5 things winners do-Stan Jones

Stan Jones is the Associate Head coach at Florida State and has been a vital part of their success.  he is a great follow on twitter as well!

Pat Riley once said, “If you are really into winning, there are only two things; winning and misery.” And in Don Yaeger’s book, “Greatness: The 16 Characteristics of True Champions”, the first sentence in chapter one reads, “The truly Great hate to lose more than they love to win.” It is becoming more aware to me as I advance in my coaching career that young people have less reference points in their lives as how to truly win. They just don’t understand that winning is a learned attitude and that it just does not happen naturally. As coaches, I think it is imperative that we develop into our methodology what it takes to win as much as perfecting our offensive and defensive philosophies and systems.

Obviously, if there was a developed curriculum that never failed, we could all follow the formula and winning would happen for everybody. So in our positions of leadership, we must constantly be taking a needs assessment of our team and be proactive in consistently educating our players both collectively and individually, what is necessary for them to be in the best position to win. Our biggest challenge in this education process is the 24-hour a day battle for their mind space and their ear space. With all the rapidly growing opportunities to technologically stay in communication with one these days, it is much harder to get them to absorb the concepts of winning, we as coaches’ work to provide them. I believe it is imperative; that we adapt and use these forms of technological interaction as pulpits to get the words of wisdom in front of our young people and their support people. Here are some themes that I have learned in my athletic career that I try to reinforce daily to our players in trying to build and maintain a culture of winning in our program:

1.       Stay in the present moment: This is so crucial for a competitor. On our team this year, we have six seniors. Old school logic would presume that a team would get great leadership because this is their last year and they want to do something special and they do. But what happened to us early in the season was the fact that they were thinking about and to a degree, worrying about next year more than this year. Our coaching staff spent many conversations working through those thoughts and we had to stub our toes a few times before our group of seniors got locked in on the now. Hopefully as they see the finish line they will desire the challenge of the now and understand the future will take better care of itself the more than accomplish now. 

2.      Trust themselves and the associations on their team: So many individuals fail to realize that the real winners take great value with who they associate with on a day to day basis. Champion athletes want to be pushed and they are willing to push their teammates. They abhor non-competitive people and they realize they can’t get better by being comfortable. In the same vein, they want leaders to challenge them. They want to be educated, criticized then educated some more. Players who lament that their coach is always negative are usually players who are basically lazy and want to be successful as long as they can be comfortable. Winners are not whiners and finger pointers. They have a great sense of the situation and trust their associates to get their job done because they have all held themselves accountable. As coaches’, it starts with us holding ourselves accountable and always being prepared to give our players the proper direction during the most stressful of situations. Players will always trust that demonstrated behavior. 

3.      Appear more calm and direct when they are most tense:  Building off of the last point, it is always a thing of beauty to see those teams that always have ice water in their veins in big moments. They are like a duck swimming on a lake, they look calm and smooth on top of the water but they are working like heck below the surface where no one sees how hard they are paddling to get where they are going. Similarly, I have learned that when you look at the bench, you see the same coolness when the game gets to be the hottest. The big time winners in coaching have a demeanor that gives their players confidence that we are going to win. There is order and direction during critical junctures in the game. And you don’t see chaos and confusion at any of those points. 

4.      Take calculated risks:  Winning leadership understands that situations may not always go as originally planned. But they never make panicky decisions that totally take them out of being able to change the momentum of the moment. They know their personnel and their personalities and they also know their enemies because of their detailed preparation. Under duress they sense if change is needed or if convincing your troops to stay with something that doesn’t appear to be the answer is the right risk. I learned that in my last high school coaching position in the very first game of my tenure. Having worked with my new players through the summer and spending hours studying film of the teams on our schedule, I had put in a fast paced system that I thought would energize the program and start us on an upward path for long term success. In the second quarter of the first game, we were getting blown by 17 points. Calling a timeout right before halftime, I confidently shared with our guys that our opponent was about to break, if they would believe in our system and keep working it. I was hoping I was right on the inside but I knew my athletic director watching from the stands thought I might be nuts. Fortunately, my confidence in my decision carried over into my guys and we ended up winning the game decisively and helped set the tone for more success to follow.

