by Bill Walsh
Here are two short lists I created that address what I deem as essential traits in a staff member and the way I went about keeping them on the same page of their new book—the book called “The San Francisco 49ers: Bill Walsh, Head Coach, General Manager, Boss.”
My checklist of personal qualities—assets—in potential staff members:1. A fundamental knowledge of the area he or she has been hired to manage. You may think this is so self-evident it’s insulting to include. However, often we are tempted to hire simply on the basis of friendship or other user-friendly characteristics. They can be important. Expertise is more important.
2. A relatively high—but not manic—level of energy and enthusiasm and a personality that is upbeat, motivated, and animated. Groups will often collectively take on the personality of their department head (e.g., in football, their position coach). A negative, complaining staff member will be emulated by those he or she is in charge of. So will a positive go-getter.
3. The ability to discern talent in potential employees whom he or she will recommend to you.
4. An ability to communicate in a relaxed yet authoritative—but not authoritarian—manner.
5. Unconditional loyalty to both you and other staff members. If your staff members are chipping away at one another, the organization is weakened from within—like a tree full of termites. There is, in my view, no offense more serious than disloyalty.
My checklist for keeping good staff members on the same page:1. You must establish clear parameters for your staff regarding the overall method by which you expect things to be done. They must be reminded—instructed, when necessary—of your Standard of Performance: philosophy, style and substance, strategies and tactics.
2. Any philosophical differences that crop up must be identified and addressed by you in private meetings with the individual(s). Sweeping them under the rug is misdirected management.
3. You must recognize that staff members may work in different ways, using approaches that are at variance with yours. This can be relatively inconsequential as long as you and the staff member are philosophically compatible on the key issues (e.g., attention to detail, exhibiting respect to all members of the organization). Insisting on a totalitarian, lockstep mentality removes creativity from within.
4. To ensure unanimity throughout the staff, make unannounced visits to various department meetings. You can lose elements of your team to a maverick staff member if you’re invisible long enough.
5. Don’t cede inordinate power or control to a staff member simply because you are relieved to have an experienced and proven performer come on board. Assigning complete control without any monitoring of methods or means can allow a separate kingdom to develop, which will split your organization into factions.
6. Sometimes a staff member may intentionally teach a philosophy that is at odds with your code of conduct, in the belief that it conforms to your philosophy. He or she may also, on occasion, unconsciously revert to his or her own techniques or philosophy. This does not constitute insubordination until you have firmly pointed out the issue and the staff member continues to put forth ideas that are counter to what you want done. Then you must take corrective action that goes beyond a “reminder.”
7. Be alert for those staff members who seek to use their position to teach and express their personal beliefs. Politics and religion are the two most common areas.
8. Remember Mike Ditka’s comment on leadership after his Bears won a Super Bowl championship: “Personal contact is part of hands-on management. Go to the other guy’s office; tell him what you have in mind so there is no misunderstanding.”
The Over and Under: The Art of Managing Confidence
More people are more familiar with losing than with winning. Consequently, losing is not that difficult to deal with, in the sense that we’ve all faced it, lived it, and are familiar with the fallout it can produce. We have seen people lose heart, self-destruct, turn on one another, and become disloyal. We know the whole syndrome of losing, but leaders often don’t think very much about the other side of the coin—winning; especially winning big.
As with losing, there is fallout from success, and many of the symptoms are the same. The only difference is that you go down with a smile on your face instead of a frown.
Our first Super Bowl championship team had forty-five dedicated and disciplined players on the roster. Soon afterward, and to varying degrees, eight of them self-destructed and ended their careers too early by mishandling their lives through drugs and alcohol, stupid lifestyles, and becoming consumed with themselves. A couple of them still can’t cope with life. Many other good players and people on that team were also thrown off stride to varying degrees. Why? Because they won the Super Bowl; we were the world champions of football.
This response—being knocked off balance emotionally and mentally—is one of the fundamental reasons it is so difficult to continue winning; it’s true in business as in sports. Repeat winners at the high end of competition are rare, because when success of any magnitude occurs, there is a dis orienting change that we are unprepared for. I, too, was somewhat thrown off by our first Super Bowl victory. Having navigated through long losing streaks and losing seasons, having climbed to the top and led a team at the bottom of the barrel to a world championship, I had little knowledge of the new terrain.
How else can you explain that in the season immediately following that championship—Super Bowl XVI—and with virtually the same personnel, we lost twice as many games as we won in that strike-shortened season? The explanation is, in part, quite simple: Success Disease.
The second-richest man in America, Warren Buffett, says one of his biggest challenges is to help his top people—all wealthy beyond belief—stay interested enough to jump out of bed in the morning and work with all the enthusiasm they did when they were poor and just getting started.
Buffett is addressing that difficult situation of trying to motivate yourself or your team when you’ve become a winner. Success Disease—overconfidence is a major symptom—can happen in any profession and can be as difficult to remedy as underconfidence. Over- and underconfidence are an ongoing challenge in leadership.
