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Be who you are and make others feel seen
Leadership from me was developed from team sports, from seeing that you have one objective and one goal, and that goal is to win it all. And here on TV, it’s about winning the ratings war, I guess you could say. But you don’t do it alone. Nobody does it alone. Even if you have on air talent that everyone sees, there are a hundred producers running around behind you making it look easier for you and make it as easy for you as they can. So it’s teamwork. It’s not one person. It’s a group of people and you have to realize that everybody needs to feel valuable. Everybody needs to feel valued. So it’s very important for me at any job I do to talk to anybody who’s security, to the person who’s sweeping the floor, to the producer, to the president of the company. It’s just important to treat people with value.
And when you do that, you get the most out of them, and that is how I try to exude leadership, is valuing everybody’s position and what they mean to the team, because at the end of the day, we all need each other to be successful. I am what I am. I think that’s the greatest thing about my job is that I am who I am, and I’m on a lot of television, three different shows in a week, six days a week. So it’s very hard to not be yourself when you’re supposed to be yourself. It would just be too exhausting. So I’m fortunate enough to be who I am and make people feel comfortable with who I am. And I think the thing about it, when you’re who you are, and you come in every day and you’re prepared and you work hard and you appreciate other people, they come in and give you the same thing. Because even though I don’t want to let them down, I know they don’t want to let me down because they’re getting the real me.
Be part of the cure, not the disease
I listen to a lot of Coldplay, love Coldplay. And I had a football coach named Tom Coughlin, who, as lightly as I can put, I hated him. And he hated … he just seemed to be a mean guy to everybody. Nobody liked him. And now I love him. Let me say, I love him, he’s an incredible coach and also an incredible man. But we had a point where we were butting heads. I was butting heads, he was butting heads with the team. I was the leader of the team, so all the guys would come to me with their issues. Then I would have to talk to him and he was very dismissive. And I just realized that, in one of the Coldplay songs, the lyrics are, “Am I part of the disease or part of the cure?” And I realized I was part of the disease. I wasn’t part of the cure. I wasn’t helping the problem. I was making it worse.
So I just changed my outlook and my approach towards him. And the fact that I realized I can’t change the way he acts. All I can change is the way that I act toward him. And I can just be positive and be part of the cure for whatever problems we were having and not part of the complaining and the disease that was only holding us back. And it was as if he heard the same song. He changed too. And next thing you know, we won a Super Bowl, and he’s gone on to win one after, and the players love him now. And this is like a complete 360-degree turn for a guy who was known for one of the guys you did not want to play for. Now you have guys who look forward to playing for him and will do anything for him.