Much like many others in the South, I spend a good part of my Saturdays watching college football and I am usually rewarded with exciting entertainment. However, unlike many of my fellow fans, I have found college football to be fertile ground for lessons on how to be successful in business.
In today’s column, I’ll share some of what I have learned, not only by watching the most successful teams and programs but also by watching those who are not quite as successful. Hopefully, you can take some of these lessons and apply them to your business to help make it more successful.
Building Your Leadership Team: Diversity of Ideas; Consistent Culture
The first area is how great college football coaches and programs build their coaching staffs and how we can apply the same principles to build our management/leadership teams in our organizations.
All great coaches tend to build supporting staffs that bring a diversity of ideas to that staff. While many college football coaches hire assistants they have worked with before, the great ones make sure they also bring in assistants with different ideas and schemes to challenge some of their standard ways of playing offense, defense, and special teams.
It takes an extremely secure individual to hire staff members who challenge some of their usual methods, particularly when those methods have been successful. Alabama head coach, Nick Saban has been particularly adept at hiring former head coaches on his staff to bring on such diversity of ideas.
However, when bringing on a diversity of ideas to their leadership team, successful college football teams also maintain a consistent culture. When a coach makes a new hire to his staff, he needs to make sure that the new assistant will maintain the consistent culture that has made the team successful.
The head coach of a successful program typically has guidelines on how the staff treats each other and its players and on what the environment around the team should be.
So, as we in business are hiring new members on our leadership team, we need to find people who have fresh ideas, but who also fit in well with the culture of the existing leadership team.
Recruitment, Development, and Retention
While it is important to have great leadership teams in both college football and business, there is an old sports adage that says, “It is not about the X’s and the O’s, it’s about the Jimmys and the Joes.” The essence of this adage is that no matter how good your plays and schemes are, it takes great players to be a great team.
Therefore, in order to be a great college football program (and a successful business), you need to be able to recruit good talent, develop that talent to make it better and, now more than ever, retain that talent.
There is a high correlation between the success a college football program has in terms of wins and losses in a season and its recruiting rankings in the years immediately preceding that season. This shows that the teams that have the most success recruiting the best players tend to win.
So, how do they recruit the best players?
Usually by making a strong value proposition to the player such as their school will likely get them to the NFL and be a successful professional football player, or their school best prepares them for life after football. In addition, they often use their team’s culture (e.g., family, brotherhood) as a way to recruit players, or now that the players can earn money from their name, image, and/or likeness (NIL), their ability to provide players NIL opportunities have become a big part of some school’s value proposition.
However, recruitment is only the first step in having the best players for a college football program. In order to have the best players, the program has to both develop and retain the players they successfully recruit.
Player development is particularly important since as the player improves, the team improves. Additionally, if part of the program’s value proposition is to get players to the next level (NFL), player development is a big part of it.
Finally, with the inception of the college football “transfer portal,” players are more likely to leave to go to other programs where they may see more opportunities, both in terms of financial opportunity (NIL) or development/playing time opportunity. In order to retain their best players, the best college football programs are those that live up to their initial value propositions.
Businesses have an analogous situation with the recruitment, development, and retention of their employees. In order to attract the best employees, you need to have a value proposition (e.g., salary/benefits, culture, personal development) that is valued by those prospective employees. However, to improve and retain those employees, you need to invest in their development (to improve them and your business) and live up to your original value proposition to retain them.
Execution, Execution, Execution
The final thing we can learn from the most successful college football programs is that winning ultimately comes down to execution. That is, even if you have the best players, they have to be able to accomplish what they are assigned in each play. This requires training, practice, and standard operating procedures that enable them to understand what they need to do.
This is clearly transferable to the workplace, where we need to train our employees, let them get as much hands-on experience as possible to improve their ability, and have guidelines and standard operating procedures to ensure they know what they are supposed to be doing. At the end of the day, winning football and winning business comes down to execution.
I hope you have a great upcoming weekend watching college football and seeing which programs embody the attributes I provide above. Then, I hope you will apply these lessons to help your business flourish!
Dr. Richard Franza is the Dean of Augusta University’s Hull College of Business. Reach him at rfranza@augusta.edu.
