Super Bowl Minisode - Cody Royle on The Patriots and what business can learn from sports

[01:00] Paul: Welcome to The Boundless Podcast. I'm Paul Millerd, and I created this podcast because I'm passionate about making sense of the future of work and having conversations with the innovators, creators, and thought leaders who are carving their path in today's fast-changing world. You can check out the podcast and more on boundlesspod.com. Today's episode is a bit of an experiment, a minisode of my conversation with Cody Royle, which I had last week. We talked a bit about sports and high-performing organizations and inevitably talked about the Patriots. We dove into his book Where Others Won't, which talks about how— what businesses can learn from sports.

So I thought it'd be relevant to share this on the Super Bowl. And in addition, I'll be giving away two of his books to supporters. All you need to do is tweet the podcast with the hashtag #BoundlessPod or email me a screenshot at paul@think-boundless.com of you subscribing to the podcast, and I'll announce the winner of the books after the full episode airs in a few weeks. Hope you enjoy the episode and let me know what you think. Thanks. Let's talk about some organizations.

So I'm a big Boston sports fan and you said you are a New York Giants fan. As a Patriots fan, we I'll definitely get to digging into them, but first would love to hear how did you become a New York Giants fan in Australia?

[02:48] Cody Royle: I am an NFL fan from way back. I think we— it was probably the mid-'90s. There was a highlight show that would come on at like 8 o'clock in the morning in Australia on Sunday morning or something like that. So I'd get up really early to watch it. I ended up— I really enjoyed watching at that time the St. Louis Rams, and when Kurt Warner got traded to the Giants, I decided I was going to follow him.

Again, no allegiances. I'm just some kid in Melbourne, so, right, I wasn't a local. I didn't need to be a homer. And, uh, and then Warner plays, I think it's like 9 games, and then gets shipped off to Arizona. I'm like, you know what, I'm going to stick it out with the Giants. They just drafted Eli.

I kind of stumbled on it. It wasn't deliberate. It was following a player that I liked, and then I've just stuck with them ever since. Eli has delivered on that, and so now I'm hooked.

[03:46] Paul: The Giants are a pretty incredible organization, and it pains me to say that as a Patriots fan, but the Patriots are also an incredible organization but have been beaten twice by the Giants in the Super Bowl. I think they've really benefited from great ownership, some great coaches, great managers. What are some things that have stuck out for you looking at organizations like that?

[04:10] Cody Royle: Yeah, we talk about this a lot with our friends here when we go and watch games. There's— and the Patriots have joined this realm of just really stable, really deliberate organizations, and you know what you're going to get from them. And as frustrating as, as that can be with what the Giants are going through at the moment with having to basically strip down the whole organization and start again, um, the consistency of what you expect from them and the fact that they're committed to who they are, I think, is what stands out the most. And, you know, you see it with only a few, a handful, like the Steelers, the Giants, the Patriots now under Bob Kraft, and Green Bay really are probably the other example. But the consistency and that we are this and this is the way we've always done it and we're going to continue to do this and we're not going to be rocked by a 2-game losing streak.

And fire everyone. We're going to stick with it. And, you know, over time— again, we're talking generational teams here— over time, you just build a consistency with that, and people know what to expect when they come into the organization, and they know what they're going to get out of it. And I think that's why people that leave the New York Giants, um, you know, players, they go and play somewhere else later on, once they've retired, they still identify as being a Giant or a Patriot or a Packer. It's because it has such an effect on those people because they feel like they're at home. And yeah, there's a lot to be said for that.

[06:00] Paul: Yeah, I think so many people underestimate how different it might be organization from organization. I think we see these teams on the field and say, oh, Patriots, there's 11 players there, there's 11 players there. But in many ways, I've tried to reflect on the Patriots and seeing what they're doing, looking at it from an organizational lens, and they're doing things very differently. Their goal is not just to win one game. They're putting people in earlier in the season, trying different things, going against the grain constantly, and it's all with this long, long-term goal of trying to win as many as many championships as possible. So what should an organization or even other football teams do when they think about copying models like this?

[06:47] Cody Royle: I think you hit the nail on the head there. The, the long view is really what you're after. The, um, it allows you to set yourself up in ways that other teams won't. So what the Patriots are great at doing, and I talk about this in the book, is they know that other teams are going to freak out and overreact and trade them something that is actually worth more value than it seems at that time. Second round picks is the big one that everyone talks about. But the Patriots just sit there and they have a long-term view.

And then someone has a quarterback controversy or an injury or something happens and they completely freak out. And they go, "Okay, well, why don't you give us your second-round pick?" And then they do that to 3 or 4 teams. By the end of it, it's seen as that they've fleeced teams. But it's because that they're just consistent. They're playing the longer game and don't really care whether they lose 1 game, lose 5 games. Yeah, and I think there's so much to be learned from that.

It happens in the business world. Companies do where something happens and everyone freaks out and panics and you fire this person and you do this and do that and it just unsettles everything and you do some crazy things and you don't set yourself up for sustained success, which is what the Patriots have had. To me, it's not amazing what they've done because they've shown that they're unwilling to flinch because they lose a game or lose a player.

[08:33] Paul: And I think a lot of those advantages build. I was reflecting with a friend and saying Tom Brady and Belichick and Kraft have played almost 2 or 3 seasons of playoff high-intensity football. So once you're— so once you're aiming high enough, uh, you're getting more reps at that high-performance level, and suddenly the gains even grow more and more. Do you have examples from other teams or sports where that kind of comes out?

