REFLECTION
I’ve been very fortunate to know and become friends with a number of tremendous leaders in the American business community: Ed Bastian at Delta, Hans Vestberg and Dan Schulman at Verizon, Chuck Robbins at Cisco, Michael Rubin at Fanatics, Mike Repole at Nobull, to name a few.
Collectively, we don’t necessarily have a ton in common—we’re each our own person—but where I feel a deep kinship with them is in their passion for leadership and their commitment to their teams and their missions. These guys never take days off. In their minds, they can’t. In their hearts, they don’t want to. And I felt the same way during my playing career.
After a game, win or lose, I was back in the building early the next morning. In the offseason, I worked on getting my body healthy and fixing things I didn’t like. In training camp, when I wasn’t on the field or in meetings, I was getting to know the new guys. Off-days were about getting myself the most prepared for the next day’s practice and being as productive as possible. When we won our first Super Bowl in 2001, I was back at the old Foxboro Stadium two weeks later, working out, trying to get better, so we could win another one.
Great business leaders take similar approaches inside their companies. They come into the office with positive energy every day. They’re always prepared to listen to new ideas and make big decisions. There’s no task too small that they won’t tackle if it’s important. They’re constantly on the lookout for solutions to problems and opportunities for growth. When they’re not in the office, they’re thinking about how they can make their team’s jobs easier. They’re constantly learning from colleagues in other businesses, checking out their competition, and expanding their knowledge base at conferences and summits.
This isn’t to say that leaders are always on the clock. Effective leadership isn’t a literal 24/7/365 lifestyle. We all have other priorities that we care deeply about—family, friends, hobbies, and as always our physical and mental health, number one. What I’m talking about here is more of a permanent mindset, where the obsession with the mission and the commitment to the team is always there, always evident, and hopefully always inspiring.
LESSON
So what exactly does “no days off” mean for a leader?
At a surface level, it means that beyond the basic tasks of your job, there are still many other things for the leader to do. At a deeper level, it means that the job of a leader doesn’t stop or start. It doesn’t come before or after anything. It’s ever-present. It’s the job within the job, or the job around the job. It’s like connective tissue that binds everything (and everyone) together.
For instance, my job on gamedays was to lead the offense, throw the football and score points. But when the defense was on the field, it’s not as if I hit pause on my responsibilities and twiddled my thumbs on the sidelines. I talked to the coaches. I checked in with my O-line and juiced them up if I felt they needed it. I talked to my receivers and offered advice to some, motivation to others, and reassurance to the guys who maybe hadn’t seen a ball come their way yet. Then, I was hydrating and taking a moment to refocus myself, because I needed to be physically, mentally and emotionally on point before the offense went back out on the field.
There was never a second on gameday when I wasn’t working in my capacity as one of the leaders of those Patriots and Bucs teams. And in reality, there wasn’t a second where I wasn’t doing that off the field either. I viewed all of my choices and decisions through a leadership lens.
The question I asked myself was, “Is this choice in service of winning? Does this hurt or help us in the pursuit of excellence?” Bill Walsh said, “champions behave like champions before they’re champions; they have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.” If we aspired to excellence as a team, and our goal was to win championships, then we needed to make excellent decisions with a champion’s mindset, not just in games, but in practice, and in everything else we did.
My job was to set the example.
If ten hours of sleep was what I needed to re-energize for a big day of meetings, that’s what I did. I understood, thanks to Alex Guerrero, that extra pliability training and good food choices were essential for my body to withstand the rigors of the season. I spent countless hours over 23 seasons making a million discrete choices—tweaking my footwork when I changed protection schemes against the blitz, refining my decision making process in the no-huddle offense, sharpening my communication skills with my receivers—just so I could get a little bit better every day in practice.
I was obsessed with making the best possible choices because I knew that if I was a better leader, we could be a better team. If I could translate my obsession with football and my commitment to the team into a greater investment by my teammates into our collective mission, I believed it would pay dividends at practice and then in the win column.
APPLICATION
Not everyone can do this. Not because of some character flaw or moral shortcoming. Being a good leader is hard. It’s also not a choice. Great leaders don’t choose to lead, they’re called to it. Obsessed with it. Pulled to it, like the duty and obligation is a giant magnet.
Every person considering a leadership position should ask themselves: do I feel drawn to this? Am I choosing this, or is it choosing me? To be clear, it’s possible to choose a leadership role in something you’re good at but not obsessed with, and to do a good job. You might be a good player who signed a big contract, or a good soldier who’s climbed another rung on the corporate ladder, and now you want to lead because you believe you’ve earned it, like a perk. What you have to understand is that eventually you will find yourself in competition with leaders who feel called to their roles like they’ve got no other choice. If you’re being pushed by external motivators, while they’re being pulled by internal ones—that’s no contest.
If you want to be a great leader, you need to find your own obsession, something you’re drawn to so strongly that the work doesn’t feel like work. A purpose so powerful that leadership doesn’t feel like a burden, it feels like a privilege you never want to let go of.
This isn’t to say that it should take over your life. Great leaders aren’t robots. We all have days where we want to check out and take off. Some days our social batteries are low and we just don’t have the energy. Other days, the temptations of the easy life are really alluring. But when it’s time to get to work, or the shit hits the fan, there should be no doubt that you will put all that stuff in a box and show up, because to you there’s no other choice.
As a leader, you have to be what you want your team members to become. You can’t show signs of weakness or a lack of confidence. You can’t have days where you show up in body but not in spirit, where it’s obvious to everyone that you’re not as obsessed or committed as you say you are. You’re there to inspire, to be in charge, to point the team in the right direction and move them forward every day.
That’s what I mean by ‘no days off.’ The demands of effective leadership aren’t something you can meet some of the time, when you’re feeling up to it. You have to do it all of the time.
You can’t ask your team to come in with focus and energy and a positive attitude if you don’t do it first, best, and always. Great leadership starts by checking in with yourself first like this. None of us want to let our teammates down, but if you’re the leader and you’ve fallen short of the expectations you have for yourself, what do you expect is going to happen with your team?
Ask yourself every day: Am I accountable to the consequences of my decisions? Did I do what I said I was going to do? Am I living the values I espouse to my team? And make no mistake: these questions get headier and their consequences get heavier as you get older and start to accumulate more responsibility.
Veteran on a team.
Manager in a company
Partner in a relationship.
Parent of a child.
Each of these is a position of leadership, and to do them well you have to find some aspect to become obsessed with so you can be on point at all times like I’ve described. You have to be consistent and reliable and true—first with yourself, then with those you’re leading.
Think of it like this: you are a lighthouse. Your presence and your actions are what reassure those who look to you but who might be drifting or lost: Ahh, THIS is the way. Conversely, it only takes one dark and stormy night with the light bulb loose or the windows dirty, or the lighthouse unoccupied, for an entire fleet to run aground or crash upon the rocks.
You are the beacon. You light the way. Indeed, unwavering commitment is such an essential feature of superior leadership because sometimes victory really does come down to the leader’s ability to bring it home.
