Lessons from Mike Tomlin

A Skyrocket team member recently sent me a video of Pittsburgh Steelers head coach, Mike Tomlin, talking about coaching (as a side note - do the people on your team send you videos that reinforce the messages that you’re constantly sending to them? If not, maybe you’re not sending those messages relentlessly enough?).

In it, Tomlin shares his thoughts on coaching and how so many people charged with making others better, often don’t operate like it.

If you’re not a football fan and don’t know who Mike Tomlin is, he’s been the coach of the Steelers since 2007. In that time, he’s never had a losing season. That’s an NFL record. He became the youngest head coach to win a Super Bowl and his team appeared in another. He’s a shoe-in Hall of Famer and one of the best to ever do it. He’s also as tough and no-nonsense a person as there is in the league.

After a game earlier this season in which the Steelers won but played poorly, a reporter asked him about his team’s subpar performance. Tomlin respond, “We’re not going to apologize for winning.”

I transcribed Tomlin’s thoughts below.

“I love to hear coaches resist the responsibility of coaching. Because they’re easy to beat. They talk negatively about a dude that can’t learn. Man, if everybody could learn, we’d need less coaches. If the group didn’t need management, we wouldn’t make as much.

I love reading draft evals and somebody is talking about anything other than pedigree. Talking about how poor somebody’s hand usage is. Well, that’s coaching.

I don’t run away from coaching. I run to coaching.

It’s all aligned with seeking comfort. Because when you’re a coach who’s talking about somebody can’t learn. You’re seeking comfort because your teaching is struggling.”

It’s easy to coach people who are easy to coach. It’s also equally easy to blame people who are hard to coach for not getting better. Sometimes, it is on them. Mostly, it’s on us. We’re the leaders. We can’t run away from coaching. Like Tomlin, we must run to it.