What Bill Walsh Can Teach You About Coaching And Recruiting – Part 3

Sunday, January 31, 2010

How did you do on your assignment from last week? I know, when it comes to reengineering your business, it is probably not something you can do over a weekend. If you need to catch-up, take some time to read the last two (1 and 2) discussions.

Since it is Super Bowl week, I thought I would spend a little more time talking about a guy who knew quite a bit about winning Super Bowls—Bill Walsh. We learned last week that Walsh decided to question (and later abandon) the status quo for NFL football teams. He did this primarily out of necessity because he didn’t have the resources to play the game like everyone else.

Once he had some initial success with the Cincinnati Bengals, he went on to prove out his theories with three more teams over the next 15 years. Here’s a quick summary:

Walsh left the Bengals in 1976 to become the offensive coordinator of the San Diego Chargers. With the Chargers, Walsh inherited a struggling quarterback named Dan Fouts. Inside of Walsh’s passing system, Fouts led the NFL in completion percentage the next year. Fouts went on to become one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history.

In 1977, Walsh became the Head Football Coach at Stanford University. He only coached Stanford for two years, but experienced quick success, especially at the quarterback position. In 1977, Stanford quarterback, Guy Benjamin, led the nation in passing and won the Sammy Baugh Award given to the nation’s best passer. One might think that was just good luck (i.e. Walsh showed up at the right time), until you notice that in 1978 Benjamin’s replacement, Steve Dils, repeated his accomplishments!

In 1979, Walsh was finally awarded an NFL Head Coaching job—his ultimate goal. However, the team he inherited, the San Francisco 49ers, had the League’s worst record and the League’s lowest payroll. He also had, by most statistical measures, the NFL’s worst quarterback—Steve Deberg. In the previous year, Deberg had a 45.2 pass completion percentage and 22 interceptions.

As usual, quarterbacks seemed to blossom in Walsh’s offensive system–Deberg’s transformation was particularly remarkable. The next year, Deberg completed more passes than anyone in NFL history. His interception percentage dropped by 50% and his completion percentage rose to 60%.

As if almost to prove his point, Walsh fired Deberg the next year and brought in a new college recruit to run the 49er offense. His choice was a third round draft pick from Notre Dame that most people said was too small and had too weak of an arm to play in the NFL. His name was Joe Montana.

As many of you know, Joe Montana went on to become one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. He was the starting quarterback in four Super Bowls in the 1980s, and his team won all four. At this point, you have to start wondering—was he really that good, or did he just play inside a system that allowed him to experience remarkable success?

Michael Lewis, in his book The Blind Side, answers this question:

“How good was [Montana] really? That’s hard to know, because his coach held a magic wand, and every quarterback over whose head that wand passed instantly looked better than he’d ever been. When Joe Montana’s play became sloppy in the 1987 season, Walsh replaced him, temporarily, with Steve Young—whose sensational performance caused a lot of 49ers to wonder, and to feel guilt for wondering, if maybe Steve Young was even better than Joe Montana.”

Of course, Steve Young went on to become a Hall of Fame quarterback himself, but there is even more evidence that Walsh was probably the ultimate star. In 1986, when Joe Montana was injured, Jeff Kemp stepped in as his backup for ten games. In Walsh’s system, Kemp completed nearly 60% of his passes and averaged 7.77 yards per attempt, posting one of the highest passer ratings in the NFL. The same year, Kemp was eventually injured also. He was replaced by a quarterback named Mike Moroski who had only been with the team two weeks before he found himself in a starting role. Even Moroski completed 57.5% of his passes!

There are some who believe that Walsh changed the entire way that football was played professionally. In the late ‘70s, NFL teams passed the ball 42% of the time and ran the ball 58% of the time. By 1995, one year after Walsh retired from coaching; NFL teams passed 59% of the time and ran the ball 41% of the time.

What’s the lesson here? Not many of us are going to be as brilliant and as successful as Bill Walsh, but we can learn from his example. Walsh created a football system that many people (who happen to be quarterbacks) could be successful under. He gave up on trying to “find the best talent” and instead built the best system.

I talk to many business owners and first level managers who mistakenly believe that recruiting a large number of people will solve their problems. In the real estate industry particularly, this is the status quo. It takes a great deal of effort, expense, and focus to execute a high-volume recruiting effort. And yet, these efforts only produce a success percentage of about 15%.

