The Leadership Game

Tom Dale Mullins

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781418525859
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Whether you are coaching football, running a business, leading a charitable organization, or organizing a ministry team, the first step to success is in building a winning team. Author Tom Mullins, a winning college football coach himself, sought input from eight national champion football coaches for their approaches in building balanced and cohesive teams. Their responses are the Key Principles shared in The Leadership Game.

Coaches Osborne, McCartney, Stallings, Fulmer, Stoops, Bowden, Coker, and Spurrier share insights, anecdotes, and real-life experiences here. Having won 11 of the last 13 national championships collectively, these coaches have what it takes to equip any leader to strategically build a successful team.

Section
I

The Seven
Coaching Principles

1
Recruiting

The greatest recruiting coup happened when I was at Michigan . . . Anthony Carter scored fifty-nine touchdowns in high school on kickoff and punt returns. [He] was unbelievable. He was being recruited by Florida State, and Florida State, as you know, can throw the ball. I was representing Michigan, and we didn’t throw the ball.

—COACH MCCARTNEY, University of Colorado
1990 National Champions

We thought we had Marshall Faulk coming to Nebraska.We had his English teacher, the principal, his mother— everybody around Marshall—about ten or twelve people, convinced he was coming to Nebraska. But right at the end he decided to go to San Diego State. What we found out was that Marshall wanted to be a running back.

—COACH OSBORNE, University of Nebraska
1994, 1995, and 1997 National Champions

My college coaching experience began at Georgetown College in Kentucky. It is a small Division II school, so I immediately accepted that recruiting a good team would require creativity and hard work. I remember one season I received a call from a coach in Lebanon, Ohio. He told me he had a good, solid tackle he wanted me to take a look at for next season. I was still trying to fill a few spots on my roster, so I drove to Lebanon to take a look at this kid named Jeff.

When I arrived at the school and observed the boy, I could see right away that he wasn’t the prototypical big tackle I would jump at recruiting. He was only six feet one and weighed only 205 pounds. He was too small for me to even consider offering a spot to, but I decided to go to his home anyway and see what happened.

I was surprised when I arrived at his parents’ house and knocked on their door. His mother answered, and I was looking up at her. Then came his father to greet me, and I think his hand wrapped twice around mine. Before stepping into their house, I understood what Jeff ’s coach saw in him. Huge potential. I offered him a spot on the team.

When he showed up for summer practice a few months later, I didn’t recognize him. He was six feet four and weighed 235 pounds. By the time he graduated, Jeff was six feet six, weighed 275 pounds, and had developed into a national All-American. More important, he helped turn the entire program around.

I was glad I knocked on Jeff ’s parents’ door, and I learned two valuable lessons that day: one, you can’t know someone’s potential until you invest deeply in a recruiting process; and two, effective recruiting can significantly boost your chances for success.

How Deeply Are You Rooted?

Recruiting is the root system of your leadership. If your team is grounded with the hardy roots of top recruits, it can grow to the sky. On the other hand, if you’re just plugging bodies into positions, your roots will remain shallow and weak, stunting your team’s growth.

The ability to recruit top talent is fundamental for any successful team—most leaders understand that. In fact, any average leader can recognize good potential in players based on past and present performance. However, the ability to convince recruits to be part of a team is a different kind of challenge that only the best leaders do well. This process begins when you determine your recruiting edge.

The most elementary ingredient of good recruiting is a compelling vision for a recruit to embrace. In the business world, this vision is often grossly predictable: money now and more money later. The accompanying assumption is that the bigger the check, the more appealing the offer. Yet the best recruits are no longer buying into that notion.

Today’s top recruits want something more than a big paycheck; they also want more than the promise of promotion. Paychecks and positions produce short-term enthusiasm, but they lack long-term appeal. If only money and status land you recruits, then more money and higher status will take them away. If you attract people to your team with something deeper, something more intrinsic, something linked to their sense of need and purpose and meaning, they will work harder and stay longer.

