Category Archives: Lessons from Pro Sports

Leadership Lessons from the NBA – When Bold Moves are Required, Leaders Don’t Care About Popularity

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Leadership Lessons from the NBA – The Surprisingly Aware Richard Jefferson

Weeks after being acquired by the San Antonio Spurs, star NBA forward Richard Jefferson was scheduled to marry his redundantly named fiancé, Kesha Ni’Cole Nichols, last Saturday. As you’ve likely heard, Jefferson, late of the New Jersey Nets, got cold feet and called the wedding off just hours before he was scheduled to become Mr. Ni’Cole Nichols.




While most in the blogosphere have lined up to crucify Jefferson for his last minute email to Nichols calling off the nuptials, the editors of AskTheManager.com believe he showed great leadership in recognizing a bad decision and rectifying it before it was too late. (Of course, there are reports he spent more than $2 million on the wedding that never happened, so we’re not entirely sure he couldn’t have made the decision a few weeks earlier.)

Leaders Make Decisive Moves

While Jefferson spent more than $2 million on the ceremony, he likely saved himself millions more by avoiding the inevitable divorce from KNN. Many have called him a coward, though we call him bold.

A coward, you see, wouldn’t want to face his fiancé, her family, his family, their friends and the rest of the world with the embarrassing news that he made a bad decision in asking her to marry him. A coward, you see, would live with his bad decision and compound it with more and more bad decisions for the rest of his life. Leaders are bold enough and comfortable enough with their own abilities to say “I screwed up, and this is how I’m going to fix it.”

Leaders Do What’s Right

The popular move for Jefferson would have been to go through with the wedding and make the best of a bad marriage. Certainly millions of others before him have done just that. Jefferson, for whatever reason, stepped up and did what was right – that’s what leaders do. Leaders care about popularity only when it doesn’t get in the way of what is right, and marrying someone you just don’t love isn’t right.

Stop Chasing and Start Leading – Leadership Lessons from the NHL

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Last night the Pittsburgh Penguins defeated the Detroit Red Wings 2-1 in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals to win the coveted Stanley Cup. Both teams deserved to be there, both played well throughout the season, and – as evidenced by a Game 7 in a best-of-seven-series – both teams were evenly matched.

Both teams were so evenly matched, in fact, that the same two teams had faced off last year for a shot at Lord Stanley’s Cup. In 2008, the Red Wings were victorious, defeating the young Penguins in a Game 6 triple overtime thriller. After their heartbreaking loss, one Pittsburgh player, Marian Hossa, was offered a five-year, $35 million dollar deal to remain with the team. He declined; shocking nearly everyone in the hockey world by instead choosing to sign a one-year deal with the champion Red Wings. Hossa, you see, wanted to win a championship.

The Best Laid Plans…

As we learned in the first sentence of this post, Hossa’s old team defeated Hossa’s new team for the 2009 Stanley Cup. Hossa chased the Cup and fell short. The prevailing thought is that he screwed up – that if he’d stayed in Pittsburgh he would be on the winning side. Of course, nothing happens in a vacuum, and Hossa’s departure surely led to other changes with the Penguins that may have contributed to their ultimate victory. That’s only speculation. The fact is that Hossa – so focused on winning a championship – couldn’t see the bright future ahead for the Penguins. He chased the Cup and (predictably) did not catch it.

Leaders Don’t Chase, They Lead

It’s strange that a hockey player would make such a mistake. From very early on in youth hockey, players are taught to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is. Players who skate directly after a moving puck become very tired, very quickly… and they never get the puck. “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been,” Wayne Gretzky once intelligently stated. Hossa, we learned, skated to where the Cup had been, and away from where it was going to be.


Leaders don’t always know where the puck is going to be, but they do recognize that chasing things (especially shiny objects like the Stanley Cup) is fruitless and akin to a dog chasing its own tail. Leaders understand the goal and weigh decisions against it. Those activities that take them closer to the goal are good; those that don’t are bad. Leaders also understand their team’s capabilities, strengths and weaknesses; and they are able to project where their team will be at this time next year.

To See the Future, You Have to Look

With arguably the sport’s two greatest talents (Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin) and a young stud goalie (Marc-Andre Fleury) already on the roster, one would think Hossa would have seen Pittsburgh’s bright future and stayed. During the six games as a Penguin in the 2008 Stanley Cup finals, Hossa scored 3 goals and had 4 assists. In his seven games as a Red Wing in this year’s finals, he scored no goals and had just 3 assists. Pundits speculate that the pressure of his decision got to him. Understanding what makes leaders and non-leaders tick, we believe he performed poorly because of his desperation to win a championship; the same desperation that led him to chase instead of lead. The kind of desperation common in poor leaders.

