7 Team Leadership Rules from the GOAT

As the first weekend of the newest NFL season winds down — and the season winds up — let’s talk about leadership football-style.

If you have to lead a team, you might as well do it like you’re the Greatest of All Time — Tom Brady, the GOAT quarterback.

Here’s the good news: The former NFL superstar isn’t shy about sharing his secrets on team leadership.

In fact, in retirement, he shared lots of leadership secrets with the Harvard Business Review (but not too many football success secrets because, you know, there’s always a chance he’ll come back.)

Over a 23-year NFL career, Brady was an informal leader (we all start somewhere, after all). And he was a formal leader who took teams to playoff wins (as a fan of an opposing conference team, I painfully know that too often), Super Bowls and celebrations.

Make Team Leadership Tips Public

Brady worked with Nitin Nohria, former Dean of Harvard Business School, to vet out his most essential team leadership strategies.

“Leadership requires trust, and trust usually comes from deeply caring about one another and the belief that winning is about the team,” Brady says in his HBR story. “You must feel passionate about both. I’ve always tried to be an ideal teammate.”

And perhaps that’s the underlying theme to his team leadership success: He may have been a leader, but he always considered himself another teammate.

Here are Brady’s seven team leadership strategies.

1. Put the Team First

There was a time Brady stood second fiddle to other quarterbacks. He watched games from the sidelines in college before he was the starter. And even as captain his senior year, he didn’t have all the QB highlights. But he supported his teammates so the team won.

As Brady put it: “There’s an old saying in sports: Do you want to be a star, or do you want to be a champion?”

To be a great leader, put the team’s success ahead of your personal success.

2. Set the Standard

Brady says he was part of the “Edgers” in his early NFL career. They were a bunch of players who always tried to get the edge on others, showing up first to the weight room, watching more game film or doing extra reps in practice. They held themselves accountable, doing more than they were told to do.

To be a great leader, set the standard you want to see your teammates follow.

3. Appreciate Your Unsung Heroes

The players who make the outstanding plays — or employees who smash the goals — tend to get the spotlight. But the people who supported them don’t get recognized as much (in football, it’s the trainers, food preparers and locker room assistants; in work, it’s your co-workers, support staff or interns).

Brady made a habit of thanking, recognizing and rewarding his unsung heroes.

To be a great leader, take time every week to praise and reward your behind-the-scenes heroes.

4. Know Your Teammates’ Motivations

Every sports professional is motivated by different things — money, celebrity, accolades, upward mobility etc. Same goes for employees and teammates. The people around you show up, do more (or less) and shoot for the stars for reasons that aren’t all that different from NFL pros’ reasons — money, accolades, upward mobility.

Brady believes you need to understand what drives each teammate to help the full team succeed. “It’s almost like love languages — the idea that different people express and receive love differently in relationships — and it’s an essential skill that leaders must learn.”

To be a great leader, don’t assume you know what drives people. Ask them. Then create a work situation that feeds their motivations.

5. Complement Your Leader’s Style

Brady worked with Bill Belichick for most of his illustrious football career. Belichick is not known publicly as a warm and fuzzy kind of guy. He leads differently — and successfully — than most coaches, CEOs and managers.

Brady didn’t argue with that. Instead, he aimed to complement Belichick’s style, filling leadership gaps if teammates needed it, building relationships and championing the strategies that would get the team to win.

To be a great leader, complement your boss’s style of leadership. Never undermine it.

6. Know and Stop Selfish Behavior

In sports, external forces can push people to focus on themselves instead of the team — for instance, agents, egos, family, fans and contracts. And when they think of those things first, they usually don’t focus on the team as much as they should.

At work, it’s similar. Although employees want to be team players, they might have external factors — spouses, mortgages or egos — that drive them to become self-centered. They therefore lose sight of the team goals.

To be a great leader, try to recognize outside pressures on yourself and team members — and then continually reinforce the team-first message. 

7. Connect Beyond the Workplace

Tom Brady likes a good time, too. He believes in the power of building better relationships with teammates through shared experiences outside of the workplace. In his case, he spent time in the offseason with teammates, traveling, bowling, texting or FaceTiming.

“The more we were interested in and concerned about one another as teammates, and didn’t want to let one another down, the more motivated we were to do our absolute best, every day,” Brady says.

To be a great leader, carve out time to connect with teammates — or at least give them time to connect with each other.