Leadership Lessons from Professional Football: Championship Wisdom from Super Bowl Champions

Remember that you’re all on the same team.

 

There is one attitude that has been around as long as people have worked to earn a living. It’s the old “us against them” mindset we first encountered in childhood. From the employees’ standpoint, the “us” stands for the workers who do not have the power to make decisions and can’t even get their opinions heard, whatever their organizational level. The “them” represents everyone else in the organization. Management, however, thinks that it is the “us” and the workers are the “them.” If anything goes wrong, the “us” blames it on “them,” and no one really wants to admit that they are part of the problem!

If all this sounds confusing—it is! A team is not supposed to have two sides. Everyone should be ...