5.       Expect the best:  So many people fail because they never try. The fear of failure is greater than their belief in themselves. True winners have fun and love to compete because they believe they will achieve positive results. They don’t hesitate to put themselves on the line and that confidence becomes infectious to all those around them. I have also observed that all winners believe in a power greater than themselves. For some this belief is based on a spiritual power source but I also see leaders with a confidence from the power that comes from the collective efforts of their organization. I think winners believe so much in their system that magical things happen because they believe in what can achieve together. Anatole France said, “To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe.”

In the big business world of athletics in today’s world, I observe many coaches who lose their positions not because they are poor coaches but because they quit fighting the battle of building a culture of winning in their program. The won-lost record and the fear of the future paralyzes their thinking and it becomes a pressure packed negative mindset of how do we just win the next one. It is obvious that we have to take each game one at a time. But I truly believe that the programs that have perpetual success have spent the most time feeding the soul of their players with what it takes to be a winner!

Alabamas mental Training

As a blowout morphed into a choke for the ages at last year's Iron Bowl, Trevor Moawad approached Alabama linebacker Dont'a Hightower on the sideline. Moawad's message? You're a leader. Say something. Gather the defense. Make a speech. Call down the thunder. Do something to convince your teammates they can make a stop.

Hightower didn't consider himself the man for the job. "I didn't feel like I was a leader," Hightower said this week. "My knee was still messed up. I wasn't playing as well as I could. I didn't feel it was right for me to say something."

Trevor Moawad (center) has served as Alabama's mental conditioning coach since Nick Saban took over the program in 2007.

Courtesy of IMG Academies

LSU-Alabama Preview

Pregame analysis from SI.com

• STAPLES: For fans, this means everything
• MANDEL: My prediction; Week 10 picks
• STAPLES: Mental coach gives Tide edge
• MANDEL: LSU's Lee transformed at QB
• TROCCHI: Game of week? Game of year
• SCHROEDER: Rematch? Not this year
• FINEBAUM: One play changed Miles' fate
• ROTHSCHILD: Best 1-2 in-season games
• MANDEL: 'Game of Century' not so rare
• MANDEL: Top teams will face adversity

Photos & Videos

Staples, Mandel preview game	STAPLES: X-factors for Tigers, Tide
Podcast: McElroy on facing LSU	Photos: No. 1 vs. No. 2 showdowns

Unfortunately for the Crimson Tide, no one else did, either.

In the parlance of one of Moawad's training exercises, no Alabama player considered himself a nine. No one thought himself enough of a leader to grab the role. Moawad knew his offseason assignment: Build leaders.

Who is Moawad? He is a coach, but not in the traditional sense. As Sal Sunseri supervises the Tide's linebackers, Moawad supervises the Tide's mental fitness. Since coach Nick Saban came to Tuscaloosa in 2007, Moawad has coordinated Alabama's between-the-ears conditioning.

"Every program is going to bring in a Navy SEAL to talk to the team before the bowl game," Moawad said. "The problem with a good speaker is that it's kind of like a New Year's resolution. It's going to be gone by halftime of the Rose Bowl." Moawad believes those messages don't stick because most programs don't provide a foundation of mental training for their athletes. Alabama does.

Moawad doesn't work only for Alabama. He has a full-time job as the director of the IMG Performance Institute in Bradenton, Fla., and he also consults with Florida State's football team (coached by Saban acolyte Jimbo Fisher) and with several branches of the U.S. military. Moawad and his staffers check in often in Tuscaloosa to ensure Alabama players are as fit mentally as they are physically. They teach players how to communicate better with their coaches and teammates, how to block out distractions, how to adopt the correct attitude and how to know when to lead and when to follow. When Alabama faces LSU on Saturday at Bryant-Denny Stadium, Moawad will be on the sideline in case anyone needs a brief refresher. After the past 11 months, he isn't worried about the leadership void that plagued the talented 2010 team.

Throughout the year, Saban will bring in Moawad -- whom he met while coaching the Miami Dolphins -- to run players through drills that reinforce specific mental traits. The exercise that helped Hightower understand why he needed to speak up during the Auburn game involves a group of players who are tasked with planning a barbecue. Each player wears a number on his head. He can't see the number, but his teammates can. A one is the low man on the totem pole. A nine is an alpha dog. Moawad instructs the players to treat one another in accordance to the number on each person's head. When the nine speaks, everyone listens and reacts. When the twos and threes speak, they are ignored. "You start to learn status," Moawad said. "The overall goal is learning where you fit in. At different times, you need to play different roles." Said left tackle Barrett Jones: "By the end, everyone clearly knew what number they were." Hightower hadn't realized during the Auburn game that he was already a nine.

