Perfection: the 17-0 1972 Dolphins |
The NFL Network
just did a great piece on Don Shula, the NFL's winningest coach with 347 wins, Don Shula on the 40th anniversary of the 1973 Super Bowl that capped off the 1972 perfect
season. One of the biggest thrills of my
coaching career was from my second year in 2002 when we played at St. Thomas
Aquinas and I went up in the booth and saw Don Shula and got to shake his
hand. Here are some of the notes from
Shula's book with Ken Blanchard, Everyone's a Coach: Five Business Secrets for High Performance Coaching
which I highly recommend. I haven't
looked at these notes in years, and I forgot how good the content was.
- When I took over the Dolphins in
1970, the press wanted to know what my three- or five-year plan was. I told them my plan was day-to-day.
- We had four workouts a day during
my first Dolphins training camp.
The players complained, but then stopped after we won a few
pre-season games. They attributed
the turnaround to the hard work they’d done. The things they complained the most
about, they later credited for the change in the football team.
- KB: Don made me realize that if
you’re going to compete today and be the best, you have to push yourself
and others—hard.
- If you allow sloppy practice and
don’t push your team to continually improve, sloppiness becomes a habit.
- The best way to continue to
improve is to practice hard all the time.
- Mean Joe Greene: “You have to
respect Coach Shula’s thirty years of excellence. That’s no accident. You’re a fool if you think so.”
- The five secrets of effective
coaching can be organized into a simple acronym: C.O.A.C.H.
- Conviction-Driven
- Effective leaders stand for
something
- Overlearning
- Effective leaders help their
teams achieve practice perfection
- Audible-Ready
- Effective leaders, and the
people and teams they coach, are ready to change their game plan when
the situation demands it.
- Consistency
- Effective leaders are
predictable in their response to performance
- Honesty-Based
- Effective Leaders have high
integrity and are clear and straightforward in their interactions with
others.
- Conviction-Driven
- My coaching beliefs in a nutshell
are these:
- Keep winning and losing in
perspective
- Lead by example
- Go for respect over popularity
- Value character as well as
ability
- Work hard but enjoy what you do
- “Without vision, the people perish.”
(Proverbs 29:18)
- Max DePree, on what the leader’s
role was in terms of vision: “You have to act like a third-grade
teacher. You have to repeat the
vision over and over again until people get it right.”
- You need to develop a clear
vision of perfection in your own mind.
Know what a perfect practice or weight workout should look
like. Go watch how the best teams
do it to know what it is supposed to look like.
- I’m not a real pleasant person
after losing a football game, but I’d be a lot worse if I didn’t realize
something far bigger than football exists.
- Norman Vincent Peale always
believed that faith leads to positive thinking and patience. When things aren’t going right, patience
is an energized belief that things will eventually go your way. As a result, you don’t give up and start
to cheat or lose control or begin to take uncalled-for risks to get the
results you want right now. While
Don Shula does not consider himself a patient man, his faith does not let
adversity consume him or let his ego take over.
- “Success is not forever, and
failure isn’t fatal.”—Don Shula’s favorite saying
- You just can’t afford to let
yourself become overconfident through victory or consumed by failure. It tends to divert attention from the
business at hand—preparing for the next game.
- One of the marks of real success
in life is to believe that there’s a reason for everything. We can’t control every event, but we can
control our response to it. We need
to transform bad events into opportunities to learn.
- Dean Smith: “If you make every
game a life-and-death proposition…you’ll be dead a lot.”
- Respect comes from players
recognizing that your actions are motivated not by your ego, but by your
desire to have them be the best.
Players don’t have to like you to respect you. If what you’re after is being liked,
that’s going to dictate how hard you’ll push. As soon as that happens, there goes your
effectiveness and your respect.
- As long as you have credibility,
you have leadership.
- If ever you make a mistake or
don’t make the right call, and you don’t acknowledge that it was your
mistake, that’ll eat away at your credibility.
- Some coaches are described as
player’s coaches, they want their team to love them. Don doesn’t care if they like him. That is not his job. His concern is that players be their
best.
- If you worry too much about being
liked, you might back off from decisions that would push people to be
their best.
