During the ensuing fourteen years, the San Francisco 49ers won five Super Bowls. It happened only because at the moment of deepest despair I had the strength to stand and confront the future instead of wallowing in the past. Many can’t summon the strength; they can’t get up; their fight is over. Victory goes to another, a stronger competitor.
Competition at the highest level in sports or business produces gut-ripping setbacks. When you’re fighting for your survival professionally, struggling when virtually no one else knows or cares, and there’s nobody to bail you out, that’s when you might remind yourself of my own dark night of despair.
When you stand and overcome a significant setback, you’ll find an increasing inner confidence and self-assurance that has been created by conquering defeat. Absorbing and overcoming this kind of punishment engenders a sober, steely toughness that results in a hardened sense of independence and a personal belief that you can take on anything, survive and win.
The competitor who won’t go away, who won’t stay down, has one of the most formidable competitive advantages of all. When the worst happens, as it did to me, I was helped by knowing what it took to be that kind of competitor—to not go away, to get up and fight back.
The Miami game was not the last time I faced a grim situation as head coach, but when downturns occurred during the upcoming years, I tried to adhere to some simple dos and don’ts for mental and emotional equilibrium in my personal and professional life; nothing profound, just a few plain and uncomplicated reminders that helped me manage things mentally and stay afloat:
MY FIVE DOS FOR GETTING BACK INTO THE GAME:
1.
Do expect defeat.
It’s a given when the stakes are high and the competition is working ferociously to beat you. If you’re surprised when it happens, you’re dreaming; dreamers don’t last long.
2.
Do force yourself to stop looking backward and dwelling on the professional “train wreck” you have just been in.
It’s mental quicksand.
3.
Do allow yourself appropriate recovery—grieving—time.
You’ve been knocked senseless; give yourself a little time to recuperate. A keyword here is “little.” Don’t let it drag on.
4.
Do tell yourself, “I am going to stand and fight again,” with the knowledge that often when things are at their worst you’re closer than you can imagine to success.
Our Super Bowl victory arrived less than sixteen months after my “train wreck” in Miami.
5.
Do begin planning for your next serious encounter.
The smallest steps—plans—move you forward on the road to recovery. Focus on the fix.
MY FIVE DON’TS:
1. Don’t ask, “Why me?”
2. Don’t expect sympathy.
3. Don’t bellyache.
4. Don’t
keep
accepting condolences.
5. Don’t blame others.
My Standard of Performance: High Requirements for Actions and Attitudes
People asked me over the years, “Bill, when you became head coach and general manager of the 49ers, did you have a timetable for winning the Super Bowl?” My answer is succinct: “No.”
Things were in such bad shape when I arrived that talk of a Super Bowl championship for San Francisco would have sounded delusional; people would have thought I was crazy. (In fact, some did think I was crazy for leaving a job at Stanford University, where I had been comfortably ensconced as head coach of a team that had just won two consecutive postseason bowl games—the Bluebonnet Bowl and the Sun Bowl. Additionally, I felt very much at home in the academic environment at Stanford.)
In the two years before I joined San Francisco, my predecessor as 49ers general manager, Joe Thomas, had basically gutted the entire 49er organization, forcing out head coach Monte Clark, whose 8-6 record had been the 49ers’ first winning season in four years; hiring and firing three head coaches in twelve months; impetuously and vindictively firing—humiliating—players in front of the team; trading away or releasing quality talent, including quarterback Jim Plunkett to the Oakland Raiders, whom he would soon take to two Super Bowl championships; and removing all “success” memorabilia from previous years (including trophies for three divisional championships, banners, plaques, game programs, photographs of teams, and even MVP awards).
Perhaps the highlight of Thomas’s mismanagement was his acquisition of O. J. Simpson from the Buffalo Bills when the superstar was at the end of his career—overweight, arthritic, and out of gas. Thomas had concluded that Simpson would attract fans simply because he was a local kid from San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood.
Fans thought otherwise and decided that seeing Simpson sitting bored on the bench with a bag of ice on his knee was not worth the price of admission. The cost to the organization was extreme: Thomas gave Buffalo draft picks that included first-, second- (two of them), third-, and fourth-round choices over three years and appeared to have mortgaged away the future of the franchise. All of the above was part of his plan to start a “new era of 49er football.” It certainly was.
What remained was a demoralized, chaotic, and near-mutinous organizational culture of failure that was epitomized by a team that produced a 2-14 record the year prior to my arrival (and was even worse than that record suggests). One writer declared that the San Francisco 49ers were the worst franchise in all of professional sports. Not just football—
all
professional sports.
Joe Thomas was summarily fired; I was hired.
That’s what I faced on my first day of work—an organization in turmoil; a team whose roster of talent was paper-thin and tattered; a future that seemed dismal, in part because in spite of that 2-14 season the year before I arrived, I didn’t even have a first-round draft pick.
Emblematic of the organizational dysfunction were the organization’s substandard headquarters and training facility. There wasn’t enough space for a regulation-size football field, so the team used two “semifields” in Redwood City, California. The weight room was sparsely furnished with rusting weights, the showers ran cold if somebody flushed a toilet, and our offices were worn, sparse, and cramped.
Consequently, I approached building the 49er organization with an agenda that didn’t include a timetable for a championship or even a winning season. Instead, I arrived with an urgent timetable for installing an agenda of specific behavioral norms—actions and attitudes—that applied to every single person on our payroll.
To put it bluntly, I would teach each person in the organization what to do and how to think. The short-term results would contribute both symbolically and functionally to a new and productive self-image and environment and become the foundation upon which we could launch our longer-term goal, namely, the resurrection of a football franchise.
