We don't necessarily associate great leadership with kindness, particularly when discussing Vince Lombardi-era football. But former NFL player and longtime college coach Bill Curry had this to say in an interview with Tom Tolbert on KNBR this afternoon:
Unexpected, undeserved, unrewarded acts of kindness from great leaders...make great teams.
He was referring to the kindness showed to him as a rookie Green Bay Packer in 1965 by veteran African American players who took him under their wing and, in his words, "taught me how to behave." Curry had no black teammates in college at Georgia Tech and initially found the diversity he encountered in the NFL hard to handle. But influential team leaders such as Willie Davis apparently went out of their way to reach out to Curry and helped him adjust.
Curry expressed profound gratitude for his teammates' kindness, and in his retelling, that kindness was as instrumental as Lombardi's legendary toughness in shaping the '60s Packers into a tight-knit, cohesive unit. I'm not suggesting--nor was Curry--that Lombardi's approach was wrong, or that kindness alone would have had the same affect.
And yet it feels as though we hear about leaders' toughness all the time, and we never hear about their kindness. But when I think about the most effective leaders I've known and worked with, they had the ability to be both tough and kind as needed, and those aspects of their personality didn't cancel each other out. Rather, their skillful use of one approach complemented the other; their kindness meant even more because I knew how tough they could be.
