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Friends,
This is the second edition of a three-part series on Lou Holtz and his leadership. Last week we talked about trust, and why it is the one advantage a wealthier rival cannot buy away from you. This week is identity, and what it takes to build something people can name for themselves.
There is a statue of Lou Holtz outside Notre Dame Stadium, at the gate that carries his name. The pedestal lists his record there, one hundred wins, thirty losses and two ties, and the 1988 national championship. Below that are three words. Trust. Love. Commitment.
His former players chose those words.
Not a marketing department, not the university, and not Holtz himself. Men who had played for him, some of them twenty years removed from the program, decided together what should be carved into stone underneath his name. Nobody put a survey in front of them. They settled among themselves on what those years had been about, and then made it permanent.
When he died in March, the same words came back. Marcus Freeman, who coaches there now and was not on any of those teams, named the values Holtz built his career on and reached for the same three. So did players from the 1986 squad, his first one. Decades apart, no coordination, and everyone arrived at the same short list.
They did not invent those words. Holtz had been saying them for years, to every team he ever had, and they are the answers to last week’s three questions: Can I trust you becomes trust. Are you committed to excellence becomes commitment. Do you care about me becomes love.
So what the statue proves is not that his players arrived somewhere on their own. It is that two decades after they stopped playing for him, his language was still theirs. They had not merely absorbed how the place felt. They had kept the words for it.
· · ·
Now the objection, and this one is more cynical than last week’s.
Identity has a mixed name right now, and it earned some of the criticism. Most programs and most companies have a values statement, and most of them are decoration. Six words on a wall in the weight room, or a laminated card in a new hire packet, describing behavior nobody in the building recognizes. When rosters turn over by a third or more, spending August on that feels like the softest possible use of the time.
I hear the same thing outside of sport. Leaders will tell me the values exercise is what you do when you have run out of real problems to solve.
They are right about the poster. They are wrong about the conclusion, and the reason is the same one from last week. The turnover is exactly why it matters.
· · ·
Think about what a clear identity does for you on a compressed timeline.
A player who transferred in eight weeks ago has no history with you. He has no idea which behaviors get rewarded here and which either go unnoticed or draw a correction. He is going to work that out, whether he learns it from you on purpose or assembles it himself from whatever he happens to observe. It’s your choice which way it goes.
If your identity is clear, that period takes a few weeks and he can tell you what the program is in his own words. If it is fog, he spends the season guessing, and everything he guesses wrong has to be corrected later at a higher cost. Multiply that by twenty new people and you have lost critical time and energy to something that was avoidable in June.
The same arithmetic runs in any organization that hires. Onboarding is not the paperwork. It is the speed at which a new person can predict what you will reward.
· · ·
The test is simple.
Ask three of your people separately, without warning, what this program stands for. If they recite the values off the wall back to you, push past it, because that is memory rather than belief. Ask what they would tell a recruit’s mother in her kitchen with no coach in the room.
Three different answers means you have a slogan, and slogans do not survive a hard November.
Three answers that agree in substance but not in language is better, and where most good programs land. The behavior is aligned. But nobody can hand a newcomer an understanding that has no words, so your June transfer learns it by watching.
What you are after is what Holtz had. Three people using your words in their own sentences, because the words have been said often enough, and backed often enough, to become the natural way to describe the place. Twenty years and a dozen careers after they left him, his players still reached for his three.
· · ·
The words are shallow without behavior.
Holtz was fanatical about the state of his locker rooms. Every shoe and every shoulder pad in the exact place it belonged, every time. He was not decorating. He believed the way people do small things when nobody is checking is the honest version of what they are, and he wanted that answer to be the same every day.
That is where identity is born. Not in the words themselves but in what the words oblige you to do when nobody is watching. Trust, love and commitment could sit on a wall in any building in the country. What made them true in his was that you could see them in the shoulder pads.
Words on their own are cheap, which is exactly why the poster fails. Words with behavior underneath them are your bridge to ownership. Once the language is true, it becomes shorthand, and shorthand is how a player who arrived in June can tell you what this program is before he has lived a full season of it.
· · ·
One thing to do this week. Ask three people in your building, separately, what you stand for. Write down what each of them says, in their words, and put the three answers next to each other.
Then ask yourself an honest question about the gaps. If the answers diverge, the fix is not a better statement. It is deciding which specific behaviors you are going to reward and refuse for the rest of this season, and then being relentlessly predictable about it.
Next week, the last one, and the hardest. What Holtz said he most regretted about his own career, why the sport now rewards precisely that mistake, and what it costs to build anyway. |
