“Don’t even think about writing a post with sports analogies.” -me to me
“….I’m gonna do it.” -also me to me
My squad won the Super Bowl.
But I don’t want to talk about football. Not really at least. Football is merely the container holding some fascinating lessons that played out over the past 6 months.
Ask any player what the difference is between good teams and great teams, and they’ll likely tell you culture.
Football, and all of team sports for that matter, provide microcosms of organizational leadership, and they’re real-time case studies on the intersection of leadership, culture, and performance.
As someone who has dedicated more-than-healthy-and-necessary attention to the Chiefs this year, these 3 things stood out as the cultural signals that put them in the best possible position to succeed.
Inflexible on the goal, flexible on the how.
The expectation of the Chiefs at the beginning of the season, both internally and externally, was to win another championship. The goal was clear and specific.
But for the first time in the past 6 years, the how of trying to accomplish that goal had to change. The Chiefs offense of years passed wasn’t going to work with this team. So the offense had to evolve into a running team, even though Andy Reid hates running the ball. And they had to learn to grind out the clock. And limit mistakes. And to take the lead, then slow down and hold. Alongside all of that, the defense had to evolve. They went from one of the league’s worst to one of the league’s best, and was the sole reason the offense didn’t have to be as good as it was in the past.
It takes humility to say what we’re doing isn’t working, and oftentimes leaders would rather continue failing in their existing strategy than admit their strategy isn’t working and adjust.
The ego has to be subservient to the goal, to the task at hand.
This Chiefs team had to show, for the first time in the Mahomes-era, that the goal was inflexible while the how was not.
Candor invites conflict.
You would be hard-pressed to find a high performing team - in sports, work, or elsewhere - that doesn’t have a candid culture. Doing hard things requires the willingness to have hard conversations.
The Chiefs had this on display at multiple points throughout the year. When things weren’t going well, coaches and players alike were not afraid to confront the people around them. Players yelling at players. Players yelling at coaches. Coaches yelling at players. And coaches yelling at coaches.
It’d be easy to dismiss this as a negative (and understandably so).
But I view it as the core reason they were able to successfully navigate their necessary evolutions this year.
When you’re trying to create change, it’s the hard conversations that make this possible. We’re asking people to do things differently while maintaining a high standard, and there’s inherent discomfort built-in.
But that candor has to be balanced with my next point in order for it to be productive, not toxic.
Conflict in private, praise in public.
The Chiefs had many “candid” conversations on full display this year. Yet for every heated sideline conversation we saw, we never saw that conflict drag into the public.
In the Super Bowl we watched Travis Kelce yell at Coach Reid on the sideline when he was pulled out of a red zone play. Fast-forward to the post-game and rather than focus on the incident, both Kelce and Reid praised their team’s cultural bent toward candor. They didn’t use these words obviously, but the gist was the same.
In contrast, pay attention to teams that have players / coaches talking negatively to the press about their team or teammates. You’ll find two commonalities among them. They lose a lot of games and they have a toxic culture. Their issues bleed into the press because they haven’t built a culture of candor where those issues are resolved internally.
This Chiefs team was willing to have disagreements in private (relatively speaking of course), yet would always praise in public. The private candor is justified in public when it’s used in a spirit of serving the ultimate goal.
All of this is connected.
It starts with the primary goal being clear and consistently reinforced.
Because the goal is clear and primary, people are willing to be candid and flexible about how to get there.
And that candor and flexibility is always directed back to the primary goal.
Clear on the goal. Flexible on the path. Candid in the results.
Rinse and repeat.
Like the Chiefs just did.
If you find value in the things I publish here, it’d mean the world if you’d share it with someone else. It’s the only way this space and community continues to grow.
✌️ and ❤️,
Adam Griffin