- I don’t know any other way, but
to lead by example. My example is
in things like my high standards of performance, my attention to detail,
and—above all—how hard I work. In
these respects, I never ask my players to do more than I am willing to do.
- One of the critical leadership
issues in our country today is lack of respect and credibility. The rule is, “Don’t ask people to do
what you’re unwilling to do.”
- If you miss your assignment and
hurt your team, you can’t ask to do it over. In life and in football, you don’t get
two chances.
- Overlearning
- The essence of coaching is the
attention to details and the monitoring of results. This is what Shula calls
overlearning. His overlearning
system is:
1. To
limit the number of goals and things players work on,
2. Eliminating
players’ practice errors,
3. Making
players master assignments,
4. Continuous
improvement.
- Don Shula believes in practice
perfection. Perfection only happens
when the mechanics are automatic, so I insist on overlearning. Overlearning means that the players are
so well-prepared that they thrive on pressure. They have the skill and confidence to
make the big play.
- A blown play is caused by a
player thinking too hard about what he was supposed to do. He’s still wondering, when he should
just react. The players must
operate on autopilot. Overlearning
lets your players operate on autopilot.
- Goal setting is overrated. What’s often more important than these
goals is the follow-up—the attention to detail, demand for practice
perfection, and all the things that separate the teams that win from the
teams that don’t.
- It seems the American way is to
set goals, file them away, and then look back at them months later and
wonder why they didn’t get accomplished.
- Goals begin the accomplishment
process. But it’s the
coaching—observing and monitoring, day in and day out—that makes the
critical difference.
- “The destination is marvelous,
but the real joy is the journey.”—Bob Small
- “Football is a game of
errors. The team that makes the
fewest errors in a game usually wins.”—Paul Brown
- Our goal each and every week as
we prepare to play the next opponent is to cut down on practice
errors. Affirming and redirecting
is where we outstrip the competition.
I think every mistake should be noticed and corrected on the spot. There’s no such thing as a small error
or flaw that can be overlooked.
- An event isn’t over until after
you’ve learned from it. People in
organizations today should develop a fascination with what doesn’t work.
- KB: My five-step plan for
coaching people is:
1. Tell
people what you want them to do
2. Show
them what good performance looks like
3. Let
them do it
4. Observe
their performance
5. Praise
progress and/or redirect
- Step 4 is the most important: to
observe is to catch them doing things right, or redirect their efforts.
- The Miami Herald’s Dave Barry
once labeled this as a nightmare scenario: You’re in the express checkout
lane, limit ten items. You have
eleven items. Running the cash
register is Don Shula.
- Audible-Ready
- Audibles are well thought out and
choreographed ahead of time. Shula
is always asking, “What if…?” so that he is prepared for any contingency.
- Have a gameplan of what your
back-up QB can do.
- “Shula listens to advice, then
makes a decision and moves forward to implement it, without looking
back. The coaches who burn
themselves out are the ones who are always second-guessing themselves. The players respect a coach who’s not
wishy-washy.”—Joe Greene
- Shula has always been able to adjust well because the moment when the need arose was not the first time he’d thought about it.
Consistency
- If performance is going well,
Shula is ready to praise. If the
team or a player isn’t living up to his high expectations, he’s ready to
redirect or reprimand. Shula
behaves the same way in similar circumstances. It’s not the mood he’s in but people’s
performance that dictates his response.
- If you are consistent, your team
will soon learn what your standards are and perform accordingly.
- Correcting and redirecting
performance is strategically important— it’s where we outstrip the
competition. Some coaches will let
little things go. Right there is
where the difference is made. It
doesn’t matter how many times we’ve done it or how late it is or how tired
the players are. We’ll do it until
we get it right.
- No matter what the reason, you
can’t let poor performance go unnoticed—even from a superstar. The same goes for good performance. Never let your mood determine how you
respond to a person.
- There are four kinds of
consequences that can follow a person’s performance:
1. A
positive consequence- if praise is given for a correct
action, the person is likely to repeat the action.
2. Redirection-
if performance is stopped and the correct procedure is shown, the person is
likely to repeat the correct procedure.
