November 24, 2024 • 15 mins
Episode 52 - What Cowboy's Owner Jerry Jones Can Teach You About Autocratic Leadership
Welcome to another episode of the Career Coaching Xs and Os podcast, where we unlock the strategies and secrets of career success. In today's discussion, we tackle autocratic leadership and its strains on the employees who suffer under it. In this episode, I focus on the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones. On October 15, 2024, Jones threatened to have three radio station hosts fired if they continued to ask him difficult questions. Can you build a winning culture if your default leadership style is autocratic? Stay tuned for indispensable advice that could redefine your approach to career challenges. Hit play and take control of your career journey.
Want To Co-host An Episode of Career Coaching Xs and Os? If you want to be entered into a drawing where the winner(s) are offered the opportunity to co-host the Career Coaching Xs and Os podcast, please do the following:
Subscribe to Ceyero Consulting's YouTube Channel. Track my progress as I complete all 100 Challenges.https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7lxMSEtBOAgNBOPrmA9O_w
Need help launching your startup or small business? Please check out my book, #Guerrillapreneur: Small Business Strategy for Davids Wanting to Defeat Goliath, available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books.
If you like the Career Coaching Xs and Os podcast, you might also like my other business podcasts, #Guerrillapreneur: The Art of Waging Small Business Warfare (Mastermind Interviews with Entrepreneurs, Consultants, and Business Mavericks) and #Gigging: Everything and Sharing Economy (news and predictions about the Sharing Economy).
Welcome to another episode of the Career Coaching Xs and Os podcast, where we unlock the strategies and secrets of career success. In today's discussion, we tackle autocratic leadership and its strains on the employees who suffer under it. In this episode, I focus on the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones. On October 15, 2024, Jones threatened to have three radio station hosts fired if they continued to ask him difficult questions. Can you build a winning culture if your default leadership style is autocratic? Stay tuned for indispensable advice that could redefine your approach to career challenges. Hit play and take control of your career journey.
Want To Co-host An Episode of Career Coaching Xs and Os? If you want to be entered into a drawing where the winner(s) are offered the opportunity to co-host the Career Coaching Xs and Os podcast, please do the following:
- Buy My Book - Career Coaching Xs and Os: How to Master the Game of Career Development from Amazon - https://a.co/d/f7irTML
- Write a review for my book on Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review/?ie=UTF8&channel=glance-detail&asin=B0CXMM24R1
- Follow me on one of the following social media platforms:
X.com - @ceyeroconsltg
Instagram - @ceyeroconsulting
Facebook - @ceyeroconsulting - Post a message on one of the Social Media platforms above stating that you submitted a review on Amazon. We will randomly select the winner(s) from the list of reviewers on August 31, 2024.
- If you like this podcast, please subscribe and leave us a comment on Apple Podcast, Spreaker, or your favorite podcast platform. If you want to support this Podcast as a Loyal Listener (Supporter) on Spreaker.com, please use this link- https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/career-coaching-xs-and-os--3047801/support
*****
Subscribe to Ceyero Consulting's YouTube Channel. Track my progress as I complete all 100 Challenges.https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7lxMSEtBOAgNBOPrmA9O_w
Need help launching your startup or small business? Please check out my book, #Guerrillapreneur: Small Business Strategy for Davids Wanting to Defeat Goliath, available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books.
If you like the Career Coaching Xs and Os podcast, you might also like my other business podcasts, #Guerrillapreneur: The Art of Waging Small Business Warfare (Mastermind Interviews with Entrepreneurs, Consultants, and Business Mavericks) and #Gigging: Everything and Sharing Economy (news and predictions about the Sharing Economy).
