Lombardi’s guiding concept for team building is to never forget what details are of the greatest concern. In helmet football, these details are closely linked to the team’s playing system and dictate which specific skills or attributes are the most important to look for in a player. A leader must understand what types of players will fit into the system in order to accurately assess players. The team that signs players based on team-specific criteria will always outperform teams that sign players based on general criteria like college performance, physical attributes, or national prestige.
Lombardi suggests that the best fit for a system is a player who meets two conditions. First is whether the player’s abilities are maximized by the team’s intended playing style. The second characteristic is whether the player fuels the evolution of the system. I liked this observation because it speaks to a general truth about most teams – the challenges facing the team in the present are rarely the same as those that they will encounter in the future. The teams that cannot make adjustments to meet these new challenges often fail because the energy level within the group was not high enough to motivate the reluctant to learn a new playing style. The team building process must allow for some signings who are not just ideal contributors to the current system but also capable of energizing the team to meet the unpredictable demands of the future.
How should a team builder approach such a task? From my experience, a strong team should seek candidates who lack the system’s most easily taught skills yet have significant strengths elsewhere that the team might leverage in the future. This method allows a team to bring aboard high-potential new hires without overpaying for teachable skills. As the new hire becomes comfortable in the system, his or her unique strengths can be slowly integrated to help the system reach higher levels of performance.
A weaker team must seek candidates who can contribute immediately. In this situation, look for people who’ve taken initiative within structured environments, have a history of completing large workloads, or have overcome unusual obstacles on the way to their accomplishments. These characteristics all point to hires who might quickly outperform members of the existing team and this is important because in weaker teams the system’s evolution will grow not from variety but from the opportunities created by increased performance standards.
