Communication
Say what you mean, and mean what you say.
—GENERAL GEORGE PATTON
Success begins with communication. In any environment, effectively communicating your message to your organization, clearly and concisely, is absolutely essential. It isn’t just what you are communicating, it’s also how well you communicate. The right message delivered the wrong way has no value. If people don’t get your message, you’re wasting both your time and their time. Earning the right to win requires establishing solid relationships with your fellow workers. You all need to be on the same page.
In December 2011, the Giants played the Washington Redskins at MetLife Stadium. It was a game we needed to win to secure a play-off spot. Our record was 7–6, we’d lost four of our previous five games, and some reporters were writing that if we didn’t make the play-offs I would be fired. The Redskins were 4–9 and were playing for their pride. It was one of those “must-win” games for us—although to me every game is a must-win game—and we played very poorly. They beat us 23–10. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. We played without passion. To say I was disappointed doesn’t begin to accurately describe my feelings. It’s always been hard for me to know what to say to my team in the locker room five minutes after a loss. That’s a really tough time. Everyone’s emotions are raw. People are angry and upset. This was a very bad loss for us, and I knew what the players expected to hear from me. Nobody expected me to be polite.
I have a temper. I tend to say what I think. I can’t help it; that’s just the way I am. Earlier in my career, if I had to face this situation, there is no question of how I would have responded. I would have exploded. I would have focused on all the negative things that happened during the game. And maybe I would have lost the team for the rest of the season. But this time I didn’t. I made my feelings clear—we were a better team than we were showing—but I focused on the fact that we still had control of our destiny. I reminded them that if we won the next two games we would be division champions. I told our players, “Get your heads up. Get the frowns off your faces.” Instead of dwelling on the loss, I wanted them to start looking forward to our next game. We turned the page and got right to work preparing for the must-win game the following Sunday.
Giants’ cornerback Cory Webster explained that best when he told reporters, “Everybody’s got a steely eyed focus. We don’t have a long-term memory. We use the short-term memory. We call it FIDO—forget it and drive on.”
I wasn’t always able to be a coach who swallowed his anger and looked ahead. During my career, I’ve had to change the way I communicate with my players. Early on my method was pretty simple: The coach speaks, the players listen. My way or the highway. The coach tells his players what to do and they do it. It was very much the same way in football as it was in any business: The boss is always right. I had learned the art of communication from my parents, and from the nuns in elementary school, who basically communicated with a pointer to your knuckles. Starting in Jacksonville I earned a reputation for being tough, taciturn, and demanding. Tom Tyrant, the writers called me, or Technical Tom. When I was criticized for my methods, I told reporters, “This isn’t Club Med.” I think the people who played for me those years would say that while they respected me, they probably didn’t like me very much. Frankly, I didn’t care about that, as long as they listened to me. They did, and it worked. That’s the way most coaches communicated at that time. Old school. Nobody ever described Vince Lombardi as a warm and friendly guy on the football field. But times changed, the world changed, and I didn’t. “Listen to me or else” was no longer considered the most effective means of getting through to your team.
When the Giants hired me in 2004 the players knew all about my reputation. From the very beginning, Michael Strahan stood up against me, probably representing the whole team, and fought me every step. He thought I was a tyrant, that I didn’t care at all about the players. He thought my attitude was too rigid and my rules didn’t make sense, complaining, “What difference does it make what color socks you wear to practice?” Whatever I did, he questioned.
It was a bad situation. I wanted to change it, but I didn’t know how. It’s not easy to change; you can’t wake up one day and become another person. You can’t “act” differently. Try that, and everyone will see right through you. Change has to be real; it has to come from your core. At the end of the 2004 season, Kurt Warner became a free agent. He had opened the year as our starting quarterback, but I’d replaced him midseason with rookie Eli Manning. Kurt Warner had been great about it; he is a man of great character, and he had accepted the situation professionally, continuing to contribute to the team by working with Eli. After the season he asked if we could sit down and talk. During that meeting I asked him to make a list of all the things he thought I needed to do better as a coach. I’d never done anything like that before, but I was trying to see the problems from a player’s point of view. “Don’t hold back,” I told him.
