This holiday season, my family and I watched the movie Horrible Bosses. The film features Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell, and Jennifer Aniston in three distinctly different incarnations of the title role. I last saw Farrell as the easy-going country singing star Tommy Sweet in Crazy Heart, and Aniston has had a girl-next-door role in most of the chick-flicks I have been subjected to. To say that they push their acting talents in a different direction (in Aniston’s case, WAY different) is an understatement.
Kevin Spacey portrays a more traditional caricature of the tyrannical, unscrupulous, totally self-promoting executive. While the other two horrible boss characters are pure entertainment, Spacey’s Dave Harken will surely tweak many sensitive nerves.
The topic of leadership in general, both for the leaders and the led, is a relevant one in an age where we seem to have dug ourselves a very deep fox hole, and are struggling to crawl out. Leadership can be a difficult quality to grasp.
In the traditional business model, the Peter Principle generally applies; people tend to be promoted to leadership positions for producing superior results, until they reach a level where they are average. At this point, they lay dormant until retirement. This elegantly simple standard ensures that organizations, in obedience to the laws of physics, will seek the lowest available energy state.
Like many parents of student athletes, I spent years watching my kids play high school sports, hoping to groom them for leadership and success later in life. The long hours in the stands frequently left me wondering why others of obviously lesser skills were getting more playing time than my own offspring. While I never met a coach who had a good explanation for this, I often sensed that there was some unseen force at work, guiding their decisions. Perhaps donating to the school’s athletic department, or leaving cookies on the coach’s desk, was not the only answer. Maybe there was something more that I was missing…
In the rarefied atmosphere of professional athletics, we are relieved of the obligation to puzzle out the playing time question. Taking the NFL as an example, there are vast legions of analysts who project statistics of every possible kind in stunning color graphics. They analyze numbers, discuss inside rumors and information, and explain exactly what it is that a coach must be thinking. On Thursday night games, in the month of November, when the temperature is 50 deg F or lower, we will be told precisely which quarterback has the best pass completion percentage.
Sports analogies are often used as motivators for success in business, as well as life in general. Stories of hard work, focus, teamwork and leadership abound as NFL players are installed in young psyches as role models. An element of danger lurks in this approach.
Take, for example, Plaxico Burress, a 10 year veteran wide receiver who showed great determination in coming back from a leg injury. Unfortunately, the injury was the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound outside a nightclub.
Then there is all-pro quarterback Ben Rothliesberger , a proven effective leader on the field for the Pittsburgh Steelers. His personal playbook, however, is apparently missing a few pages when it comes to interacting with young female fans.
One of the most exciting all-around athletes in football, quarterback Michael Vick, has played with great determination this season; it’s almost as if he has something to prove, both to his fans and his parole officer.
There is yet another NFL player whose name seems to be everywhere this season. He ranks 25th out of the 33 rated NFL quarterbacks, just ahead of Josh Freeman. In both total completions and passing percentage, he is dead last, behind John Skelton and Blaine Gabbert. Overall, he has gained 27 more total yards than Skelton, and appears to have a lock on 31st place.
In a profession where masses of numbers are squeezed through computers to produce a mind-numbing matrix of statistics and rankings, Tim Tebow seems to excel in only one area, winning games. He has led the floundering Denver Broncos to within reach of the NFL playoffs for the first time since 2005.
Reading about or watching Tebow, it is hard to believe that he is not playing the lead in another one of those wholesome Disney movies. His leadership position represents a paradigm shift not just for professional sports, but perhaps even for the “L” word in general. Being an all around good person and a decent role model is suddenly bold and innovative.
The NFL in particular, and American society in general, is a culture of “bling”, screaming that success is built on a foundation of self-adoration and promotion. Tebow typically praises his teammates first, then modestly summarizes the areas in which he needs to improve. Sports Illustrated columnist Peter King called him “the most polite interview in NFL history.”
There’s a pretty good chance that Tebow won’t be in the news for carrying a Glock into a club, taking performance enhancing drugs, or groping a woman. The question he is quietly raising is this; is the Dave Harken model working for us (see Crash of 2008), or do we need a change?
Self-absorbed leaders (e.g. the late Steve Jobs) are typically brilliant and charismatic, but often have fragile egos and very little empathy. Quarterbacks live in a different world, where the people they depend on are looking them straight in the eye in every huddle.
There are other Christian athletes on the field at any given time, often on the losing side. Tim Tebow brings a positive attitude, calmness under pressure, healthy self-confidence, discipline, consistency, and the belief that in the big picture, things will always work out for the best. If asked, he will politely tell you from whence these qualities come.
Tim’s leadership secret is neatly summarized on his autographed helmet - GB2 (God Bless, Go Broncos).
Author Profile - Paul W. Smith, a Founder and Director of Engineering with INVENTtPM LLc, has more than 35 years of experience in research and advanced product development.
Prior to founding INVENTtPM, Dr. Smith spent 10 years with Seagate Technology in Longmont, Colorado. At Seagate, Dr. Smith was primarily responsible for evaluating new data storage technologies under development throughout the company, and utilizing six-sigma processes to stage them for implementation in early engineering models. While at Seagate, he was a proud member of the team that brought the world’s first notebook disk drive with perpendicular recording technology to the market.
Dr. Smith holds a doctorate in Applied Mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, a Master of Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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