Leadership Styles of the SEC: Mark Richt

Last week, we learned about leadership lessons from Steve Jobs and this week we’ll look at UGA Head Football Coach Mark Richt.  (For those who are in college football withdrawal, I can’t promise this will help but we can always try).  Much attention was given to the outcomes his team produces but do you ever wonder about the leadership style that lead to those outcomes? 

Profiles of any coach demonstrate that they all have the same goal – winning – and each has a multi-faceted approach to getting there, but for Mark Richt, what’s important is how his actions match his values.  Coach Richt wants to win and works hard to achieve that, but he believes he’s failed if he gets the journey to that goal wrong.  As he told Dan Wetzel, “’Do I want to win a national championship…Sure I do. I want to win. Everybody who has ever won a national championship wanted to win the national championship…But it is about a process. Doing things right, fundamentally, schematically and football-wise. But hopefully [it's also about doing it] morally, within the rules of the game, educating young men, educating them academically, educating them about life, helping them understand right and wrong, how to be a good husband, how to be a good father, how to function in this society properly. I'm in the business of doing that. And you do that well for long enough maybe you have a chance to win a national championship. I want to win,’ he reiterated, ‘but it's all important to me.’"

Wetzel asked him: “Does that balance help…when Georgia has fallen short?” and Richt replied: "’Fallen short of what? If we're doing the best we can every day and we're doing it in a first-class manner so that when I go home at night I can lay my head on the pillow and God would be pleased with the decisions I made, how I treated players and the coaches, the media, my wife and kids, I'm OK with that.’"

It’s easy to see that Coach Richt’s focus is on his values, which determine his priorities.  Although he clearly understands the need to win, his values define his priorities and how he measures success. That was reiterated last fall in this press conference.  He was largely applauded for pushing back against an insulting question but a close listen reveals he was making his thoughts clear when a reporter asked about things that weren’t important.  Like Steve Jobs, he is focused on what’s important and doesn’t waste time addressing every single detractor or distraction. 

As a leader, you have goals but how important is the process for achieving those goals?  What values or priorities guide you?  What do you do when your professional priorities don’t match those of other key stakeholders?  How have your priorities altered how you define success and failure?  

Leadership Lessons from Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs revolutionized several industries and was a leader who accomplished amazing things.  It is natural that many want to study him to glean lessons and, while some elements of his personal style couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be imitated by most aspiring leaders, his biographer, Walter Isaacson, recently published a piece that I’ve been thinking about all week.  There are several leadership insights in the article that apply across organizational types.  The entire article is worth a look and can be found here. 

Focus and Simplicity

Apple’s products are noted for their beauty and simplicity of design.  This was a direct result of Jobs’ Zen training and his strong belief in focusing on what really matters.  Isaacson relates a story of Jobs coming back to Apple after being ousted and sitting through weeks of meetings about the dozens of products Apple was making.  One day he stopped the meeting, went to a white board, and drew a two by two grid.  He told the team that they would be making four great products, one each for consumer and pro, desktop and portable.  All other products were eliminated.  He also pushed his designers to make everything as simple as possible, even famously eliminating the on/off button on the iPod.  That stringent focus and simple design aesthetic birthed a revolution.

Everyone knows they should be the best they can be but that is impossible if you are running in fifty directions.  Focus on the unique thing your organization provides to your community and do it extremely well.

Empathy and Accountability

Jobs was not famous for his empathy with his staff.  His empathy with the people buying Apple’s products, however, was immense and he used it to fuel his demand that his teams create the best products and experiences possible.  He didn’t rely on focus groups but he cared deeply about what people needed and wanted from Apple products.  He understood their frustrations with competitors’ products and remedied those frustrations in Apple’s.  If you work for a company, the lesson is obvious, but what if you work at a non-profit or in education?  The lesson is the same:  Use empathy to understand your constituency – students, parents, beneficiaries – and their needs on an intimate level and understand how those needs aren’t being met well enough by others in your field.   Become so in tune with them that you can, as Jobs would say, “read what’s not on the page.”

Empathy is a key skill but should not, in Jobs’ belief system, be misplaced.  Jobs held others to very high standards and was direct in how he communicated that.  He believed that mediocre people stuck around in an organization when their managers were too timid to address performance problems – he called this “the bozo explosion” -- and this emphasis on excellence was a key to Apple’s success.  The details of Jobs’ particular style would not work in most organizations but direct communication, timely feedback and holding teams (including yourself) to high standards are critical to success and can be practiced without Jobs’ abrasive stylistic specifics. 

Priorities

A final lesson is priorities.  Apple went downhill after Jobs was ousted in the 1980s because more traditional, sales-oriented approaches were adopted at the cost of the innovative, intuitive products Jobs had initiated.  When Jobs returned, he put the focus relentlessly back on what was truly important – the product and the experience of users – and the profits followed.  All organizations are subject to this problem. Budgets will always be important.  They, after all, make the good work we are doing possible.  But a singular focus on profits, or prestige, or other less important factors takes the focus away from the group you serve, and will always lead to mediocrity.

What could be simplified in your own work?  How well do you really know your constituency or customers?  What is your vision for creating new ways to engage or serve them?  What is really important about what you do and how can you focus on it more clearly?

What's Your Word?

Global advertising powerhouse Saatchi and Saatchi has a creative philosophy that permeates everything they do:  “Brutal simplicity of thought.”  It means that simple ideas have a greater impact.  They are understood faster and retained longer.  Saatchi and Saatchi requires all their ad concepts to be distilled to their essence, ideally to one or two words.  Think of President Obama’s latest campaign slogan – Forward – or the classic Volkswagen ads – Think small – and you can see the power of simplicity to help an idea or image communicate something important about a product, a candidate, or an idea. 

You may not be creating ads or campaigns, but all leaders, regardless of their field, have to communicate ideas and persuade others.  Simplifying ideas to their most basic essence is critical to helping your ideas cut through the information clutter and making them “stick” in people’s minds.

This simplicity concept can also be powerful as you think about who you are as a leader and what you want others to associate with you.  What one word do you want others to immediately think of when they think of you? 

Think about it for a minute and post it below.  Don’t over think it.  It’s probably the first or second word that comes to mind when you ask yourself this question. 

Mine is truth.  What’s yours?  

Developing Women Leaders

This week, I want to highlight an insightful piece about how to develop women leaders.  It’s a good guide for those who wish to encourage more women in leadership and for women who aspire to leadership positions. 

The author, Lucy Marcus, recommends five essentials:

1. Developing basic skills, like negotiating and public speaking.
2. International travel, not just because we live in a global world, but because of the impact of experiencing other cultures and new ways of thinking.
3. Mentoring, across all stages of career from student days to the highest levels.
4. Role models, because they foster ideas about what we want to be and how we want to get there.
5. Starting early, by helping girls to think of themselves as leaders and encouraging them to aspire to whatever they want to do.  It is just as important for boys to believe this about women as it is for girls.

I highly recommend reading the entire piece, which provides more detail and can be found here.