It’s Time for Football and… Trees?!?

Football’s back, and I have a confession. I grew up in the Los Angeles area in the 80’s and 90’s and never ”had a team”. They all left me. It makes me a little ambivalent about who to root for so I’m left cheering for the most likeable team… which we all know is more valid reasoning than uniform color.

Raider Nation was right there, until they ditched L.A. for Oakland. The Rams ran to St. Louis. Both gone after the same season. Then I moved to the Denver area, where game days are full of painted faces, blue and orange attire, dyed hair and the over-the-top enthusiasm that goes with it all. And that’s usually just at church on Sunday morning.

I thought I’d catch the craze, but it just hasn’t happened. Now, the Nuggets and Avs, I’m all in. As for the Rockies… all I can say is I love the environment at Coors Field. The best AAA stadium anywhere.

Back to football. So I just watch, because I love it. I love the strategy. The teamwork. The coaching. The dynamics of coaching trees.

For those who don’t know the term: A top-level coach’s assistants go on to become head coaches themselves, their assistants do the same and the influence spreads across the league for decades.

By 1998, half of the NFL’s active head coaches traced back to just two men: Bill Walsh and Tom Landry. Twenty years later, an ESPN breakdown found that 28 of the 32 coaches set to lead NFL teams in the 2018 season connected back to Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick. Andy Reid’s tree has produced eight NFL head coaches, including John Harbaugh, Doug Pederson

The championship gets celebrated in the moment. The tree is what lasts, shaping generations of coaches after it. That’s the legacy.

Fleet has trees too

Ask fleet leaders how they got where they are and you usually get a name and a story. The supervisor who guided from afar, but let them lead a project they weren’t 100% ready for. The manager who dragged them to the budget meeting and made them present a slide. The mentor who took time to share experiences, good and bad, over lunch or coffee. The industry events they were invited to before they had the big title.

And then there’s the other kind who hires and manages like every capable person is a threat. Chases the good ones away by claiming their achievements. Spends more energy on politics and looking busy than on actual work.

You know that person.

Their shop may not feel the weight of consequences while they’re still there, but it’s in trouble the day they leave. No bench, no successor, nothing written down and the people who could have carried it left three years ago for a culture that let them grow.

The actual job

Your job isn’t to be indispensable at every step. It’s to become less necessary, on purpose, to as many people as possible. Mentor. Lead. But don’t be an unneeded roadblock or hurdle.

That doesn’t mean working yourself out of a job. It means the opposite: every task you hand off frees you up for the work only you can do, like the budget fight a year out, the replacement strategy, the culture setting, the difficult customer communication and the political cover your team needs to do good work. Handing off the spec meeting doesn’t make you less essential. It’s what makes you essential to the things that actually require a top-level leader.

The part people get wrong

None of this means pushing good people out the door. The first goal is retention when there is room to grow: develop people, deepen roots and keep them.

So build the room to grow first. More responsibility, a title that matches what they’re already doing, a real seat at budget planning. Many people who leave a team just ran out of road where they were.

The harder call only comes when you’ve truly run out of room, when the org chart’s full or the next step up just doesn’t exist at your operation. If you’ve genuinely got nothing left to offer someone who’s ready for more, don’t hold them back. Make the introduction. Write the recommendation. That’s how you grow your tree and impact the person and the fleet community.

Three questions you may want to consider:

• Who on your team needs your mentorship right now and isn’t getting it?
• Who is ready to grow, if you’d just give them more opportunities?
• And is there someone ready to branch out and expand the tree of great leaders beyond your operation?