One of the most persistent myths about great coaches — who
are, of course, interchangeable with great teachers and great leaders — is that
their primary job is to come up with Big Ideas. You know, those creative,
last-minute, improvised bursts of genius that change everything: the
revolutionary strategy, the brilliant 11th-hour gambit, the heart-lifting
pregame speech. This myth, born in Hollywood, is built on the governing idea of
the coach/teacher/leader as visionary artist — a special one who sees something
no one else can see. In other words, the coach as wizard.
It’s a tempting view — because from a distance, it seems to
be true enough. The problem is, when you look closely at great
coaches/teachers, they’re doing precisely the opposite. They’re not thinking
like wizards. They’re thinking like construction workers.
For a revealing glimpse into this mindset, check out the Belichick Breakdowns, a weekly video by the man currently
regarded as the greatest living NFL football coach, Bill Belichick of the New
England Patriots, who have just played in their fifth Super Bowl in 11 years.
In the series, Belichick analyses half a dozen or so key
plays from the previous game. The
remarkable thing is what he considers to be key plays — and what he doesn’t.
The coach doesn’t focus on the big moments we notice — he skips over all the
amazing athletic moves, the key turnovers, and pretty much anything that you
might remember from the game. Instead,
he focuses exclusively and obsessively on Little Things — the perfectly
executed block that turned a 3-yard run into a 5-yard run. The way a defensive
player sealed off an end that led to an incompletion. He focuses, time after
time, on small moments.
This is not an accident — this is, in fact, his
construction-worker mindset in action. This mindset focuses on three
qualities, which can be approached as questions. Think of these questions as
the filter in a great coach’s mind, governing his attention and action.
- 1) Is it Replicable? Is this a one-off fluke, or is it an action that can be applied in a variety of situations? Blocking technique matters on every single play. If Belichick were a guitar teacher, he wouldn’t care about that great solo — instead, he’d obsess about thumb position and finger angle, the stuff that matters on every single chord you play.
- 2) Is it Controllable? Is this something that has to do with effort, awareness and planning? If you watch the breakdowns, you’ll see how he makes heroes of players who pay attention, who anticipate, who get to the right spot at the right time. If Belichick were a high-school English teacher teaching Huckleberry Finn, he’d make heroes of the students who are first to spot the themes and connections in the text, because that’s about awareness and effort.
- 3) Is it Connective? Is
it related to a successful outcome? Belichick understands that every big
play is built on a scaffold of solid technique. So he focuses, like any
good construction worker would, on the foundational things that made
success possible. Each of those small moves (the perfectly executed block)
is in fact vital, because without it all the good luck (the big pass play)
never happens. If Belichick were a sales consultant, he’d focus on the
first ten seconds of the sales call — because without a warm emotional
connection, the sale would never happen.
It’s no accident that Belichick’s Super Bowl counterpart was
Tom Coughlin of the NY Giants, who’s cut of a similar construction-worker
cloth. If you watched this year’s Super Bowl you saw the Giants win with an
overtime field goal in wet conditions. It turns out that the Giants practiced
all week snapping and kicking wet balls — they soaked them in a water tank. It
probably seemed silly and small and obsessive at the time. But in fact, they
were building toward a win.
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