Does this mean that income shouldn’t be part of your recruiting pitch if you’re a corporate leader? No. But it does mean that the vision you communicate to recruits must find a place in their hearts as readily as their pockets.

College coaches know a lot about this subject. They do not have the luxury of a payroll, and the positions they offer aren’t guaranteed. Neither money nor job stability is a viable promise. College coaches can offer only intangibles such as trust, hope, unity, possibility, and opportunity. However, such intangibles often promote commitment and loyalty better than anything else. That’s because they are connected to something internal—they speak to an individual’s sense of purpose and meaning—and this gives any leader a recruiting edge over the competition.

The vision you communicate to recruits must find a place in their hearts as readily as their pockets.

What’s Your Edge?

In my interviews with the national championship coaches, I asked what type of recruiting edge they possessed that set them apart from other top schools. Obviously the competition is fierce when it comes to wooing the best high school players in the nation each year, and these coaches have certainly proven their ability to get top talent on their teams. Here’s how a few of the coaches accomplish this.

Coach Larry Coker of Miami said he recognizes that one of the biggest recruiting edges for his team is its tremendous football history. But other Florida universities—namely, Florida and Florida State—offer something similar.

“In our sales pitch, I think we really sell academics well,” he told me.

Football speaks for itself. Recruits have access to television or can pick up a USA Today . . . see a national trophy. All of that speaks for itself. The big thing is trying to make sure they realize that [Miami] is both football and an education. You look around the country—that school isn’t out there that is better than us academically and football-wise. We [take] pride in [education] here . . . Just recently we had the top recruit in America committed to us—the best quarterback in the country. [The] main reason he wants to be here is because he loves the business school.

It would be easy for Coach Coker to rely on the school’s winning tradition to entice recruits, but he understands that doesn’t necessarily set Miami apart. The school’s academic reputation does. The school considers itself the “Harvard of the South.” To the recruit looking for a shot at a national championship and a top-notch education, Miami is certainly an excellent choice.

Looking back, Coach Tom Osborne admitted that Nebraska didn’t have the same appeal that many top schools did. He therefore approached the recruiting process from a different angle:

We always felt recruiting was [about] the parents and . . . our campus because we didn’t have beaches or mountains or a lot of social life . . . We tried to use a very personal approach. In fact, I would visit every player in his home. We didn’t go on reputation or simply on what a coach told us about his player; we made sure we had done our homework.

Coach Osborne’s edge found residence in the hearts of top recruits like Florida resident Tommy Frazier who liked the idea of belonging to a larger family. This edge did the team well as Frazier, according to Osborne, “put us over the hump from being a very good team to a great team” and catapulted the Cornhuskers to three national championships in four years.

It was tradition that drew recruits to Alabama during Coach Gene Stallings’ reign. The great Bear Bryant once walked the very sidelines where the recruit stood, and it was an honor to be a part of Bryant’s legacy. “I never tried to get a player to come to Alabama to play for me,” Stallings confessed.

I wanted them to come to Alabama because of the rich tradition . . . When I was coaching for Coach Bryant, I definitely felt like it was to the young player’s advantage to come to Alabama and play for [him] just to be around him, to listen to him, and to watch him because he’s the only one that I know of that fits in that particular category.

Every good leader knows a good recruit when he sees one, but great leaders recognize and develop a recruiting edge that funnels the best recruits to their teams. This isn’t automatic. Coach Coker admitted it is easy to count on Miami’s recent trophy or even the vacation-like location to draw recruits, but neither may be enough. Championship-caliber players like Tommy Frazier will still sign with schools a thousand miles from their Florida homes if they have a better offer. The fact is that if you want to attract and sign the best people to your corporate team, you need to sharpen your recruiting edge, then use it to draw them in. Once you’ve determined what sets you and your company apart from the competition, you should take five steps to accomplish this.

Step 1: Communicate Your Vision in a Compelling and Concise Fashion.

