An Operating System for a Winning Team by a Super Bowl-Winning Coach

Bill Walsh's "Standard of Performance" still sets the standard.

The Super Bowl trophy, one of the most coveted trophies of any sport, is named after a coach.

“The Lombardi,” as it’s affectionately known, commemorates the first Super Bowls won by the Green Bay Packers and coached by the legendary Vince Lombardi.

Winning a Super Bowl is not easy. Heck, winning a single football game is not easy.

Which brings me to one of the greatest leaders in football, business and life: Bill Walsh.

Bill Walsh is one of my heroes.

He was the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers and Stanford Cardinal.

He was also the inventor of one of the game’s most disruptive and creative innovations, the West Coast Offense. (Talk about Horizontal Thinking.)

Bill Walsh won Super Bowls. Three of them: XVI (1982), XIX (1985) and XXIII (1989).

Before I go further football-geeky and lose you, let me share a Bill Walsh document that just may help you in your life and business.

It’s called the “Standard of Performance.”

It was written before all those Super Bowl wins. In fact, it came to life when Bill took over a hopeless and hapless 2-win and 14-loss 49er team. A team with a dismal culture and a habit of losing.

Bill had to re-invent this team from the ground up.

The cornerstone of the rebuild was the Standard of Performance.

It became the team’s “operating system.” Understood and adhered to by everyone from the receptionist to the Pro Bowl Wide Receivers and everyone in between.

Here it is:

· Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement.

· Demonstrate respect for each person in the organization.

· Be deeply committed to learning and teaching.

· Be fair.

· Demonstrate character.

· Honor the direct connection between details and improvement; relentlessly seek the latter.

· Show self-control, especially under pressure.

· Demonstrate and prize loyalty.

· Use positive language and have a positive attitude.

· Take pride in my effort as an entity separate from the result of that effort.

· Be willing to go the extra distance for the organization.

· Deal appropriately with victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation.

· Promote internal communication that is both open and substantive.

· Seek poise in myself and those I lead.

· Put the team’s welfare and priorities ahead of my own.

· Maintain an ongoing level of concentration and focus that is abnormally high.

· Make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark.

Within three years of establishing the Standard of Performance the 49ers went on to win the Super Bowl.

Which brings me to you.

How can you use some of the ideas in the Standard of Performance to up your game?

Or improve the team you lead?

Or turn your organization around?

What’s your “operating system?”