Leadership lessons from a legend: Bill Walsh

Below are two great items from one of the greatest professional sport coaches and leaders of all time, Bill Walsh. 

Bill Walsh on Culture:
“Winners act like winners before they're winners… The culture precedes positive results. It doesn't get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand. Champions behave like champions before they're champions; they have a winning standard of performance before their winners.”

Bill Walsh’s Standard of Performance:

1. Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed toward continual improvement.
2. Demonstrate respect for each person in the organization and the work he or she does.
3. Be deeply committed to learning and teaching which means increasing our own expertise.
4. Be fair.
5. Demonstrate character.
6. Honor the direct connection between details and improvement.
7. Relentlessly seek improvement.
8. Show self control especially when it counts most—under pressure.
9. Demonstrate and prize loyalty.
10. Use positive language and have a positive attitude.
11. Take pride in my effort as an entity separate from the results of that effort.
12. Be willing to go the extra distance for the organization.
13. Deal appropriately with victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation.
14. Promote internal communication that is both open and substantive (especially under stress).
15. Seek poise in myself and those I lead.
16. Put the team’s welfare and priorities ahead of my own.
17. Maintain an ongoing level of concentration and focus that is abnormally high.
18. Make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark.
19. The leader must exhibit the principles, code of conduct, and behavior that he is asking others to emulate.