When New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton rallied his team in the locker room during half-time at the Super Bowl, he presented them with a gutsy proposal: Open the second half of the game with an onside kick.
The Saints were trailing the Indianapolis Colts by four points, and an onside kick had never been attempted before the fourth quarter in the history of the Super Bowl.
As it turned out, the play was the beginning of a comeback that would win the team its first-ever championship.
The way Mr. Payton prepared his players for taking such a big risk could be a good lesson for executives, managers and anybody who has to lead a team when the stakes are high.
The coach had made the team practise the onside kick, naturally. He’d spent the season winning the players’ trust with other successful high-stakes moves, and had shown them that although bold, the plays he crafted were well thought out. At half-time, he already had the players sold.
Earning trust is key in an office setting too, executive coaches say. If leaders want to take risks, they can’t hold their cards close to their chests and simply dictate – they must have buy-in from employees.
“Business is so much like a sport,” Toronto-based executive coach Mikael Meir says. “The greatest leaders are really in tune to the flow of the organization, and they don’t make decisions in their head.”
Al Brockway was working as vice-president of marketing and sales at pharmaceutical company Pennwalt Pharma, Inc. when he saw a big opportunity that he knew would be tough to sell to staff.
The company had traditionally sold drugs to pharmacies and hospitals, but there was a chance to take over a line of consumer over-the-counter products and sell those, too.
“I had to take a sales force [that was] totally untrained for the situation and, in a manner of a couple of months, had to turn them into a consumer-oriented [team],” Mr. Brockway says. “They were totally out of their comfort level.”
Mr. Brockway had to convince a group of about 60 people that it was a risk worth taking, and so he reached out to the “opinion leaders” of the group: the ones who, even if they were at the bottom of the ladder, had influence over their colleagues.
“They’re not just the managers, but they’re the people who are sitting around the meeting room ... posing questions, or during coffee break saying, ‘That’s a crock of you-know-what,’ ” he explains.
“You take them aside, chat with them a little bit, and they spread that word faster than any top-down approach to the situation can do,” he says.
The strategy worked, and he won over the rest of the sales team. Within a year, the project was launched and it was a success. Mr. Brockway now shares the leadership lessons he learned on the job as an executive coach in Toronto.
Sandra Oliver, owner of Toronto-based leadership coaching company Impact Consulting, says it may be tempting to hype up the potential payoffs and gloss over the risks, but good leaders work transparently.
“Don’t be afraid to give the full context and the options you considered,” she says.
One of her clients, a business unit manager at an American consulting company, succeeded in dramatically changing corporate strategy by creating a strong dialogue with sub-unit managers.
While the team only met once a month before, the manager instituted weekly meetings to plan and execute the new strategy. In three years, the company had doubled in size.
“People need to feel safe to take risks,” she says. “[The manager] was great at bringing people around and getting consensus.”
New Orleans Saints kicker Thomas Morstead, the man whose onside kick in the second half of the Super Bowl turned the game around, praised his coach’s leadership when he was interviewed after the game.
“You've got to love playing for a coach who puts that much trust in his players,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I mean, that was a pretty big risk.”
