Watching the baseball playoffs makes me think back to the times when I played on teams in school. In particular, it makes me think about what coaches do to help their teams win. If your coach was any good, he or she did all of the things listed below:

• Make sure you know the rules of play
  
• Get you in shape
• Drill you on plays
• Figure out your strengths
• Define your role
• Challenge you to improve
  
• Boost your confidence
• Build team camaraderie
• Help you win during the game
• Think long-term about the team's needs

A leader-coach does all these things. I want to focus on two here: Drilling you on plays and helping you win during the game.
When your actions affect hundreds of people, you need to be drilled in advance so you’re prepared to do the right thing: how to communicate, who needs to be in the loop, what pitfalls to avoid, how to detect early signs of trouble. A leader-coach will take his or her team through simulations and exercises designed to get you prepared. At HSBC Bank, for example, managers are drilled on how to handle cross-border disputes. At Sprint, IT managers are drilled on crisis management. It’s easy to see how this investment can pay off. At Sprint, dozens of network problems are headed off each day because their teams are prepared.
Leader-coaches also help you win while you’re playing the game. They provide real-time feedback as you’re handling an issue, offering support and giving useful insights. Their doors are open, they keep their heads, they offer perspective. I’ll never forget how one of my first bosses helped me deal with deadline pressure. “Look,” he said with a grin. “The beauty of the business is that everyone forgets what you did after 24 hours. So if you screw up, you can make it right in a hurry."

 

In his book "Good to Great," Jim Collins tells the following story: In the 1970s and 1980s, Bank of America and Wells Fargo Bank had similar revenues and profit margins. Bank of America was led by a strong, egotistic CEO who, by dint of his personality and commanding nature, had assembled a passive team of "yes" men.
Wells Fargo, on the other hand, had assembled one of the most dynamic management teams in the industry. At Wells Fargo, people posed tough questions to one another and weren't afraid to challenge the status quo. They felt free to challenge each other's thinking. Their relationships were founded on mutual trust rather than mutual fear.
In the early 1980s, banking deregulation took place, triggering a revolution in the industry. The industry's traditional profit margins were threatened. Wells Fargo's management team saw the changes coming and focused on cutting costs. They recognized that banking was becoming a commodity business, with thinner profit margins than before. “Run it like you own it,” became their mantra.
In contrast, BofA reacted slowly. The country club culture prevailed. No one challenged the status quo. The result? Over a fifteen-year-period, from 1983 to 1998, Wells Fargo’s stock outperformed BofA’s by 500 percent.
That story comes to mind as I contemplate the new financial landscape. Wells Fargo's takeover of Wachovia gives it the most branches of any bank in the United States. BofA's takeover of Merrill Lynch makes it the largest brokerage in the world. BofA becomes the number one underwriter of global high yield debt.  Wells is positioned to get new deposits. Both will see their shares purchased by the U.S. government under Treasury Secretary Paulson's bailout plan.
So which bank will emerge the better? I'd bet on Wells Fargo. In this climate, I'd rather be the country's largest commercial bank than the world's largest holder of high yield debt. Stay tuned!

I worked last week with a group of scientists and clinicians. Their mission is to understand, prevent and treat autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. The goal of this day-long meeting was to figure out what the faculty could do to best achieve their mission.
One scientist talked about specialization. "We are very specialized in our individual research," she said. "That's how we win our grants and get money. And we are becoming increasingly specialized.  It's like the expanding universe. All our stars are flying farther apart from each other."
"That's very true," said another scientist. "Yet to be effective in solving this very complex puzzle, we need to get closer to each other. We need to build understanding of what each of us is learning. Bridging that gap is our biggest challenge."
Another person jumped in. "In my last project, we put together an inter-disciplinary team. We met twice each week as a team. At first I hated having so many meetings. But that project yielded surprising and important breakthroughs in understanding how our immune system affects early childhood development. Communication was key to our success."
"That's right," another person said. "The breakthroughs occur when we understand what happens at three levels - behavior, development, and biology. We need to bridge those gaps."
"But that's a huge leap," another person said. "Each of those is a different world with a different history and protocols and language. How can we possibly do that?"
People make the same leap when they become leaders, I said. When people are promoted into leadership roles, they have to rethink how they add value. The biggest leap is understanding the importance of communication. Those who succeed as leaders build good systems of communication. They make sure there's enough communication so that everyone understands how they can best work together and achieve the organization's goals.
"So who is responsible for that here?" someone asked.
"Good question," I said. "What do you think?"
"I guess we all are."
"So how can you build systems of communication?" I asked.
People started to toss out ideas. Within an hour, we had identified five new strategies to build communication. The faculty agreed to try all of them. They also agreed to meet each quarter to assess how well they were communicating. I was happy. They were making the leap.

Picture someone you think of as a great leader. It could be someone you work with. It could be someone you’ve read about or seen on TV. What are the qualities that make him or her a great leader? What comes to mind? Courage? Vision? Wisdom? Experience? What sets them apart?
Admit it, the question is difficult to answer. More difficult than it should be. One reason is that leadership is a highly complex activity, so complex that we have difficulty comprehending it. Our minds are hard-wired to think linearly. A before B, then comes C. That’s easy to grasp. But as the writer Peter Senge points out, our minds are not well-suited to grasping dynamic complexity. And if anything embodies dynamic complexity, it’s the process of leading.
A second reason is that we assume a good leader will always make good decisions. We go about our daily lives, catching snippets of reality shows and news headlines (“Another CEO was  fired today”) and homespun wisdom (“All we need is someone with a grain of sense to lead this country.") We expect our leaders to be perfect.  We forget that they are human.
A third reason is more humbling. Psychologists have demonstrated through experiment that human beings are rather sheepish in the way we follow our leaders. If Person A is our leader, we don’t ask challenge his decisions.  Instead, we do what A says, trusting him to do a good job. We’re hardwired for this kind of blind obedience because it conferred an evolutionary advantage on early human beings. When told to attack a woolly mammoth, people went along and got the job done no questions asked (even if a few lost their lives in the process!). Why? Because killing a woolly mammoth was good for the tribe.
So what if A proves not to be a very good leader? The evidence suggests that we wait too long before we do anything. The majority of humans still faithfully follow until the evidence of incompetence is overwhelming. By then, the damage has been done.
Given all these reasons why we can’t distinguish a good leader from a so-so one, how can we ever get it right? What can save us from being perpetually deceived? What is the way out of this leadership paradox? The answer is that we all need to agree on what good leaders actually do. We need a clear roadmap – one that’s simple enough to understand, yet complex enough to capture all of leadership’s dimensions. If we agree on such a roadmap, then we can exercise much more discretion and intelligence in our choice of leaders. My new book (due out next year) aims to provide that roadmap. I'll be previewing it in future posts to this blog.