Leadership, Sexy Rexy, and our Preliminary Thoughts

Monday night's inaugural Leadership, Mentoring, and Coaching student forum at Wesleyan (CT) University was about introducing and evaluating a form of leadership, who we've come to know as Sexy Rexy, the man with the foot fetish, and the man who talks just as much trash as he does winning. Rex Ryan epitomizes the phrase "If you're gonna talk the talk, you better walk the walk". Rex Ryan was selected because he's such an interesting character in the world of sports today. He's ESPN's and the New York Post's dream and he's getting the whole country to talk about him and his NY Jets. In a job interview I was once asked "Who would you rather have as your coach, Bill Belichick or Rex Ryan?" The established and proven champion or the rash, abrasive, and eccentric trash talker who hasn't done anything but gotten his Jets to two AFC Championship games only to lose both (a great feat in itself but when you're measured by wins, losses, and championships in this day and age of million dollar salaried coaches - winning championships is everything).

The purpose of Leadership, Mentoring, & Coaching is to evaluate effective forms of leadership, seek out answers to what is leadership, define it, dissect the changing conceptions of leadership, analyze the psychology of leaders, and eventually discuss the difference between leadership and power. It's a round-table discussion made up with many future Wesleyan leaders in business, medicine, law, teaching, religion, and with their own families. It's almost like a radio talk show throwing around ideas and observations. We'll be taking cases from classical to modern times, evaluating leaders from Pericles and Caesar to Martin Luther King, John Wooden, and Abraham Lincoln.

Here's a video for all of you who don't know Rex - there is a heavy use of swears so avoid watching this at work or in front of your kids:
Rex Ryan HBO Hard Knocks Training Camp Speech

After a solid two hours of discussion we asked many of these questions:
1) Is Rex Ryan's vision to win the Super Bowl, but doing it by leading the league in wins appropriate for leading his team? Every leader must have a vision for his organization. Every leader must set the bar - but how high does the leader set the bar?
2) How do you feel about his his use of curse words and his clearly easy to understand rhetoric? Notice how he uses we, how "we're" going to do this and do that. Everybody needs to be in it to win it, everybody needs to feel like they're important and that they're part of something big. How does a leader go about convincing his organization or family that this is the path we're following - some people say it's a strong belief in one's own convictions.
3) Who would you rather have as your coach - Rex Ryan or Belichick?

Several questions were intertwined and raised that would take us days to read, we discussed and we discussed and there wasn't one right answer but what we came up with were a few ideas to lead off the semester:

1) It's important for the leader to remain on an even keel, not stay too low or get too high, but rather stay right in the middle (Petey T.)
2) A leader needs to be the guy who's willing to take a hit for his organization, when there are 49 marines and 1 sergeant, but only 49 beds - the leader (sergeant) should be the one who sleeps on the floor. The best word for this scenario is unselfishness - putting the organization, team, firm, or your kids' interests in front of yours. (TK)
3) Leadership is convincing a troop, organization, desk at a firm, teammates, or a nation (like President Obama will do with his State of the Union Address tonight) that there is this plan and this vision that is going to bring them to the promised land. A plan that's going to lead them to monumental profit, that's going to lead them out of a recession, that's going to get them through a battle, and that's going to win them a championship. Convincing people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't or think they couldn't in order to achieve something great. It's likely someone like Vince Lombardi said this before but I couldn't find the quote. (Deeps)
4) Finally, the leader needs to surround himself with the right people in order for people to buy what he's selling. We talked about Rex Ryan having Mark Sanchez and Bill Belichick having Tom Brady making an influence on winning championships. But what was really interesting was this article from the Star Ledger about Rex Ryan's first encounter with Tony Richardson:
Tony Richardson Leader NY Jets
The article discusses the importance of having the right people in place to promote the leader's goals and vision. Rex didn't go around to other players, he asked the security guard, the medical staff, and the cafeteria workers at the Jets training facility who their favorite player was. It wasn't one of their 1st round draft picks, but a veteran unsung hero the guy who never gets his name in the paper Tony Richardson. “You’re the type of guy I need to have on my football team,” Ryan told Richardson that morning. “You’re the type of guy I want to build an organization around.” Finding the right people to build a leader's convictions around is a part of the equation just like anything else. (Rudy)

Wesleyan has given us the opportunity to go off and study this heavily interesting question in an academic environment amongst our peers. We're going to invite influential leaders from the Wesleyan community to come in and speak and there will be members of the forum leading class at different points in the semester. One of the beauties of this class is that it is an open forum and if any of our blog readers have any articles, journals, current events, or past events that inspire them please let us know. If there are any connections to influential leaders in the real world we would love to have them on campus. The forum is going to be an inspiring journey that is going to allow people who may have never been in leadership positions before to find their inner leader, because according to Mr. Lombardi:

Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.
Vince Lombardi


I'll leave you with this thought: Why do you think you're a leader?



All the love,
JG