Moawad is quick to say he isn't a sports psychologist. He prefers to be known as a coach. After a brief career in pro soccer, Moawad worked as a high school teacher and coach in south Florida. Then he attended a mental conditioning workshop at IMG Academy. Shortly after, he took an internship there and never left. Moawad gets his penchant for motivation honestly. His late father, Bob, was a nationally renowned motivational speaker who focused on self esteem. The elder Moawad even contributed one of the stories to the original version of Chicken Soup for the Soul.

In 2001, Moawad was working with stars such as Serena Williams when he and his then-partner, Chad Bohling, got a call from the Jacksonville Jaguars. Coach Tom Coughlin wanted to know if the mental coaches could find a way to help tailback Fred Taylor -- known at the time as "Fragile Fred" because he was so injury-prone -- play a full season. Moawad remembers the first meeting with Coughlin, who was skeptical of the entire idea of mental conditioning. "You've got three minutes," Moawad remembered Coughlin saying.

Moawad and Bohling -- who now coordinates mental conditioning for the New York Yankees -- convinced Coughlin. Then they went to work on Taylor. They surveyed the longest-tenured veterans on the Jaguars' roster to determine what they did that Taylor did not. They discovered that all of the veterans came to work at about 6:30 a.m. Taylor showed up two hours later. They told Taylor he needed to begin showing up earlier. He asked what he needed to do during those two hours. Do what the veterans do, Moawad and Bohling told him. Taylor filled those two hours with training that helped him start 46 consecutive games between 2002 and 2004.

When Moawad began working with Alabama players in 2007, he sought to make them more coachable and better communicators. For example, some players arrive on campus unable to look coaches and teammates in the eye. Moawad has a drill to fix that.

Find a friend and try this exercise.

You: One
Friend: Two
You: Three
Friend: One
You: Two
Friend: Three

Pretty easy, right? Now replace each "one" with a clap and try again.

Awfully hard to do without maintaining solid eye contact, isn't it? Now replace each "one" with a clap and each "three" with a finger snap.

It can't be done without eye contact. Work that drill enough, and the shiest person can learn to look even the sternest authority figure in the eye.

Moawad also tries to help teammates communicate better with one another. Back when Jones played guard, he sat back-to-back with center William Vlachos. Vlachos had to describe a series of complex shapes on a card in his hand. Jones, without seeing the card, had to reproduce the shapes. The pair performed well, which makes sense. They also played well alongside one another. Other communication drills include improvisational drills similar to the show Whose Line is it Anyway? In one drill, Hightower and quarterback AJ McCarron got their Wayne Brady and Ryan Stiles on while teammates watched and chuckled. "AJ is pretty hot with the ladies," Hightower said, "so he kept putting me into situations to talk about girls."

Another critical piece of Moawad's training involves attitude. He said that a player who says, "I can't practice in this heat" will need 10 positive experiences to counteract that one negative thought. Moawad said one of the early challenges with the Tide was convincing players to believe they could perform the tasks required of them. "The general operating principle at most programs is 'seeing is believing.' I'm going to have some success. Then I'm going to start to believe it," Moawad said. "Coach Saban's overall philosophy is the exact opposite. Believing is seeing. Once you believe it, you're going to see it. That's how you go from 7-6 [in 2007] to 12-2 [in 2008]."

Moawad trains players to believe by changing their internal monologue. He said an athlete says 800-1,400 words a minute to himself on a subconscious level. Those words must be positive, and they also must be the correct words that allow the player to focus on the task at hand and not some distraction in another part of his life or on some external influence like, say, 100,000 screaming fans. Moawad often uses the example of sprinter Michael Johnson, who tried to limit his internal monologue to the same four phrases during a race.

1. Keep my head down
2. Pump my arms
3. Explode
4. Think like a bullet

Moawad has a drill to keep players focused despite external distractions. First, he has a player attempt to find a sequence of numbers in ascending order. Second, he has the player complete the same task with a partner staring silently at his work. Third, the player must complete the task while his partner screams insults at him. When the Alabama players did this drill, Jones and Hightower performed the best. So Jones and Hightower were placed together. Jones, Hightower said, is a terrible trash-talker. (Here is a YouTube clip of this drill with high school students.)