[09:07] Cody Royle: Yeah, well, I think there's some consistencies with that as well. The recent example in the tennis world would be Roger Federer, where you know, he's just won his 20th Grand Slam having come back, you know, he's, you know, in his late 30s and everyone had written him off. But you have to remember that he, he fully understands what it takes and what his body needs and, um, and the pressure that he's going to come up against and how to play against XYZ player. Um, and yeah, I think we see it in all walks of life, not just sport and business. But when you have that understanding of what it's going to take at the highest of high levels, it kind of becomes self-perpetuating to a certain degree. And so that's why people that have one success often have 3, 4, and 5 successes, because they now understand what it's going to take, right?

[10:14] Paul: Yeah, those, uh, those advantages build over time. One example we talked about with the Patriots was, I wrote about this in one of my articles of saying, okay, Tom Brady wins his first Super Bowl and succeeds. And what the corporate world would actually do in this situation is say, all right, great, you're really good at your job, we're going to promote you. But Bob Kraft didn't come on the field and say, Tom, we want to make you general manager now. Well, why do we have such a disconnect? Like, we understand that the players should be doing the creating and the work in this, in sports, but, uh, in the business world, we just promote people past what they're actually thriving at.

[10:56] Cody Royle: Yeah, exactly. Uh, that's a great example that, that, uh, your whole article there, which is actually how we started talking, um, just hits the nail on the head. And I think it's, it's one of those old world strategies again. You know, you're good at putting, um, nuts on the on the conveyor belt and so we're going to promote you to the leader and you just keep going up and up and up and up. The whole system is set up that way, but you're starting to see examples of companies like Google who don't do that and they have— I think you mentioned this in the article as well— they have people that are earning more at the lower levels than the higher levels. So you're starting to see it, but it is really a structural thing.

We need to completely revamp the way companies do business and how they promote people or don't promote people. But again, it kind of comes back to you have to be asking those questions of your people. Do you even want to be a leader? We don't even ask that. We just promote people and they take it because it's more money. But we don't know whether people are interested in leadership, whether they can lead.

[12:10] Paul: We just say, you're good at your job and so now you're going to teach everyone else how to do Yeah, the counterintuitive thing may be they may actually be a better leader by just remaining doing the work and doing it at a really well level, right?

[12:25] Cody Royle: Right. And that was one of my real frustrations, I guess, in the corporate world was I just wanted to be a leader. So I actually would have taken a lower salary to be able to manage people and coach them and help them do their jobs better. But you can't do that unless you code the toe the company line for long enough and basically outlast everyone else. Then you get your opportunity to lead. That's really not a good way of doing it.

I think we should be almost putting particularly leaders into some sort of leadership pipeline where they can actually utilize those skills.

[13:04] Paul: Right. I love that. That's one of my ideas I've been thinking about. We have career tracks for supply chain, operations, finance. But there's no career track where you're just saying, "I am a leader of people." You kind of discovered this in sports, but why aren't we creating a path just to develop people to inspire, coach, and lead?

[13:27] Cody Royle: Yeah, it's an interesting one, and there's so many coaching examples now where, well, I talk about a bunch in the book, but If you want to talk about the NFL, Sean McVay, 30 years old. In the corporate world, he doesn't get his head coaching position because he's too young and there's a more experienced guy to come in and take that role. There's another example in Germany, a coach by the name of Julian Nagelsmann. He has a small team. He was 29 when he took the job and he took them into the Champions League qualifiers within 18 months. From when he took over, they were about to be relegated from the German first division.

There's proof in sports that when you put people into a leadership career path, it doesn't take them long to be able to be really, really effective. They're not even out of their 20s, a lot of these guys, and they're competing. They're inspiring and managing and leading teams at the highest, highest levels of sport. There just has to be more examples in business where that could be. The most effective thing to do rather than bringing in the 55-year-old, you know, guy with super experience at this and that who maybe is checked out and doesn't really want to lead.

[14:53] Paul: So I'd, I'd love to just get your reflection on if I'm a business person listening to this and wanted to know what are one or two things I should just copy and put in place in my business tomorrow?

[15:10] Cody Royle: The big thing for me would be— so throughout the book, there's really 4 quadrants that I talk about: recruitment, leadership, culture, and high performance. And the big change that I ultimately campaign for is for people to see those 4 as being interlinked. They're not siloed in any way, shape, or form, but they're treated as such. Again, we're talking about the old world where you go and have an HR division and you have this division and you have that, that, that. I think what needs to happen is we need to reverse engineer a lot of that. And, you know, an easy change to make is your recruiting.

You need to align your recruiting with what you're trying to achieve rather than just grabbing a job description off the shelf The last accounts payable person that we hired, let's just grab their description and we'll put an ad out on Monster or whatever it is, LinkedIn, and we'll just do that again. But spend some time worrying about the people that you bring into your organization. How are you going to lead them? What culture, what cultural elements they bring to the table? And then how are you going to manage them? It's not two things, but it's really one big thing, is we need to stop looking at our world as being siloed.

Those four elements are very much together. You should be recruiting people worrying about how you're going to lead them and, and how you're going to manage that performance. And then, like we've been talking about, how is that going to change over time? Because Once your top salesperson who was flying when they were 25 and single, once they have their first kid, their priorities change and maybe they lose their edge. He doesn't care about being a ruthless salesperson anymore. How are you going to manage that person?

That starts at the recruiting process. If there is one little thing, I think really think about who you're bringing into your organization and why, and how you're going to manage those people once they're in the job, rather than sitting down and trying to checklist people. Can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this?

[17:32] Paul: Thanks for coming on the pod today, and, uh, had a great time.

[17:36] Cody Royle: Thanks, me too. Appreciate it.