Saturday Blueprint With Michael Lombardi

Over his three decades in the NFL, Michael Lombardi has worked alongside some of the most influential and visionary minds the game of football has ever seen, including Bill Walsh, Al Davis and Bill Belichick.

Lombardi, a former NFL general manager and three-time Super Bowl winner, is widely viewed as one of the top evaluators in the sport — revealing what really makes organizations tick at the championship level in his pioneering book Gridiron Genius.

In 2019, he co-founded The Daily Coach alongside Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall-of-Famer Coach George Raveling.

Our team at The Daily Coach spoke to Lombardi recently about the four aspects of leadership, developing organizational culture and how to evaluate talent.

This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity.

Where did your passion and love for the game of football begin?

I think a lot of times your passion grows from what you see. As a kid growing up in New Jersey, and watching Vince Lombardi with the same last name as you on a sideline achieve such notoriety and such success and become an idol, his dreams and his path really became my dreams and something that I really wanted to become.

Only because it was the same last name, and it looked like he could have been at any one of my family reunions, I thought that, and so I just really got passionate about learning about him, learning about his life, about what he tried to do, and that set me on the path of football.

There was a journey and roads traveled to you becoming the Cleveland Browns General Manager. Can you share how your keen interest in football translated into gaining hands-on experience as you started your career?

You start out, you study the game, and you play. I played football at Hofstra. Before I graduated, I wanted to learn about football, so during my whole collegiate career as a player and as a student at Hofstra, in the winter I would travel and do these coaching clinics all over the Northeast Corridor. One would be in Atlantic City, or North Jersey, or even Connecticut, or anywhere. I would go and sit down there and listen to coaches speak, pay the $40 fee and go and spend three days listening to coaches speak about football and learn football.

From doing that in college, I knew that my path to get to coaching or being involved in football required me to become a graduate assistant, continue my learning process, at a school, basically getting the doughnuts, getting the coffee, doing whatever you had to do.

From those clinics, I was fortunate enough to meet a man named Harvey Hyde, who had just happened to become the head coach at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He took a liking to me, and he offered me a tremendously high paying job. No money, but as many Burger King coupons as I had, I went out there and started working and learning.

Actually, I don’t think I was working, I think I was learning. There’s a fine line between work, producing work and learning, and I think that I was in the learning stages. There wasn’t a lot of production of work other than getting his car cleaned and picking up his dry cleaning.

What do great coaches and leaders understand about developing organizational culture?

Great coaches in the NFL or any other sector understand that the leader's job is to establish, drive and maintain the organization's culture. Leaders today spend more time focused on their bottom line, strategy, and tactics and not on people; therefore, their leadership is killing culture. Every day a leader's behavior impacts the organization to the slightest degree. The organization can slip away if leaders are not mindful of their behavior. A leader's job is to drive creativity and curiosity within the organization. Leaders who create culture don't need the light to find their mission.

What are the four elements of leadership that great coaches and leaders possess?

Most great coaches have at least three of the four, and they usually don’t succeed if they don’t. The elements of leadership are management of the tension, which means you have a plan. Most coaches have to have a plan.

The management of meaning, meaning you can explain your plan clearly and concisely and communicate it to the players or to the people you’re leading. The management of trust, the players trust you to be consistent within yourself and within the people you’re leading so that you don’t have double standards. It’s one thing to be a really hard, tough coach, but you’re going to have to be hard and tough on everybody. You just can’t pick and choose. Then the management of self, which is probably the hardest area to be self-critical. When you make a mistake or when you do something that’s not effective, you have to be able and honest to say, “You know what? I made a mistake here. I need to correct that.”

When you have those four areas, then you become a better coach. I think that’s really the fine line. Coaching is leadership. Coaching is teaching. It isn’t just a separate issue. It isn’t just a separate singular vocation. It’s truly about being a good leader. It’s about being a good teacher. If you have those two qualities, you certainly can become a successful head coach.

In times of rapid change and disruption, why is nurturing a macro leadership approach critical to the organization's daily wins?

From a coaching standpoint, as a leader, you want the organization to have a philosophy that transcends time and understands what we’re trying to accomplish. It can’t be on just a very narrow focus. It has to be a 10,000 feet view of what you want the organization to be, how you want it to react, and how it’s going to behave over time. Those standards and those beliefs and principles have to be time tested. Then when they are they can sustain any bump in the road. You can overcome it without having to dramatically change. There’s a difference between change and modification. I think you see the great organizations that have adapted to the change have been leading by rules, have been able to modify their systems and play. Then oftentimes, we see teams that haven’t been successful. They change completely every two years. They’re always wondering when they’re going to catch up.

Can you speak about the scouting process in the NFL and how you and the franchises evaluated talent?

It’s what Bill Walsh used to talk about scouting inside out, not outside in, so you know what you want as a football team. The draft is a huge event, but it’s really a very singular operation because if you focus on what you need and what you really want, and then you search for players that fit those needs and fit those wants, it becomes a lot easier.

Scouting is not about finding players, scouting is about eliminating players. And so, when you have standards, you have requirements, and you have beliefs in your system and things that you must have within your system, then you search for players that fit the criteria and you eliminate ones that don’t. That doesn’t mean they can’t go on to be great players, it just means that they don’t fit what you do or how you want to play.

That’s part of the scouting process and that’s why it’s very important as a general manager, a director of player personnel, to really understand the coaching, what’s being taught, the systems that are in place, because when you do that then it becomes a lot easier to find players that fit within the system.

Do you think a lot of leadership can be taught and how do you differentiate being a manager and a leader?

I think it can be developed, and I think there’s a level to where not everybody is going to be the greatest leader, but there’s elements of leadership that need to be taught. There’s a difference between a manager and a leader. Managers do things right, leaders do the right thing, and so that fine line is always the balance. That’s essentially what leaders are. They do the right thing. Managers do things right. So you can’t teach people what the right thing is to do, but they can do it well, but they’ll do what you tell them to do. I think that separates them.

What would you say you’ve learned from coaching and being in the NFL that you’ve applied to being a parent?

I think the number one thing would be that coaching isn’t criticism. So you have to always convey to your children that you’re trying to help them and not criticize them. That’s a fine balance, whether it’s coaching players or whether it’s talking to your children.

Your criticism is really in coaching ― you’re not being critical of them as people. If you can break down that barrier where they’ll take that information in knowing that your goals and your objectives are pure for their own success, you have much more success with the players and with your children.

Q&A Resources

Michael Lombardi ― Twitter | Instagram | Book: Gridiron Genius