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Jack Dorsey on what he learned about culture from 49ers coach Bill Walsh
When Bill Walsh joined the 49ers, they were the worst team in the NFL. Within three years, they were Super Bowl Champions.
In his book, The Score Takes Care of Itself, he writes:
“Winners act like winners before they’re winners…The culture precedes positive results. It doesn’t get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions; they have a winning standard of performance before their winners.”
And he provides six guidelines for establishing a standard of performance:
1. Start with a comprehensive recognition of reverence for and identification of the specific actions and attitudes relevant to your team’s performance and production.
2. Be clarion clear in communicating your expectation of high effort and execution of your Standard of Performance. Like water, many decent individuals will seek lower ground if left to their own inclinations. In most cases you are the one who inspires and demands they go upward rather than settle for the comfort of doing what comes easily. Push them beyond their comfort zone; expect them to give extra effort.
3. Let all know that you expect them to possess the highest level of expertise in their area of responsibility.
4. Beyond standards and methodology, teach your beliefs, values, and philosophy. An organism is not an inanimate object. It is a living organism that you must nurture, guide, and strengthen.
5. Teach “connection and extension.” An organization filled with individuals who are “independent contractors” unattached to one another is a team with little interior cohesion and strength.
6. Make the expectations and metrics of competence that you demand in action and attitudes from personnel the new reality of your organization. You must provide the model for that new standard in your own actions and attitude.
Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey encourages anyone thinking about leading teams or building a company to read this book:
“What’s important about this is that as you start building a team, you need to set expectations around how people need to perform in the company—how people need to act in the company. And these can be very simple things, but without that, you are rutterless—you will react to the outside. And if you react to the outside, you are building someone else’s roadmap and you’re building someone else’s dream instead of your own.”
Video source: @ycombinator (2013)
