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Twenty years ago, Jim Popp was simply the son of a Cleveland Browns assistant football coach who had a hankering for football himself.
As a teenager, he would wander around the Browns' practices, gleaning what knowledge he could, trying to stay out of the way.
One day, one of the assistant coaches invited Popp into his office to watch game tape. The assistant showed the young man what to look for on tape, gave him some ideas about strategy and taught him some of the fundamentals of game planning.
The coach made the boy feel at home. The office sessions became somewhat regular.
A short while later, this assistant would be fired with the rest of the coaching staff. He continued his odyssey in the NFL...wanting eventually to become a head coach.
The assistant was a football nerd. He was passionate about the X's and O's (most football people said he had one of the greatest offensive football minds around), but, his kind deed to the young Jim Popp notwithstanding, had little comfort with or passion for the people around him. He simply was unaware of his need to connect.
"I was never belligerent, malicious or mean-spirited in anything I did," he would say many years later. "I was just not paying attention very well to what was going on around me. I was so focused on my work that I didn't recognize it's more important to develop ongoing relationships with people, to spend time with them, to get to know them, to let them know you care."
With this lack of connection, this insensitivity, this inattention to the needs of the people he associated with, he kept wandering from job to job.
From time to time, his mind would drift back to his father who owned a restaurant in Minneapolis.
"I realized why people loved my dad so much," he said. "He cared about people. That's why they worked so hard for him, that's why they chose to stay there. I decided it was time to look at the way I did things differently."
At fifty years old, he found himself. He changed his ways, his entire approach. He still had his football knowledge, but now he became a people-oriented leader. He realized that people came first.
With his newly found leadership approach, he wanted badly to be a head coach still, but his reputation dogged him.
Then in 2008, he received a call from the general manager of the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League. The GM wanted to know if this lifelong assistant was interested in interviewing for his vacant head coaching position.
The general manager's name was Jim Popp. Yes, the same Jim Popp whom this assistant had taken under his wing twenty years before.
During his interview with Popp, the coach discussed not a whit about X's and O's. He talked about leadership, teaching life skills, making the locker room an environment of respect and clarity. He talked exclusively about the people part of the job.
Popp hired him. In five years, this coach led the Alouettes to two Grey Cup championships (equivalent to the NFL's Super Bowl).
Now at 57 years old, he's the new head coach of the Chicago Bears. His name is Marc Trestman. His career fully resurrected, his dream of being a head coach in the NFL realized.
Isn't it fascinating that it took him so long to learn the value of relationships, and then it was a relationship from long ago that saved his career?
Who knows whether Trestman will succeed with the Bears, there are so many factors that go into a coach's success or failure.
But he's come to the job having learned one of the most important lessons in leadership...that leaders can have a head full, can be loaded with knowledge and business acumen, can be brilliant individuals, but if they can't engage people, they'll inevitably fail.
Please don't ever forget...you lead people.
Most facts in this article and the quotes are drawn from an article by Dan Pompei in the Chicago Tribune.
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