I’ve been a huge NFL enthusiastic and a passionate Denver Broncos fan for something around 5 years now. Although I acknowledge I might be biased towards believing my team is the best, I try to keep a critical eye and a realistic expectation regarding our odds in each game. I love my team, but we’re in a terrifying moment… We have a new head coach, no definitive quarterback, a weak offensive line and honestly, no real perspective of getting any better (which is probably any fan’s nightmare). On the bright side, a retrospective on the Broncos scenario has shown me a few interesting things I’ll bring back to my professional life and which I’d like to share.
You might not see how weak you are until you lose your strongest player
“Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket” is an old say everyone is familiar with, but in the day by day routine, it might be really trick to realize how much you are relying on a single player. For instance, until the season of 2015, we’d still have Payton Manning, which was one of the greatest quarterbacks of the NFL. On Peyton’s farewell year we won the Superbowl! With his great talent, he was able to drive a challenging offensive line to success. On the bright side, the team went back home with a Superbowl ring. On the other hand, although everyone understood we were heavily relying on Peyton and on our defensive line, it wasn’t until the next season we truly saw the problem. For the second year, we didn’t make the playoffs, and this year we had a season full of incomplete passes, fumbles, and interceptions.
You always know who stands out. You always try your best to have a balanced team and not heavily rely on a single person. The bad news is: you won’t know if you truly succeeded on this until you lose that guy.
Short-term results might blind-sight you for long-term sustainability
Whilst Broncos was still winning games, going to the playoffs and even winning a Superbowl, the offensive line issues were somehow overlooked. Don’t get me wrong, everyone knew they were there, but there was this “we’ll make it work” spirit going on, and somehow it felt as if the “horsepower” (a Denver Broncos motto) would always move us forward somehow. It could be a consequence of the previous topic, on top of many other things, such as head coach and players changes… but, by the day everything blew up, it was too late. Everyone knew, but no one had actually realized the problem until we face it. We had overlooked sustainability. The lack of a long-term team strategy put us in a spot where there was much more to be fixed than resources and time available.
You must be able to identify and acknowledge the problem
There’s no way of fixing a problem if you either don’t know what it is or you’re too proud to acknowledge it exists. So here’s a curious thing that happened throughout the Broncos’s season: by the beginning of every head coach press conference after a practice day, Facebook comments would arise with people anticipating the coach saying “it was a good day of practice”, and after every lost fans would anticipate the “we need to do things differently” and the “we need to review the tape and see what happened”. First of all, if you have just watched your team on the field making mistake after mistake, how are you not able to do any kind of assessment on what went wrong?? You’re simply avoiding facing the problem or, even worst, avoiding any kind of confrontation with your most important stakeholders, and old news: this will get you nowhere. When there’s a problem, and you’re responsible for it, not having a clear path for fixing it, any clue on what’s causing it or how to get your team moving forward will only create an environment that lacks trust, motivation and where skepticism, complaints, and finger-pointing raises and grows.
If you are not able to understand what the problem is, you must be humble and ask for help. If you do know what the problem is, you must be able to say: we failed! Patronizing will not get you anywhere. You must be humble to identify and acknowledge your mistakes in order to be able to create a clear path towards growth.
Acting as a martyr is not being a leader
As a leader, your role is to inspire and drive your team towards results. During the failure, your role is to keep your team motivated enough to thrive and drive them towards it. Now imagine this: you are in the field, you did a huge mistake that cost your team the victory, how is it possible that anybody else coming and saying “it’s my fault! I should have trained you better!” take away take terrible feeling you have at this moment?? It won’t!! As a leader, your role is not to take the blame for your team’s failure, you must help them identify what they did wrong and then, help them find ways of avoiding it from happening again. When you’re in a team, everyone is a key part of it, and a problem with any engine might cause the whole system to collapse… As a leader, you must be able to identify those failures and fix it, which is really different from taking the blame for it.
Foster your strengths, no matter how out of the box you must get to do so
I remember this one game in the pre-season where the defense would score more than the offense, we changed quarterback a few times… It was the prelude of the end of times… Simply terrifying! Broncos have a great defense, and they usually leverage it!! This is so true that our Superbowl MVP was Von Miller, one of the greatest defense players in the NFL. I have no doubts we have one of the greatest defenses of the NFL, and even them were stumbling this year. You must be able to strengthen your weak spots and leverage your strengths, leveling by the lowest will get you to the bottom…and I’m sure that’s where no one wants to be.
As any other organization, a football team is a business and we can learn from it. Although we might loose sight from this sometimes, there’s a career and thousands of people involved so that we can blindly defend our teams. If you pay close attention, you will always get something out of any NFL football game, because it’s like a chess game… but much cooler!! Understanding the rules of the game and the league, your team’s strategy and what takes any team up or down might be a great business school if you know how to learn from it! But don’t be mistaken, I still believe in the #horsepower! And I’m pretty sure we’ll get through this phase because I believe in our locker room as much as I believe in our leadership!
P.S.: By the way… Be aware I’m not a football expert, this is just my personal perspective as a fan based on the years I’ve been keeping up with the Denver Broncos. Furthermore, there’s always that shortsighted view of someone that is not on the day to day of an organization, but is analyzing from the outside view, biased by its personal interests.