3. A
negative consequence- if a reprimand or punishment is
given for an incorrect action, the person is likely to avoid repeating the
incorrect action.
4. No
response- nothing is said or done following the
action. This is the worst response. Good actions that receive no recognition are
likely to be discarded, and bad actions will continue unchanged.
- 25 percent of what impacts performance
comes from setting goals, and 75 percent comes from what happens after
goals are set.
- One thing I never want to be
accused of is not noticing.
- In an organization, the most
frequent response that employees receive about their performance is no response.
- “The key to developing people is
to catch them doing something right.”—Ken Blanchard
- I like to recognize our players
in front of their peers. I have the
entire team view the game film that focuses on the special teams. It makes the special teams players feel
they are an important part of the team when a star like Dan Marino says,
“Hey, that was a great hit!”
- When our staff is teaching
something new in training camp, we give the players a lot of support and
are more patient. Later, when the
season starts, we expect more; therefore we praise less.
- KB: “People often ask me, ‘What
is the one most significant thing you’ve learned about managing and
motivating others? I tell them
that, without question, it’s the concept of catching people doing
something right.’”
- Managers often think that the way
to motivate associates is with money and promotions. The highest incentives found, in study
after study, had to do with praise and recognition.
- If I see somebody doing something
casually that I don’t think should be done casually, I don’t hesitate to
correct it on the spot. I can’t let
this creep into my football.
- When I get upset with a player or
the team, it is always focused on performance. Respect for my players is a given.
- I try to fit my feedback to a
player’s personality. Bob Griese
was a very quiet, thoughtful person.
He did not respond well to emotional reprimands. It was better to take him aside and talk
to him quietly and in private. Dan
Marino is an emotional player and has to be treated in a completely
different way.
- Redirecting is the way to correct
a mistake when an individual or team has not yet learned to do what you
want them to do. It is incorrect to
punish when someone is learning something.
When a learner makes a mistake, be sure the person knows that the
behavior was incorrect, but take the blame upon yourself (“Maybe I didn’t
make it clear enough”) and go back and give redirection.
- A reprimand is an example of a
negative consequence. Use a
reprimand only when an individual or team has already proven that they can
do it, but they aren’t doing it correctly now. Use a reprimand when the problem is a
lack of effort.
- After delivering a reprimand, it’s important for people to understand that you still value them. Make sure they know that you are upset because you expect more from him (“You’re better than that!).
5. Honesty-Based
- Effective leaders are clear and
straightforward in their interactions with others.
- “I had a tough decision to make
before the 1972 Super Bowl of whether to start Earl Morrall or Bob Griese,
who had just come back from injury.
I chose to start Griese and had to tell Morrall. Softening a blow is not one of my
gifts. I approached things in a
straightforward manner—I sat down and looked him in the eye and said,
‘This is what I think. You may not
agree with it. But this is the way
I feel, and this is why I am doing it.
I know it’s tough to swallow, but I just want you to try to
understand what I’m thinking and what my purpose is.’” The decision hurt Morrall, but he
appreciated the way I handled it.
- In a competitive environment,
ethical considerations are often the first to be abandoned. The reason this doesn’t work is that the
number characteristic people are looking for in a leader is
integrity. Integrity is the only
way to be successful in the long-term.
- Dealing with others in a
leadership role will test your character, especially if your role is a
visible one. You should expect the
pressures and be ready for them.
- There is often a big gap or
difference between what managers say they stand for and how they actually
treat people. Gaps are also a
problem in our personal lives. We
say our families and our health are important, but we don’t invest enough
time into our families and exercising as we should. All of us must find ways of bridging the
gaps between what we say and what we do.
- Feedback is the breakfast of
champions, but it can only be given effectively in an environment where
people aren’t uptight and feel like they always have to defend
themselves. Humor can help to keep
the environment from being too tense so feedback can be effective.
- The real difference in coaching
is not about talent. Or personality. Or pride. Or ambition. It’s about you believing in
someone. And then doing whatever it
takes to help that person be his or her very best.
Also, tremendous article on Shula from MMQB's Jenny Vrentas here.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.