Moawad's influence isn't limited to drills. Saban also consults him on what other coaches might consider minutiae. For example, many programs drop their players at a movie theater the night before a game and give players their choice of flick. Alabama players sometimes get to watch a popular film, but sometimes they get a pick from the Saban collection. They'll all watch the same movie, and the movie is selected by Saban or Moawad to deliver a particular message. Before Alabama faced Ole Miss on Oct. 15, the Tide watched Saving Private Ryan. Saban believes it teaches a valuable lesson about leadership. "You can't hide in the back," Saban said.

Before Alabama faced Texas in the BCS title game in January 2010, Saban and Moawad chose Miracle. They wanted players to pay special attention to 1980 U.S. hockey team's final game against Finland. Herb Brooks' team had trained for months to beat the Soviet Union, but after that win, the Americans still had to beat Finland to win gold. "That team isn't remembered if they don't beat Finland," Moawad said. Saban and Moawad felt Alabama's entire 2009 offseason and season had built toward the SEC Championship showdown with Florida. They didn't want the players to believe they had accomplished their mission when they vanquished the Gators.

Moawad should learn Saturday whether he accomplished his offseason mission of helping build leaders for the Tide. Some players, such as former Alabama linebacker Rolando McClain, are born leaders. Others, such as Hightower, need help unlocking those skills. "Where I think Coach Saban is by far ahead of most people is his understanding that a lot of these things are skills that can be learned, and they're not necessarily things that we're endowed with when we're born or that we can only recruit for," Moawad said. "That's the right philosophy when you're developing athletes."

It certainly worked with Hightower. In August, Moawad asked Hightower to speak to the team. The player who didn't consider it his place to speak months earlier opened his heart to his teammates. "I love my teammates, and I'm a people person, but I'm not really one to get up and be sentimental or get emotional," Hightower said. "But that's what I did. I wanted them to understand how I felt about last year and how I feel about this year."

Thanks to Moawad, Hightower now knows he is a nine.

"He didn't tell me," Hightower said. "He taught me."

Some Great thoughts on Post Play from Pat Kelsey and the Asst to head coach article from espn

10  TRUTHS OF POST PLAY
1. RUN  THE FLOOR - “BUST IT”
2. HANDS - “IF YOU TOUCH IT,CATCH IT!”
3. STANCE - “PLAY THE  GAME LOW”
4. FOOTWORK - “BALANCE AND PIVOTING”
5. POST MOVES - “FAVORITES AND COUNTERS
6. OFFENSIVE REBOUNDING “BE RELENTLESS”
7. SHOOTING “MASTER THE  10’ and in AREA
8. POSITIONING - “POSTING, SEALING, DUCK-INS”
9. PLAY OFF PENETRATION
10. BALL SCREENING “SPRINT and SIT” pop for seperation and shot…OR ROLL “HEAD ON RIM”



The Road from Asst to head coach
http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/7914677/for-assistants-long-road-become-head-coach

Transparency is the New Leadership Imperative

Great read about leadership...

