Sponsor/Ad Voice (9:05)

Others for their losses.

Martin Moore (9:08)

He said, and I quote, some players take all the credit when things go right, but when things go wrong, they make excuses and place the blame on everyone else, including referees, teammates and coaches. They focus too much on individual statistics or records or awards. They're self serving and their teammates recognise it. When I see players like that who seem to care more about themselves and the team, I can also see how that makes the people around them less motivated to give their best effort. And here comes the kicker, he says, in a way, I was lucky those behaviours are so pervasive because if they weren't, many of the teams I played against would have been more difficult to beat. So you want to build a great team, then lead from the front. You have to be the poster child for accountability. The third insight was Brady's ability to handle disappointment. In the final season of his college career at the University of Michigan, Brady suffered a significant setback as the coach questioned whether he should be the starting quarterback in Brady's own the way I handled myself during the first few games of that season, when things didn't go the way I wanted them to, was very important in my development as a leader. I continued to work hard, I put the team first and I always supported my teammates, even as I tried to prove that I was the right person to play quarterback. This fundamental change in attitude set the tone for the rest of my athletic career. Brady didn't throw his toys out of the cot. Instead, he remained focused on improving and supporting his teammates. Now these three insights give us some clues about the personal foundations you need to start with if you want to be able to effectively influence the team around you. Let's look at some of Brady's lessons about leading the team and see how applicable they are to us as business leaders. I want to start with one where he says, you've got to set the standard for 100% effort. Brady says, you've got to hold yourself to a higher standard. This is the essence of leading by example. It's the philosophy of always doing more than is required. He tells A great story about his preparation and approach to training. When the coaches would say, you're all going to do 20 wind sprints, each under seven seconds, with a 30 second break in between, Brady would pipe up and say, no, we're not doing that. We're going to run 24 sprints each under 6 seconds with only 15 seconds break in between. You want a competitive edge, you gotta do more than the next guy. He talks about relative individual performance compared to the team. Now, by Brady's reckoning, most players in the NFL only give 70 to 80%. But he provides clear rationale for this when he says, imagine being on a losing team because you're the best on that team. The feedback is self reinforcing and your own standards drop. That's why he says, to look for that extra 5 to 10% because that's what ultimately makes the difference. To quote Brady directly, sometimes the pace setting wasn't about working harder physically. It was about communicating expectations more candidly. Hey, do you want me to lie and tell you what you want to hear or do you want me to tell you the truth? You were not prepared today, so you weren't at your best. We need you to be better. And in a more philosophical tone, he adds, as a society, we've moved away from having those frank conversations. As I've gotten older, I've come to realise that when people give me tough love and tell me the truth, it's often the best sign that they really care about me. This is such a critical leadership principle. You often hear me talking about principles like respect before popularity and giving people the gift of feedback. Well, on this one, Tom and I are in complete alignment. The second lesson is to recognise each player's individual psychology and work out how to motivate them. One of the most challenging and at the same time rewarding aspects of leadership is that every individual is different. You can't use a cookie cutter approach and hope to excel as a leader. It's important to know every individual what drives them and what makes them tick. You can't build a high performing team unless you bring out the best performance of each individual. Their contributions won't be equal, obviously, because some people have more talent, more skill and more capacity than others. But your job as a leader is to work with each individual to bring out their best performance in terms of working out what drives different players. Brady says some are motivated by money and contracts. Some are motivated by recognition, like making the All Pro team. Some are motivated by what the media is writing about them. Some are motivated by winning championships, while others, well, they're just trying to avoid losing their job. Great leaders recognise these things instinctively and they're able to find each person's motivational levers. In my view, this is leadership at its best. But then he spoils it by going on to say, you spend 90% of your time with the 10% of players who are most challenging. The time spent managing challenging teammates is worth it because you're not just bringing up their performance, you're also keeping them from bringing down everyone else's. People don't always appreciate this work, but it's what leaders must do. Well, look, what he says is partly right, but I learned over the years you need to spend 80% of your time with the top 20% of your people, not the bottom 20%, where you're naturally going to gravitate. This is where we differ slightly and where I think player leadership diverges from a formal leadership role. Brady says you just have to work with players around you, no matter who they are. And to be fair, he wasn't accountable for selection decisions, although, of course, as his career went on, he had an increasing influence on them. But in the world of corporate leadership, when you don't have the right person, you don't have to persevere to the bitter end. When someone doesn't fit the team culture, or when they aren't up to the job, or when they simply choose not to perform, that's when you need to step in and free them up to be successful in another organisation, preferably one of your competitors. The third lesson from Brady is you need to understand and complement the formal leader's style. It's hard to have the Tom Brady conversation without also talking about Bill Belichick, the man who coached Brady and the Patriots through this purple patch. Belichick's leadership style was fairly severe. As Brady puts it, the focus was on discipline and accountability, not on empathy or compassion. No matter how we played, Coach Belichick's coaching style was to motivate the team by looking for weaknesses and areas to improve. Brady said that there's an argument that players need that. Pro athletes have a lot of people in their lives telling us how great we are. Coach Belichick always wanted to keep us from buying into those narratives and becoming complacent. We all felt fortunate to play for him and there were many benefits to his approach. But his motivational style, often based on fear, was sometimes difficult. So as a team leader, I tried to complement that approach by being a bit more upbeat. Now, reading between the Lines here. This is a classic case of damned by faint praise. Brady clearly didn't resonate with Belichick's style, but he saw himself as the counterbalance. And maybe this is why it all worked. Brady observed that Belichick never got too close to his players. He says Belichick wasn't one to form personal relationships with players or coaches because it's difficult to do that when you know you'll have to trade, cut or fire most of them at some point down the road. So I often took the opposite approach. I tried to get to know my teammates deeply and show that I cared about them personally. Okay, this is a really interesting topic for business leaders. Brady and Belichick were yin and yang. Belichick being performance driven to the point of being unfeeling. Brady showing compassion as a peer to try to mitigate the brutal realism of the coach. What if you could build both of these attributes in the one person? I described how to achieve this balance in an episode we produced almost three years ago. It was episode 182. What is strong leadership? The very best leaders are deeply compassionate, caring and empathetic, as Brady clearly is. But they also preserve a level of professional distance, as Belichick did. This means they aren't compromised by sympathetic lapses when hard decisions have to be made. They totally understand the friendly, not friends principle. And they meet in the middle at a common point, setting uncompromising standards for performance in order to achieve great things. This is the synergy that the Brady Belichick relationship delivered. One that I want to talk about because I depart a little from Brady. Here is the importance of connecting outside the office. Brady talked about his recent junket as a member of the Fox Sports commentary team to the Bahamas. He says, we played games on the beach, we shared meals and we got to know each other. We were creating a shared experience outside the environment that we're used to and we saw new parts of everyone's personalities. The camaraderie we built and the better understanding we gained of one another as individuals is going to help us to perform better as a group this fall. Yeah, Tom, I don't know. Maybe. You know, a commentary team is very different from a team in a business. Now, never having done it, I'd imagine one of your objectives is to be able to relate to each other on camera and have an ease of rapport that facilitates the flow of conversation, thereby improving the viewer experience. It's very different from running a team that has to deliver high value outputs every day as a peer Group, I suspect this can work pretty well. But as a leader, I wouldn't recommend you do this with your team members. It may cross a line that's counterproductive. Brady goes so far as to say some people criticise corporate off sites or team building events as wasteful junkets. That is enormously short sighted. Leadership is about improving the quality of teammates relationships and building trust. And that is about comes from shared experiences.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (20:40)