What if some of this effort was redirected toward creating a sales system where 50% or more of the people who operate inside of it are successful? You’ll know you’ve developed such a system when, like Walsh, you can plug almost anyone into the position (who has a baseline set of capacities and competencies) and he/she is successful. This would be a major paradigm switch for the real estate industry. While you wouldn’t make it into the football Hall of Fame for developing such a system, you could change an industry and be remembered as a great innovator in your own right.

Editor’s Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you’re an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the “comments” link below.

What Bill Walsh Can Teach You About Coaching And Recruiting – Part 2

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Earlier this week, I discussed how Michael Lewis’ bestselling book, The Blind Side, tells the story of how Bill Walsh changed professional football by conceiving a superior “system” later termed the “West Coast Offense.” While I know many of our readers are probably not avid football fans, it’s worth learning a little about football to glean the important business and life lessons that Walsh’s story can teach us.

The topic we’re going to cover today concerns a principle that Walsh used to transform one of the worst performing teams of all time (The San Francisco 49ers) into three-time Super Bowl champions in the 1980s (you may need to read the previous article to understand today’s discussion).

Here is the principle: Bill Walsh questioned the status quo. When Walsh started coaching professional football in the late 1960s, football was primarily a running game. For each running attempt, a player typically gained 3.9 to 4.1 yards (depending on the statistical year considered), and had a 3% chance of fumbling the ball and turning it over to the opposing team.

Teams did pass the ball also, but at a much lower rate. Why? Because the average pass netted just slightly more yardage (4.9 yards on average) and resulted in an interception 6% of the time. Also, quarterbacks typically completed fewer than 50% of the passes.

The general strategy for football teams at that time was to run the ball until they got into a pinch and needed a bunch of yards for a first down. Then, they’d chuck the ball downfield 20 yards or more and hope for the best. Of course, the desired outcome (a completed pass) didn’t happen very often, and the undesired outcomes (incompletions and interceptions) were common.

Walsh first started questioning the status quo more from necessity than genius. In 1968, he took a job as the Offensive Coordinator for the Cincinnati Bengals—an expansion team that had “comically inadequate football players.” Without the talent and brute strength necessary to run the football, the Bengals had no choice but to turn to passing if they had any chance of winning.

But unfortunately, their passing game was not that hopeful either. Their quarterback, Virgil Carter, had his own challenges. “Carter wasn’t able to get the ball more than 20 yards downfield in any form other than a desperate wobble,” explains Lewis.

If you think about it, Walsh was facing the same situation that many of you are facing today. Many companies have teams of individuals who are simply not talented enough to get the job done. Your “players” are operating in sales systems that were designed to take advantage of some extraordinary strengths that only a few people possess.

For real estate companies in particular, the status quo has been to recruit large numbers of agents with the hope of finding a few that can attune themselves to the existing system and be successful. As you know, this is a tough road and it is filled with a lot of incompletions and interceptions. I’ve spoken to many owners and executives who are growing very weary of the status quo. Maybe you feel the same way.

What did Bill Walsh do to solve his problem? He built a better system. More specifically, he built a system that played to the strengths of the players that were available to him. While Virgil Carter could not throw the ball very far, he was accurate and quick. Walsh used his strengths to design pass plays that were short and depended on precision and timing rather than brute strength and superhuman abilities.

After implementing Walsh’s system, Virgil Carter, who had never completed more than half of his passes in a previous year, led the league in completion percentage (62.2%) and bumped his yard per attempt from 5.9 to 7.3 (remember, the league average was 4.9). In 1970, the Bengals went to the playoffs just two years after starting this process. In the playoffs, they put up a good fight against the Baltimore Colts in their final playoff game before the Colts went on to win the Super Bowl.

Here is the surprising part of this story: The next year, Virgil Carter was replaced by a little known quarterback from a division 3 college named Kenny Anderson. Walsh made his point loud and clear: It wasn’t the person in the quarterback position that created the successes, it was the superior nature of the system itself. Kenny Anderson went on to lead the NFL in total yards, completion percentage and yards per attempt (8.13) in 1974.

As business owners, it’s easy to fall victim to thinking that the business systems we have (or we’re given as the status quo from an industry that surrounds us) are the business systems we’re stuck with using. In this state, the only solution seems to be hiring bigger linemen and faster running backs.

