REFLECTION
When the Patriots moved into Gillette Stadium in 2002, there was a sign on the wall as you walked through the doors of the facility. It contained four statements that functioned almost like commandments. Follow them, and they would lead us to success.
The main one, famously, was “do your job,”
It’s a simple phrase that Coach Belichick got from Bill Parcells and it quickly became a kind of North Star for the team. It rattled around in our heads every day, like a battle cry, and it became the singular focus for every player who walked through the door each day, committed to achieving our objective of winning the Super Bowl.
Personally, it was like everything Greg Harden taught me at Michigan had been distilled into an undeniable mantra. Control what you can control. Take advantage of the opportunities you get. Do your job.
Still, it could sound cold when it came from Bill or one of the other coaches in response to a player explaining what he was thinking when he screwed up. It could feel like the player was being reduced to the tasks assigned to him. You’d be surprised, though, how often a team needs this kind of reminder.
In our case, we were all talented. All NFL players are. When we lose games, it’s not because we needed to be better athletes; ability almost never explains why things don’t go well. Our failures, like most teams, were almost always a matter of execution and people not doing what they were supposed to be doing. When this was made clear in meetings—usually very loudly and with lots of expletives—the easiest thing to do would have been to shield ourselves individually from responsibility by putting the onus for our poor performance on others and focusing on what everybody else was doing. (Ironically, that’s usually what gets guys in trouble in the first place.)
But the easy thing is almost never the right thing to do. It’s the hard thing that’s usually the right thing to do. And sometimes that means doing what you have to do, not what you want to do. It means, in my case, running the scout team offense when I wanted to be running the first team offense. It means accepting and owning your role as it’s constructed right now.
The truth is, when you take it to heart, the “do your job” mantra is liberating. Those three little words refocus your attention around the things you can control while freeing you from worrying about all the things that aren’t in your control. And what made so many of my Patriots teams great is that I had a lot of teammates who took the message to heart. Who recognized that being good wasn’t good enough, and that if they wanted to be great—if they wanted to win—they had to take care of their responsibilities and trust that their teammates would do the same.
LESSON
What you learn being part of any kind of team with bigger ambitions is that so many little things can still go wrong when everyone is trying their best at the tasks assigned to them, when you have people (even one or two) who don’t have their eyes on their own paper, little mistakes have a way of snowballing into bigger failures.
The best analogy I’ve found to describe this aspect of team dynamics is an orchestra. Every member of an orchestra has a specific part to play. That part is uniquely written for their instrument, which requires a specific skillset the player has spent years cultivating. When it’s time to perform, if you want the music to sound beautiful, then the violins need to play the violin parts, the horns need to play the horn parts, and so on. Now, it might be valuable for the violins to know when the horns are coming in or the horns to know which instruments are carrying the melody, but all of that goes into the background when the conductor raises the baton and it’s time to play, because if one player falls a beat behind or plays the wrong part, the result can be chaos. Loud, ugly chaos. That’s all it takes to ruin a performance: one or two people not doing their jobs.
But ruining a performance is not the same as ruining a game or a season, where someone is keeping score. It’s not the fullest measure of your ability or capacity. That only comes with direct, head-to-head competition. That is the true litmus test for greatness, whether you’re a team or an individual, whether we’re talking about sports or business or school.
Once you commit yourself to the competition, whether by virtue of your profession or your obsession or your priorities, the way you close that gap between good and great is by doing what you’re supposed to do every time, as well as you can do it. This takes an incredible amount of discipline, focus and clarity of intention. Because when you finally become accustomed to doing your job well, it’s easy to get distracted by those who aren’t doing their job and convincing yourself that you can do theirs too. If you give into this temptation, you make yourself vulnerable in the very area where you are supposed to be strongest and most squared away. The discipline comes with not letting this happen and forcing your teammates to raise their level. When you have a whole group of people who think this way, like I did with many of my teams, anything’s possible.
Of course, this all starts with management and leadership. You can have an entire army ready to do exactly what they’re told, but if they don’t know precisely what their jobs are, then their effort, their commitment, and their willingness to own 100% of their responsibilities 100% of the time, aren’t worth all that much. It has no focus, no target. It’s the same way with a football team, a law firm, your church group, a PTA, any organization really. Establishing clear roles and responsibilities must come first. If you’re trying to create a culture where every person focuses on what they can control, you have to start at the top. You can’t work harmoniously or effectively toward your fullest potential without every member of the group knowing their role.
APPLICATION
Once your teammates know their roles, the ones who are destined for greatness don’t need to be told what to do or how to do it. They’re able to shut out the external stimuli of our hyper-distracting culture. They don’t allow the well-meaning voices of the people in their support system to offer excuses for failure or absolution for mistakes. They compartmentalize their personal life from their professional life so that when they’re on the field 100% of their focus is on their job. As a result, a truly great teammate doesn’t really need to be thought about at all. You can just count on them.
I remember during my playing days, if I didn’t have to think about a guy or what he was going to do, it was the greatest gift he could ever give me as a teammate. I could trust him unconsciously and unflinchingly to make the right play and be where he was supposed to be, every time.
The perfect example of this was Wes Welker. He was one of my favorite teammates and one of the greatest players that I've ever played with. That is a man who knew how to do his job. He was the epitome of that great line: “my heart’s in it, but my ego’s not.”
Wes never made mistakes. He had incredible mental toughness. He performed at an incredibly high level, not just in games but in practice every day. He was never a diva or a distraction if the ball didn’t come his way for a while, which is crazy to think about because he was basically uncoverable. There was an argument to be made that I could have thrown to him on every passing down if I needed to.
The point is, he never took up my mental capacity. He showed up with a great attitude every day. I knew he’d be prepared. And from a quarterback standpoint, when you’re trying to please everybody all the time, he didn't burden me with anything. He was just available every single time that I needed to get him the ball.
Wes was like this 100% of the time. Some guys were this way 80% of the time, some 95 or 98% of the time. Wes made it so I never had to think about him doing his job, which allowed me to commit even more energy to doing mine. That is an elite teammate, in my estimation. It’s also a recipe for success, for greatness, and for digging your way out of the biggest of competitive holes.
Focusing on what you can control and doing your job consistently well is how 28-3 in the 3rd quarter of Super Bowl LI becomes 34-28 ninety minutes later. What I mean is, if we were going to come back, I couldn’t worry about the fact that I couldn’t run or block or catch passes. I couldn’t tackle or kick or coach. But what I could do was get us in and out of the huddle quickly, check to the right play at the line of scrimmage, make the right reads, throw a good, catchable ball. And do that every time, one play at a time.
In other words, I could fulfill my role on the team. I could play quarterback. Nothing more, nothing less. And if I did my job well, then the ten other guys in the huddle with me could do their jobs well too, just like the eleven guys in the defensive huddle could do theirs.
Super Bowl LI was an improbable win by a great team. But that comeback wasn’t a fluke. It was the result of taking advantage of opportunities that only arise when you’re doing your job as well as you can 100% of the time. Dont’a Hightower’s strip sack? Julian’s ridiculous catch? Those huge plays happened because both guys were exactly where they were supposed to be. Good fortune like that doesn’t come to those who take 50% of the plays off or who are selective with their effort and enthusiasm. The ball doesn’t bounce to the guy who’s in the right place at the wrong time. That’s not how life works, especially not when you’re up against stiff competition.
Want to close the gap between good and great in your own life? Beat good competition—even if you are your own competition.
Want to know how to do that? It’s simple, just not easy.
Do your job, the right way, every time.