An Update to our Leadership Lessons from Brett Favre

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Brett “Cuatro” Favre and the Leadership Lesson of Humility

When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. The best thing to do is admit it. We are certainly humble enough to admit it.

At the beginning of the 2008 NFL season we predicted that the New York Jets would finish the season no better than 8-8… we were wrong. (See our August 27, 2008 post.)

The addition of Cuatro, which we predicted would not be enough to help the Jets make the playoffs, was indeed not enough to help the Jets make the playoffs. We were right on that point (and yes, we do like to gloat). The New York Jets finished the 2008 season 9-7 and fired Head Coach Eric Mangini today (read the New York Daily News story here). It seems Cuatro leaves a wake wherever he goes.




To add insult to the Jets’ injury, they missed the playoffs because the quarterback they jettisoned in favor of Favre, Chad Pennington, led last year’s 1-15 Miami Dolphins to the playoffs by defeating the Favre-led Jets. That’s karma; and in leadership, karma can be a bitch.

We also predicted that Brett Favre would throw more interceptions than touchdowns in 2008. Well, we were wrong on that point, too. Favre threw exactly 22 touchdowns and 22 interceptions – pretty crappy for a future Hall of Fame QB, but still not what we predicted. While we admit we got that one wrong, we do want to point out that Favre still led the NFL in interceptions this year – in fact, he threw 22% more INTs than the next closest QB. (Perhaps he should change his number to 22.)

The Green Bay Packers, who let pride and ego get in the way of a good decision, finished the season 6-10 – a far cry from the 13-3 they enjoyed with Favre in 2007. The leadership lessons we pointed out in our July 17, 2008 post still ring true: Brett Lorenzo Favre is more important than the team (in his mind); and get out in front of issues early, speak the truth and stay firm in your convictions (we warned the Packers not to capitulate – they did).

Interestingly, unlike last year when the Favre-led Packers were in the playoffs, both the Green Bay and Favre have plenty of time off to rethink their 2008 leadership blunders. Something tells us they learned nothing from the experience – their lack of humility keeps getting in the way.

Email Etiquette Lessons from the Cleveland Browns’ Phil Savage – Dropping the F-Bomb is So Not Cool

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Phil Savage, Cleveland Browns GM, Responds too Quickly

While email etiquette in business has long been an important topic to the editors of AskTheManager.com, we’ve never pontificated on the importance of responding expeditiously. We’ve posted articles and opinions about email typos, email signatures, and we even ranked the worst email etiquette mistakes of all time in a two-part series. Had we weighed in on email response speed, we would have said speed is good.

That was until we read about Phil Savage. In Savage’s case, speed kills.

As first reported by the website deadspin.com, Cleveland Browns GM Phil Savage responded quickly Monday night to an idiot fan’s relentless and constant email criticism with the not-so-friendly reply “go root for Buffalo, f*ck you.” (Editor’s note: Phil used a vowel in place of the asterisk.)

You don’t have to be a seasoned leader to know that his response easily tops our list of the worst email etiquette mistakes ever. It’s hard to beat the F-bomb when it comes to what you shouldn’t say in a business email.




The Email Etiquette “24-Hour Rule”

Firing off an angry memo or cursing someone out over the phone ten or more years ago was not a big deal – in the Internet Age, angry responses will haunt you forever. Just as we learned from Alec Baldwin’s “thoughtless little pig” rant that you shouldn’t leave nasty voicemails, we now know from Phil Savage that you shouldn’t write “f*ck you” in an email.

(Seriously, didn’t we already know that?)

Before the onset of the World Wide Web, it was common practice for enlightened leaders to withhold a response when they were irritated. In a proper display of etiquette, they practiced the 24-Hour Rule – that is, they would wait twenty-four hours before sending a nasty note or letter. The prevailing wisdom assumed (correctly) that whatever made them angry today would seem less important in twenty-four hours.

It’s been almost 72 hours since Savage’s savage reply to the thoughtless-little-pig-of-a-fan, and we’re pretty sure it all seems less important now. 

 

Donovan McNabb is no Albert Einstein… or is He?

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Leadership Lessons from Donovan McNabb

After five quarters of football on Sunday, November 16, 2008, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Cincinnati Bengals played to a 13-13 tie. This tie was the first the NFL had seen in six years – ties, it seems, are rare in the NFL.

After the game, Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was quoted as saying that he wasn’t aware that ties could occur in the NFL. He assumed, incorrectly, that the teams would continue to play until someone scored.

Since making these statements, McNabb has unfairly become the poster child for dumb jocks all across America. From where we stand there are only four people on Donovan’s side: Radio hosts Mike Golic, Mike Greenberg, and Colin Cowherd; and Steelers’ QB Ben Roethlisberger. Fans, especially in Philly, are loudly claiming that McNabb is either the worst quarterback in the NFL or an idiot, or both.

