Thread by @TedBartlett905

Some thoughts today about coaching football, and business, and hiring, since we unfortunately keep having to go about this as #BroncosCountry fans. Thesis - Everything that most of us think is important is unimportant, and the important stuff is non-obvious.

The football media messes us up, because a lot of what they have to say is motivated talking points that somebody (often agents) gave them. The rest is often nonsense that reflects a lack of understanding of how the world works beyond their immediate daily environment.

I work as a CFO for a privately held middle market company, and through my career, I've worked closely with both good and bad CEOs. That leaves you with impressions. A Head Football Coach is essentially a CEO, and to be succesful, the person in the job needs a CEO skill set.

I was talking with a private equity person recently about a tech business and they said "It needs product leadership, tech leadership, and go-to-market leadership." All those things are important to tech business success, and no one person is all those things.

A CEO probably comes from one of those areas (or sometimes finance.) Their background informs their values and the personal expertise they can contribute to problem solving efforts. But the CEO job is not a continuation of what they always did before, and it can't be.

If I was CEO of a company, I could add a lot to discussions of financial performance, and I couldn't add very much to discussions of machine optimization on a manufacturing line. I would need to leave the accounting to the CFO, even if I thought I could do it better.

I mention this because the last 3 HCs the Broncos have hired have understood their job to be continuations of their lives as coordinators. I'll call the plays for my side of the ball, because that's what got me here, and I'll outsource the other stuff to somebody else.

The CEO needs to set the vision for the entire enterprise and drive activities on a consistent basis that lead to the accomplishment of that vision. He/she must be part visionary, part executor. The CEO pushes past the excuses and makes sure the enterprise delivers.

CEOs have a tough balance to strike - they have to be in the weeds enough to know what's really happening, but zoomed out enough to see the big picture. Not everybody is capable of doing that. They have to surround themselves with trustworthy and effective people.

Some people won't even do that, because they are insecure in their own ability and qualification, and they fear losing legitimacy if they have a direct report who is smarter than them. These people put a ceiling on everything by insisting that nobody smarter than them is around.

The CEO doesn't have to be the smartest person; they do have to get the most out of the smartest people though. They have to organize all the efforts and harmonize all the people. It's the concept of having the right horses pulling in the same direction.

That's the essence of team-building - the right horses going in the right direction. And that's what successful NFL coaching is all about. You have to identify good players and coaches and other staffers, and develop them, and get them to do the right things all the time.

There are lots of different ways to do this! What do Bill Belichick, Mike Tomlin, and Sean McVay have in common? Ostensibly, not much, at least in terms of obvious traits, and yet they all win and create obvious value through their work.

What happens when Belichick guys try to copy Bill? It seems to rarely work out. I think that's because they are copying style, and not realizing that they're missing the essential substance that really makes the performance difference.

Belichick doesn't say hi to people in the hallway. McVay always does. Both succeed because their ways come from security in themselves and personal authenticity. In leadership, there's no substitute for it. Books tell you that, and any asshole with $29.95 can buy a book.

Not everybody can thrive playing for Belichick, just like not everybody appreciates Pete Carroll's rah-rah stuff. When you decide on the CEO, you build the team around him/her from there. It helps to pick the right one & then have patience, so you're not resetting every 2 years.

This is where the Broncos are, caught in a loser spin cycle. The original sin was declining to hire Kyle Shanahan because Joe Ellis was insecure about Mike regaining influence in the building. They're now hiring their 4th(!) HC since that disastrous choice.

Kyle is interesting to me as a case study because he's the only HC in the NFL whose scheme means very much to me, and really, it's not "the scheme" as much as it is the overall mentality of generating matchup advantages. His stuff looks similar through the years but it evolves

Belichick, Tomlin, McVay, Andy Reid, and Sean McDermott have all shown schematic flexibility in more obvious ways. That's far more important than Knowing A Scheme. It's good to have the answers to a test, but the test is always changing!

Matt Nagy knew the Reid scheme, and failed. I would say it's because he lacked in the other things that make Reid who he is. Nagy was never able to be the Chief Figure Out Officer, as @mlombardiNFL talks about. He could never solve the problems or chart a consistent course

Vic Fangio has unimpeachable credentials as a DC, but he fell short as an HC. He didn't have what was needed to run a whole program. It's OK to merely be a good NFL coordinator! You're not a failure to be that.

Nathaniel Hackett was another coordinator, with far less impressive of a track record than the guy he replaced. He will probably be a coordinator for the rest of his career, which is a fine way to make a living.

I think Hackett's situation reflects a structural problem that pervades hiring in the NFL, which is a whipsawing between whether the GM or the HC is the real CEO. George Paton hired himself a subordinate who then lacked the juice to lead effectively.

(That was far from Hackett's only problem, but my sense is that it was a problem.). The program was built around the GM, and players know that. If the Broncos hire Sean Payton, it will indicate a change there, and Dan Quinn would essentially have meant more of that structure.

In my view the HC is responsible for performance and the GM is responsible for providing inputs that aid that performance, which makes it a support function. Because of that, the HC should have the real juice in the building. All the best current NFL programs work this way.

If I was an owner hiring a Head Coach, I would start by articulating what I want my enterprise to be. I would not ask a HC or a GM to tell me what it should be. (And football media people who say owners should stay out of football descisions can go jump in Stupid Lake.)

Remember this - NFL teams = owners. Everybody else comes and goes. If owners have no vision, you're in the loser spin cycle. I don't mean that the owner needs to dictate what the coverage structure should look like, but they do need to have an overarching vision.

