When Buy-in is the Best Buy

Lessons from John Harbaugh

Last month in my profile of The Heart of Business, an excellent new book by former CEO of Best Buy Hubert Joly, I talked about how the capacity to listen and even defer to those on the front line is essential to successful leadership.

A deeply perceptive and fascinating article on the topic appeared in the December 23rd edition of Washington Post. It was not from the business section, however. It was written by Sally Jenkins, a sports journalist who has as much to say about leadership as anyone writing about the topic and who, in my opinion, has taken sports commentary to the next level. 

In her article, Jenkins comes to the following conclusion about NFL coaching styles:  

“So many coaches misapprehend the nature of real authority. The fact is, a team can destroy any leader. People have to grant you their cooperation for any idea to work, no matter how brilliant you are, and if they distrust your intentions, if they find you unworthy or not genuine, they will frag you, as Urban Meyer discovered.” (Urban Meyer is the former Jacksonville Jaguars coach, a famously blustery, trash-talking alpha male, who was fired or in the words of Hall of Fame Head Coach Jimmy Johnson of the Dallas Cowboys, “backstabbed” because “he didn’t have his people.”)

Having your people— having their backs, building trust among your team— it turns out, is the true basis of good leadership, not being a single-minded visionary, having a tyrannical grip on power or simply having guts. 

As Jenkins notes, soft-spoken Baltimore Ravens’ coach John Harbaugh deferred to his team in the closing minutes of what turned out to be a heart-breaking one-point loss to the Green Bay Packers on December 19th: 

 “‘We want to kick it or go for it? What do you all think?’ he asked undrafted backup quarterback Tyler Huntley and the rest of that hard-working crew. Did they want to play for the win or for overtime, go for two or kick the extra point?”

In fact, Harbaugh routinely gets his team’s buy-in, collaborating with his players and even at crucial moments like the one above, deferring to the collective opinion. In doing so, he quietly, efficiently and consistently inspires both the cohesion and the extra ounce of motivational energy from his players that allow the team to perform at its highest level, excelling even when they lose, as they did that day. 

Jenkins further points out that tight end Mark Andrews, after the game, “went out of his way to publicly support {Harbaugh’s} call, which he knew was sure to be controversial in the press and social media. ‘That was the decision,’ Andrews said. ‘Anyone who second-guesses that is wrong.’” 

In fact, as both Hubert Joly and John Harbaugh have shown, an organization’s ability to thrive and perform depends more on its team than on any single leader. It is teams that win games and teams that develop a market for their performance (in sports) or a market for their products and services (in the business world). When leaders listen to the front line, they are more likely to make decisions that lead to continual, often process-based, incremental improvements that offer marginal advantage in a fiercely competitive environment: 

The result is a true win-win-- even when they lose.