I expected him to write down three or four suggestions. Instead he wrote page after page of what I needed to do to improve my relationship with the players. He didn’t hold back, telling me that he knew I wouldn’t hold it against him, because he did it with my best interests at heart. A key point of that list was: Rather than just making rules and enforcing them, I should explain to the players why that rule is important to me. Not defend it, explain it. As he said, “Some players will still think the rules are silly, but they’ll figure, ‘He wants us five minutes early because it’s important to him. No big deal.’” Basically, he suggested that I swallow my pride and find a way to really connect to the players—every player, from the biggest star to the players on the practice squad.
I kept that list, and on occasion I still refer to it. If I really wanted to communicate with our players, Kurt emphasized, I had to stop being so negative. Being critical is part of a coach’s job. A coach spends at least part of every day correcting players, helping them improve their game. When a player continues to make the same mental errors or repeats the same physical mistakes over and over, a coach has to deal with it. Which I did, often very loudly and in what would be referred to as “colorful” language. I learned how to do that from some real masters of the art, and some of those times I had learned because I was on the receiving end of a tirade. So I knew what it feels like to be criticized. It isn’t pleasant. What I didn’t know was how to do it differently.
Being negative is an easy habit for any leader to fall into, and I had to learn that it wasn’t necessarily the most effective way to communicate. It took me some time to figure out that too often it just didn’t work. It doesn’t create a positive relationship, it doesn’t motivate a player to play harder for you or work harder for you. Mostly, being negative causes resentment and makes it even harder to communicate. In my profession, like in most businesses, if you’ve got good people working for you, those people are driven to succeed. Their character, pride, and ambition motivate them far better than any of my words could. And when a person is driven, he or she is the hardest person in the world on themselves. They don’t need me standing behind them yelling in their ear to know that they made a mistake. When you have hardworking, disciplined people like Eli Manning working for you, why would you ever yell at him, no matter how he has played? He’s ten times harder on himself than I’m ever going to be. All negativity does is create more negativity—without being particularly effective. I had to learn that I could accomplish a lot more by being reasonable, or even positive. I have to admit, I don’t remember that all the time, but I definitely have gotten better. When the result isn’t what I want, rather than coming down hard, I try to focus on the effort. John Wooden believed that a coach should evaluate effort. If the effort is good, then a coach’s job is to try to find a way to help them improve the result.
Probably the most difficult thing for me to change has been learning how to better express my frustration and my disappointment. It’s hard for me, with my Irish ancestry, not to be emotional and vocalize my feelings. But most of the time getting angry and yelling communicates only one thing: you’re angry. Generally, though, it doesn’t help achieve your goals. Once you start screaming, shouting, and turning red in the face, no one is going to be paying much attention to what you’re trying to tell them. Instead they’re thinking, “Get this guy away from me.” People on the receiving end of an angry rant often don’t focus on the specifics of what went wrong. They already know what went wrong. What they need is guidance about correcting it to make certain it doesn’t happen again.
I try to remember that, although sometimes it isn’t easy for me. I do express my anger. At times it got out of control. I didn’t just get angry, I erupted. On the sidelines, when an official made what I believed was a bad call, I let him know it, loudly. When a player made a mistake, I wasn’t shy about telling him what I thought about it. As a member of my staff pointed out, it was ironic; I would drill it into my team over and over and over that they had to maintain control on the field no matter what happened, that they had to keep their poise, and that I did not want any penalties—while at the same time I was screaming, yelling, throwing clipboards, and losing control and my poise.
One Sunday afternoon early in my career as a head coach, my wife was watching our game on television at home with my mother. After what I considered to be a bad call, the camera focused on me just as I let loose a long string of expletives. You didn’t have to be an expert lip reader to know what I was saying. Judy was appalled. How was my mother going to react to seeing her son cursing on national TV? “Oh, don’t worry about it,” my mother said. “I’ve heard that word many times before.”