Bill Walsh changed the status quo so that personnel factors played a diminishing role. He created a system so good that he could plug almost anyone (who happened to be a quarterback) into the system and it produced results. Take Bill Walsh’s lead..challenge the status quo and start to conceptualize your own system. Think about creating something that would keep you from playing to factors you can’t control.

This is a tough assignment, so don’t feel bad if the answers don’t come to you quickly. I’ll write more about Bill Walsh in my next article. There are few more strategies we can gain from him that may spur your thinking.

The Blind Side: What Bill Walsh Can Teach You About Coaching and Recruiting

Monday, January 25, 2010

Last Thanksgiving, The Blind Side was released in theaters. While the movie received lukewarm reviews from many critics, the public seemed to fall in love with it. By New Year’s Day, the movie had gross sales of over $200M…and it only took $29M to make. When a low-budget film produces this type of return, it demonstrates the compelling nature of the story that the movie told.

The movie is based on a book (by the same name) written by Michael Lewis. He is the same author that wrote Moneyball—a book that we wrote about last year in WorkPuzzle. While the book and the movie both do a great job of chronicling the life of Michael Oher, the book goes into much greater depth about the topic of professional football. Michael Lewis has a gift for boiling down the complexities of a sport into simple observations and statistics that open your eyes to the realities of why some teams win and others lose.

One of Lewis’ observations involves the impact that coaching legend Bill Walsh had on professional football. As an offensive coordinator for the Cincinnati Bengals in the early ‘70s, Walsh started to figure out how to build an offensive “system” around players who had average skills (as compared to other NFL players). Because “superstars” were not something that Walsh had at his disposal, the system itself had to compensate for his team’s lack of talent if he hoped to win.

And win he did. After leaving the Bengals and coaching Stanford to two winning seasons, Walsh took the position of head coach for the poorly performing (2 Wins / 14 losses ) San Francisco 49ers in 1979. By 1981, Walsh lead the 49ers to the first of three Super Bowl championships during his ten year tenure with the 49ers.

The “system” that Walsh built is now called the “West Coast Offense,” and it was so superior that it was eventually copied by every team in the NFL and landed Bill Walsh in the Football Hall of Fame. The system changed the nature of how football was played professionally by transforming how a team could gain an advantage by passing the football. I won’t go into all the details here (it took Lewis a whole chapter to chronicle the events and explain all the particulars), but there are some important business lessons we can learn from Walsh’s accomplishments.

In general, Walsh’s system was designed to take advantage of the possibility of near perfect execution. If a quarterback and a receiver were able to accomplish fairly simple tasks with near perfect timing, short pass plays were almost impossible to disrupt or curtail. This style of play did have one major weakness however—if the quarterback did not have enough time to perform his tasks (due to defenders harassing him during the pass rush), the plays would breakdown. The most effective way to rush the quarterback was from behind his field of vision so he couldn’t see the defender coming. This is called the quarterback’s “blind side.” Reliability protecting the blind side has translated into big business—it’s something a team will now pay millions of dollars to have reliably performed.

In my next article, I’ll outline some of the recruiting and coaching lessons that can be taken from Bill Walsh’s successes. I think you’ll find there are some important similarities to what you’re trying to achieve.

The Checklist Manifesto – A Surgeon’s Attempt to Keep You Alive as a Recruiter

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Did you know that over 80,000 people die each year in hospitals due to infections? Depending on how you define an accident, as many as 225,000 people die each year “accidently” in the United States while being treated by a physician. (The Journal Of The American Medical Association)

Compare these numbers to other forms of death, and it becomes apparent that one of the most dangerous things a person can do in the United States is step into a hospital! However, one of the safest things a person can do is take a trip on a commercial airplane. On average, only 200 people die each year while undergoing air transport.

A few years ago, an inquisitive surgeon named Atul Gawande noticed this differential and wondered if there was something a surgeon could learn from the airline industry to help save lives. His discovery was so simple that it almost seems ridiculous: a checklist saves lives no matter what industry you use it in.

A recent article in the Seattle Times tells the story:

“Commercial pilots have been using checklists for decades. Gawande traces this back to a fly-off at Wright Field, Ohio, in 1935, when the Army Air Force was choosing its new bomber. Boeing’s entry, the B-17, would later be built by the thousands, but on that first flight it took off, stalled, crashed and burned. The new airplane was complicated, and the pilot, who was highly experienced, had forgotten a routine step.