When you reach a large goal or finally get to the top, the distractions and new assumptions can be dizzying. First comes heightened confidence, followed quickly by overconfidence, arrogance, and a sense that “we’ve mastered it; we’ve figured it out; we’re golden.” But the gold can tarnish quickly. Mastery requires endless remastery. In fact, I don’t believe there is ever true mastery. It is a process, not a destination. That’s what few winners realize and explains to some degree why repeating is so difficult. Having triumphed, winners come to believe that the process of mastery is concluded and that they are its proud new owners.
Success Disease makes people begin to forego to different degrees the effort, focus, discipline, teaching, teamwork, learning, and attention to detail that brought “mastery” and its progeny, success. The hunger is diminished, even removed in some people.
“Complacency” may be too strong a word to describe it, maybe not. Perhaps “contentment” describes it. You feel content after navigating up the hard and treacherous road to victory. This is understandable; you should feel satisfaction and contentment. But when it lingers—sets in—you and your team are suffering from Success Disease. It can create a lack of respect for the competition, a feeling of superiority, and an assumption that you can win at will, turn it on when it counts. The time to turn it on (and leave it on) is before it counts. In fact, my belief is that it counts all the time.
And, of course, when you couple contentment with underestimating the competition, you—all by yourself—have set yourself up for defeat. Imagine that.
There are specific actions I took based on the lessons learned after the 49ers’ experience with Success Disease following our first Super Bowl championship. They are very effective, although there is no guarantee that in following them you will fend off the fallout from achievement; specific
ally, Success Disease:1. Formally celebrate and observe the momentous achievement—the victory—and make sure that everyone feels ownership in it. Praise, bonuses, and other rewards can make it special. This is a unique opportunity to strengthen the bond everyone feels to your organization, especially the special role players who get less attention.
2. Allow pats on the back for a limited time. Then formally return to business as usual by letting everyone know the party is over. Nevertheless, don’t tighten down too far. Victory can produce enormous energy—so powerful and overwhelming that in sports grown men will burst out in tears and run around like little children at Christmas. You must channel that powerful force and enthusiasm into the work ahead to solidify and build on the gains made by your team in achieving their recent success. Make sure the power of your victory propels you forward in a controlled manner.
3. Be apprehensive about applause. Instruct your team on the pitfalls of listening to accolades from those outside (and even inside) the organization. The praise can become a hindrance to buckling down to the hard sacrifice that will be required ahead. Ongoing applause can turn the head of the most disciplined and determined member of your team. Watch that it doesn’t turn your own head.
4. Develop a plan for your staff that gets them back into the mode of operation that produced success in the first place. Don’t assume it will happen. Hold meetings to explain what steps must be taken to sustain momentum; refocus personnel by covering in detail why success was achieved; review with them why they prevailed.
5. Address specific situations that need shoring up; focus on the mistakes that were made and things that were not up to snuff in the success. Point out deficiencies and the need to find remedies for them.
6. Be demanding. Do not relax. Hold everyone to even higher expectations. Don’t relax your Standard of Performance. The Standard of Performance is always in a state of refinement to raise performance. That’s your gold standard, the point of reference above everything else, including the won-lost record, Super Bowl titles, shareholder value, quotas, sales, or praise from people who don’t have to get down in the trenches with you and do the real work.
7. Don’t fall prey to overconfidence so that you feel you can or should make change for the sake of change. Change is inevitable, but change is not a casual consideration. When you’re flush with victory, you can take on a mind-set that says, “Hey, let’s try this!” Only in the most desperate situation is change made simply for the sake of change.
8. Use the time immediately following success as an opportunity to make hard decisions, including elevation or demotion of individuals who contributed—or didn’t—to the victory. This window is brief. Use it.
9. Never fall prey to the belief that getting to the top makes everything easy. In fact, what it makes easier is the job of motivating those who want your spot at the top. Achievement, great success, puts a big bull’s-eye on your back. You are now the target—clearly identified—for all your competitors to aim at.
10. Recognize that mastery is a process, not a destination.
When your organization achieves a significant goal, you must demonstrate the strongest and most demanding adherence to your own established ideals and principles—the Standard of Performance you abide by. This is essential, because if you fall prey to the consequences of winning, you will soon be dealing with the consequences of losing.
This, in my experience, is the reason it’s tough to repeat, whether it’s a regional or national sales contest or a number one position in a high-tech industry. It’s one of the reasons only six teams in the history of the NFL have won the Super Bowl and then repeated by winning it again the next year. The San Francisco 49ers are among that small group of organizations that fought off Success Disease—if only for two years. That may not sound like much, but in the history of the Super Bowl, no team has been able to win three in a row. Success Disease is one of the reasons why.
When things are going best is when you have the opportunity to be the strongest, most demanding, and most effective in your leadership. A strong wind is at your back, but it requires an understanding of the perils produced by victory to prevent that wind from blowing you over.
