I found an old interview with Bill Parcells from the Academy of Management Excellence,AME: You said you tell your team what it should look like. Do you spell it out and tell the team: "I want us to make it to the Super Bowl"? Or do you start with small goals?
PARCELLS: What I say to them is, "I want this team to play consistently to its potential." My challenge as a coach is to organize it, structure it, give the team a good enough design and the motivation to allow the team to play to its potential, as I perceive the potential to be. I'm not out there trying to please the media or what other people's perception of their potential is. I have my own idea about what that potential is, and that's the one that I'm using as the standard. In other words, I want them to play to their potential as I perceive it to be, because I think I'm a better evaluator of that potential than the layman or the media or the people outside the organization. I basically determine where we can go, and I want them to make every effort to reach their potential. And if they do, then I deem them to be successful in that year. And if they don't, regardless of what the record says, I deem them to be unsuccessful. I've had teams with winning records that I thought were unsuccessful, and I've had teams with losing records that I thought were pretty successful in terms of fulfilling their potential.
AME: What other motivational techniques have you used?
PARCELLS: First, I think motivation has to be self-starting. I don't have the ability to motivate anybody that doesn't want to do it. I think people sometimes confuse motivation with proper direction. If I'm pretty sure the player wants to do it, then I've got to guide him properly toward where he wants to go. If that's called motivation, well, it's motivation, but I don't look at it quite like that. I think that sometimes people confuse proper direction with motivation. There have been other cases where you just have to call someone in and say, "This isn't any good. I'm not happy with it, you're not happy with it, the organization isn't happy with it. Where do you want to go from here? Do you want to go forward and upward and try to accomplish something, or do you want to just try to maintain what you're doing, because that's not going to be good enough around here for very long." That's a form of confrontation. You're not belittling the person, but you're telling him that what he's doing isn't good enough. You have to draw a fine line between people that just don't care and those that just need direction. Some of them won't be able to express to you which one of those things is bothering them. You're going to have to determine that yourself by watching them. If a guy is overweight, lazy and in poor condition, then I pretty much can determine that this guy doesn't really care that much about being good at what he's doing. On the other hand, if he's in tremendous condition and is a good practice player and is working very hard to get better, then I've got to think, "Well, I need to technically direct this guy better because he obviously wants to do it."
The entire interview can be found:
