Drawing parallels between the athletic field and the corporate environment, Tyler Palko, Managing Director at Solutions 21, shares his insights on achieving a true sense of partnership within teams. With a background as a Division I and NFL quarterback, Palko emphasizes the importance of trust, leadership, and individual development in fostering a cohesive and high-performing team. This Q&A delves into his experiences and offers valuable lessons for leaders striving to build stronger, more resilient teams.
Q: As a former Division I and NFL quarterback, you know all about different kinds of teams. What are some differences, similarities, and consistencies between what you’ve experienced in the athletic field and what you’re involved in now in the business world?
Palko: When you become a part of a team, you’re a part of a team, you win as a team, you lose as a team, you do all those things. First of all, the level of trust that you have with a team member when you’re on a sports team is so high. When you walk into a locker room, you trust blindly because of the team. Everyone’s on the team and they have your back. You accept that really quickly.
In a business, you could be dealing with COVID for three years and not actually see the person face-to-face, or they had a bad experience because of the pandemic. We talk a lot about workplace trauma and it’s a real thing. The real key word here is trust. I think that that’s why, when you have a team that can trust, they can trust that you’re going to be there, they can trust you’re going to get your stuff done, they can trust that you’re going to have their back, all those things. It may take longer in business, because people have been burned or had bad bosses along the way.
Q: As a leader, if trust is lacking or missing, is that all on you? How do you bring balance or can you even do it?
Palko: I think that if you’re a leader, yes, it does fall on you. It also falls on you to make sure you’re developing other people around you, so that you’re not the single point of failure. Making sure people have a level of trust and you take the time to get to know them and you take the time to get to help them ask questions and be curious.
Q: What’s the balance between doing individual development versus focusing on how the whole team is succeeding? Does one always lead to the other?
Palko: Maybe. Generally speaking, you need good players. You need a good quarterback, so you need a good sales guy. You need a good recruiter if you’re talking about coaching. The individual components of that, you want good players. You don’t want good players that don’t play well with others. If you’re a really good player, you have to be exponentially better. When you look at that individual talent piece, we just have some really talented people on our team here, quite frankly, because we are a family, we ask them questions, we get a chance to know them, and we’ve uncovered some amazing things that they can contribute.
Q: As individuals get developed and the team gets stronger and performs better, is there a point where the leader is okay to just step back and just let the thing run itself?
Palko: Yes. Every team that I’ve been on, the locker room was our sanctuary, so the players were there. If there was anything going on in the locker room, we handled it. If there was anything that we needed to be done, we handled it. The coaches didn’t come down to the locker room in New Orleans. That was our space. That let the coaches deal with the captains on a monthly basis, a weekly basis, and they bring up issues, and it’s less time. It’s more efficient. The coaches can go do what they do, put the game plans together. The players are taking care of what the players take care of and there’s no drama being brought up to level for that because they’ve developed the leaders, right? The equivalent in the workplace would be, you need to develop the people underneath you because those people are supposed to be taking work off of your desk, not putting it on.
Q: How do team members achieve a level of partnership?
Palko: The human element of people is unpredictable. It’s imperfect and it’s messy sometimes.
All that you try to do is create an environment where you allow people to thrive at what they’re most passionate about. If you allow people to be autonomous and give them a sense of purpose and say, “Hey, go run. I trust you with this,” that that creates way more of a connection point with team members and trust and achievement. You get a lot of that from military and sports. You’re on a team, I don’t want to let you down.
Q: Can we assign any metrics to this? How does leadership behaving this way and granting that trust, how does that turn into better results for organizations?
Palko: You have to have talented people who fit your culture. The metrics are real simple. You have all these things you need to get done in the business. Think about how many times you have to stop and redo or stop and get a new person or find out that it didn’t go through. When you are on a football team, bad plays are going to happen. It’s how do you handle the bad, how do you handle the hard? How do you handle the adversity, and I think that has to do solely with leadership. On an individual basis and then as a group, I think that it has to do with leadership.
The metrics are, how do you deal with hard? Do you deal with hard well? Do you hit your goals? Then you take that and you do it on the other end. How do you deal with things when they’re going well? How many times a day could you be moving faster, scoring more points? How do you address those moments? How do you fix them?
Q: Are there areas or clients you’ve worked with at Solutions 21 where you’ve had to go in and assess that this level of trust could be stronger and here’s what can happen and here’s what we need to do?
Palko: Yes. Most of the time where there’s a lack of trust or there’s a lack of leadership development, it really just comes down not understanding it, not knowing how to ask the right questions. They’ve never been taught how to say, “Hey, why don’t you stop in my office after lunch? I’d love to be able to spend an hour and a half with you and just catch up on how things are going,” as opposed to, “Hey, that contract that was supposed to be signed last week, get that done. What are we waiting on?”
This is not fluffy stuff. We’re not asking you to do trust falls. These are tools. This is how people communicate. Now it’s like, holy cow, I could actually have a conversation with an employee now, or I can set expectations. That’s how you build a winning team.