Reference no: EM133211359

Case - Row the Boat

When P. J. Fleck was a wide receivers' coach for the Rutgers University football team, he told the team's then offensive coordinator, Kirk Ciarrocca, that his goal was to become the youngest head football coach of a college team (Mattingly, 2017a).
Just two years later, at the age of 32, he was named the head coach of the Western Michigan University (WMU) Broncos, making him the youngest coach of a NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision team. When Coach Fleck took over the Broncos team, it had a 22-27 record. Four years later, the team was 13-1, became the Mid-American Conference (MAC) champion for the first time in 28 years, and earned a trip to the 2017 Cotton Bowl.
Coach Fleck then took the top coaching job at the University of Minnesota, a Big Ten school that hadn't seen a championship season in 50 years. In just three seasons, he built another floundering team into a formidable one. In 2019, the Golden Gophers finished the season 10-2. They also tied for the Big Ten West title, the first time the team had won a share of a division title since the Big Ten began divisional play. Minnesota defeated No. 9 Auburn in the 2020 Outback Bowl for its 11th win, the team's most since 1904.
The thing about being a successful football coach is that your success is based on how your players perform. Coach Fleck could only achieve his goals by setting goals for his players and then leading his players in achieving those. He boils down the ability to turn around a program into three pieces: the right people, cultural consistency, and the value of long-term vision over short-term desires (Giambalvo, 2019).
One of Coach Fleck's first actions as coach at WMU was to rescind all the scholarship offers to incoming players who had verbally committed to attend the university in Kalamazoo, under the previous coach. The scholarship withdrawals occurred just weeks before the national signing day and left players unable to arrange other Division I scholarships as slots were already filled at other schools. Despite the bad press and the hit to his reputation that resulted, Coach Fleck said his decision to start recruiting fresh was for the good of the program because recruits "commit to the coaching staff" (Ambrogi, 2013).
"He built Western Michigan by building it with better players," said Sports Illustrated writer Andy Staples (Mattingly, 2017b). By the next year, Coach Fleck had one of the highest-ranked recruiting classes in the MAC conference, and he continued that streak for the next three years.
When he began his tenure at WMU, Coach Fleck was clear that he was creating a culture for the program that emphasized athletes' growth in four areas: "academically, athletically, socially and spiritually."
He established a team mantra, which also became the team's rallying cry: Row the Boat. It came from the tragedy of losing his second son, Colt, to a heart condition just days after he was born in 2011. But it was more than a mantra; it was a mindset.
Coach Fleck explained the phrase, saying, "It's very simple when you break it down. There are three parts to rowing the boat. There is the oar, which is the energy behind rowing the boat. There is the boat, which is the actual sacrifice, either our team or the administration or the boosters or the audience or whoever is willing to sacrifice for this program. There is also the compass. Every single person that comes in contact with our football program, fans or not, they are all going for one common goal and that is success" (Drew, 2013).
Holding onto that mindset became important after his first season at WMU, when the team went 1-11. Coach Fleck, along with his rallying cry of Row the Boat, which was emblazoned on billboards, T-shirts, and posters in bars and restaurants across Kalamazoo, became an object of ridicule among fans, the media, and rivals, who happily flouted broken oars at away games. But he made it clear to his team that Row the Boat was for times of adversity.
"It's very easy to row the boat in times of triumph and success in calm seas, but when you're in the middle of the night, and there are really big storms and there are really big waves, and it's cold, and it's dark, and you can't see, you have to continue to keep your oar in the water. That's what it's for. It's not for the really amazing times. It's for when you get really tough times and you're tested," he said (Nothaft, 2017).
"And at one point, he was the only one who believed in it," said WMU running back Jarvion Franklin. "His voice never wavered. People were screaming at him and he stayed true to himself and his beliefs" (Markgraff, 2018).
Despite the team's deplorable record, Coach Fleck's energy and charisma was enough to help him draw top-level players to WMU, and the coach preached patience.
"When you take over a program, all 125 players have to adapt to your culture," he said. "I think it takes two or three years when you first get into a program," he said. "There's a new personality, and it takes two or three years until everyone begins wearing that personality. Once you start getting into year three and year four, it's really just incoming freshmen that are adapting" (Markgraff, 2018).
That culture made his players focus on more than athletics. Coach Fleck stressed that he was preparing the players for life after college. He wanted them to have the tools to be successful and overcome adversity in whatever life threw at them.
"Coaching is way different in 2018 than it was in 2008," he said. "All areas of the student-athletes' lives are affected by everything they do in college. I have to teach these four areas more than I ever have before" (Markgraff, 2018).
In the team's meeting room, a large sign detailed how to improve "academically, athletically, socially and spiritually." Under spirituality, it read, "connect with three new people."
"Stepping outside your comfort zone in all four areas helps you change the narrative of whatever that narrative is," said Coach Fleck. "We are here to change that by our actions every day of doing the right things. You should never be a better football player than you are a person" (Greder, 2017).
The winning record was one indication Coach Fleck was achieving what he set out to. Another was that by 2017, the WMU Broncos football team had the highest grade point average in the conference. Another indication was how the players' own outlooks had changed.
"It's not just about football or not just about the program, it's about life," WMU defensive lineman Keion Adams said. "It's about never giving up. The boat is sacrifice and the oar is the compass and direction you set for yourself. It's guided me through my life and made me the person that I am today" (Nichols, 2016).
Coach Fleck's success at WMU meant bigger football programs would be calling, and within months of the team's Cotton Bowl experience, it was announced that he would leave WMU to coach football at the University of Minnesota. Once in the Twin Cities, Coach Fleck immediately began to instill the same culture he created at WMU with his new team, building camaraderie, teaching life lessons, and developing a multilevel leadership committee of players. He was insistent that players assume leadership roles and consistently model the desired culture of the team, often repeating, "Bad teams, nobody leads. Average teams, coaches lead. Elite teams, players lead."
Once again, Coach Fleck knew it would take a couple of years before his culture became ingrained in his players. But with time, consistency, and a focus on cultural values, he produced "mature players who are ready to lead" (Markgraff, 2018).
"We define maturity as, 'When doing what you have to do becomes doing what you want to do,'" he said. "If our guys don't know what they have to do because it's a new program, that takes a couple of years for this maturity to take place. Once the expectations are laid out for them, they know what they 'have to do.' Once they want to do it, they also know every reason why they want to do it. That shows a very mature football team. That's when you start seeing players lead elite football teams" (Markgraff, 2018).
"Everything's connected," Coach Fleck told ESPN. "How we live our life is going to be how we play. It sounds like a lot of slogans and all this other stuff. It's really not. It's very well connected, it's very organized, it's a very detailed culture, there's a standard, and that standard can't be compromised in any area of your life" (Rittenberg, 2019).

Question 1: Path-goal leadership and expectancy theory are about how leaders can help followers reach their goals. Were the goals the players were working toward their own or Coach Fleck's?

Question 2: Explain Coach Fleck's leadership in terms of expectancy theory.