While many people won’t believe it, I actually have a good relationship with many NFL officials. At least some of the NFL officials. This is definitely a different type of communication. Usually, when I’m speaking to, or sometimes yelling at, officials, I’m trying to get their attention or make a specific point. Maybe I’ve disagreed with their call or I’m trying to get them to look at something. I’ve got only a few seconds before the next play to plead my case. In those situations the most important thing to remember is to keep the focus on the decision and to not make it personal. Keep it on a professional level. You have to be careful in these situations: You want people to listen to the point you’re making, not dismiss it because of the way you’re making it. If I’m trying to point out to an official that a defensive lineman is continually holding my player, I want him to look for that, not get angry at me for screaming at him. I’ve had officials ignore me because of the way I’ve made my point, not because it isn’t right. That’s human nature. It’s easy to write down this advice, but it’s hard to remember in the moment. There is a tremendous amount of emotion surging through everybody on the field; there’s joy and anger, and there’s a lot of frustration, and it can change in an instant. My point is that we have to find ways to communicate with people whose goals and concerns are different from ours. One thing I do know for certain, though, is that shouting loudly is not particularly effective. There’s no gain. It’s difficult to present a rational argument when you’re screaming. And in some instances screaming at the officials may have hurt my case.
Many veteran officials have been in the league for almost as long as I have. We know each other, and they’ve worked many games I’ve coached. As a group I respect them and believe they do a good job often under very difficult circumstances. That said, there are times when we don’t see the game the same way. When that happens I try to help them, even when they don’t want that help.
I do talk to the officials on the field. Every coach does. Does it help? Maybe. During Super Bowl XVII, for example, after we were called for holding, referee John Parry came over to the sideline and asked me if there was anything I wanted to discuss. I said, “John, we’re trying to win a Super Bowl here. You can’t make a holding call like that on Kevin Boothe.”
“First of all,” he said. “It wasn’t me. But I’ll go and check it out.” A few plays later he came back. The official who made the call had spoken to the player who supposedly had been held. “He said it wasn’t a good call,” Parry told me. “But he wasn’t going to complain about it, because it made up for all the calls he’d never gotten!”
There are times when anger is an appropriate response. At times I still get angry on the sidelines. I guess I always will. Players want their coach to be fighting for them, especially when they believe a bad call has been made. Sometimes expressing that is the right thing to do. It ignites passion. You have to show that winning makes a huge difference to you and that you’re willing to fight for it. You have to show the people around you that you care enough to fight for them. I’ve never lost my passion for winning, so I’m never going to be able to completely contain my frustration on the sidelines. I’m never going to be calm and relaxed. The important thing is to maintain enough self-control to know when to express yourself and when to try to contain it. I have made an effort to tone it down at least a little bit, and Judy tells me that I do exercise at least a little more control.
Kurt Warner’s list made it very clear that I had to improve my relationship with our players, but the reality is, I finally did it because I had to. I did it because my job was in jeopardy. Going into the 2007 season I had a year left on my original contract with the Giants. Our ownership suggested strongly that I try to improve my working relationship with our players and others suggested the same about my relationship with the media who covers the team. Trying to figure out how to do that, I asked several people I respected for advice. One of them was Charles Way, a former Giants player who had become the team’s director of player development in 2000. Charles is the liaison between the coaching staff and the players. But he had also gone to college with my son Tim so he had seen me with my family, away from the football environment. He knew that at home I was a very different person. “Don’t change your core values,” he said, “because you need that discipline and that structure with today’s player. But right now the players feel it’s them against the coaching staff, that you don’t care about them. So if you want them to play for you, you have to show them that you’re sensitive to them, that you care about them. I know you do, but you have to show it to them.”
Loosen up, he told me. Unbutton the top button of your collar, and finally he said, in these words, “Let the players see you the way you are with your grandchildren.” That suggestion had a huge impact on me. I thought about it when he said it, I thought about it driving home, I thought about it the next morning, and I thought it about before my next meeting with him. He was right; I was a different person with my family and friends than I was with my team. I had built and maintained an emotional curtain between myself and my players because I believed it helped maintain respect. And maybe it had at one time, but I was a dinosaur, and if I was going to survive I had to adapt. In the time I had been in the NFL, both as an assistant and a head coach, the game, the mentality, and the people who play the game had changed. Our society had changed. But I hadn’t. The problem was that it was difficult for me to adapt and adjust to the changes that had taken place all around me without changing my core values.
