The pot is still boiling in Indianapolis. It’s been eight days since the Colts pulled their starters in the third quarter of the game against the New York Jets and turned their back on the opportunity make NFL history by running the table and having a perfect season. The loss to the Bills yesterday has only fanned the flames.

Polls are running 4:1 against the decision, and Payton Manning’s post game apology notwithstanding, fans’ feelings are running the gamut from disappointed to mad as hell. As an executive coach, I’ve been musing about how I would have conducted a coaching session with the Colts’ president prior to his decision to rest the starters.

As an executive coach, my job isn’t to offer an opinion, but to make visible all the possible implications of a decision. I’m hired to facilitate new thinking, new ways to look at a decision. How my coaching clients understand an issue will determine what they do about it. To accomplish my mission, there are three sets of questions I would have asked:

1. 1. In addition to achieving the stated goal of protecting the starters from injury, what are other ramifications of this decision? What might it cost in terms of team morale and the organization’s reputation?
2. 2. As team president, your job is to maximize shareholder value; will this decision contributed to or reduce the value of the organization?
3. People who study group dynamics say “all business is group business.”  If this is true, how and when will you share your decision with the team?

Forsaking my role as an executive coach and speaking as a fan, I’m disappointed that the Colts didn’t make it a goal to run the table. But as leadership guru Lee Thayer points out, arguing about whether or not the Colts made the right decision is a waste of time. The real issue is where the decision takes the team. The impact lies in the consequences; i.e. did the decision get the Colts what they wanted, and at what cost? That’s the leadership lesson we can all take from this decision. Go Colts!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 8:25 am and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.