We argue that Donovan McNabb is neither. In fact, by not understanding this seemingly simple rule, we argue that McNabb could be one of the best leaders in the NFL today.


Leaders Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

NFL quarterbacks are required to remember scores of plays, receiver patterns, defensive schemes, and blocking patterns. We find it easy to forgive Donovan for  being a little unclear on the nits and nats of the NFL rulebook. In our opinion, that’s the coaches’ job.

True leaders, guys like Lincoln, Reagan, Iacocca and Buffet, don’t get involved in every detail of the business. They understand that they are only one person and that the collective intelligence of their leadership team will help them make the right decisions.

McNabb is no Einstein

While probably the greatest athlete-quarterback of the last ten years, McNabb will never be confused with the study-crazy QBs of this generation: Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. He is no Albert Einstein, for sure.

Interestingly, Albert Einstein and Donovan McNabb are more similar than you might think. Analogous to McNabb’s current situation, it seems that a colleague once asked Einstein for his phone number. Albert Einstein surprised this person by picking up the nearest phone book and reciting the number from the White Pages.

Einstein, you see, refused to fill his head with information that was easily obtainable from other sources. Genius, we might exclaim. Why don’t we exclaim the same about McNabb? It seems odd to us that any quarterback would fill his head with the rules about tie games in the NFL when they happen so seldom.

They have so much more to think about.

 

Leadership Lessons from Fantasy Football

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Leadership Lessons from Fantasy Football

Tonight kicks off another season of NFL Football. To many, this is the most anticipated day of the year – especially to the millions of fantasy football players.

The editors of AskTheManager are fantasy football fanatics and we spent most of our draft last week discussing how fantasy football intersects with management and leadership.

Not surprisingly, we found correlation between a top fantasy football manager and great leadership and management skills.

The Fantasy Football Draft

While there are plenty of fantasy football cheat sheets available to the fantasy player, those who do the best in their league’s draft conduct an inordinate amount of research to fill their team with the very best players using the lowest possible draft pick.

Peyton Manning, LaDainian Tomlinson and others of their fantasy prowess are no-brainers and are gone in the first two rounds. Anyone can pick these guys. Only someone committed to total world domination is going to take the time to choose Justin Gage, Matt Forte or Steve Slaton in the later rounds.

While those who aren’t willing to commit to the research will choose players past their prime, like Edgerrin James, true leaders balance the right amount of investigation into each decision – and they smoke everyone else on draft day.

The First Game

The NFL is quirky in the first few weeks of the season. The problem, as it were, is that every team feels like they’re going to win the Super Bowl. This brings out some amazing performances from the most unexpected players.

To pick the right players for your first game in fantasy football requires more instinct and moxie than any other week. Often in the fantasy leagues, you see those who ultimately finish near the bottom winning in the first week.

Firm decision making – avoiding any second guesses – delivers victories in week one to the true leaders.




Week After Week

Fantasy football takes commitment. Commitment is something that separates the leaders from the laggards.

The week after week grind brings out the strong management skills and true leadership decision making in the best fantasy players. Setting your weekly lineup, reviewing the available free agents, using your waivers sparingly and understanding that the teams your players face in a given week have as much to do with their success as their own talent takes strategy and a certain acumen not found in the laggards.

Leaders really excel during the week after week grind, because they bring commitment and a desire to be the best.

The Trades

Throughout the season, fantasy players are faced with the possibility of trading players to other fantasy players. Knowing when you can get the most for a superstar and when you can pay the least for an up-and-comer is key.

Leaders who understand negotiation always make great trades. They understand win-win. A negotiation that ends in win-lose or lose-lose is a failed negotiation. Leaders live this.

Making certain you get the best of a trade is not as important to true leaders as ensuring that they helped their chances to win by making the trade. True leaders will give up a great fantasy tight end in week two, for example – if they’re stacked with two tight ends – in order to fill a running back void in the twelfth week of the season. Their decisions are made with the goal in mind – and they always focus on the goal.

The Playoffs

All good fantasy leagues have a playoff. Generally, these playoffs occur during the last few weeks of the regular NFL season. Great fantasy players manage their rosters for playoff success throughout the season.

Why can’t you just stick with the great players that got you to the playoffs? Sometimes, you can. More often than not, NFL teams will rest great players if they’ve locked up a playoff spot. Additionally, NFL coaches use late season games to test some of their bench players – hopeful that these players will be useful in the NFL playoffs. Fantasy football leaders might mix in some second-stringers to aid their march through the fantasy playoffs.

The strategic and tactical maneuvers employed by great leaders during the final few weeks of the fantasy season are sometimes beautiful. You can tell in the first week of fantasy playoffs who the strategic thinkers are and who will go home without a trophy. Leaders always cash in their fantasy leagues… and TheManager always cashes!

