RESPECT
In my experience, effective leadership often begins with respect. Both giving it and getting it. Respect is about consistency, dependability, and integrity. You get respect when you consistently do hard things, have hard conversations, make tough decisions, and you do it from a consistent and ethical place. There has to be one set of rules that applies equally to everyone—including yourself. And you can’t break your own rules. If you want your word and your decisions to be respected, you have to practice what you preach.
How I applied that as a leader was I always did what I said I was going to do. I didn’t ask anyone to do something that I wouldn’t do myself. And everyone knew why they were doing what I was asking (or not asking) of them.
If I asked everyone to be on time, I was on time or early. If I asked people to stay late, I needed to be the last to leave. I tried to be first in-last out of the building every day that I could. If I wanted to quiz the offense on an opponent, I had to be sure I knew all the answers. I tried to be so prepared that being clutch on Sunday looked like just another day at the office.
This was one of the things I admired about Josh McDaniels. He became quarterback coach and started calling plays in 2005 after Charlie Weis left. I was a sixth-year vet by then. We’d already won three Super Bowls. He could’ve easily messed up the chemistry. Instead, what he showed me (and the rest of the offense) was incredible diligence and preparation. I always knew why Josh was asking us to do something. We’d be on the sideline and he’d tell me exactly what was going to happen on our next play and it would happen just like he said it would. He did all the little things right.
The way Josh earned our respect those first couple years is how I sought to earn the respect of Mike Evans and Chris Godwin when I went to Tampa Bay fifteen years later. Mike and Chris are great team players. I couldn’t come in there like I knew everything and start barking orders, upending the winning culture they’d started to build. So I treated my twentieth season like it was my first. I came in early and I stayed late. I got back to basics in the offseason and in training camp. Learning, teaching, developing our communication, sharing what I knew with Mike and Chris and the rest of the offensive unit. They showed me respect from the beginning because I had a resume that warranted it. But how I conducted myself—consistent, dependable, always with integrity—showed them the respect that they had earned and cemented their respect for me in turn. It also created an environment where I could step into the huddle alongside them from the very first game as one of the leaders of the team.
When you have the respect of your team, your family, your employees—they will follow you because they trust that you won’t falter, that you’re a person of your word, and that the mission always comes first.
When leaders are consistent and dependable, respect is what emerges from their relationships with those they lead. And respect for the leader, more than any other emotion, keeps a team’s culture stable. It’s the thing that keeps actions aligned with priorities, and priorities connected to values—all of which are the responsibility of the leader to reflect and uphold.
FEAR
Then, there’s fear. The leader’s job is to make it clear to every member of the team what the expectations are (the “why”) and that actions to the contrary will have consequences, no matter who you are. A teammate’s job is to embrace the leader’s “why” and allow the fear of those consequences to motivate them toward improvement.
When I threw an interception or screwed up in practice, I knew I was going to hear about it from Bill Belichick. I hated it, but I welcomed it. It’s how I got better, because if I didn’t fix the problem then I wasn’t going to play. For a good chunk of my career, Bill was able to motivate me with this kind of fear. It worked because I understood his “why”. He wasn’t being arbitrary. It was never criticism or punishment for its own sake. His goal was perfection. Perfection was the only way to be good enough in the NFL to have a chance to win every single week.
As I became a leader, I also knew that when Bill yelled at me and critiqued me in meetings, in front of everyone, it was going to make my job easier. No one in that room could honestly believe that they were above taking critiques from me after I took them from Bill.
Rob Gronkowski loves to tell a story from his first year with the Patriots where I yelled at him in a meeting about not getting outside of his defender on a flag route and then threatened to never throw him the football ever again. What I really said was, “You can go inside if you want, but as soon as you do, I’m never going to throw you the ball. So go ahead, keep it up. Keep running inside, and I’ll always find somebody else to throw to. But it’s your choice, Rob.” My point to him was that he was free to go whichever direction he wanted to, and I was free to throw the ball wherever I wanted to, and it wasn’t going to be him. Rob was accountable to me, as the leader of the offense, and I was accountable to the entire unit. You aren’t free from the consequences of your choices.
The fear those consequences produced was motivating for Gronk, because the expectations were clear: if he worked to get outside his defender, I would work to get him the ball; if he didn’t, I wouldn’t. He’ll admit it, too. It lit a fire under his ass. He worked hard in practice and as a result I threw him the football about 600 more times. Rob is a Hall of Fame tight end, so he was going to learn eventually, but fearing the consequences I would levy as the guy who distributed the football got him there much sooner, and it will get him into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot as well.
