In my Saturday Morning Book Club we are currently reading The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by legendary pro football coach Bill Walsh.

Walsh changed the way football is played. And he transformed a franchise that was in shambles – the San Francisco Forty-Niners – into one of the greatest dynasties in the history of the sport.

He was a football genius. But he was a leadership genius too.

Many forget that Walsh was not only the head coach responsible for the X’s and O’s on the field, but also the General Manager – the leader tasked with staffing the entire organization.

Walsh was a firm believer in the idea that a leader, and the organization he or she runs, can only be as good as the people they hire.

He illustrates this in the book with a lesson he learned while on Paul Brown’s staff with the Cincinnati Bengals. One game day the bus taking the team from the hotel to the stadium became lost. After it became obvious to Brown that the driver did not know where he was, he barked at the driver: “Fella, I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at the person who hired you.”

Brown understood that his anger was pointless if directed at the bus driver. He was just doing what he was hired to do: drive the bus. The true responsibility lay at the feet of the person who placed Brown’s team in the hands of this unprepared driver.

Walsh took this lesson to heart and created a list of essential traits of staff members in a winning organization.

I have excerpted them here:

1. A fundamental knowledge of the area he or she has been hired to manage. You may think this is so self-evident it’s insulting to include. However, often we are tempted to hire simply on the basis of friendship or other user-friendly characteristics. They can be important. Expertise is more important.
2. A relatively high level of energy and enthusiasm and a personality that is upbeat, motivated, and animated. Groups will often collectively take on the personality of their department head. A negative, complaining staff member will be emulated by those he or she is in charge of. So will a positive go-getter.
3. The ability to discern talent in potential employees whom he or she will recommend to you.
4. An ability to communicate in a relaxed yet authoritative – but not authoritarian – manner.
5. Unconditional loyalty to both you and other staff members. If your staff members are chipping away at one another, the organization is weakened from within – like a tree full of termites. There is, in my view, no offense more serious than disloyalty.

The big picture? If you want to succeed as a leader, recognize, like Walsh, that the people with whom you surround yourself can be the difference between winning and losing.