so completely overwhelmed by ongoing setbacks that you start focusing on issues completely extraneous to improvement in an attempt to keep from having to look at intractable problems.

  Seeing it in others, I watched for it in my own behavior—as you should in yours—knowing that it would significantly reduce my ability to be effective, that it was dodge, a way of diverting my attention. A coach who becomes afflicted with the malady of “trivialities” might suddenly and compulsively worry about whether all of the practice uniforms have been laundered correctly (“Can’t you get all of those grass stains out?”); obsess over luncheons with local fan clubs; and take inordinate pride in various award ceremonies or alumni gatherings.

  All of this is an escape mechanism—a method of distracting yourself from the tough work ahead. George Allen isn’t the only NFL coach who became immersed in the meaningless at the expense of the meaningful. A Seattle head coach once diverted himself from the hardships of fixing a dismal team and organization by focusing more on how the Seahawks performed during the national anthem than on how they performed during a game. Valuable
practice time was actually spent rehearsing the national anthem “formation”—lining players up by height and number in a perfectly straight row, feet together, helmets held in the left hand by the face guard, no gum chewing, no movement, shirttails tucked in, and actually singing the words. This was going on at a time when the team was in the tank.

  Of course, it’s an easy trap to fall into, because the trivialities I noted are typical of what a desperate leader can grab onto and control when everything seems out of control. It creates a false and fatal sense of accomplishment, a trap with serious consequences because it keeps you from addressing the key thoughts and solutions, the tough decisions that are at the core of accomplishing a very difficult task; that is, the task of turning things around.

  As a leader, when you find yourself with a host of problems that seemingly defy solution and start dwelling on the least relevant or even irrelevant aspects of your job—constantly sitting on the phone with nonessential conversations, doing endless e-mailing, writing memo after memo, fiddling around getting all your pencils sharpened and lined up perfectly, being excessively concerned about hurting feelings and trying to make sure everyone is comfortable, straightening out your desk drawer, getting wrapped up in the details of the annual Christmas party, and a million other kinds of stupid busywork, tell yourself this: “There’ll be plenty of time for pencils, parties, and socializing when I lose my job, because that’s what’s going to happen if I continue to avoid the hard and harsh realities of doing my job.”

  And that’s exactly what happened to the coach of the Seattle Seahawks. Just like George Allen, he was fired, in spite of the fact that his team could sing the national anthem better than any other outfit in the NFL.

  Sharpening pencils in lieu of sharpening your organization’s performance is one way to lose your job. Here are ten additional nails you can pound into your professional coffin:1. Exhibit patience, paralyzing patience.

  2. Engage in delegating—massive delegating—or conversely, engage in too little delegating.

  3. Act in a tedious, overly cautious manner.

  4. Become best buddies with certain employees.

  5. Spend excessive amounts of time socializing with superiors or subordinates.

  6. Fail to continue hard-nosed performance evaluations of longtime—“tenured”—staff members, the ones most likely to go on cruise control, to relax.

  7. Fail to actively participate in efforts to appraise and acquire new hires.

  8. Trust others to carry out your fundamental duties.

  9. Find ways to get out from under the responsibilities of your position, to move accountability from yourself to others—the blame game.

  10. Promote an organizational environment that is comfortable and laid-back in the misbelief that the workplace should be fun, lighthearted, and free from appropriate levels of tension and urgency.

  For leaders in all professions, including coaches in the NFL, looking for relief from the high anxieties, deep frustrations, and toxic emotions that go with the job can lead you to do everything but your job—worrying about issues of lesser and lesser relevance with greater and greater consequences.

  The tangential aspects of your job become attractive because they’re monumentally easier to control than what you’re there to do; specifically, to create high performance; this is the toughest part to live with, concentrate on, and control. You use the peripheral stuff as an escape mechanism, rather than tackling what may appear, and indeed may be, unsolvable problems until finally you’re done, finished, sitting there with nothing to show for your leadership efforts but a cup of sharp pencils.

  Good Leadership Percolates Down

  The trademark of a well-led organization in sports or business is that it’s virtually self-sustaining and self-directed—almost autonomous. To put it in a more personal way, if your staff doesn’t seem fully mobilized and energized until you enter the room, if they require your presence to carry on at the level of effort and excellence you have tried to install, your leadership has not percolated down.