I understood what Charles really meant: I had to allow my players to see that I was a human being, that I was a lot more compassionate than they had seen. The truth is that I did care about my players, I cared about them tremendously; I just didn’t allow myself to show it very often.
The willingness and the ability to change is essential. That doesn’t mean changing with the tides, going in and out all the time. You have to establish your principles and stick to them while also finding a way of making what you do relevant to the people you’re working with. You can’t expect to succeed by doing the same things the same way when the world around you is changing. I had to learn that. The first thing I had to do was to let my players know that I was aware of the problem and that I intended to change. To everyone’s surprise, we scheduled a casino night in the stadium during our preseason minicamp. It’s fair to say that the players didn’t quite know how to react to that. What did it mean? The message that things were changing was reinforced one night during training camp. Instead of the scheduled team meeting, 120 of us got on buses and went bowling. That was absolutely the last thing any of my players could have anticipated. They couldn’t figure out what was going on. Bowling? We’re going bowling? With Coach Coughlin? The purpose was not to see who was the best bowler but to send a message: Things were going to change. The players laughed and hooted when I threw a gutter ball. Breaking the routine made the point that things were going to be very different—and showing it was much stronger than anything I could have said. It was so out of character for me but it was obvious to my players that something was changing. There was no question they got my message: I had gotten their message.
It’s accurate to say that we have changed the working environment. But I haven’t changed my core values, I haven’t changed my coaching philosophy, I didn’t change my personality, and we haven’t changed our core culture. Everything we do emphasizes teamwork, hard work, and attention to detail. But what did change was that I found a better way to communicate with my team, a better way to express myself, and I adapted to the changes in the environment around me. Those changes made a big difference. The result was Michael Strahan saying several years later, “When Tom Coughlin got here I hated him. I wanted to play for anybody else but him. And now I would not want to play for anybody but him.”
The other important lesson that I learned at that time is that positive communication requires that you listen to other people. Not just hear them, but actually listen to what they have to say, and pay attention to it. In addition to Charles Way, I met with Pat Hanlon, the Giants’ senior vice president of communications. It would be accurate to say that at that time my relationship with the New York media was awful. The relationship between a leader who wants to control the flow of information about his team or company and the people whose job it is to report some things that, at best, aren’t helpful for that leader, is always going to be difficult. The New York media thought I was rude, dismissive, surly, unpleasant, uncooperative, abrasive, and fill in whatever other adjectives you’d like to describe a combative, confrontational relationship. My wife looked right into my eyes and told me bluntly, “Tom, the media doesn’t just dislike you. They hate you. So I’m telling you right now: Do something to help yourself.”
To quote the classic line from the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” The Giants are a very public organization, and we have a large and extremely loyal fan base. My combative relationship with reporters who covered the team made my job tougher and their job tougher. And I was the only one who could change that. Pat suggested that I meet individually with the dozen or so reporters who regularly covered the Giants. We set no ground rules for these meetings. We told the reporters that this was their opportunity to look me right in the eye and clear the air, that they should be honest and open about their issues with me, and we assured them that there would be absolutely no repercussions. I said, “You go ahead and tell me what you don’t like about me, I’ll tell you what I don’t like about you, and we’ll see if we can find some middle ground.” We met in my office. Some of those meetings were brief, others lasted more than an hour. They were all cordial.
One-on-one I found that some people don’t say the same things to your face that they’d said to others, or written, while others are quite candid. No one called me any names or explained why they’d written I should be fired. Mostly they told me they felt I had no understanding of their job, and that by being acerbic or evasive I was making that job more difficult. A columnist told me, “You act as if you don’t have time for us.” When I thought about that I realized that he was probably right. At times press conferences would go on for a long time, and after we had lost a football game, the last thing I wanted to do was sit there answering questions that I’d answered several times, or questions that I thought were ridiculous. When those things happened I wouldn’t respond very well, or even very nicely. But after I heard that complaint, I knew I could do better than I was doing to help them do the best job possible.
