Loyalty is a virtue, that much can’t be denied. I am blessed to have loyal friends, most of them made in some shape or form out of my experience in the sport of swimming. When I got married, only my brother-in-law and I had never shared a swim, so we promptly entered the Atlantic Ocean (on September 25th, in Massachusetts) to rectify the situation.
Like any virtue, though, loyalty can go wrong. People can be loyal to bad actors, an all too frequent occurrence in sport. But for today I’m not going to focus on that direction. I’m going to focus on the opposite. The fact of the matter, a true sign of a weak leader is that they value loyalty above all else.
Early in my coaching career, I sat in the office as we greeted an athlete from the team. We were going to tell her she wasn’t welcome anymore. To be sure, the athlete hadn’t been a model citizen. She had flouted rules, hadn’t performed particularly well.
Looking back, however, she hadn’t performed any worse than average for our team. There were definitely teammates who had violated team policy much more that were nevertheless welcome back. Her chief offense was one of loyalty, or lack of it. She had been publicly defiant.
So we excused her (I was an assistant coach, mostly sitting silently as an accomplice to the process). To put it mildly, she was not happy. She raged at us. Why not? It was more than a little unfair.
One reason for this habit is our normal social order. We can and should value loyalty in friends. It’s perhaps the best trait a friend can have. But putting it way out front when we lead is professional coaching malpractice.
Putting a high price on loyalty is poisonous for team culture. As a leader, you take people’s natural competitive instincts and energy and direct it towards appealing to you as a leader. As energy is not an unlimited resource, it therefore draws their attention from where it should be- working together with you and each other to actually get better.
It’s important to have faith, and that’s another thing I barely understood at the beginning of my career. Having grown up with no religion, faith was a foreign concept to me. I was a rigid non-believer. Science and reason could explain everything.
That all changed for me when I read Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan” and spent the next few months desperately trying to convince people it wasn’t about ballet. I realized that it was incredibly arrogant to assume “everything” could be explained. It was also definitely not true.
So now I have faith, but I hedge to make sure that it’s as non-blind as it can possibly be. I still hold loyalty as a virtue, but I prefer faith that is constantly tested and re-evaluated much more.