3 Ways Seahawks Coach Macdonald is a Level 5 Leader
Super Bowl Champion coaches are elite leaders. Seahawks Coach Mike Macdonald embodies the Level 5 Leadership Jim Collins described in his book Good to Great, It’s HUMILITY to serve and empower. It’s consistent and doggedly FOCUSED on the main thing driving mission success.
While much of the “leadership” in today’ society demonstrates more arrogance, self, and distraction than Level 5 Leadership, the surge of superior leadership in NFL coaches is awesome. (I previously celebrated John Harbaugh’s example, as he walked his defeated and crushed kicker all the way into the locker room during the Ravens’ “agony of defeat” moment this past season).
3 Ways Mike Macdonald Demonstrates Level 5 Leadership
Results speak. The Macdonald-led Seahawks Super Bowl win modeled team, not superstars. He gave them a brilliant scheme. His tone is winsome and magnetic. I would have loved to have been coached by and played for him. But the true success of Macdonald is in his process.
1. Being a great leader is not just teaching—it’s learning, too.
In an interview with NFL Network, Macdonald said, “I learned a ton. New experience for all. It’s cool that we have a common experience…that we’re all in this together, coaches and players. It’s a new experience for me, too. A shared experience. It’s really that the players feel the coaches are in this with them in what we’re all trying to do. Our methods can be ‘new school,’ and we can innovate and do what’s best for us as the Seahawks, not what worked for others in the past.”
Macdonald wasn’t satisfied with creating a good defense based on others’ standards. He kept learning, kept innovating, and with the buy-in of his players, developed a complex defense that is essentially offensive in nature.
It initiates the surprise, creates uncertainty, and spells trouble for the offenses they face. Their defense plays offense against the offense to make the opponent’s offense defensive. Have I confused you enough?
Macdonald continued, “Being all in this learning and developing experience together helps make the process a lot of fun. Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we get it wrong, but we pick back up. We are a different team than a year ago because of what we’ve been through together.”
As you can see, learning is not something that comes from the top down. It’s an essential practice that the team does together.
2. Real humility is treating everyone as equals and displaying a servant’s heart.
Macdonald revealed that his sense that the players really believe and feel that the coaches are in this “with” the players. He says “we” when talking about any part of the team.
Macdonald represents a new young cadre of coaches who are collegial and connected with their players. They’re in the room, on the field, and in the process with their guys. In military terms, they’re in the boat and on the front lines.
They have a single-level view of all roles. Their authority doesn’t come from a title. It comes from the fact that they have expertise, accountability, their close relationships with the players, their ability to admit their own mistakes and take feedback.
What does this create? A team with peer-to-peer motivation and accountability, rather than a team that depends upon (or resents) top-down motivation and accountability which can be interpreted (daily or unfairly) as dominance and manipulation.
For a long time, the NFL was dominated by coaches with big egos who were authoritarian and distant and put themselves on a pedestal. But Chuck Noll was ahead of his time.
At our recent Manhood Coaching event, Super Bowl Champion coach Tony Dungy shared that all of us men need great coaching. His model was Coach Noll, who told him as a rookie Steelers coach that his job as a coach was to “teach and develop the players to make them better, not just as individuals but also collectively.”
Football is a hugely interdependent game, requiring alignment, synergy and serving one another to make the scheme and coverages all work. And that’s just one unit. Coaches always talk about how important it is to play complementary football—the play of the offense, defense, and special teams units all have to pull their weight.
For Coach Noll, and as far as I can tell, the Seattle coaches all see their players as equals, and their role as a coach in service to the players becoming their best.
3. Mission-focused, not credit-obsessed.
Another mark of Level 5 Leadership is security – eliminating fear. Secure leaders aren’t threatened by talent around them—they’re energized by it. They hire people who are smarter, more gifted, or more experienced in certain areas because the mission matters more than the position.
You see this in how top coaches empower their staff. They pay assistants well. They give them real authority. Many younger head coaches intentionally hire older, seasoned former head coaches as coordinators or assistant head coaches because wisdom and perspective strengthen the whole operation. Macdonald, for example, hired Leslie Frazier (a long-time coach and former head coach for the Minnesota Vikings) as an assistant head coach.
The little sign on President Ronald Reagan’s desk read, “Much can be accomplished if there is little concern for who gets the credit.” He gathered strong, capable people around him and trusted them to do their work. That’s Level 5 Leadership. The leader’s ego shrinks so the mission can grow.
When leadership is mission-focused instead of credit-obsessed, it creates buy-in. Assistants, staff, and even superstar players stop performing for attention and start investing in the process. Ownership spreads. Focus deepens. Effort multiplies. Sacrifice becomes normal. That’s how cultures become exceptional—and that’s how championships become possible.
The trick is to maintain the humility and culture after the super-sized fruits of success are showered upon the winners.
Humility unites. Pride divides.
Humility bonds. Pride individualizes.
Humility learns. Pride boasts.
One leads to rising.
The other leads to falling.
Applying Level 5 Leadership to Our Own Lives
Most of us will never lead an NFL franchise or hoist a Lombardi Trophy. But we are leading a life that will either bless or damage, unite or divide, lift or drag down. We are leading in our homes, our friendships, our workplaces, and communities as fathers, grandfathers, mentors, and husbands.
Think about the humility of a truly good husband who cherishes, loves and honors his wife by understanding and valuing her differing nature and gifts. With a servant’s heart, he seeks to wisely serve, lead, empower, and lift her to her best. It’s not about following or deferring to the other—it’s about, together, seeking and waiting for unity between differing natures and perspectives.
He uses his physical size, strength, and masculine nature, as well as his biblical authority as the head of the couple and protector of the home with resolve and tenderness always for the benefit of his wife—never for the convenience or whims of his own desires, tastes, and will.
Jesus is the archetype husband who washes his bride’s feet, brings out the best in her, empowers her to excel in her mission, and ultimately lays down his life to rescue and perfect her.
In our consumeristic, conditional, and immediate-gratification society, the word and concept of love clearly needs a revival of its true meaning: Love is desiring and doing what is best for others at a cost to self. Love sacrifices selfishness for serving someone else’s best.
Day by day, from the first interaction each morning to the thousands of moments each day, how will we think, relate, and lead? (They happen in that order from the inside out, from the heart.)
What’s your takeaway? Here’s mine:
- I want to be a humble loving leader like Jesus.
- I’m going to keep thanking God He accomplished what I could not and gave me His confidence and Spirit’s power to live His way.
- I will depend on My Heavenly Father to receive this mindset and manner of love and leadership.
- I will prioritize relationships, honor my wife, and dignify others.
- I will be a learner who listens to God, my wife, and others so I can LIFT them to their best.
- I need to make sure my wife and children (and those that I work with in career or volunteer efforts) actually experience and feel that I am “with them” in this life experience.
- To gain self-awareness and live in the light of honesty, I will ask my wife, kids, friends, and peers: “What’s it like to live with me?” “Do you feel that I’m ‘in this with you’?”
Do you want to bring this kind of leadership into your own life and experience Level 5 Friendship with a couple of close friends? Sign up for my CORE3 Coaching, a no-cost weekly text to benefit your life. It’s brief, visual, and action-oriented to build deep, consistent, Jesus-like (Level 5) friendships.
Photo by SounderBruce – CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=183803731