Among the people I met with was Newsday’s Neil Best, who described the same problem from his viewpoint: “The men who had sat in that chair before Tom Coughlin had been the ultimate dream for a reporter in terms of accessibility,” he said. “It was a rocky transition. He came in and lived up to his image as a tough guy with somewhat arbitrary rules. In training camp I asked an innocuous question and he snapped at me like he had no patience for it. And when he was giving one-word answers and being grouchy in his press conferences, we’d roll our eyes. It was not a good relationship.
“I went in there at six in the morning, and we met for an hour and a half. He didn’t just sit there and listen; he seemed open to what I had to say and took copious notes. We had a discussion. He agreed with me on some points and contested other points. Most of what I said to him seemed fairly obvious. I told him that this was a lot simpler than he was making it. No one had an agenda against him, which he seemed to think there might be. We were just trying to do the best possible job, so when he gave us a hard time it didn’t help us accomplish that.
“I even suggested that little things like saying our name when he answered a question, acknowledging us, might actually be an easy way to our hearts. So at the Super Bowl at the end of the year, when he started calling on the New York reporters by name I thought, wow, maybe he really was listening.
“Looking back on that situation, he hasn’t changed fundamentally. He’s the same person he was, but there now is a good level of mutual respect. Because of his consistency and integrity and the fact that he doesn’t play favorites, I think he has grudgingly won the respect of the New York media in a way that I don’t think any of us envisioned when it started.”
The first thing I had to try was more patience. Patience had never been one of my strongest virtues. I have always been in a hurry, even when I wasn’t quite certain where I was going. When I wanted something done, I wanted it done right away. If it wasn’t, I didn’t respond well. That wasn’t a secret either. When we were moving into our new stadium in the Meadowlands, for example, there was the potential for all types of challenges. I told the coaching staff, “This isn’t going to be seamless, so I want everybody to take his patience pills. Don’t go off the handle, go with the flow, just be patient.”
Me telling other people to be patient? Well, that got their attention. When I walked into our staff meeting the next day, I found that Chris Palmer, the quarterbacks’ coach, had placed a container labeled PATIENCE PILLS in large letters and full of jelly beans on the table next to my chair. Without a word I reached into the jar, took out a handful, and swallowed them. Obviously, I had gotten that message.
I spent time reviewing my notes after these meetings with the reporters and figuring out what to do. I came away with a much greater understanding of how I was making it harder for them to get their job done. That was never my intention. I understand people taking pride in their work and wanting to do the best job they possibly can. I got that. And, as they explained to me, I was making it difficult for them. To do their job they needed my cooperation. One result of these meetings was that I promised myself that I’d at least pause and actually think about what I was about to say before responding to a reporter’s question. I’d show some patience. I also came away with the realization that the people who communicated the best were people who did it with humor—and the very important knowledge that to communicate my thoughts I had to learn how to listen.
You can’t communicate effectively if you don’t listen. It’s that simple. At our team meetings, for example, I would stand in front of the room and make all the points I needed to make. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I thought I was pretty clear about it, but later I would find out that there might be as many as five completely different interpretations of what I had just said. Different people heard the same words differently. Perhaps they heard what they wanted to hear. But it became obvious to me that no matter how well I thought I was making my point, if that many people got it wrong, I was not communicating effectively. I was just talking. I had to figure out how to do a better job.
To deal with that we formed what we called a Leadership Council consisting of ten players from all the position groups. The sole reason I did that was to improve the level of communication within our team. I wanted to make sure that the players were getting the information they needed. If there was any confusion, the members of the Leadership Council cleared it up. Rather than having to deal with fifty-three different players, I met with this smaller group regularly. In these meetings we would go over our upcoming schedule and discuss any issues or problems we were facing. I wanted the team to have plenty of notice of what we intended to do, and when we intended to do it, to give players and their families the chance to make their own plans. I also wanted to make sure that we were all on the same page, that everybody understood precisely what I was saying. I gave these leaders real responsibility, allowing them to take care of issues that in the past would have ended up on my desk, without my having to get involved.