12:07 PM Wednesday April 11, 2012
by Dorie Clark | 

What kind of leaders do we need today? Steve Jobs — mysterious, charismatic, intriguing — is often cited as one of the recent greats, and there are clearly benefits to his style. A recent study showed that leaders like him — those perceived as having an almost magical aura — are seen as visionary, with employees and customers clamoring to touch the hem of their garments. But that kind of leadership also has its limitations.
Succession is made harder by a towering and mysterious personality (good luck, Tim Cook). And, even more importantly, there's no formula for becoming charismatic. You could try to model others — emulating Jobs' cool reserve, exacting standards, and mercurial temper, for instance. But the nuances are subtle; you're just as likely to come off as aloof or entitled, rather than intriguing. The harder, but more rewarding, path as a leader is to make yourself known — to your employees, your customers, and the public. Here are three reasons the new leadership imperative is all about transparency.
To know you is to love you. Well, love might be strong. But you want your employees to at least like you and understand where you're coming from — because, as copious research has shown, money isn't a good motivational tool. Rather, what will make them go above and beyond is their relationship and loyalty to you — and you'll never get that if you don't let them know you as a person. (Customers, being human, also like to form relationships with real people, not just faceless organizations.) Lunch meetings and feedback sessions are a great place to start, and if you're managing across continents or your workforce is simply too large, don't underestimate the power of video. Your personality and enthusiasm can come through just as clearly on YouTube. (A great example is this 2009 video featuring Best Buy Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge, in which he explains his philosophy of marketing and how the company should interact with customers.)
Transparency is brand insurance. Paul Levy was the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, one of the nation's best. In 2006, he launched a blog, then called "Running a Hospital," which took the bold step of putting his unvarnished thoughts into the public realm, sans PR gloss. He drew accolades for his openness (posting the hospital's infection rates) and sharing personal touches, such as his passion for coaching youth soccer. Over years of dedicated blogging — with literally thousands of posts — he built up a reservoir of goodwill. (Noted Boston magazine in 2009, "Through discipline, openness to criticism and feedback, and, yes, a certain amount of golly-gee enthusiasm, Levy has taken the most self-indulgent medium of 21st-century communication and turned it into a business tool as sharp as any scalpel.") And it turned out he'd need it. The following year, Levy admitted to "lapses of judgment in a personal relationship" involving a female former employee. He kept his job but had to pony up a $50,000 fine; he resigned half a year later. It was an ignominious end to a respected nine-year tenure — but thanks to his blog (where he posted an apology), the blow was softened considerably. Today, he continues to weigh in on healthcare using the very same blog - albeit with a new, self-deprecating title: "Not Running a Hospital." Transparency didn't save Paul Levy from making a thoughtless mistake that negatively impacted his career. But it did earn him a degree of understanding and a continuing platform to opine about his field and stay in the mix.
You attract like-minded talent. Blogging started out as a cry in the wilderness. (Back then, it was known as "online journaling.") Aren't there any other left-handed gay sushi chefs out there? The business case for blogging, tweeting, and the rest of social media is a lot stronger these days. But the result, in many ways, is the same — by putting your voice out there, you attract others who are like-minded. If you're a company with a unique set of corporate values (think Zappos), you can broadcast your culture and draw in people who think they'd be a fit. And if you're a venture capitalist — whose livelihood depends on scouting new talent and forging close ties with the best — then it's especially important to show people who you are, how you think, and what you're looking for. That's what happened for Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, whose blog has been a powerful magnet, enabling him to invest in hot deals early. Each post draws at least 100 comments — sometimes closer to 400 — and has positioned him, 3000 miles away from Silicon Valley, as an industry thought leader.
Whether it's in person (through speeches, meetings, or one-on-one interactions) or leveraging social media, it's more essential than ever for leaders to embrace transparency. Employees, customers, and shareholders need to understand your vision, your values, and your approach. That doesn't mean putting on an aura of mystique, because if it's not coming naturally, people can see through it. Instead, the new leadership imperative is to make yourself known.
What kind of leaders do you think we need? How are you making yourself known to your colleagues, employees, and customers? What results are you seeing?

Leadership

This is an older article about leadership...  Tim Tebow may be a polarizing figure to some, but there is no doubt that he has a natural ability to lead others.  This article was something that I sent to our team captains during the season.

 

Tim Tebow shows that in sports, there’s no faking leadership (and Bruce Boudreau and Randy Edsall could take note)

By Sally Jenkins, Published: December 1

In a real crisis, like say if an asteroid threatens to strike the planet, I want Tim Tebow as my leader. I don’t want University of Maryland football coach Randy Edsall, with his faux-militaristic carping, or recently fired Washington Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau, with his abrupt shifts from friendly buddy talk to deafening profanity.

“As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another,” Tebow, the NFL quarterback, told his Denver Broncos teammates solemnly last week, quoting Proverbs. If anyone else said that, the room would have erupted into hooting laughter. When Tebow said it, people believed in him.

People didn’t believe in Boudreau and Edsall, for all of their shouting. Yet they believe in a scripture-spouting kid with a hitch in his arm. Why? Possibly because Tebow grasps something about leadership that Boudreau and Edsall have yet to learn: It’s not about domination but about persuasion. Someone who tries to force others to do his bidding isn’t a leader; he’s a warlord. Leadership only works when other people find you credible and grant you their cooperation.

In the past few weeks, area coaches have given clinics in failed leadership. The Washington Capitals staged a virtual work stoppage on the ice under Boudreau. The Maryland football team quit so badly on Edsall, they lost seven consecutive games by double digits. And the Washington Redskins lost six in a row thanks in part to Mike Shanahan’s misjudgment that the happy-talk of quarterback John Beck was leadership, only it turns out they trust Beck’s fellow signal-caller Rex Grossman more, even when he throws interceptions.

