REFLECTION
During my career as a starting quarterback, I always loved greeting and introducing myself to new players on one of their first days in the building. It was a gesture the older guys like Willie McGinest and Tedy Bruschi did for me when I was the new rookie in the locker room. The 199th pick who no one expected to play but who wanted to be seen as someone who could contribute. By introducing themselves, Willie and Tedy saw me. It was a simple, yet powerful and effective example of leadership, and I wanted to pay their generosity forward when I became a leader on the team. I wanted our new guys to feel the same way Willie and Tedy made me feel.
“Hey, I’m Tom Brady,” I’d say, “Nice to meet you. I’m looking forward to having you as part of our team. Let me know if I can help with anything.”
I’d get a variety of responses. Some guys would laugh and be like, “bro, I know who you are!” Some of the younger guys could get a little starstruck, and others, like the new draft picks, were just overwhelmed by being in an NFL locker room for the first time as a pro.
Regardless of who it was, I introduced myself to every new guy with the same purpose: to take the first step in establishing a relationship with a new teammate who was there to help us win and maximize our potential as a team. Leadership is so much about relatability. As a veteran in a position of authority, with stature and status and years behind me, it was my job to relate to these guys (not the other way around) by meeting them where they were. A leader is only as effective as their ability (or inability) to connect with those they are meant to be leading. You can be an elite performer, but if your team thinks of you as separate from them, there’s a ceiling on what you can accomplish together.
Obviously, relatability is not one-size-fits-all. Everyone has their own journey. We’re all internally motivated by different things. We have different priorities. Still, relatability requires trust, and it’s my belief that developing that trust always begins with caring, no matter who you are. As a leader, I was going to be the one to break down the walls of unfamiliarity and begin building that trust by reaching out to the new guys first and showing that I cared.
I cared about getting to know them. I cared about their comfort and camaraderie, so I wasn’t going to make them come to me or wait for them to break the ice. I cared whether they understood that I knew what they were going through, that I had been there once too. I wanted them to see that, while I was now one of the leaders on the team, I viewed myself as 1 of 53, just like them, not #1 of 53, like they may have anticipated. I cared that they felt from the very beginning that we were one team with one mission—to become the best version of ourselves so we could compete for a chance at a championship. I wanted them to trust that even though I’d already won a few Super Bowls, I wanted to win my next one just as much as they wanted to win their first one, and I wanted to win it for them as much as, or more than, I wanted to win it for myself.
LESSON
When you’ve been a leader long enough, you learn a couple of things about the emotional prerequisites for effective leadership.
First, the mission and the people must always come first. Let me reiterate that: you must always subjugate your own self-interest to the needs of the team. Hell, that’s why we’re all on teams in the first place, isn’t it? We chose team sports because we wanted to be part of something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the whole only stays greater when everyone puts it first.
I’ve talked about a “we first, not me first” mentality in this newsletter before. That mantra has to start at the top, otherwise what you have is hypocrisy. You end up with a leader who talks out of both sides of their mouth, where the unspoken mantra is “do as I say, not as I do.” A leader has to be willing to do whatever they expect their teammates to do, and they have to be willing to do it first. There can be no task too big or too small for a leader.
Related to that, the second thing you learn is that relatability isn’t just about developing trust with your guys by showing that you care about them. It’s also knowing what your teammates are going through, as they’re going through it, and then going through it with them. To be one with the guys, you must be one of the guys. And what you’ll find is that it’s almost never the big things that create this connection, it’s little things that you’d never expect.
In my second year, John Friesz, one of our backup quarterbacks, introduced me to a local car dealer who agreed to loan me a car in exchange for making a couple of appearances at the dealership. I hadn’t become the starter yet, we were many months away from winning the Super Bowl that season, and I was still on a 6th round draft pick’s rookie salary, so it was a great deal.
The car he gave me was a yellow Jeep Wrangler with a snowplow on the front. It was a vibe. Our parking lot that season only had a few fancy cars like you’d expect from an NFL team. We had a lot of guys on the league minimum and practice squad salaries. We also had a solid group of middle class, midwestern guys. That meant the lot was full of trucks and various types of blue collar vehicles. My Jeep (minus the color) fit right in. More importantly, it produced an unexpected and authentic point of connection with my teammates. For the offensive linemen who I ate with, it gave them something to bust my balls about. Getting a free car for a couple of appearances, and that car looking like it belonged to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, is something that absolutely could have happened to any one of them!
It was a totally innocuous thing in the moment, but no single choice I made those first couple of years in New England taught me more about relatability or connected me to more guys in our locker room. This dumb car, which I hadn’t given a second thought when I drove it off the lot, created an opportunity for conversation around the lunch table. It opened up lines of dialogue about shared experiences. It made me relatable.
APPLICATION
The reason you need this kind of relatability on a team is because a leader has to be able to make more than friends. They have to make hard decisions and have tough conversations, as well.
You see the importance of this dynamic unfold naturally when you become a parent. You love your kids and instinctively care deeply about their health, happiness, and safety. You earn your kids’ trust by being the one who protects those things for them at all costs, especially when they’re under threat. At the same time, you have to establish firm boundaries with kids and levy consequences when those boundaries are violated. It can be tough, and those conversations can be difficult, but the deeper and sturdier the relationship is between parent and child the better those decisions tend to be and the more productive the conversations turn out.
The same is true for teams of all kinds. And much like the parents in a family, the leader of a team will never know if they’ve actually earned trust or shown a sufficient amount of care until things get tough. It’s your teammates who will show you if you’ve met the prerequisites for effective leadership. When you say, “trust me, follow me and I’ll get us out of this tough spot,” if they say LFG!, or better yet if they don’t say anything and they just go…then you know you did your job.
Because care is something that is banked in the normal moments—in conversation, at the lunch table, on birthdays and special occasions, in simple gestures like introducing yourself to someone and showing that you’re truly interested in who they are and where they come from.
Trust, on the other hand, is earned in the difficult and disappointing moments, when that care is put to the test. Your teammates want to see, when nothing has gone right, when you’re down 28-3 in the Super Bowl, are you going to throw them under the bus or stand in front of it for them? Are you going to do your job and have faith that they will do theirs? Will you have empathy and understanding, but also are you the field general with all the right answers who will lead them out of this shitty situation?
I loved being a leader of a team. It’s a tough job. There are no days off. To be a leader is to have a dozen jobs with a hundred different ways to do them. My challenge to you is to lead with relatability. Whether you’re a current or an aspiring leader of a large organization or a tiny rec league softball team, take the time to get to know the people you’re trying to lead. Find out where they’re from, how they like to relax, what music they like to listen to. What are their hobbies, their dreams, their fears?
Meet them where they are. Show them that you care. Give them another reason to trust you, beyond your play on the field or your performance at the office. Not only does this benefit the team (and you by extension), it benefits their future teams as well, because by showing them that you care, you are showing them how to care. You are teaching the next generation of leaders, whether they realize it at the time or not.
Some of us are more naturally inclined toward leadership than others, but all of us are forged, in one way or another, by the leaders who came before us. It’s a cycle. One that can break teams when it produces a bad leader, and make champions when it produces a good one.
A great leader binds a team together. The glue is caring. The bond is trust. And when a team knows that you’ve learned from the best, and that your people and your mission always come first, there’s almost nothing that can tear you apart.
It’s ride or die, all the way. Even if that ride is a yellow Jeep with a plow on the front.