For pilots, checklists are part of the culture. For surgical teams they have not been. That began to change when a colleague of Gawande’s tried using a checklist to reduce infections when using a central venous catheter, a tube to deliver drugs to the bloodstream.

The original checklist: wash hands; clean patient’s skin with antiseptic; use sterile drapes; wear sterile mask, hat, gown and gloves; use a sterile dressing after inserting the line. These are all things every surgical team knows. After putting them in a checklist, the number of central-line infections in that hospital fell dramatically.

Then came the big study, the use of a surgical checklist in eight hospitals around the world. One was in rural Tanzania, in Africa. One was in the Kingdom of Jordan. One was the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. They were hugely different hospitals with much different rates of infection. Use of the checklist lowered infection rates significantly in all of them.”

This is a very counter-intuitive finding. You’d think that with all the training, equipment, procedures, and smart people involved in the process of conducting a surgery, the simple things would be covered. But, the opposite is true. It seems that failures in the mundane arenas of life have a way of derailing some of the most important things we try to accomplish. Something as simple as a checklist can have a profound effect on the end result.

If you think about it, this finding can be directly applied to recruiting. Many of us have been working in and around the recruiting process for many years. While that experience is valuable and necessary to perform at a high level, it can also be the very thing that trips us up. When we start to see circumstances that repeat themselves, it is human nature to get bored and start to skip steps. Before long results start to diminish and the cause is not obvious. We tend to want to concentrate on what we perceive to be the most significant issues (the condition of the market, the quality of the candidates, our company’s offerings compared to competitors, etc.) and assume we have the basics down. Dr. Gawande would say that’s a mistake.

Have you ever considered building a checklist for your recruiting process? The new year is a great time to take inventory of the processes you’re using to accomplish the most important functions in your business. At first, this will feel ridiculous, but as with surgery or commercial air transport, it can have a profound impact on your end result.

Take the time to build a list of 12 to 15 steps that you know work (i.e. best practices) in your recruiting process. Arrange them in a checklist format and follow the checklist for each candidate. Then, measure results on a month-by-month basis. If your results improve, then I guess it’s not just those airline “dummies” who need a checklist to be successful.

One of the questions Dr. Gawande often gets regarding his research is: If providing a checklist can improve results and (in his profession) save lives, then why has this not been done in the past, and why do surgeons still resist the concept? The answer is almost as simple as the concept of using a checklist–surgeons don’t want to use checklists because they are arrogant. Hopefully, this issue will not be the thing that trips you up…

Job Satisfaction: Up in the Air

Monday, January 18, 2010

Last week (1,2), I presented data which sadly reveals job satisfaction among Americans to be at an all time low, with a steady downward trend over the past 20 years.

I theorized that much of that decline isn’t so much a result of fewer interesting jobs, as it is the result of higher levels of emphasis upon individualism, and an increased focus on self-gratification…rather than on earning respect through contributions to something greater than oneself.

If you recall, I proposed two possible answers to the above problems: (1) Building a culture of standards, and (2) Having recruiters and managers of character.

Most recently, I focused on the importance of building a culture of standards and expectations, which will in turn attract the brightest and best candidates. Today, I’ll tackle the importance of having recruiters and managers of strong character.

I came across an insightful article by Peter Weddle that describes the vital importance of strong character, specifically with regard to recruiters. Weddle describes having seen the latest George Clooney movie that he feels serves as…

“an appropriate metaphor for post-bubble America… Called Up in the Air, it tells the story of a human resource professional who works for what might best be described as a LOO-a Lay Off Outsourcing firm. Clooney travels 10 million miles by plane doing the dirty work of firing employees companies no longer want or can afford.” (Weddle)

Without giving too much a way (I’ve seen it too), I can tell you that the storyline is subtly wrapped around the importance of character.

By the end of the movie, Clooney has succeeded in teaching a tech-savvy young go-getter “a thing or two about the human side of their work. More importantly, he personifies a value we often overlook in our efforts to improve performance: character matters most. Especially in recruiting.” (Weddle)

Do you recall the definition of culture I described in the last blog… “a specific set of beliefs and behaviors built on those beliefs?” This is very similar to Weddle’s discussion of the definition of character:

“The dictionary defines character as ‘The combination of qualities or features that distinguishes one person, group, or thing from another.’ While that may be accurate, I think it’s much too neutral. To me, character has a decidedly positive overtone. It is the combination of qualities or features that represent the best of a person or group.

