Two people joined my retention org at Oats Overnight this week. After one of my usual monologues about what we’re building and why it matters, both of them told me they were fired up. One said it felt like he had just left a locker room. That one hit different.
I’ve heard this before. Not in those exact words, but the sentiment. The energy shift after I lay out a vision. The look on someone’s face when something clicks and they realize what they’re a part of. It’s happened enough times now that I’ve stopped treating it as a coincidence.
I play the coach role at work. Not officially, not in any title, but in practice. It’s become part of my operating system. The way I open meetings. The way I frame problems. The way I talk to people about their potential in the context of our team, our goals, what’s at stake. I didn’t set out to be this person. But I’ve realized that the moments I’m most effective as a leader aren’t the ones where I’m organizing a project plan or reviewing a dashboard. They’re the ones where I’m standing in front of people and making them believe that what we’re doing matters and that they’re capable of more than they think.
I grew up on sports movies. Coach Carter. Friday Night Lights. Miracle. Remember the Titans. We watched them over and over as a family, and they’re some of my favorite memories. I loved those movies. The games, the drama, all of it. But the scenes that stayed with me longest were always the speeches. The locker room moments. The turning points where someone looks a group of people in the eye and changes how they see themselves. Those scenes did something to me. They taught me that the right words, delivered with conviction at the right moment, can shift the trajectory of an entire group. Building a new team has me reflecting on that more than usual.
There’s a reason we remember certain coaches, even fictional ones. Coach Carter locked his undefeated team out of the gym because they weren’t holding up their end of the academic contract. Everyone turned on him. But he didn’t care about the winning streak. He cared about whether those kids understood they were more than basketball players. That’s not strategy. That’s something else entirely. It’s the understanding that performance is downstream of belief. That people don’t do their best work because you tell them what to do. They do their best work because you help them understand who they are and what they’re capable of when they commit fully.
That’s what I try to do. Every day.
I won’t pretend it’s easy. Right now I’m pulling long days building strategic plans for the team, then pulling late nights working on my side projects, then waking up and chasing after a toddler. After a couple days of back-to-back meetings your social battery is completely drained. You get fried. But you still have to bring it. The coach doesn’t get to walk in at sixty percent. Your team reads your energy before they read your Slack messages. If you walk in flat, they feel it. If you walk in locked in, they feel that too.
I take this seriously because the difference between a team with a great coach and one without is not incremental. It’s night and day. It’s the difference between people doing their job and people doing their life’s work.
It feels a little strange to call myself a coach. I was never on any team. I grew up in a sports family though. My dad played college basketball. But the more I lean into this role, the more I realize it’s where I’ve always been headed. I had people who loved me and supported me growing up. But the specific thing I’m talking about here, someone standing in front of you with fire in their eyes telling you that you’re capable of something extraordinary, I never really got that. What I got instead was my back against the wall and no choice but to believe in myself. I had to try things I didn’t think were possible and find out what happens when you bet on yourself with no safety net. That experience shaped me. And maybe that’s why I feel so strongly about being that person for others. I’ve seen what belief can unlock. I just had to find it on my own first.
For years I’ve been helping people do their best work. Turns out, there’s a word for that.