Yeah.

Martin Moore (20:41)

Nah, I don't think this translates at all well to the corporate environment. And my experience, which I outlined in episode 170, Epic Team Building Fails, is that conducting a team building exercise once a year does little to improve either relationships or performance. It's only shared experience in the workplace, achieving difficult things together that creates that bond. But hey, I'm not the goat. So maybe Tom's right. The final lesson I want to take from Brady's interview is that a leader's influence takes time to evolve. He says, and I quote, it can take years for a leader style to become natural and effective. During my first season in the NFL, I was a third string quarterback. No one outside the Patriots thought of me as a team leader. But inside the locker room I was showing leadership in small ways. For example, I regularly pulled younger guys aside after practice to run extra plays. I told them the starters are playing more than we are, so we need to do more to keep up and to get better. Within my small group, the offensive players who weren't starters, I I was taking charge. I also focused on showing confidence so that more experienced teammates would trust me. When I began playing in games, by the time I was in my 40s, I was leading in a much different style. Some younger players who'd grown up watching me on TV felt intimidated by me. So I worked on being approachable and showing humility. And by that point I didn't have to try to appear confident because I had developed ra real confidence. There's a lot of fabulous lessons here. One is that you can be a leader even before you're given the title. It just takes a willingness to stand up and take control and to show people a way forward. Another is that over time, your comfort and style will evolve. The more you do, the more you'll learn and the better you'll become. And the third is to not believe your own bullshit. You can always be better personally and you can always focus on helping your teammates to be better too. Look, despite the obvious differences, there's a lot we can learn from professional sport. And the reason I look to it occasionally for lessons is that it redefines our perception of what the term high performance really means. As a business leader, you'll find heaps of opportunities to apply these principles and to begin to establish a team culture where every individual does more than is asked of them where you understand every individual's drivers, the unique talents and their potential for delivering value to the team where you're able to harness and apply everyone's unique talents to ensure they complement rather than replicate each other where everyone shares an uncompromising quest to reach a higher standard and where you work every day to evolve, improve, and grow into the leader you know you can be. But don't worry too much about the team building exercises, okay? All right, so that brings us to the end of episode 326. Thanks so much for joining us. And remember, at your CEO mentor, our purpose is to improve the quality of leaders globally. So please share this episode with your colleagues. There are some incredible lessons here, even for non NFL tragics like me. I look forward to next week's episode. What do you do when your boss doesn't rate you? Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no bullshit.