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is career coaching x's and o's, and I'm your host,
Mark Anthony Peterson, Founder and thought leader at Sierra Consulting,
a small business strategy and technology consulting firm. A small
part of our practice is executive coaching. These episodes are
the summation of some of those sessions. Welcome to episode
(00:25):
fifty two entitled what Cowboys owner Jerry Jones can teach
You about autocratic leadership. For those of you who aren't
huge sports fans, Jerry Jones is the owner of the
world famous Dallas Cowboys football team. There is no doubt
(00:47):
Jerry Jones is a brilliant business person. He's been one
hundred and forty million dollars to buy the team that's
now worth an estimated ten billion dollars. No one can
question his business acumen. But he's also the president and
(01:09):
general manager of the team, a position that most owners
don't assign themselves. They stay above the operational fray and
allow football experts to run the team. They also stay
above the fray when it comes to the week in
(01:30):
and week out interviews with the local press in talking
about players and player performance. But Jerry Jones has been
in that mix since he purchased the team for that
one hundred and forty million dollars. During that time, Jones
(01:52):
has been known to be an autocratic leader, and there
are times when that leadership style makes a lot of sense,
especially when we think of, say the military, where you
need clear, precise directions because of the risk associated with
(02:12):
the activities that you're performing. Many people equate and compare
football to the military, just given the type of physical
pounding that both a soldier and a football player takes,
as well as what we refer to players when they
(02:36):
are on the gridiron as warriors. But does that type
of style, that autocratic leadership style transfer perfectly from the
military to American football. More and more people are saying no.
(02:57):
In the early days of the American Football League and
then Football League, there were a lot more owners and
coachers who were autocratic my way or the highway. But
now when you have players who are making two hundred
three hundred million dollars to play the sport and that
have options to be able to take their talent to
(03:19):
other teams, that autocratic leadership style may not create the
type of culture that you want for a winning franchise.
On October fifteenth, twenty twenty four, Jerry Jones showed the
worst side of his autocratic leadership style. After each game,
(03:44):
gms and coaches typically make themselves available for interviews with
their flagship station, and since Jerry Jones is in an
operational role, he allows himself to be interviewed by the
flag ship station. And during that interview, Jones had this
(04:06):
to say, after receiving several tough questions from the flag
ship station about the team's poor performance, This is not
your job. Your job is to let me go over
all the reasons that I did something and I'm sorry
that I did it. That's not your job. Well my
(04:29):
job is that as my job, or I'll get another
I'll get somebody else to ask these questions. Man, Jerry,
We're just we're trying to figure out why the team.
I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding at Jerry Jones was
not kidding. Jerry Jones threatened the jobs of Shan Shariff, R. J. Choppy,
(04:52):
and Bobby Belt, three of the radio presenters on the
flagship station for the Dallas Cowboy. Now, just to set
the context, every team in the NFL has a flagship station.
These are the state radio stations that broadcast the game
and are typically paid to host programs that promote the team.
(05:19):
Those stations are also giving exclusive rights to interview coaches, players,
and general managers before and after a game. Now, they
try to be as professional and to avoid as much
bias as they can and covering the team, but they
(05:40):
do have a financial relationship with that team to help
promote the most positive aspects of that team. These presenters
were merely asking questions about the performance and whether or
not Jones would make changes, including a coaching change, in
(06:02):
order to improve that performance. Instead of addressing the question,
he opted to threaten their jobs or threaten to leave
that station to find someone who would ask him better
softball questions after a horrific loss. Certainly, that's Jones's prerogative.