  Ideally, you want your Standard of Performance, your philosophy and methodology, to be so strong and solidly ingrained that in your absence the team performs as if you were present, on site. They’ve become so proficient, highly mobilized, and well prepared that in a sense you’re extraneous; everything you’ve preached and personified has been integrated and absorbed; roles have been established and people are able to function at a high level because they understand and believe in what you’ve taught them, that is, the most effective and productive way of doing things accompanied by the most productive attitude while doing them. Fundamentally sound actions and attitudes are the keys.

  Consequently, I was very pleased when I began overhearing 49er coaches repeating my ideas to one another and subsequently to our players. Later, when I heard the players using my terms or phrases—my personal dialogue or choice of words that represented concepts and ideas—I knew that I’d made a connection, that my leadership had percolated down. (Of course, seeing it produce an improving won-lost record was better evidence.)

  This is extremely important because an organization is crippled if it needs to ask the leader what to do every time a question arises. I didn’t want an organizational psyche of leadership dependency, of being semi-dysfunctional without me around making every decision. Here are specific examples in which my leadership philosophy percolated down.

  My battle cry was “Beat ’em to the punch!” which I repeated over and over to coaches and players through the years. It meant, “Hurt your opponents before they hurt you. Strike first.” It was like a mantra of competition for me. Soon I was hearing it repeated by others. I saw it on the field as the 49ers became known for establishing an early lead, which, of course, changed the dynamics of a game in our favor.

  Another was “Commit, explode, recover (if you’re wrong)!” which was shorthand for having a plan of attack, executing it suddenly and powerfully, and then reacting quickly and intelligently to the results of what you’ve done. It was a way of thinking and performing, a philosophy—my philosophy, my approach to competing. It, too, was soon part of our organization’s vernacular and attitude.

  “Four-minute offense” meant we were ahead late in the game and wanted to take time off the clock, avoid penalties, not go out of bounds, control the ball, and more. When that situation arose, I didn’t have to say anything. Players would be shouting it to each other: “Four-minute offense! Four-minute offense!” It was satisfying to hear because it meant they had come to understand and embrace what I was teaching.

  I instructed our maintenance crew to put up a white five-foot-square grease board with “I WILL NOT BE OUTHIT ANY TIME THIS SEASON!” printed in bold letters across the top. I got out my Magic Marker and signed it—“Bill Walsh.” Then everybody on the team signed it. It was a frame of mind, an attitude that I sought to instill.

  “I will not be outhit any time this season!” was about the physical aspect of the profession, but also about the mental and emotional—a state of mind. And everybody on the team literally signed up for it—a contract. This, too, was soon in the air, repeated, absorbed, part of our DNA.

  My leadership had percolated down and had begun taking on a life of its own. It went beyond my phrases, of course, and included everything from offensive and defensive schemes to the precision and professionalism applied to all matters in training camp and the regular season. And much more.

  Ultimately, you hope your ideas and way of doing things become so strongly entrenched that the organization performs as effectively without you as with you. That’s the goal and, in fact, it happened to me.

  When I retired as head coach of the 49ers following our victory in Super Bowl XXIII, the organization moved forward without a hitch and continued its dominance for years. Why? In part because my leadership philosophy had become ingrained within the San Francisco 49ers.

  It takes nothing away from my successor George Seifert’s coaching nor the great abilities
of his coaching staff to suggest that my Standard of Performance had become so ingrained with the 49ers during my decade of teaching that when I retired they were able to practice, prepare, and perform at the same level of excellence—higher, in fact—as during my final season.

  This is a reliable indication of an effective leader, namely, one who creates a self-sustaining organization able to operate at the highest levels even when he or she leaves.

  The responsible leader of any company or corporation aggressively seeks to ensure its continued prosperity. It’s the mark of a forward-thinking leadership. A strong company that goes south after the CEO retires is a company whose recently departed CEO didn’t finish the job. If everything goes great when you’re around but slows or stops in its tracks when you’re not there, you are not fulfilling your responsibilities. Your leadership has not percolated down.

  Nameless, Faceless Objects

  Demonizing the competition is a common but contrived method for stirring up emotions. We see it used in sports (most frequently), business, or war to motivate people, to light a fire under them. Coaches will attempt to incite players by reminding them that the upcoming opponent “wants to embarrass us on Monday Night Football; wants to make us look like fools in front of the whole goddamn country!” or “is trying to take away your job so you won’t be able to send your kids to a good school,” or a laundry list of other supposedly incendiary but usually silly declarations. (The “genius” tag the media put on me was used in this way occasionally by coaches to stir up their teams, to demonize me.)

  I generally preferred the opposite approach in characterizing the other team and its players. To me they were objects that were both faceless and nameless: Nameless, Faceless Objects.