By Gary Heil and Ryan Heil, PhD
On January 13, the Clemson Tigers will play the Tigers of Louisiana State University for the National Championship of College Football (the Natty).
The Tigers of Clemson are coached by Dabo Swinney who has led his teams to participate in four of the last five national championships. LSU’s head coach, Ed Orgeron, is leading his Tigers to their first appearance in the Natty since the inception of the College Football Playoff. Two very talented teams with passionate fan bases. It will be quite a show when the teams meet in New Orleans.
As different as the two teams appear on paper and as different as the two coaches are in backgrounds and personalities -- and they are very different -- they have one important and unmistakable thing in common. Both coaches break the traditional coaching mold of yesteryear and have chosen to build cultures founded on positive emotion. They are unabashed in their love for their players. They’re also willing to tell anyone who will listen that they believe the secret sauce to their on- and off-field success is the fact that they have built cultures where people love each other.
For these coaches, love is not some touchy-feely concept right out of Never Never Land. It is not just a description of a compelling positive emotion. For them, it appears that love is also a lens through which they view their responsibility to build an environment where every person feels that they can reach closer to their potential.
Make no mistake, these coaches are demanding. They got to the Natty because they expect players to learn, grow and give their best effort daily. They demand excellence and they believe that excellence is best sustained in an environment where positive emotions are more prevalent than fear. By reaching the Natty, these coaches are challenging us to see what has been visible for decades-- if not centuries. Cultures built on love, gratitude and positive emotions are fundamental to extraordinary performance.
Since Machiavelli was first asked whether a leader should choose love or fear, people have known, at least intuitively, that when leaders choose love, people are far more likely to be open to new ideas, be expansive in their view of the world, and develop confidence in their team’s ability to be remarkable. Research by North Carolina’s Barbara Fredrickson over the last couple of decades has provided even more proof that positive emotions make extraordinary performance more likely and that fear renders people more change-averse, narrows their field of vision, inhibits learning, and leaves them less adaptive.
Make no mistake, fear moves people to action. But it does not motivate them to greatness. Rather, it moves them to do whatever is necessary to eliminate fear -- which is usually more of what they did yesterday. It creates a fight or flight response rather than a passion for development and better execution. Building a culture with a foundation of fear is building a culture that makes perpetual underperformance more likely.
Yet, too often, fear-based cultures remain the norm.
College coaching has a long tradition of using fear to try and produce ‘peak performance.’ Tough coaches have been revered and imitated for as long as we can remember. As a result, we have often tolerated (or worse yet imitated) behaviors more akin to bullying and hazing, than effective leadership. We have watched as many abusive coaches were excused as simply demanding or results-oriented.
Most have remained resistant to change even after studies have demonstrated that fear-based coaching is harming athletes. According to an American College Health Association assessment, more than 40% of college athletes are “so depressed that it [is] difficult to function,” and 52% feel “overwhelming anxiety.” Ben Tepper’s studies at the Ohio State Fisher College of Business demonstrated that intercollegiate student-athletes are 2 to 3 times more likely to be abused by their leaders than employees in business.
We are not arguing that all college coaches choose fear as an organizing principle. We were lucky to have felt the love that was part of playing baseball on a team coached by the late Tony Gwynn. But, we have also experienced the fear created by another coach that picked his starting shortstop using a process more akin to a UFC match than a college baseball competition. We are arguing that choosing to build a team culture based on fear is both common and ineffective. We are arguing it is time to trade in tired notions of ‘tough’ coaching and to summon the courage to choose love as a foundation of team culture.
Based on the coaches in this year’s Natty, there is reason to believe that the times may be changing. Perhaps Coaches Swinney and Orgeran are part of a new breed that is committed to finding a more positive way forward, one that is more consistent with what we know about how and why people fully engage and perform closer to their potential.
Maybe their successes will encourage future coaches to choose love as an organizing principle. When they say they love their players, maybe it will become more difficult for us to continue to ignore what we know to be true. People don’t play well when they play scared. People perform better on the field, at work, and in the classroom when there is at least 3 times more positive emotion than criticism in the team’s culture.
Clemson versus LSU. It should be one heck of a game. As you watch the game and listen to the coaches, listen to their language. Watch how players treat each other and hold each other accountable. We hope that what we will be watching is the beginning of a different trend in coaching. We hope that their example will demonstrate to a new generation of leaders, coaches, and teachers that choosing love and not fear is not only a more human strategy but it is also a more effective winning strategy.
We know where we will be at kickoff. We will be watching the game, all in. We will be cheering for the Tigers who play in the REAL Death Valley to win the game. And we will be celebrating the successes of two coaches who continue to choose a road far less traveled.
What does love have to do with great leadership? For these two coaches, the answer seems obvious: Just about everything.