For me to do this I had to have autonomy, the power to quickly make decisions in all relevant areas. Team owner Eddie DeBartolo understood this and named me general manager soon after I became head coach. Equally important, he let everyone in the organization know that I was the boss and that he would not undercut my authority. Without this power and support my task would have been virtually impossible given the abysmal situation.
While the media eventually and inappropriately labeled me “the Genius,” the 49ers’ subsequent turnaround—from a 2-14 record my first season to Super Bowl champions twenty-four months later (becoming the first and only team in NFL history to go from the worst to the best in two seasons), from organizational chaos to praise from the
Harvard Business Review
for organizational excellence—was due in large part to many quantifiable, even nuts-and-bolts, skills available to you or anyone with drive and intelligence.
There was innovation and expertise, yes; force of will, certainly; and occasional good fortune, of course. But my organizational and managerial starting point was something else. I came to the San Francisco 49ers with an overriding priority and specific goal—to implement what I call the Standard of Performance. It was a way of doing things, a leadership philosophy that has as much to do with core values, principles, and ideals as with blocking, tackling, and passing; more to do with the mental than with the physical. While I prized preparation, planning, precision, and poise, I also knew that organizational ethics were crucial to ultimate and ongoing success.
It began with this fundamental leadership assertion: Regardless of your specific job, it is vital to our team that you do that job at the highest possible level in
all
its various aspects, both mental and physical (i.e., good talent with bad attitude equals bad talent).
An Organization Has a Conscience
Beyond the mechanical elements of doing jobs correctly, I assisted coaches, players, staff, and others in assimilating the values within my Standard of Performance, including what I believed regarding personal accountability among the organization and its personnel. This is consistent with my conviction that an organization is not just a tool like a shovel, but an organic entity that has a code of conduct, a set of applied principles that go beyond a company mission statement that’s tacked on the wall and forgotten. In fact, we had no mission statement on the wall. My mission statement was implanted in the minds of our people through teaching.
Great teams in business, in sports, or elsewhere have a conscience. At its best, an organization—your team—bespeaks values and a way of doing things that emanate from a source; that source is you—the leader. Thus, the dictates of your personal beliefs should ultimately become characteristics of your team.
You must know what needs to be done and possess the capabilities and conviction to get it done. Several factors affect this, but none is more important than the dictates of your own personal beliefs. Collectively, they comprise your philosophy. A philosophy is the aggregate of your attitudes toward fundamental matters and is derived from a process of consciously thinking about critical issues and developing rational reasons for holding one particular belief or position rather than another.
Many things shape your philosophy, including your background, experiences, work environment, education, aspirations, and more. By adhering to your philosophical tenets you are provided with a systematic, yet practical, method of deciding what to do in a particular situation.
It is a conceptual blueprint for action; that is, a perception of
what
should be done,
when
it should be done, and
why
it should be done. Your philosophy is the single most important navigational point on your leadership compass.
My Standard of Performance—the values and beliefs within it—guided everything I did in my work at San Francisco and are defined as follows: Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement; demonstrate respect for each person in the organization and the work he or she does; be deeply committed to learning and teaching, which means increasing my own expertise; be fair; demonstrate character; honor the direct connection between details and improvement, and relentlessly seek the latter; show self-control, especially where it counts most—under pressure; demonstrate and prize loyalty; use positive language and have a positive attitude; take pride in my effort as an entity
separate
from the result of that effort; be willing to go the extra distance for the organization; deal appropriately with victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation (don’t get crazy with victory nor dysfunctional with loss); promote internal communication that is both open and substantive (especially under stress); seek poise in myself and those I lead; put the team’s welfare and priorities ahead of my own; maintain an ongoing level of concentration and focus that is abnormally high; and make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark.
These are also the basic characteristics of attitude and action—the new organizational ethos—I tried to teach our team, to put into our DNA. Of course, for this to happen the person in charge—whether a head coach, CEO, manager, or assembly-line foreman—must exhibit the principles, code of conduct, and behavior he or she is asking others to emulate. I believe I did this.
Make no mistake about it; my first commitment was to nurture an organizational conscience with this very high internal code of ethics, ideals, and attitudes. Concurrently, I was committed to identifying and hiring the best people I could find and teaching them what I deemed necessary to achieve the required levels of performance.
If you were lucky enough to receive a 49er paycheck, it meant you were part of an organization that had high expectations of itself and of you, whether you were a superstar or a secretary, manager or maintenance man, athlete, executive, or head coach. Those expectations, of course, went beyond ethics and attitude to specific performance standards and actions.
Specifics of My New Standards
For returning players, veterans acquired in trades, and rookies such as Notre Dame’s Joe Montana and Clemson University receiver Dwight Clark, my Standard of Performance required not only maximum mental and physical effort, sacrifice, and commitment but also attention to such seemingly incidental requirements as “no shirttails out,” “positive attitude,” “promptness,” “good sportsmanship (no strutting, no posturing, no cheap shots),” “never sit down while on the practice field,” “no tank tops in the dining area,” “control of profanity,” “no fighting,” “treat fans with respect and exhibit a professional demeanor,” and many more, including “no smoking on premises,” which applied to all of us. Much of this may seem trivial to you, but it adds up and changes the environment.
For example, how the players dressed at practice and the appearance they gave to others when taking the field was very important to me. I wanted our football team to look truly professional—impeccable. Thus, shirttails tucked in, socks up tight, and more were requirements.