Every Team I've Ever Led, I've Coached

What a lifetime on the field taught me about the one thing that never changes.

I grew up in a football household — sort of.

My father coached at the highest level when he was very young. I'll just say this: Google Terry Brennan. He was good enough that the biggest names in the game came calling when it was over. He turned them all down.

He had learned something the hard way that a lot of people in leadership never figure out: coaches get hired and fired, and families get hurt in the process. He decided his family would not go through that again.

So my earliest memory of my father is not a sideline. It's a television screen. He went into broadcasting and built a second career. He did well. I got to grow up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, and Kenilworth, Illinois.

The man I watched growing up wasn't a coach on a field. He was someone who had already decided what mattered most.

That lesson has never left me.

Coaching Is a Different Kind of Leadership

I played three sports at Wisconsin — football, track and field, and rugby. Rugby is the one that never let go. I still play in the alumni tournament every year.

And for about 25 years, I coached youth football.

Every time I walked onto that practice field with a group of kids who didn't yet know what they were capable of, I thought about what I'd watched growing up.

Not a playbook. Not a scheme. The human part.

In sports, there is no ambiguity about who is in charge. The structure is clear. Business is messier. People have their own pressures, their own definitions of success. You can't blow a whistle and run the play again.

But the instinct is the same.

You study your people the way you study film. You put them in positions to succeed. You hold the standard without breaking the relationship. You coach them through the moments they want to quit.

My little football players were 12 years old. The people I've managed throughout my career are considerably older and considerably harder to read.

The approach has never changed.

I love people. I love fresh ideas. I love watching someone figure out they're more capable than they thought.

That's not a management style. That's coaching.

Purpose, Direction, and Focus

I came across that framework at The Leadership Institute, and it immediately clicked because I had lived it without having words for it.

Every coach knows the three questions that matter before any season begins:

Who are we?

Where are we going?

How do we get there?

In business, that translates directly. Goals and objectives. Strategy. Tactics. You cannot align a team around a destination nobody has named. You cannot hold people accountable to a standard that was never clearly set.

Purpose. Direction. Focus. In that order. Every time.

The COACH Result

Leadership assessments keep coming back the same way for me: Coach.

I don't think of that as a personality type. I think of it as a skill and a responsibility. What you do with it is the point.

The best leaders I've known don't lead by title or by force. They lead because people trust them. Because they show up prepared. Because they care more about the person across from them than about being right.

My father figured that out before I was born. I'm still working on it.

Just without the whistle.

Joe Brennan is the founder of Prospect-Vision LLC, a fractional sales leadership and BD consultancy based in Evanston, Illinois. Badger. Rugby player. Coach.

joe@prospect-vision.com | (312) 505-8272 | prospect-vision.com