Lessons On Pride From Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers

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Pride, Leadership, and The Green Bay Packers

Excuse the abridgement, but Proverbs 16:18 said it best: Pride goes before a fall.

The leadership lessons we’ve gleaned so far from the pre-season struggles between Brett Lorenzo Favre (hereafter “Cuatro”) and the Green Bay Packers have been plentiful. (To read an earlier lesson from these two juggernauts of leadership, follow this link.)

Among other things, we learned that the Packers did a poor job of externally communicating their quarterback intentions early enough, and we learned that people we once thought were selfless leaders (like Cuatro) are really just selfish crybabies who chant the overused mantra “play me or trade me.”

Despite what you see on the cover of EA Sports’ Madden ‘09, Cuatro will not be playing for the Packers this year. The Packers, unwilling to guarantee Cuatro the starting quarterback role, traded the Hattiesburg, MS gunslinger to the J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets.

Good news for the Jets, decent news for Cuatro, and disastrous news for the Packers.

The Packers, allowing their pride to get in the way of a good business decision, must now win their division and at least two playoff games or they’ll look like fools. What’s more is that they stand to lose millions of dollars in jersey sales if Aaron Rodgers fails to perform in Cuatro-like fashion.

Based on their egotistical decision making, TheManager predicts that the prideful Packers will finish no better than 9-7 this season. While they may sneak into the playoffs with this record, it’s a far cry from the 13-3 that Cuatro attained for them last season.

Pride Kills

Actually, speed kills, but pride can still be extremely dangerous in business. Pride involves ego and ego is often the worst leadership characteristic a manager can bring. Just look at the management of the Green Bay Packers. Their inability to capitulate on their earlier stance of “Aaron Rodgers is our starting quarterback” required that they draw a line in the sand. This line became impossible to cross once Cuatro made it clear he would also remain strong in his stance of “play me or trade me.”

Cuatro won, the Packers blinked. They gave up their best chance of getting to the Super Bowl because changing their earlier stance would make them seem weak. Their pride was too great to allow them to make the best decision for their team. Pride killed the Green Bay Packers chances for Super Bowl greatness this season.




“When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way…”

The New York Jets, who had a dismal 4-12 record in 2007, are now expected by many sportswriters to contend for a wild card spot. Not so fast. Cuatro is a no-doubt, first ballot Hall-of-Famer, but he is not about to improve the Jets’ record by the 6-7 games required to make the playoffs. TheManager predicts the Jets will finish no better than 8-8, and Cuatro will throw more interceptions than touchdowns. (Interestingly, they would probably have finished somewhere around 7-9 without Favre.)

While Cuatro uniquely understands the Packers offense, he will struggle to learn the Jets’ system before the fourth or fifth week of the season. And, while the Jets have a couple of pretty good receivers, Cuatro’s pride will be working overtime to prove to the world that he is still great – this will lead to some classic situations where Cuatro forces his passes and creates interceptions.

Cuatro may still be great, but his need to prove this to the world is going to be his undoing. If he had displayed real leadership and remained with the Packers –even if it meant he would have to earn the starting role – he would have been more comfortable in the position once Rodgers inevitably stumbled.

Pride is often a great trait to have as an employee, though it’s an equally terrible trait to have as a manager or a leader. Managers and businesses who make decisions based on ego or pride soon find themselves on the bottom looking up.

The Packers drew a line in the sand and they stuck to their guns – admirable if not for the fact that they tripped over their pride in the process. Cuatro, Brett Lorenzo Favre, let his pride cloud the fact that real leaders would put the team first and themselves second.

Both Cuatro and the Packers stand to lose in the end.




 

Why Your Best Salesman Will Fail as Sales Manager

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It seems odd that the best salespeople do not make the best sales managers. But that is, unfortunately, the truth.

 

Empirically speaking, this seems to be a function of “how” those salespeople became great. More often than not, truly great salespeople have some internal “it” that makes them great. They have trouble explaining the “it” to others, and more importantly, they cannot teach “it” to anyone. They just have “it.”

 

Look at the example of Ted Williams (the last man to bat over .400 in Major League Baseball). When Ted tried his hand at managing a ball team he failed – miserably. Why did he fail? Because he expected everyone to be as naturally gifted as he was. There are debates, but one of the traits that made Ted Williams such a great hitter was that he had extraordinary eyesight. He could see precisely where on the ball he hit each and every pitch. You can’t teach eyesight.

 

Likewise, a great salesperson cannot teach traits such as a high tolerance for rejection or the ability to read body language. Since they acquired these traits through nature and not nurture, they cannot easily transfer them to someone born with thin skin or a lack of social awareness.

 

The best sales managers, just like the best baseball managers, come from those who had to work very hard to get where they got. They were generally average or just above average performers, and they watched and learned from the greatest in their game. Because they had to teach themselves to sell (or play baseball), they are best equipped to teach others.