(06:24):
He owns the team, and he can move that relationship
to any other station that would want to tolerate those
sorts of threats. But what can we learn from that
sort of leadership style, that autocratic leadership style, because it
seems to be multiplying among fortune five hundred CEOs who
(06:50):
are choosing to be a lot more autocratic than they
have been in the past. And that's maybe because they
want to eliminate jobs and want to fire every reason
to do that and shift that blame back onto the
employees as opposed to their failed strategies. But what can
(07:10):
we learn Because I've said there are times and places
when you do need an autocratic style, but this may
not be one of them. So let's talk about what
an autocratic style could do for your organization. Well, first,
(07:33):
it's going to create a fear of failure. Yeah, a
fear of failure culture that ultimately leads to failure. When
people are so afraid that they're going to get fired
for failing, they ultimately fail. They press, they put themselves
(07:57):
under too must much stress, and ultimately they end up
missing the mark. Of course, there are people who thrive
under stress, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
And if you're always in a pressure cooker, you know
(08:18):
what happens to food and a pressure cooker, Yeah, you
get yourself a nice cup of gumbo because everything in
it is shredded down to its core. With an autocratic
leader at the top, you're ultimately going to end up
with an echo chamber. He or she's going to hear
(08:41):
exactly what they want to hear every day, and that's
going to create operational blind spots in the organization. And
people have said that for years about the Cowboys, that
they miss certain elements on the team because there's nobody
(09:03):
there to point them out. That echo chamber just repeats
what everybody thinks the owner wants to hear, and ultimately
all of the ingredients need to produce a winning culture
or never baked them because there's no one there to
(09:24):
push back against bad ideas. An autocratic leader makes it
hard to retain top talent. As I mentioned, in the
early days of the NFL, some of your best players
had to work a second job because they weren't paid
(09:45):
enough to play football. Yeah, great names from the past
were car salesman, insurance salesman after the season ended in
order to make ends meet. Now that it's a global game,
your top players are commanding north of two hundred three
(10:08):
hundred million dollars with half of that money guaranteed. And
if you put them in a pressure cooker like what
Jones has done, you're gonna have a hard time retaining
that top talent without over paying to keep them. And
(10:30):
I think we've seen that time and time again with
this and other organizations where you have that sort of
leadership style at the top, you're gonna have low morale,
your browbeat people over and over again, as the Cowboys
(10:53):
organization has done, and there's no joy in come to work.
Last season a very successful season by most organizational standards,
the Cowboys put the entire blame on the playoff loss
(11:13):
on their quarterback and stated as such on the team website,
doing what my grandparents used to call putting his business
on front street for everybody to see. Now, it's interesting
(11:33):
an owner who doesn't want to be questioned, but wants
to put the blame on a very public display, but
still wants that individual to perform at a high level.
Sure you can set those expectations you're paying that person,
(11:56):
but you're also treating them like less of a human
when you don't think about what it takes to create
a winning culture. Finally, an autocratic leadership style ultimately leave
you with no real bench depth. Why because those managers
(12:23):
never get a chance to really make a decision, They
never develop the critical skills, those soft skills needed to
make them a three dimensional leader. Their two dimensions at best,
(12:43):
and in many cases just one dimension. They become just
yes people to whatever they think the owner wants, especially
if they're autocratic. Unfortunately, we're living in a time of
shop jock CEOs and politicians where people have intentionally removed
(13:06):
their filter and seek to humiliate at every chance they get.
There was a time when people sought to let individuals
save face, avoid humiliation, and give them dignity and respect
(13:26):
even when losing their job. More and more there's less
of that. I'm still a big believer that you can
make profits while still putting people first. I hope you
found this episode helpful. If so, hit subscribe. Listen to
(13:47):
this episode on speaker or Apple podcast. It really helps
us if you leave us a positive review, follow us
on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook at Sierra Concer, and I know
you'll share this episode with your colleagues, because the best
people listen to this podcast. Hey guys, we're entering the
(14:11):
holiday season and I have a new book out. It's
called Career Coaching x'es and O's funny just like the podcast,
but the subtitle is how to master the Game of
career Development. And if you have a young niece or
nephew that's career oriented, corporate oriented, and they want to
(14:32):
learn the secrets of how to climb the corporate ladder.
Get that book for him. They can get the digital
copy for ninety nine dollars or paperback for nineteen ninety nine.
Also share this podcast with them, give them a head
start on learning how to think like a corporate executive.
(14:54):
I'll put a link in the show notes to my
new book, and I would love it if you would
support this podcast by getting a copy now back to you.