My team is going to be mentally and physically tough, and operate with a high work ethic and respect for the people development process, and also for the game of football. The team will be process-oriented and we will prize problem-solving skills across the entire enterprise.

That's an appropriate owner-level vision for a football team. You need a GM and HC who are aligned with that vision. Then, they need to hire staffs that are aligned with it down the org chart. This is how enterprise-wide alignment is achieved. It started with 2 sentences.

Accountability starts with alignment. Why haven't our offensive linemen improved at all? We are failing in our people development, and we need to solve that problem immediately. You see how that works? We are failing, and We need to solve the problem.

Without alignment, there's no We. If you've ever been part of an aligned organization, this will probably resonate with your experiences. If not, I'm sorry your work life is so disappointing and I hope you find a better place to be.

Here are some things that are less important than he media will tell you in hiring a HC. 1). Scheme, and it's cousin, Coaching Tree Pedigree. We covered this a little bit already, but scheme and pedigree won't get you there in the absence of more important things.

2). Proven/Unproven as a HC. A proven HC track record mitigates some basic risk, in the sense that you know the coach can operate in his role at a decent level (unlike the early Hackett experience). Do you want to miss on a McVay or Tomlin though? They were quite Unproven.

3) Opposite Day. Teams like to hire the stylistic/experiential opposite of what they just fired, often to their detriment. It often reflects a lack of understanding of why teams win and lose. Like item 2, the media influences this mistake negatively because they don't get it.

We are losing because the coach is too mean, and 2 years later, we are losing because the coach is too nice, so let's go hire Matt Patricia. You're losing because you're not aligned as an organization. Don't listen to beat writers who have no clue about football or business.

4) Looking The Part. This seems to be receding in the NFL, but it's a big historical problem. Valuing this leads to the hiring of incompetent clowns, as seen in the Trump administration. Zagging on this might lead you to hire a Mike McDaniel, who impressed me this year.

5) Connections. The fact that Paton and Quinn were together at the Dolphins in 2005 is nothing to necessarily bank on as an indicator of success. It can help alignment but it isn't alignment. Everybody can be simpatico on the wrong things, and have a great time losing together

This is the story of the Washington Football Team over the last 20 years. Losing consistently, and never coming close to solving the problem, but having lots of fun with booze and racist emails and sexual harassment while doing it. It's a similar deal here in Phoenix too.

6) Past Results. Why we win seems simple, but it's not. A coach can fail in a W/L sense and still be a good coach who can succeed in different circumstances. A lot of luck is involved with narratives that follow guys forever, and sometimes, patience gets rewarded.

Look at Zac Taylor. He looked out of his depth in the first year as HC and won 6 games in the first 2 years. Now he may go to his second straight Super Bowl, and everybody thinks he's good (including me). If he got fired after 2 years, he'd be a C-list coordinator for life.

7) Media Savvy. Winning the press conference is fine, but ultimately non-essential. Spinning reporters will help a guy get a job, but it won't help a team win.

8) Irrelevant Correlation. Talking heads will tell you all kinds of trivia based on non-predictive correlation. 7 of the last 10 blah blah blah. The commonality between the 10 is usually superficial and meaningless. Ignore this stuff as a reflex. It's just hot air.

9) Desirability For Other Teams. It's like a hire is only good if you beat out 3 other teams that wanted the same guy. Remember, more than half of the teams in the NFL are loser operations that you'd never copy, and frequent coaching searches are big indicators of that.

Here are some things that are important. 1). Problem-Solving Skills. Nothing is more important than this, in any enterprise where score is kept. If it matters whether you win or lose, you better be able to identify and solve problems, and do it quickly and consistently.

2). Integrity. The most successful leaders are forthright and direct with people, and can (and freely do) articulate Why. Gen Z and younger millennials (ie NFL players) generally don't thrive under authoritarian structures Because I Said So. Integrity is required for trust.

3). Culture. Trust is essential for culture, which gets breezily mentioned sometimes by people who don't know what it is. Culture is a shared understanding of how an enterprise does its work. Highlight Shared Understanding. How well a leader Shares leads to Understanding.

Outcomes will reflect culture, and cultures are best understood as structures that enable/produce outcomes. I wouldn't like to work in some places that have effective cultures, and it's important not to equate Fun with Good vis-a-vis culture. You think the Patriot Way is fun?

4). Accountability. This comes from culture, which comes from organizational alignment. If the leader is truly accountable, the team will follow suit. Have you ever worked at a place where It's Not A Big Deal? Those are loser places with loser leaders.

5). Openness. A good leader has to always be open to changing his/her mind in the face of new information. Inflexible ideologues will always fail as leaders. As the kids say, check your priors.

6). Emotional Intelligence. A good leader is self aware and is also aware of the feelings of others. He/she succeeds by being mindful of the feelings of people they're counting on to deliver results. Some of you think it's weak or soft to care about feelings but you're wrong.

7). Toughness. It takes resolve and persistence and mental clarity to be successful. It's easy to have those things when you are up 27-0. It's hard when you're on the other side of that. Toughness gets you through difficult times, and helps you come back against the Chargers

8). Humility. You'll never succeed if you think you have nothing else to learn or no improvements to make. Winners think about improvement the way fish think about swimming. You have to have a Growth Mindset and avoid a Fixed Mindset (read Carole Dweck's book on that)

My advice for any enterprise looking to build sustain success is to pick the right leader first, and let everything else flow forward from that. My hope is that the Broncos finally get that right at last. (And don't let me hear that the next HC wants to call plays.)

Which HC should the #Broncos hire? I don't personally know, because I haven't been in those rooms or worked with any of those people. If they hire the best leader, and give them what they need, we will see a return to winning football soon.