Quantifying Leadership
Quantifying leadership is hard. I’ve learned a lot about leadership in football from some great coaches, and recently have thoroughly enjoyed reading Michael Lombardi’s Daily Coach newsletter. In November he wrote an entry titled “The 4 Types of Coaches.”
Three of the four types are actively sought out by schools because the fourth type, the best leader, is most difficult to pin down. These are the types:
The Schemer. This coach has demonstrated proficiency and expertise in a specific area of the game. Schools that hire the "Schemer" feel this will get them into the winning circle. But schemes never win. They only help.
The Caretaker. This coach provides some cache and brand power and relies on hiring a great staff for him to oversee, not direct. He cannot fix problems other than firing and hiring another expert in the problem area.
The Recruiter. This is a coach who has great contacts with all the high schools and can connect on a personal level with the players.
The fourth is known as the Strategist, “someone capable of handling the three elements above — and much more. The Strategist can anticipate problems, ask the right questions, and build something sustainable…. The Strategist is a leader, not a manager. Remember the difference: Leaders do the right thing, and managers do things right. The three others are essentially managers. When the conditions of their situation are not perfect, the margin of error greatly increases, and another search begins.”
I bolded the above on conditions not being perfect because it reminded me of a recent conversation with a friend about building an antifragile organization. Antifragile is a term coined by Nassim Taleb and represents one of three states something can have (fragile, robust, antifragile). Think of fragile as a teacup, when dropped to the floor it shatters. Robust would be a bag of sand, when dropped to the floor there’s no change. Anything that when faced with adversity strengthens is antifragile.
A great leader’s goal should be to build an antifragile organization. One reason why this is difficult is because their goal should be to work themselves out of a job. Two great resources on this concept for me were Jim Collins’ Good to Great and Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership. If your organization would fail should you be removed from your current responsibilities, you don’t have a great organization.
This certainly wasn’t intuitive for me. If I’m the only person able to successfully complete XYZ task, that seemed to be a good thing. However, as Jocko would say, that only incentivizes someone to keep you there. If you were to “work yourself out of your job” by teaching and leading, your organization has no choice but to promote you.
Why am I writing about leadership right now?
The other day I was listening to the SumerSports podcast, and the hosts (Eric Eager and Thomas Dimitroff) were talking about the top qualities that NFL teams look for in a head coach. In order, people involved with making these decisions listed the below:
Leadership
Communication
Intelligence
Culture Builder
Adaptability
Evaluation Prowess
Play Calling
On-Field Ability
Scheme Ability
Discipline
Development
In the Meeting Room
Game Planning
Relationships
Substitutions
The qualities at the bottom resemble the skill set of “The Schemer.” Organizations suffer when these coaches are no longer doing what they do best. This seems to be the difficulty when hiring a prolific coordinator or play-caller.
However, how is someone supposed to quantity leadership, communication, or culture building? I’d love to talk to anyone who’s figured this out.
The task assigned at the end of the SumerSports podcast episode on hiring a head coach is partly to come up with an analytical approach to one of these hard to quantify characteristics.
An idea to quantity leadership came to mind when thinking back to an incredibly memorable conversation with current UNC head coach Mack Brown. At a University of Virginia football practice back in 2014 I worked up the courage to introduce myself and ask him how to successfully lead an organization of over 100 people.
As any great teacher would, he broke the task down into component parts. He explained how communication, trust, and respect were paramount to successfully leading, and as a result there would be common purpose.
What if we were able to quantify common purpose within an organization? This would involve surveying employees, stakeholders, etc. but could provide meaningful insights.
The first step would be asking questions like having someone describe what their role is, what their team does, and the mission of the organization. Then the themes and words used can be compared between the leader and the rest of the team to measure alignment.