If you need more support in your career, please find
us on the web at cerro dot com, c E
Y E r O dot com and let us help
(15:16):
you develop a plan for your career. This has been
career coaching x's and o's, and I am your host,
Mark Anthony Peterson, Founder and thought leader at Sierra Consulting,
This is career coaching x's and o's, and I'm your host,
Mark Anthony Peterson, Founder and thought leader at Sierra Consulting,
a small business strategy and technology consulting firm. A small
part of our practice is executive coaching. These episodes are
the summation of some of those sessions. Welcome to episode
(00:25):
fifty two entitled what Cowboys owner Jerry Jones can teach
You about autocratic leadership. For those of you who aren't
huge sports fans, Jerry Jones is the owner of the
world famous Dallas Cowboys football team. There is no doubt
(00:47):
Jerry Jones is a brilliant business person. He's been one
hundred and forty million dollars to buy the team that's
now worth an estimated ten billion dollars. No one can
question his business acumen. But he's also the president and
(01:09):
general manager of the team, a position that most owners
don't assign themselves. They stay above the operational fray and
allow football experts to run the team. They also stay
above the fray when it comes to the week in
(01:30):
and week out interviews with the local press in talking
about players and player performance. But Jerry Jones has been
in that mix since he purchased the team for that
one hundred and forty million dollars. During that time, Jones
(01:52):
has been known to be an autocratic leader, and there
are times when that leadership style makes a lot of sense,
especially when we think of, say the military, where you
need clear, precise directions because of the risk associated with
(02:12):
the activities that you're performing. Many people equate and compare
football to the military, just given the type of physical
pounding that both a soldier and a football player takes,
as well as what we refer to players when they
(02:36):
are on the gridiron as warriors. But does that type
of style, that autocratic leadership style transfer perfectly from the
military to American football. More and more people are saying no.
(02:57):
In the early days of the American Football League and
then Football League, there were a lot more owners and
coachers who were autocratic my way or the highway. But
now when you have players who are making two hundred
three hundred million dollars to play the sport and that
have options to be able to take their talent to
(03:19):
other teams, that autocratic leadership style may not create the
type of culture that you want for a winning franchise.
On October fifteenth, twenty twenty four, Jerry Jones showed the
worst side of his autocratic leadership style. After each game,
(03:44):
gms and coaches typically make themselves available for interviews with
their flagship station, and since Jerry Jones is in an
operational role, he allows himself to be interviewed by the
flag ship station. And during that interview, Jones had this
(04:06):
to say, after receiving several tough questions from the flag
ship station about the team's poor performance, This is not
your job. Your job is to let me go over
all the reasons that I did something and I'm sorry
that I did it. That's not your job. Well my
(04:29):
job is that as my job, or I'll get another
I'll get somebody else to ask these questions. Man, Jerry,
We're just we're trying to figure out why the team.
I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding at Jerry Jones was
not kidding. Jerry Jones threatened the jobs of Shan Shariff, R. J. Choppy,
(04:52):
and Bobby Belt, three of the radio presenters on the
flagship station for the Dallas Cowboy. Now, just to set
the context, every team in the NFL has a flagship station.
These are the state radio stations that broadcast the game
and are typically paid to host programs that promote the team.
(05:19):
Those stations are also giving exclusive rights to interview coaches, players,
and general managers before and after a game. Now, they
try to be as professional and to avoid as much
bias as they can and covering the team, but they
(05:40):
do have a financial relationship with that team to help
promote the most positive aspects of that team. These presenters
were merely asking questions about the performance and whether or
not Jones would make changes, including a coaching change, in
(06:02):
order to improve that performance. Instead of addressing the question,
he opted to threaten their jobs or threaten to leave
that station to find someone who would ask him better
softball questions after a horrific loss. Certainly, that's Jones's prerogative.
