As a football coach, Jimmy Johnson won two Super Bowls with the Dallas Cowboys and a national championship at the University of Miami, but when he gave a keynote interview Sept. 15 at Becker’s 11th Annual IT + Revenue Cycle Conference, his sharpest leadership advice had nothing to do with strategy on the field. It was about who gets acknowledged in the hallway.
Mr. Johnson recalled advice he gave to a former assistant, Jason Garrett, after he was promoted to head coach: that the job requires paying attention to people who previously had no reason to expect it from him.
“No one likes to be ignored,” Mr. Johnson said. “Especially, no one wants to be ignored by the leader.”
He told Mr. Garrett that no one pays much attention when the offensive coordinator walks down the hall. As the head coach, however, every head turns.
“If you’re going to get the best out of this organization and these people, give them some attention,” Mr. Johnson said. He advised the audience not to be consumed by one’s own to-do list that an opportunity to share a compliment or acknowledgment passes by.
That same instinct for reading people individually, Mr. Johnson said, is the harder and less visible skill of leading a group of talented, driven people: learning that the same approach does not work with everyone.
With Hall of Fame receiver Michael Irvin, discipline meant confrontation.
“I could cuss him like a sailor, and he just worked that much harder,” Mr. Johnson said.
Hall of Fame running back Emmitt Smith, on the other hand, needed the opposite touch.
“[If I said] you know, Emmitt, that’s the wrong way to do it, he’d go into a shell, and I wouldn’t get anything out of Emmitt the rest of the day,” Mr. Johnson said.
Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman needed something different as well.
“I wasn’t going to holler at Troy,” Mr. Johnson said. “I’d just say, ‘Troy, come on over here. How do you think we can get better?'”
He described a harder case in Charles Haley, a star pass rusher he traded for after Mr. Haley had worn out his welcome in San Francisco. After a bad loss to Minnesota, Mr. Johnson closed the locker room door and called the team up front to talk — and Mr. Haley, sensing trouble, hung back. Mr. Johnson ordered him forward twice before the player complied.
The next day, Mr. Haley came to him privately. “Coach,” Mr. Johnson recalled him saying, “I love playing for you, and we’re going to do good. But don’t embarrass me in front of the other players.” Mr. Johnson said he understood the message, even if he could not always promise to act on it.
“I had to know the individuals and what button to push,” he said. “That takes time. It’s much easier as a CEO or the head of a company to just say, ‘Hey, a blanket on everybody,’ but you got to take time for each individual.”
Mr. Johnson said the other half of leading people is convincing them what is possible in the first place. Before the Cowboys played a more experienced Buffalo Bills team in the Super Bowl, he told his young roster to picture a two-by-four laid flat on the ground. Anyone could walk the length of it without falling. Raise that same board 10 feet in the air, he said, and most people would fall — not because the task changed, but because of what took over their mind.
“It’s all in your mind,” Mr. Johnson told his players, who went on to win that Super Bowl. “You’re better than they are. You don’t turn it over. In your mind, you’re on that practice field. Nobody’s watching. You’re going to kick their [bleep] because you’re better than they are.
“Treat a person as he is, he’ll remain as he is. Treat a person as if he were what he could be and should be, he will become what he could be and should be.”
For all the credit he could have claimed across two Super Bowls, a national championship and a Broadcasting Hall of Fame induction, Mr. Johnson turned most questions about his career back onto the people around him.
“I didn’t win the Super Bowl. I didn’t win the Broadcasting Hall of Fame. I didn’t do the college [championship],” he said. “It was the Troy Aikmans, the Emmitt Smiths, the Michael Irvins, the Terry Bradshaws, the Howie Longs, on and on and on.”
He said he was fortunate to be surrounded by people who wanted to be the best.
“That’s why I was able to ride their coattails all the way to have whatever success that I had,” he said.
Mr. Johnson said some of his proudest work had nothing to do with wins at all. When he arrived at the University of Miami, he said, the graduation rate among his players stood at 51%. He instituted mandatory study hall, hired academic counselors, sent players to summer school and had his coaches physically check classrooms for attendance.
“Our graduation rate when I left, after that support system that we put into place, was right at 91%,” he said.
He said the payoff extended onto the field as well.
“When you show that individual that you care for him — care for him in a way other than just being a football player — I think they lay it on the line a little bit more for you,” Mr. Johnson said.
