In the aftermath of another almost disastrous, but at the very least, average, Chicago Bears season, I took an hour from grinding through producing lecture videos for a few online courses to see what the Bears’ leadership would announce and more importantly, how they would handle their big leadership moment.
photo from chicagobears.com
Normally, despite teaching leadership and being involved in leadership development for a long time now, I don’t like overanalyzing every single example of leadership in life or media. That to me is an exhausting way to do life. However, the Bears press conference was so fascinating to me and so wild in how it was handled that I couldn’t help but really think about what happened and why.
What propelled me to explore leadership originally was the question of what leads good people and even competent people to completely fail in handling the leadership moment. And this is was such a clear example of good people failing to own the moment and truly lead forward. In a social media poll, over 96% of fans were unanimous that it was a dumpster fire. These days you can’t get 96% of people to agree on anything! But those Bears fans and outsiders have united in their assessment, bewilderment, and outrage – with the end result mostly just being discouragement and the extinguishing of any hope that the future will look different than the present and past. Ultimately – those are the big leadership moments when leaders have to both acknowledge reality and from that reality generate hope and trust that good and positive change is coming.
There have been hours dedicated to this failure of a press conference already so I’m not looking to do an analysis of the whole thing. But here are some takeaways regarding key leadership moments.
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- Messaging.
It’s super important to be clear on messaging. There are key aspects of communication that signal to hearers that you see reality, understand reality, and have an eye on the path forward. Conversely, you can signal that you don’t see, don’t understand, and have no clue what the path forward is.
Most often, I have seen leaders and teams fail in this because they don’t religiously talk about messaging in their preparation. They get up and “wing it” or rely on events and activities to try to handle their leadership and vision work. In the Bears’ case, it was clear that they most definitely had talked about messaging. They were just so disconnected from the reality and audience that they chose to message things that completely discouraged anybody listening.
There has been abundant mocking already of how many times the Bears’ leadership used collaboration and culture as indicators that they are on the right track. Results were dismissed in favor of subjectively assessed qualities. The Bears President said the Bears had a culture that all the other teams would aspire to and essentially envy. Yet, three days early the quarterback proclaimed they needed to develop a better and more championship-oriented culture…after a game in which one of their players punched the same player another Bears player punched earlier in the season.
Collaboration is no doubt a buzzword. But it’s hard to create healthy collaboration that doesn’t degenerate into groupthink. It’s also true – that collaboration alone is not a guarantee of success. If your collaboration leads to bad decisions, maybe some of that collaboration is the problem. I used to have a poster in my office of a hammer coming down on a bunch of bent nails. It was one of those demotivator posters that read, “Incompetence: If you really think you change your results by doubling your efforts, there’s no end to what you can’t do (paraphrase).”
Leaders who rely on collaboration as a source of hope I think are chasing fantasy. There’s got to be more. Because collaboration by itself doesn’t guarantee anything. And proclaiming your awesome culture is empty if you’re the only one saying it and it’s not translating to the bottom line outcomes and results the organization exists for. Culture and collaboration are things to work for, but outside of clear measurables and tangible results or indicators that it truly is a healthy culture and collaboration. They aren’t magical qualities. That language sometimes feels like we’re trying to use the Jedi mind trick on people to assure them that “Everything is ok. We’re awesome here.” I also think of the youtube “double rainbow” guy – stoned out of his mind, crying at the double rainbow, reverently asking the universe, “What does it mean?” When you use culture and collaboration to defend your competency and authority, you have to have answered the question of “What does it mean?” Otherwise, what are we doing? - Industry Awareness
One of the things that really showed up that I think stood out to be that would seem obvious, but I don’t think it always is. I train leaders in a lot of walks of life, including pastors and ministry leaders. I think there’s a real lack of industry awareness sometimes because the focus is so much on “what we do.”
While the Bears’ leadership was celebrating its own awesome culture-shaping leadership (that’s the implication – if we have a good culture, then we are good leaders…), they demonstrated clearly that they had no awareness of their industry. The Bears President declared that everything was there except they hadn’t gotten the quarterback right and the number of wins wasn’t right. Yet – in their industry where there are only 32 teams, those are the only 2 things that really matter. Wins and having a quarterback to build around and who can help overcome some of the other team perfections. So pumping up your culture while minimizing the greatest measurements people would use to measure your health as an organization is an embarrassing acknowledgment that you don’t know what matters most in your industry and what leads to true success.
As the chairman and President took questions, it was wild how little knowledge they had of the industry that the average football fan would know instinctually. - Niceness
Everyone wants a healthy culture and we want to be nice people and work with nice people. However the language involved clearly showed that a pleasant working environment, nice people, and loyalty are higher values than getting high performance with urgency, expertise, and learning.
No one was fired and no restructuring was explored because they have a great culture and the people in place are great people who can collaborate. Now, maybe not everyone should have been fired. But something needed to be communicated that would build trust that they were committed to getting results and not just playing it safe for the long haul with people we like or are comfortable with.
Nothing more exemplifies the role of a President who has control of the hiring of all the football people, who don’t get involved in football things though, and who has an epic record of on-the-field failure in 20+ years on the job. It was an amazing display of celebrating people’s personal qualities and loyalty while ignoring their results. - Structure
I used to hate a lot of org structure talk but it matters. Beyond celebrating their culture, there was also a defense of their structure despite an obvious blind spot where no one with any football acumen is evaluating the key people making a lot of the football decisions. It’s a glaring blindspot. I know at some point there will be someone who is not a football insider who has to provide some analysis – but that is where industry awareness at the highest levels can help. You can’t have a hands-off organizational structure AND have no industry awareness at the top levels.
A glaring moment was that the Bears Chairman indicated that there had been no consulting or even conversations with other organizations about structure and contemporary efforts that can support on the field results. In Chicago, you have folks like Theo Epstein and there have been similar scenarios recently with the Bulls and Blackhawks. But the chairman indicated that he didn’t “know them.” That’s industry awareness to – needing to educate yourself for the things that ultimately are under your domain even if you’re not a football guy. But when you love yourself and are most committed to protecting your own space and fear change, this is what you get. - Doubling Down
What was informative was that in the aftermath of an infamous press conference, the same messaging was brought to radio stations and the public in the next couple of days. There was no awareness as to why 96% of fans thought it was a failure. There was a put the head down and push through it mentality. That was wild to me – not being able to “read the room” metaphorically given all of this was on zoom and not budging from an approach to messaging that everyone had declared a failure – again, that’s really hard to do. Trust only plummets when leaders get a big wave of feedback and they only get stronger in the rigidity of their direction.
- Messaging.
I think these things matter and they aren’t always talked about. A lot of gatherings – meetings, conferences, go bad because leaders don’t think about messaging or they don’t have the industry awareness or ear to the ground to understand what the messaging should be. We can hide beyond culture and collaboration as magical solutions that will guarantee different results despite having all the same people and same mindsets driving that collaboration.
I always get sad when there are missed leadership moments. I don’t always hit them. But those moments matter. We waste a lot of resources and time when we rely on information, activities, and events to do leadership work that must show contextual awareness and some measure of wisdom and discernment about what it means and how strategy should be formed. But I guess sometimes we don’t want to think that hard or take needed risks for something better.