(06:24):
He owns the team, and he can move that relationship
to any other station that would want to tolerate those
sorts of threats. But what can we learn from that
sort of leadership style, that autocratic leadership style, because it
seems to be multiplying among fortune five hundred CEOs who
(06:50):
are choosing to be a lot more autocratic than they
have been in the past. And that's maybe because they
want to eliminate jobs and want to fire every reason
to do that and shift that blame back onto the
employees as opposed to their failed strategies. But what can
(07:10):
we learn Because I've said there are times and places
when you do need an autocratic style, but this may
not be one of them. So let's talk about what
an autocratic style could do for your organization. Well, first,
(07:33):
it's going to create a fear of failure. Yeah, a
fear of failure culture that ultimately leads to failure. When
people are so afraid that they're going to get fired
for failing, they ultimately fail. They press, they put themselves
(07:57):
under too must much stress, and ultimately they end up
missing the mark. Of course, there are people who thrive
under stress, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
And if you're always in a pressure cooker, you know
(08:18):
what happens to food and a pressure cooker, Yeah, you
get yourself a nice cup of gumbo because everything in
it is shredded down to its core. With an autocratic
leader at the top, you're ultimately going to end up
with an echo chamber. He or she's going to hear
(08:41):
exactly what they want to hear every day, and that's
going to create operational blind spots in the organization. And
people have said that for years about the Cowboys, that
they miss certain elements on the team because there's nobody
(09:03):
there to point them out. That echo chamber just repeats
what everybody thinks the owner wants to hear, and ultimately
all of the ingredients need to produce a winning culture
or never baked them because there's no one there to
(09:24):
push back against bad ideas. An autocratic leader makes it
hard to retain top talent. As I mentioned, in the
early days of the NFL, some of your best players
had to work a second job because they weren't paid
(09:45):
enough to play football. Yeah, great names from the past
were car salesman, insurance salesman after the season ended in
order to make ends meet. Now that it's a global game,
your top players are commanding north of two hundred three
(10:08):
hundred million dollars with half of that money guaranteed. And
if you put them in a pressure cooker like what
Jones has done, you're gonna have a hard time retaining
that top talent without over paying to keep them. And
(10:30):
I think we've seen that time and time again with
this and other organizations where you have that sort of
leadership style at the top, you're gonna have low morale,
your browbeat people over and over again, as the Cowboys
(10:53):
organization has done, and there's no joy in come to work.
Last season a very successful season by most organizational standards,
the Cowboys put the entire blame on the playoff loss
(11:13):
on their quarterback and stated as such on the team website,
doing what my grandparents used to call putting his business
on front street for everybody to see. Now, it's interesting
(11:33):
an owner who doesn't want to be questioned, but wants
to put the blame on a very public display, but
still wants that individual to perform at a high level.
Sure you can set those expectations you're paying that person,
(11:56):
but you're also treating them like less of a human
when you don't think about what it takes to create
a winning culture. Finally, an autocratic leadership style ultimately leave
you with no real bench depth. Why because those managers
(12:23):
never get a chance to really make a decision, They
never develop the critical skills, those soft skills needed to
make them a three dimensional leader. Their two dimensions at best,
(12:43):
and in many cases just one dimension. They become just
yes people to whatever they think the owner wants, especially
if they're autocratic. Unfortunately, we're living in a time of
shop jock CEOs and politicians where people have intentionally removed
(13:06):
their filter and seek to humiliate at every chance they get.
There was a time when people sought to let individuals
save face, avoid humiliation, and give them dignity and respect
(13:26):
even when losing their job. More and more there's less
of that. I'm still a big believer that you can
make profits while still putting people first. I hope you
found this episode helpful. If so, hit subscribe. Listen to
(13:47):
this episode on speaker or Apple podcast. It really helps
us if you leave us a positive review, follow us
on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook at Sierra Concer, and I know
you'll share this episode with your colleagues, because the best
people listen to this podcast. Hey guys, we're entering the
(14:11):
holiday season and I have a new book out. It's
called Career Coaching x'es and O's funny just like the podcast,
but the subtitle is how to master the Game of
career Development. And if you have a young niece or
nephew that's career oriented, corporate oriented, and they want to
(14:32):
learn the secrets of how to climb the corporate ladder.
Get that book for him. They can get the digital
copy for ninety nine dollars or paperback for nineteen ninety nine.
Also share this podcast with them, give them a head
start on learning how to think like a corporate executive.
(14:54):
I'll put a link in the show notes to my
new book, and I would love it if you would
support this podcast by getting a copy now back to you.
If you need more support in your career, please find
us on the web at cerro dot com, c E
Y E r O dot com and let us help
(15:16):
you develop a plan for your career. This has been
career coaching x's and o's, and I am your host,
Mark Anthony Peterson, Founder and thought leader at Sierra Consulting,
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