The trap you have to avoid with fear as a leader is getting caught up in the negative connotations. Would it be great if everyone was motivated by the carrot? Of course! But A LOT of people are motivated by the stick. I’ve known amazing athletes who enjoyed the rewards of peak performance, but who only reached that level because they feared being benched, or disciplined or called out in meetings, or being cut. Avoiding the pain of those potential experiences was more motivating than the pleasure of positive reinforcement for a job well done.
A leader’s job is to know when to use the carrot and when to use the stick with each person they lead. It can be hard to get right at first. It’s more art than science. But what makes success possible (and failure survivable) when it comes to fear, is having a relationship with your teammates that is first and foremost based on mutual respect.
LOVE
I’ve always thought that love is grounded in caring and trust, but at its core it’s also about vulnerability. When a team allows for love to grow between them, and there’s a real sense that you care for each other and for the best interests of the team, it supercharges the power of respect and fear to motivate people and get the most out of them. As a leader, you create the conditions for this kind of love to emerge by showing people that you care about their lives, making them trust that you have their best interest at heart, and having the courage to be vulnerable with the truth of who you are and what you want.
I first felt what it was like to be on the receiving end of this kind of leadership when Willie McGinest and Tedy Bruschi put themselves out there as veterans to make me, a 6th round rookie backup, feel welcome. And they didn’t just welcome me, they taught me things. Willie taught me to take care of my body and introduced me to my best friend, Alex Guerrero. Tedy taught me how to get better as a young player and what it means to actually commit to the team.
It was similar with Lawyer Milloy, who looked after me my first few seasons, before I had any money. He offered to let me move into his place in Marina Bay. Then he helped me figure out how to build my first house and helped me move all my stuff in. He was like a big brother. There was a lot of love there.
All three of those guys authentically cared—about me and about the team. The result was genuine love and a bonded team that trusted and respected each other and won a lot of games. As I got older and more established in the league, I found myself in a similar leadership position and, taking a page from their book, one of the young guys I reached out to early on was Julian Edelman. To hear old coaches talk about it now, Julian was on the verge of getting cut every other week for like three years. But back then, what I remember most is what we had in common: we were two Bay Area kids who had somewhat difficult college experiences playing quarterback but somehow found ourselves picked at the bottom of the draft by the Patriots.
By the end of his first season, our shared experiences drew us together and made for an easy connection, so I reached out to him in a way I hadn’t with any other receiver. I asked him to make a commitment to me: in the off-season, would he get on a plane and come to meet me wherever I was, to catch for me when I wanted to throw and work on things in preparation for the following season?
It was a big ask, and if Julian looked at it through the wrong lens—with ego or insecurity—it could seem like I was big-timing him. But that’s not Julian, and that wasn’t me. I was admitting that I needed the help and showing that I trusted him to be the one to help me. He was admitting that he could use the reps to help secure a spot on the team and by saying “yes” he was showing that he trusted me to do right by him and make him better.
The end result of our collaboration on the field was 580 catches, 41 touchdowns and 3 Super Bowls. But the real wins were off the field: we became great friends; our families got to know each other; we helped each other through tough spots. An on-field partnership full of wins and an off-field friendship full of love emerged from the same place: our vulnerability with, and trust in, each other.
This kind of vulnerability isn’t complicated. You’re just trying to create a mutual connection with another human being that has the potential to grow and to deepen—which is really important whether you’re forming a team, growing a family, or building a business. But I also understand that it’s not always easy. You can definitely make a fool of yourself, putting yourself out there. But that’s okay. It’s necessary, actually. You have to show that you care enough about other people to go out on a limb for them and face down your own fear of being rejected. Then, if you make a misstep and slip, you need to be able to laugh at yourself–to show them and yourself that you are tough enough to survive that little fall. In my experience, when you do that enough times you develop the kind of respect where you can trust that your guys will be laughing with you, not at you, when they lend you a hand to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. That’s love.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
There’s a lot of touch and feel that goes into leading through emotional connection. Getting the most out of people involves knowing which of their buttons to push, how often to push them, and why.
It’s not all that different from what anyone needs to know when they’re trying to grow. Self-improvement requires a degree of radical honesty that can be painful at times. It demands that you swallow your pride and acknowledge that you need to be pushed. It demands that you put your ego aside and accept that you don’t always know why you need to be pushed—or how often. It requires you to push beyond your comfort zone into that difficult, uncertain place where growth happens.
As the leader of your own life, some of this you can do for yourself. But most of the time, it’s the leader of your team, or your family, or your company, who has to do that pushing. And, at least for me, it was the respect, fear and love I was able to cultivate with my coaches and teammates that determined how much we grew and how far we could go…together.