Meantime, Tebow has given us a starkly powerful display of the real thing, and so has the underrated leader who had the guts to hand the team over to him, Broncos Coach John Fox.The Broncos are 5-1 over their last six games, and Fox was smart enough last Sunday to ask Tebow to give the pregame talk that led to a crucial overtime victory over the San Diego Chargers and put them in the playoff hunt.

“I’ve never seen a human who can will himself to win like that,” Broncos linebacker Von Miller told the Denver Post afterward. “He gave us a great speech. We came out fired up. And that was a wrap.”

So what exactly is that mysterious quality called leadership? It’s not exactly charisma; it doesn’t hurt that Tebow gleams like a superhero, but the worst despots are charismatic too. It’s not exactly talent, either. According to experts, one reason we struggle to define it is because we look at it from the wrong side up.

“The academic study of leadership has failed, and the reason is that it focuses on the leader, when the appropriate focus is on the followers,” suggests research psychologist Robert Hogan, who profiles executives for Fortune 500 companies. When we flip the examination of leadership on its head and look at what followers will follow, we get a better idea of what quality we’re talking about.

“What is it the followers are looking for?” he asks. “The focus should be on the work force or the team, and what they perceive. Because if they don’t perceive the right thing in a leader, you’re through.”

Okay, so let’s talk about followership. The truth is, it’s not in our human nature to “follow” anyone very willingly, from an evolutionary standpoint. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm asserts that for 2.5 million years hunter-gatherer societies were so egalitarian they wouldn’t tolerate such a thing as formal “leadership.” Bands awarded temporary authority only for coordination: Someone had to plan the hunt. As soon as the group doubted his competence, or regretted awarding him control, they had clever ways of ridding themselves of him, which anthropologists coolly call “leveling mechanisms.” They ranged from ignoring orders, to casting out of the tribe, to killing.

Seem familiar? Sounds like Boudreau got leveled by a mechanism. Edsall, too.

According to Hogan’s research, followers want four things: integrity, confidence, decision-making and clarity. But just as important is what followers don’t want: irritability, moodiness, untrustworthiness, indec­i­sive­­­ness, needless micro-management and excessive authority. They perceive these things as incompetent, and pretty soon the leveling mechanism kicks in and there is a subtle rebellion. (Incidentally, I would be a terrible leader, according to Hogan’s personality test. Too irritable. “Volcanic,” he announced.)

With that in mind, let’s reconsider our local teams, and ask why the followers refused to follow.

Boudreau is an extremely likable man and expert coach; the Capitals followed him cheerfully until this season, and he was hired by Anaheim less than three days after getting fired. But after winning just two playoff rounds in four years, Boudreau decided he needed to get tougher, especially on star Alex Ovechkin. This from a guy who already had a nasal intensity, and who before his first-ever practice with the Capitals in 2007 decided to chastise Ovechkin solely for the purpose of making an impression. And who in 2010 was captured on tape giving an intermission diatribe that consisted of 17 obscenities in 90 seconds. Deafening profanity can be useful — until it’s numbingly repetitive. At a certain point it didn’t motivate anymore and became tiresome. “If people say, ‘He’s just manipulating us,’ at that point you’re done,” Hogan says.

Edsall’s act with the Terps was just sort of low and snarling and alienating. He treated the nine-win squad he inherited from the far more accomplished Ralph Friedgen as if it was in need of discipline and not up to his standards. But there’s a difference between rigor, which builds confidence, and petty puppeteering, which destroys enthusiasm. Fact is, Edsall’s never won anything bigger than a PapaJohns.com Bowl. Some of the Terps responded by nicknaming him the “warden” and by playing with stunning lassitude and apathy, losing 10 games.

Edsall has shown zero recognition he is the problem; instead he had the temerity to compare himself to the New England Patriots. Edsall might want to look at a study on airline crew performance that Hogan cites. It found that the number of flight errors significantly correlated to the personality of the captain. Crews led by captains perceived as agreeable, self-confident and emotionally reliable made the fewest errors. Crews with captains considered arrogant, hostile, passive-aggressive or dictatorial made the most errors.

Leaders lose their teams, Hogan says, for the simple reason that followers withdraw their consent to be led. The late Red Auerbach, the legendary coach and executive with the Boston Celtics, always said that you don’t motivate teams, you motivate players, one by one, by building relationships.

“The key to the relationship is trust, and if they don’t trust you, you’re done,” Hogan says.

A leader is worth nothing without voluntary commitment, because the followers are actually more in charge of the outcome. Every aspiring leader should ask, “Would people choose to follow me?” and understand who the boss really is.