Chris Boyd learned his first lessons about business leadership in
college. That’s not remarkable in and of itself. But the fact that he
learned those lessons from his football coach might be. Boyd, the
CEO of Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center, played for John
Gagliardi at Saint John’s University in central Minnesota. Gagliardi
has been coaching and winning in small-college football since the
1940s. Gagliardi takes a different approach to coaching, principles
Boyd now uses in running his 1,600-employee medical center,
which generates $250 million in net revenue annually. “One of the
things I learned (from Gagliardi) is that you hire good people, and
if you’re very selective in the hiring or appointment process, you
get out of their way and let them work,” Boyd says.
“He doesn’t wear headphones, and he lets the quarterback
call the play over 80 percent of the time. In today’s environment, with all the signals and signs that coaches call in, he still
lets his quarterback on the field call the play.
“From a business sense, the thing I learned from that is you
put the right person in the right place and let him do the job.
Your quarterback is trained to think under pressure and assess
what is happening on the field, he should be the one calling the
plays, and the same thing is true in the world of business. If I
hired the right people, I shouldn’t be in their way. I should let
them do their jobs.”
Boyd makes that happen by pushing leadership downward in
the organization whenever possible, enabling the people
beneath him to take their own leadership role within the
organization.
But that process must start at the top.
