Sports Watch: "Washington Redskins are the victims of top-down organizational dysfunction" (Sally Jenkins)

With UPDATE: Bruce Allen does pay a price!


Redskins No. 2 stooge Bruce Allen, the president and GM who has presided over four losing seasons, says he feels "awfully responsible" for the team's dismal 4-12 season. "We're going to make sure that we hold everyone accountable for everything that happened," he says. But himself maybe not so much?

"For too long, no one has trusted the basic setup of the [Washington Redskins] organization. So many flatterers and yes men survive while the truth tellers get offed or ignored, and every three or four years everyone gets fired and the club starts from scratch again. Step one for Snyder is to identify some real leaders, not just enablers. And to convince them he’s not out to waste their best efforts and earning years."

-- the finish of Sally Jenkins's Washington Post column "Washington
Redskins are the victims of top-down organizational dysfunction"

by Ken

I love it! How can you not love the spectacle of the Washington Redskins in perpetual turmoil? Okay, it's a little easier for me owing to years of New York Giants football fandom. Of course you hate the Dallas Cowboys -- what reasonable person wouldn't? -- but the hatred of the Redskins is more personal. True, the Giants are pretty sucky themselves these days, but it's been years since I cared about them. Really, can you root for any length of time for a team coached by Tom Coughlin? To the extent that I pay any attention at all, I get a kick out of watching the Giants stumble around on the field. What's interesting, though, is that the Redskins hatred doesn't fade.

Probably this has something to do with the happy circumstance of the Redskins falling into the clutches of the appalling Dan Snyder. Watching this jillionaire legend in his own mind stink up the entire DC area year after year -- my gosh, does it get any better?


For a non-Redskins fan, the special pleasure of hating the floundering franchise is watching idiot jillionaire owner Daniel Snyder make a fool of himself.

Once upon a time we New Yorkers took pleasure in giggling in much the same way at a Cleveland shipping baron name of George Steinbrenner, who gained control of the New York Yankees, and remained a leading figure of NYC fun for as long as he remained the team's presiding brain. But that was different. There was a lot that was oafish and even ridiculous about George, but for all his craziness, he did gradually learn to hire competent baseball people and let them do their jobs, more or less, and George fielded a lot of winning teams in the Bronx. Perhaps Dan Snyder is as splendid a genius as he thinks he is in the business world, but in the football world he's a clown, and his puppet president-GM Bruce Allen is an even sadder clown. In Stooge-speak, Bruce would be a Larry sucking up to Dan's version of a Larry pretending to be a Moe.

All of which may explain why I took special delight in recent column by the Washington Post's Sally Jenkins, which gives a splendid behind-the-scenes glimpse of the way the Redskins organization is run, which she argues is not just a joke in terms of football smarts but a joke in terms of business-organization smarts.

The column seems to me so sensibly argued that I'm just going to let Sally tell the story her way.

Washington Redskins are the victims of top-down organizational dysfunction

By Sally Jenkins | Columnist
December 31, 2014

An NFL player’s chief commodity and source of earnings is his body, and he has only so many bone-breaking efforts contained in it. Would you invest your savings in a company run by Dan Snyder and Bruce Allen? No, you wouldn’t. Of course not. So why would the players? This is what is wrong with Washington’s football club, why there are so many losses and whiffed tackles. It’s very basic and purely transactional. There is a gnawing doubt inside the club whether the effort is worth it.

A lot of thought and literature has been devoted to how to transform a losing culture into a winning one. Management experts define culture as the shared psychology in a working environment, which sets habits and defines an organization’s identity. “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture,” says Edgar Schein, former MIT professor of management and author of the standard textbook “Organizational Culture and Leadership.” The trouble with the leaders in Washington, Snyder and Allen, is that one is an amateur and the other is a phony. The culture they’ve created is not just a losing one but a laughingstock. This is why the team can seem so hapless, unprofessional and slapstick, why they snatch comedy from the jaws of defeat.