In the days of leading his Huskers to three titles, Osborne recognized that knowing his recruiting edge was one thing; communicating it well was another. “We tried to make sure they had a good picture of what they would be going through for four years,” he said, “because otherwise they could envision spending a lot of time on their social life with parties and girls when that isn’t reality or what it’s all about.”

This clear picture is the foundation of your relationship with recruits. The vision you cast is your first opportunity to prove yourself trustworthy. Therefore, it is important for you not to overstate your case. “I think the big thing that I learned in the last twenty-seven years,” admitted Coach Bobby Bowden of Florida State, “is that when you begin to build a program, you begin to build a reputation. When you talk to kids and say, ‘Son, this is what I’m going to do,’ well, he’s [going to determine] whether ‘this guy’s a liar or this guy always does what he says he’s going to do.’ And so you establish a reputation. Finally, after twenty-seven years, most of these kids, their parents, and their coaches have a good idea of how we’re going to run this program here.”

The word picture you paint is about honesty more than persuasion. There is an element of your vision that says, “Here’s who I am and here’s who we are . . . and there’s a place for you here if these things are appealing to you.” Many leaders make the major mistake of trying to paint a utopian environment that any recruit would want to be part of—whether or not it is accurate. This is less risky and more widely appealing, so it seems. But the truth is that generalizations and idealizations set a leader up for failure.

“I always felt,” stated Coach Steve Spurrier of Florida, “that honesty was the first fundamental key to recruiting.” He understands that team members won’t perform under the weight of an unfulfilled promise or an inf lated assessment of reality. Eventually they will quit or become dead weight.

Coach Osborne stated,

I think maybe one of the most important things was that when we recruited a player, I never promised him anything other than an opportunity. More recently, in the last part of my coaching career, the more common recruiting deception many coaches used was promising kids that they would start, that they would be given playing time, or that they would get to travel abroad. The problem is that those promises are very hard to keep—so you might recruit twenty players in a season and find that two years later you’ve got none of them left. This usually happens if you break trust with them and they find that you’ve lied to them. They’re not going to play for you.

The foundation of your reputation is poured into the minds of recruits when you share your vision. If you are as candid as you are compelling, your team’s foundation of trust will be steadfast for the long-term.

Step 2: Connect on a Personal Level.

Perhaps the most important step of recruiting is offering perceived value to your recruits. “In each home I went into,” said Coach Bill McCartney of Colorado,

I would place a chair directly across from the kid. Then I would look right into that kid’s eyes, but position myself where I could also turn and look at his parents. He and his parents would hear me tell him that I believed in him, that I needed him on my team, and that I had a place for him on my team . . . That guy has got to know the four most powerful words in the entire English language, which are, “I believe in you.” When you communicate “I believe in you,” you can recruit.

With this approach, McCartney pulled off what he calls his “greatest recruiting coup” when, as an assistant at Michigan under Bo Schembechler, he recruited a superstar away from his home state. “Anthony Carter scored fifty-nine touchdowns in high school on kickoff and punt returns,” he recounted. “He was unbelievable. He was being recruited by Florida State, and Florida State—as you know— can throw the ball. I was representing Michigan, and we didn’t throw the ball.”

“That guy has got to know the four most powerful words in the entire English language, which are, ‘I believe in you.’”

—BILL MCCARTNEY

Coach Phil Fulmer of Tennessee concurred with McCartney’s approach:

“We learn not only about the recruit but what the recruit likes, who the recruit is dating, and who the key inf luencers are in the recruit’s life. We go out and build relationships in this recruit’s world so we know how to help that recruit understand that we care about him.”

At the Division I level, where highly talented athletes typically have a number of options, recruiting on a personal level is of crucial importance. Jerry Rice is a good example of this. He was once asked in an interview why he chose to attend such a small college. He was an outstanding athlete in high school who set all kinds of records, and he went to Mississippi Valley State instead of one of the larger and more prominent universities. He replied that the Mississippi Valley State coach was the only one who came to his house and sat down with him and looked him straight in the face and said, “Jerry, I need you. I believe you will make the difference in our program.” All the others wanted him to visit their campus, but that c...