The irony, of course, is that we spend countless hours attending recruitment conferences and training programs that teach us the best practices in our field, and that effort leaves us little or no time to focus on character. Yet, character is the secret sauce of best practices. The best practices work best in the hands of recruiters who are at their best as people. Implement the best practices with a recruiter whose character is deficient, and they may fill their reqs, but they will never recruit the best talent.”

Why? Because character operates like a magnet. It attracts those who have it and repels those who don’t. And the best talent are almost always people of character. They not only perform at their peak, they help others do so, as well. Or to put it another way, they focus on both doing things right and doing the right things.

The best talent have their pick of employers, and not surprisingly, they want to work with the best of their peers. While they may know a colleague or two in any given organization, they will often judge the character of its overall workforce by the character of its recruiters. A recruiter without character, therefore, can be an expert in social networking; they can make Twitter sing, they can write job postings even the most passive job seekers will read, but they cannot recruit top talent. Their nature actually pushes them away.

Happily, the converse is also true. Recruiters of character have a powerful advantage in the War for the Best Talent. They bring in top performers because they are top performers themselves, and because they have personal attributes that resonate with those individuals. They transform the recruiting experience from a transaction between strangers to an interaction between those who share a commitment to being their best.”

I couldn’t agree more. Combining managers of character with companies of standards will help you greatly improve the level of job satisfaction on your team.

Editor’s Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you’re an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the “comments” link below.

Job Satisfaction Is Down: What This Means For You – Part 2

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

On Monday, I presented data which sadly revealed job satisfaction among Americans to be at an all time low, with a steady downward trend over the past 20 years.

Now, as promised, today I plan to discuss why you need not necessarily give up hope. Although an increased number of people in our culture are following the mantra of: “Let’s find ways to increase the duration and frequency of individual pleasurable experiences,” you don’t have to cater to this philosophy to hire the best people.

In fact, if you do try to adopt your environment to cater to these people, they will likely end up among the most dissatisfied with their work environment, and never really engage helpfully in work for your company.

If you’ve read WorkPuzzle for long, you know that true happiness is built on hard work, specific goals, and focused attention on reaching those goals built around adding meaning to one’s life and the lives of others. Happiness is NOT achieved through personal pleasure, until one has earned it… Then of course, pleasure can be extremely rewarding.

So, how does one build a company that is founded on principles that will attract the most innovative, hard working people…people of character?

The answer involves two very important ingredients: (1) Building a culture of standards, and (2) Having recruiters and managers of character.

(1) Building a culture that is based on the right standards will attract the best people. Have you ever thought about the word culture? It comes from the same Latin root word “cultura” that also gives us the word “cult.” No, I’m not recommending you develop a cult, but they both mean “to cultivate.”

Central to this root word is the idea of a specific set of beliefs and behaviors built on those beliefs. There are historians who believe that the greatest societies have fallen when they lost these central belief systems and instead began to live by the idea of “anything goes.” Losing beliefs and standards- losing the expectation that everyone will contribute their best toward the greater good for their families and their society, will eventually lead to decay, and YES, lead to dissatisfaction.

Catering to meet the needs of a self-serving generation will leave you competing against perks and commission, and neglecting the focus of providing the intangible and very attractive sound culture that’s becoming more and more difficult to find.

The companies who will raise the bar of job satisfaction will be those who consider how to cultivate an environment that nourishes and rewards people for hard work and extraordinary effort toward the greater good of the entire organization and others. It’s been my experience that people are starving for these standards, and thrive when you provide them.

I’ve seen this first hand in several organizations, including the fastest growing church in the Seattle area, that for the past ten years has attracted thousands of people in their 20’s. These young people are hungry for someone to speak to them about responsibility, selflessness, contribution, helping others, parenting well, and railing against self-preoccupation.

By providing a company that is built on sound principles regarding the source of true happiness, you’ll attract the best talent and inspire others to change. Only then will job satisfaction improve.

In the next edition, I’ll focus on the importance of having people of character as your first point of contact when recruiting new candidates.