There already has been one firing in Jim Haslett, and there may be more, but it’s a sure sign of amateurism to believe that all you have to do to change a culture is make some heads roll. “Just changing a coach isn’t going to do it,” says author-consultant Jon Katzenbach, a senior global adviser at the management firm Strategy&. To really make a change, you have to expose the “discrepancies” between the stated values of an organization and its actual behavior, Schein teaches. Think about how many discrepancies there are between what people say within the franchise and what they actually do.

In fact, when is the last time you heard a coherent expression of a company value from anybody at the Ashburn headquarters, much less saw it carried out?

There is lip service to tradition and loyalty — there have been seven coaching changes in 15 years. Which explains Jay Gruden’s demeanor, that odd combination of bite and fatalism. Players are pursued, seduced, petted, berated, betrayed, swept away and brushed aside. It’s no mystery why there are continual miscues, penalties and missed assignments; their competitive instincts are at war with an is-this-really-worth-it sense of self-preservation.

If you had to sum up Snyder’s organizational philosophy, it would be this: Stability is for wimps. Year after year, he commits one dictatorial error after the next, piling self-deceit on self-deceit as he tells fans success is close. His style is a cross between a cat caught in a yarn and a moth banging at a windowpane.

As for Allen, he is such a public relations puppet you can practically see the jerking motion when he moves. At a dodging, evasive news conference Wednesday, Allen made one thing clear: The team’s problems have nothing to do with him. “We’re winning off the field,” he said. Not a breath of doubt ruffled a lock of his sprayed hair as he said it.

Allen is right about one thing. Washington is indeed “winning off the field” — if the metric of success is fiscally gouging fans while offering a perfectly horrible on-the-field product. Over the course of an execrable 4-12 season, the game-day experience at FedEx Field was the fourth-most expensive in the NFL, according to the annual Team Marketing Report. Parking prices were second highest ($57.50) in the entire NFL. A team hat cost $30 — 10 bucks more than a Dallas Cowboys hat. The average price for a premium seat was $375.32, which was $116 more than a premium seat for the Baltimore Ravens and $158 more than for the Philadelphia Eagles.

As fullback Darrel Young was cleaning out his locker for the offseason this week, he asked rhetorically, “Are we trying to be football players, or are we trying to make money?” Nobody summed up the club’s paycheck culture better than that.

There is only one way things can change in Washington. (Unless fans decide to break Snyder, force him to sell by staying away until the team’s debt service is more than its operating income.) Snyder would have to listen, really listen, to his staffers and his players. Not to his pets and his stars and top jersey sellers, either, but to those who he has often disregarded and disrespected, the rank and file who show up for work every day and manage to do a professional job in an unprofessional environment. He would have to ask them, “What are the three or four behaviors you consistently see in this club that need to change?”

According to Katzenbach, in every organization there are critical informal leaders further down the chain who, if they’re properly empowered and energized, can help create a turnaround. They may not have the most exalted titles or salaries, either. They are “people respected not for their position but for who they are and the kind of interactions they have with their peers,” Katzenbach says.

“Who are the informal leaders on the team right now?” Katzenbach asks. “Who do members of the team respect? You look for people who generate that respect, even without a hierarchical position. There have to be some of those informal leaders inside the team, and I’d be trying to figure out who they are. And to get some help from them in converting this sense of give-up.”

For too long, no one has trusted the basic setup of the organization. So many flatterers and yes men survive while the truth tellers get offed or ignored, and every three or four years everyone gets fired and the club starts from scratch again. Step one for Snyder is to identify some real leaders, not just enablers. And to convince them he’s not out to waste their best efforts and earning years.

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: 
So Bruce Allen does pay a price

As of Wednesday afternoon the 7th, "The Washington Redskins have finalized a deal that will bring well-respected talent evaluator Scot McCloughan aboard as general manager, according to two people with knowledge of the situation," the Post's Mike Jones and Mark Maske remain.

Bruce Allen, while mercifully stripped of the GM title, remains as president, however. And however much or little authority he retains, it remains to be seen whether owner Dan Snyder has learned any of the organizational lessons Sally Jenkins wrote about.

#