I did one other thing. I not only listened to the Leadership Council, I paid attention to their requests. For example, in my twelve years as a head coach in the NFL, I’d never had permanent captains. The Leadership Council voted unanimously that we should have three season-long captains. We did, and those three captains added an extra layer of leadership that helped keep the team together throughout the season. When we were preparing for Super Bowl XLII, instead of simply announcing what the curfew would be, as I would have done in the past, we discussed it. We agreed that early in the week there would be no curfew, but we would institute a curfew as the week progressed. We got total buy-in from the team. The players understood that they had a stake in the decision-making process. As All-Pro lineman Chris Snee, who is also my son-in-law, said about me that season, “He tweaked a few things. He’s established a better relationship with the players. Now he’ll hear both sides of an argument.”
I have changed. I’m certainly not as rigid as I once was. I don’t want to be perceived as a stuffed shirt. Maybe I’ll stand in front of the team at a meeting and do some jumping jacks. The players love it—they may think I’m a little nuts, but they love it. Now I try to be less predictable, to shake their preconceptions. We played the Cowboys on New Year’s Day 2012, and at the end of our team meeting on New Year’s Eve, we opened the doors and waiters walked in, carrying champagne for everyone. Everyone was shocked. Tom Coughlin serving champagne to his team the night before a game? “You spend New Year’s Eve with your family,” I told them, “and this is our family.”
Change is hard to institute. When we introduced these changes there were a lot of people who were skeptical that it was anything more than a temporary Band-Aid. I suspect they were afraid that anything they said to me during this period of candor might come back to bite them when I returned to my old ways. Getting people to talk honestly to their boss requires that you establish a level of trust, and it takes time to build that trust. In any business situation, including a football team, there are always people who will tell the boss what they believe he wants to hear rather than saying what they really believe. My friend Dick Jauron likes to tell a wonderful story that exemplifies this attitude. It took place when he was my defensive coordinator at Jacksonville. As he tells it, “We weren’t having a very good day defensively. Our offense would score, and then the other team would come right back and score. We were losing by a few points in the fourth quarter. So after we scored, I heard Tom’s voice in my headphones asking me, ‘If we onside kick and don’t recover the ball, will we stop them?’
“When the head coach asks you that there is only one answer. And it isn’t, ‘No, we can’t stop them.’ So I told him, ‘You kidding me? Sure we’ll stop them.’ We tried an onside kick; they recovered it and moved right down the field and scored. Then, sure enough, we went right back the other way and scored. Once again, there was Tom’s voice in my ear, asking the same question, ‘Will we stop them if we onside kick?’ I thought the answer was pretty clear by then. What I wanted to say was, ‘Coach, we haven’t stopped them yet.’ Instead, I told him what I thought he wanted to hear, ‘Go ahead. Onside kick and we’ll stop them.’
“‘Well, we haven’t stopped them yet!’”
Putting anyone in a position in which they feel compelled to tell you what they think you want to hear doesn’t work. It hurts rather than helps you reach your goal. The way to change that is by listening to what people say and then taking action based on their suggestions. And when they’re wrong, as everyone will be at some point, you don’t turn around and blame them. Sometimes you have to demonstrate to people that you hear what they have to say even if what they are saying isn’t what you want to hear. Figuratively and, at least in one example, literally. At our Saturday night team meeting before a Sunday game, if we’ve won the week before, we play a highlight reel showing our people making great plays. It’s a “rock ’em, sock ’em, go get ’em, here’s what we’re going to do tomorrow” tape. We always add an upbeat musical soundtrack to this tape, something to communicate a message. I’m not a huge fan of rap or heavy metal. Sometimes I don’t understand a word of it. But, as I’ve learned, that music isn’t meant to please me or get me ready to play. The players’ taste picks the music. If that’s the type of music that starts their engines, that’s what we play.
I’ve become more tolerant. When I look back at things that I did in the past, there are certain decisions I wouldn’t make today. For example, when I was at Jacksonville, two rookies racing to get to a Saturday night meeting in the rain went speeding over a bridge and got into an accident. It was a fender bender, and fortunately nobody was hurt. But it made those players late for the meeting. This had been a continuing problem with them, and they’d been warned several times. I was angry, and I fined them, not for being in a car accident but for not giving themselves sufficient time to get to work on time. When the media found out about it, they wrote that I had fined players for being late because they were in an accident. That was not true, and it certainly wasn’t the message I wanted to communicate. If that same situation occurred today, I wouldn’t fine those players. In that situation, fining them sent the wrong message.
