Making Confidence Contagious: Deion Sanders' Leadership Lessons

Sports leadership used to be a business cliche. Less reasoned analysis than chest thumping inspiration. 

But US college sports, with the ability to transfer between schools and to earn sizeable sums from NIL intangibles - name, image and likeness - a new connectivity between the two disciplines is emerging, focused on confidence, belief and self-fulfillment. A leader like Deion Sanders, capable of instilling values that produce results captures that ethos. JL  

Callum Borchers reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Sports leadership lessons don’t always translate to business, though they may be more applicable in the corporatized era of college athletics. Deion Sanders is less a coach of student athletes than a boss of young professionals. He has taken a chief executive’s approach to cleaning house and rebranding, vaulting a moribund program to pop-culture sensation. “Confidence is key because people need to believe you know which levers to pull.” It isn’t a cocky superiority but belief that you’re capable of greatness through hard work. Sanders is a leader who earns subordinates’ trust by showing he cares while holding them to his own high standard, a model for contemporary management.

Everyone from The Rock to “60 Minutes” swooned over Deion Sanders after he led one of college football’s worst teams to a 3-0 record early this season. To business gurus, though, this is the moment that Coach Prime and his swagger really get interesting. 

Now that his Colorado Buffaloes have lost two of their last three games, the true test of Sanders’s hyper-confident leadership style is whether it can withstand defeat, they say.

“Confidence is absolutely key because people need to believe that you know which levers to pull, whether you really know or not,” says Carter Pate, who specialized in corporate restructuring at PricewaterhouseCoopers before a three-year stint as chief executive of MV Transportation. “What always hangs in the back is: Be careful how much you hype if you can’t back it up.”

Sports leadership lessons don’t always translate to business, though they may be more applicable in the corporatized era of college athletics that Sanders embodies. “Neon Deion,” as the flashy Hall of Famer is known, is less a coach of student athletes than a boss of young professionals. He has taken a chief executive’s approach to cleaning house and rebranding, and has vaulted a moribund program to pop-culture sensation.

Inheriting a team that won a single game last year, he overhauled the Colorado roster by capitalizing on a relatively new rule that lets college athletes transfer without sitting out for a year, as was required in the past. Because Sanders’s program has gotten so much buzz, his players also have better odds of landing endorsement deals—another recent change that upends traditional notions of amateurism. 

Deion Sanders celebrates with his son quarterback Shedeur Sanders after a touchdown against the Colorado State Rams last month in Boulder, Colo. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: ELENA SCOTTI/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, GETTY IMAGES

Though Sanders’s resume commands instant respect, legendary former players sometimes struggle to lead less-talented charges and often don’t make the best coaches. Few, if any, of Sanders’s Colorado players are as gifted as he, yet it appears at times like he sprinkled some of his ability on the “Prime 21” sunglasses he gave to each of them. (Look good, feel good, play good is Coach Prime’s motto.)

Pate, who now sits on three public-company boards, is a longtime Dallas Cowboys season ticket holder who witnessed Sanders’s almost-supernatural athleticism during his playing career. In addition to winning two Super Bowls, Sanders played nine seasons of Major League Baseball and ran track at Florida State. 

Pate says that, as a PwC consultant and managing partner, he distributed his own kind of good-luck charm to clients. He left his mobile-phone number off his business cards just so he could scrawl it in pen on the back. He’d hand the cards to executives at floundering companies and tell them to call if there is ever a crisis, making each feel like they were getting special access to a lifeline.

It was a shtick, Pate says, and exactly the reassurance some people needed.

Confident yet critical

There’s no dimming Coach Prime’s confidence, but he does know when to turn down the limelight.

After Colorado dropped a second straight game late last month, Sanders declined an interview request through a university athletic department spokesman: “Coach is really scaling back on media.”

Losses to the universities of Oregon and Southern California, each with top-10-ranked football teams, showed that the Buffs still have a way to go. Then they got back in the win column this past Saturday against Arizona State, the go-ahead field goal splitting the uprights with 12 seconds left.

 

“Wonderful win,” Sanders said in a postgame news conference. “Played like hot garbage.” He explained that he was pleased by the outcome but felt that his players’ effort and discipline were lackluster at times. He refused to accept mediocrity, he said. 

Several executives later told me that Sanders’s assessment reveals something important about his brand of confidence: It isn’t about a cocky feeling of inherent superiority but rather a belief that you’re capable of greatness through hard work. 

“If you look at it as a business turnaround—and, let’s face it, college football is a business—he’s done a lot of things right,” says Doug Yakola, a former McKinsey & Co. senior partner who is now an independent consultant. “He’s come in and set really high expectations, to the point where people are going, ‘You’re crazy.’

As a corporate turnaround expert himself, Yakola says he can relate. “Unless people are telling me I’m crazy, I’m not pushing hard enough.” 

Bright future

Jason Forrest says he’s been studying coaches for 20 years, looking for tips he can use in the sales and leadership trainings run by his Forrest Performance Group. His favorites include Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski and New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, whose understated work ethics he admires.

The loquacious Coach Prime is his latest fascination, partly because Colorado upset Texas Christian University, Forrest’s alma mater, in the first game of the season.

He describes Sanders as a benevolent alpha, a leader who earns subordinates’ trust by showing he cares while holding them to his own high standard. That’s a model for contemporary management, in Forrest’s view, as many executives struggle with employees’ loss of ambition. 

The key, he says, is to be upbeat yet realistic—and assertive in a way that spreads confidence to others. Being too domineering can have the opposite effect. 

“They need to borrow your certainty during uncertain times,” Forrest says. 

Alvin Sanders (no relation to the coach) says pumping up his staff was a priority when he became president and CEO of World Impact, a Christian ministry training nonprofit, in 2017. A longtime fan and student of Sanders’s career, he pulled a Prime Time move when he gathered the team to chart a path out of a budget deficit at the start of his tenure.

He handed out sunglasses.

“I told them, ‘Our future’s so bright we’re going to need these,’” Alvin Sanders recalls. “I was trying to give them some swagger.”