Coach Boz’s Blog

Over lunch today, I read an interesting story that talks about how former college football powers Florida State and Miami are both trying to recapture their dominance, and how both are doing it with player-led committees.  The idea is to get players to take responsbility and become an active part of the plan for success.  All sounds great.  But from my personal experience as a college player and a high school coach, it doesn’t seem to work.

When things get to the point where players are forming committees, there is an underlying message there, which is “our leadership is no longer relevant.”  I wish it wasn’t the case, but again, from 5 years of college ball and 13 years of coaching, it almost always seems to fall short of the goal.  Something — and it’s hard to put my finger on just what — but something has gone wrong with the leadership when things like this happen in a way that appears to be a REPLACEMENT FOR, not an COMPLIMENT TO, strong leadership from the top.

The strongest teams I’ve been on, coached, or played against, have had a combination of both, but in every case, it was FAR more tilted to the top-down leadership being the stronger pull of the two.  Within that framework of strong top-down leadership, it was a privilege to be allowed to form a smaller, sub-leadership team to help the cause.  That’s the “compliment to”.  But you never doubted the ultimate source of your teams strength.  Paradoxically, acknowledging that strength actually strengthened the individual players. 

This one has caused me a moment of pause to think about how (if) this concept applies to the business world.  Would be interested in any comments here, publically on the blog, or emailed to me privately.