The Under: Strive to Be a One-Point Underdog
It is extremely difficult to resist the debilitating temptations of Success Disease—to work even harder and smarter than before, to fend off overconfidence. Of course, you should allow for elation and celebration without letting it contaminate the future, but it takes some creativity and mental agility to keep your team focused when they are on top—when they are feeling full of themselves and invincible. Thus, when we faced an opponent the 49ers were expected to easily beat, I had to come up with some innovative reasoning as to why we could just as easily lose, why we should consider ourselves the underdog—ideally a one-point underdog.
For example, we faced Kansas City during a season in which the 49ers were defending Super Bowl champions, while the Chiefs had lost five consecutive games and were just getting worse and worse.
As we prepared for the mid-November game at Candlestick Park, I earnestly told our team, “Fellas, I’m afraid of these guys; I really am. The Chiefs are angry because they’ve been humiliated publicly and privately for over a month. Honestly, this is a very dangerous situation for us. They can put it all behind them by knocking us off. They can come out and just explode on us.” I continued with this line of reasoning for many minutes.
Of course, everybody on the outside was telling our players the opposite—that Kansas City would just lie down. Having won Super Bowl XIX several months earlier, and in spite of a regular season that was far from stellar, some 49ers might have been inclined to listen and take a little breather and let up. That’s when Success Disease insinuates itself into the organization. (In fact, it seemed to have already begun. After that 18-1 Super Bowl season, we were 5-5 going into the Kansas City game—perhaps the best 5-5 team in NFL history.)
It was always my goal to create and maintain a working environment both on and off the field that had a sense of urgency and intensity but did not feel like we were in constant crisis mode. Ideally, I wanted to instill in each member of our group the belief that, regardless of the opponent, we were a one-point underdog, that the upcoming team was just a little better than we were or had motivation enough to really raise their level of play—the Kansas City Chiefs, for example. I wanted our team to believe that we could win, but only if we worked hard. This was challenging when they were surrounded by evidence of how “great” they were—public adulation, acclaim, and Super Bowl rings and a trophy that were still fresh in their minds.
When you can instill the one-point-underdog attitude in both yourself and your organization, complacency and overconfidence are kept at bay. My ability to do that was one of the primary reasons San Francisco was focused during the week’s preparation for Kansas City. We won 31-3, in part because I had temporarily immunized our team against Success Disease.
(My comments for that game, in fact, addressed two different attitudes that may have existed within the team. Some players were victims of Success Disease—overconfidence—because of the Super Bowl championship. Others may have started cashing out on the season because of our 5-5 won-lost record. Either way, cocky or cashing out, I needed to create a positive attitude adjustment and the one-point-underdog mentality was part of the solution.)
Nevertheless, the ongoing and ultimate safeguard against attitudes that are detrimental to the team is your dedication and monumental adherence to the Standard of Performance you have created. This is always the way to win, the road to a goal even more elusive than success; namely, consistent success.
Seek Character. Beware Characters.
Cedrick Hardman, an extremely talented defensive end, found himself increasingly unhappy when I took over the 49ers, because he had just gone through two losing seasons, including a 2-14 year just prior to my arrival. His discontent grew greater during my first year as head coach, which produced another 2-14
won-lost record. Four victories over two entire seasons can cause despair in some.
Nevertheless, he had been an outstanding player with the organization for several seasons (the leader in sacks for eight straight years), and I strongly believed he was going to be a key performer, a leader, on our emerging team. Unfortunately, he proved me wrong.
Cedrick was basically a good guy who was just unable to cope with his perception that things would not get better. As a result, his attitude worsened and his performance on the field suffered. Because of his disappointment, perhaps despair, and the fact that he wasn’t getting what he wanted out of the game—namely, victory—he began sniping at and belittling teammates for their efforts as we continued to lose nearly 90 percent of our games that first season. Then he began disparaging the assistant coaches, the owners, the staff, and eventually me. I tolerated it longer than I should have because of his talent, even though in his state of mind his play was far below what he was capable of had he gotten his act together.
Under more favorable circumstances, Cedrick might have been a positive force. However, given the situation as he viewed it, he became a negative and disruptive force—howling at everything, wounded and frustrated. While he was capable of being a leader under positive circumstances, he was not capable of doing it under losing circumstances. It takes extraordinary fortitude to stay with it when times are bad. Cedrick didn’t have it.
I determined that it was impossible to resurrect his enthusiasm for being a 49er and knew that every minute he continued to be with us he did damage to those who hadn’t given up. I called Al Davis across the Bay in Oakland and arranged a trade with the Raiders for our disgruntled defensive end.
Hardman had given up on the San Francisco 49ers too soon. Twenty-four months after the trade, we won Super Bowl XVI. In some small way, the championship came about because I had been willing to remove players—even those with great talent—whose actions or attitude didn’t conform to the Standard of Performance, who didn’t get with the program.