Through the years I’ve developed my own methods for communicating effectively with my staff and my team. It’s a pretty simple rule: When I have something to say, I say it. I don’t waste time looking for the politically correct way to make my point. I am blunt without being rude. I can do that because everybody knows that my goal is the same as theirs: Win. That’s already established. So whatever I say is meant to help us reach that goal as a team. It is never meant to be personal. As a result, as tight end Bear Pascoe told a reporter in 2011, “He’s always straight up with us. He tells us what he’s thinking. We know where he stands.” Steve Spagnuolo said the same thing: “You’re going to know exactly where you stand with Tom Coughlin, because he’s going to let you know.”
I don’t waste time, my time or the time of those people I work with. When I schedule a meeting, it starts on Coughlin Time, and every aspect of it is planned, even to the moment when an assistant is supposed to dim the lights. Before the meeting I’ve prepared or approved just about every word that is going to be said to my team. When I’m speaking to the team almost nothing is spontaneous, and I don’t allow anyone else to speak without my approval. Every word, every piece of footage, is consistent with the theme we are trying to implement. Every speaker we invite to address the team, every sign we hang in the locker room, everything we give them to read has been chosen because it reinforces the concept we are trying to communicate.
John Wooden always believed that people learn more effectively if they are given smaller bites of information each time rather than being served the whole information meal. Rather than having a general rule like that, I think it’s important to understand how much information each person can comprehend and give them as much as they can assimilate. We try to give each player the information he needs to succeed, and then work with him to make sure he understands it, digests it, and can apply it on the field. Part of each assistant coach’s job is knowing just how much information his players can absorb. You have to know the physical and mental capabilities of your people and work within the range of what’s possible. We follow this principle (from Confucius) in our teaching: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” We use a variety of teaching methods to communicate to people: lectures, video/Powerpoint, demonstrations, jog-throughs, and testing. We work with the entire team, with various units, and on an individual basis. And we keep working until we’re confident that we’ve successfully communicated the message.
I’m also a sticky note guy. Where other people might send an e-mail, I’ll write on a Post-it. There’s nothing more direct than a simple message waiting for someone when he walks into the office. It’s not one of a long list of e-mails; it’s the first thing they see. The fact that I took the time to write it and put it right in front of him or her makes it clear that this is a priority. Pay attention to this. Get it done. When I do give a note or a project to an assistant, it is his duty to follow up to the point when it is completely carried out, without questioning it. So I’m constantly writing little notes and leaving them where I know they’ll be found. I’m as direct on these notes as I am in person. Generally they cover those thousand little details I’ve noticed and want taken care of right away: The light’s out in my office and I need a new bulb. The grand catchall: See me. Every assistant knows when they walk into their office and finds one of my notes that it is something that needs to be taken care of right away.
Very often, when members of our coaching staff arrive in the morning, they’ll find a note stuck to their desk. For me it’s a way of reminding people that details matter. In 2002, I hired Mike Priefer, a graduate of the Naval Academy, as the Jaguars’ assistant special teams coach and my scheduling assistant. As he tells the story, he had made some small mistake on the schedule, and when he came into work the following morning he found a note on his master schedule reading, “This is not what I expect from you. This is not what I expect from a Naval Academy graduate. It is not what I expect from one of my assistant coaches.”
He later said, “I kept that sticky note with me the entire season to remind me that there’s no time for amateur hour in the NFL. That note taught me that everyone in the NFL, even the lowest guy on the totem poll like I was, has details he has to focus on, that mistakes cannot be tolerated.”
Sometimes, as I learned, earning the right to win requires taking a hard and honest look at the way you’re doing things and admitting that you have to make changes. My message hasn’t changed, but the way I communicate it has. And that has made a significant difference, both in my effectiveness as a coach and the quality of our working environment—which translates into winning.