In the U.S. the most successful profession football coach by far is a man named Bill Belichick. He is an intelligent man. Over the thousands of football pre-game and post-game press conference he has had across the decades, he has talked about nothing except his team and the recent or up-coming game of his team. This has not made him a darling of the press. In fact it is quite the opposite. Even when there has been another one of those daily “breaking news” social scandals in the nation or in the National Football League—social scandals being the meat and potatoes of what is passed off as journalism today in North America, Belichick will not speak to the press about them, even if the people involved are on his team. He just says, “My job is to be a football coach. All that other stuff will be handled by the League Administration.”

His approach to his vocation, “My job is to be a football coach,” is humble, rational and practical. It is humble because many people, who get a mere a photon or two of media publicity start pontificating in areas outside their expertise, as if they were Aristotle, Plato or Thomas Aquinas, when in fact their expertise in what they are now pontificating on probably does not rise to the level of Joe the bartender, if that.

It is rational because he has no personal expertise beyond the average person on the subject and would never even be looked at by the press if he were not a momentary celebrity and the media could gin-up what he says, one way or another, to promote confusion, conflict, controversy and thereby sell their “news” product. Now, academic or professional expertise is by no mean the last or only word on a subject nor is it by any standards a guarantor of truth. But, it at least significantly raises the probability that a person has given serious time and energy, from some motivation, thinking about a problem and its solution. When such time and energy is given by anyone trying to fathom a problem and it solution that person’s opinion, even if it is by someone who is illiterate, deserves equal human respect as any opinion of any PhD or professional public relations expert or profession media pundit, if he or she choose to make it public. But note, once it is established, whether it be a professional expert or ordinary person, that he or she is just shooting off his or her mouth out of nurtured ignorance or planned deception, that opinion deserves no credence, even if he or she is voicing it from a some type of high profile pulpit.

It is practical because of what is going to happen when a leader, especially a celebrity leader, starts opining on issues outside his or her expertise. He or she is going to bring confusion and conflict to the people he or she should be leading in a task. Extraneous thoughts, ideas and fellings are going to arise in the group. They are going to interfere with the leader’s authority, clarity and directions being communicated with the maximal and demand lucidity to those whom one is leading to a goal, so that they can do their job and reach the goal they joined the group reach.

Also, it is practical because a successful leader is one who lives what he is teaching others to do so they can do their job. A good leader is one who is willing to walk through the furnace of his or her own teaching to show, indeed to prove, to his or her constituency that this is the right way. Belichick’s official motto for himself and for his team is one sentence, “Do your job!” By, “Do your job,” he means, if you are a left tackle on the team, do everything, absolutely everything, a left tackle must do to prepared for a game and for a season of games, e.g. be at all practices and meeting on time, do your film study of next weeks opposing tackle and team, do all the hours of physical workouts and physical therapy needed to be in shape to play your best, and do not worry about other people’s jobs, trust they will also do their jobs properly. From the moment a player signs a contract with Belichick’s team and enters the practice facility to the moment before he goes onto the playing field he is surround by signs reading, “Do your job.” 

How vapid those sign would be if Belichick were not on hand doing his job and only his job for fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, e.g. if he were out pontificating to the media on matters other than football. No one puts in the time Belichick does trying to make his group successful in reaching its goal. Leadership by example instills imitation. Perhaps two very telling notes are these on the importance he places on each person doing his job and sacrificing whatever has to be sacrificed to do it well, so that every group member can have full confidence that every other group member is doing his job. For, knowing that all are on the same page and on it giving a 100% is essential for group coherence, conviction and the individual’s personal persevering commitment to do whatever it takes to do one’s job well and achieve his and his teammates’ chosen goal.

The telling notes are as follows, and they are certainly not meant to validate Belichick’s draconian disciplinary approach for achieving his end. First, Bill Belichick removed from the team a player who was regarded as one of the very best in the league at his position after only a year, costing the team about six million dollars, because the player either could not do his job or refused to do it; Second, a player who had scored a remarkable four touchdowns on Sunday but who was late for the Monday morning team meeting to go over Sunday’s mistakes, even though Belichick’s team easily won on Sunday, was fined and never played in another game for Belichick’s team that year or any other year. Neither player lost any salary that was due to him under his contract.

Does it not seem probable to the point of certainty that if Belichick changed his mind and his modus operandi and became a laid-back 9-5 football coach, continually making the media talk-shows rounds pontificating on football but also on all other varieties of issues, his, “Do your job” motto would soon become a mere repetitious sound bite like, “No more war. War never again?” As the leader changes, so does the imitation of the leader change as well s his follower’s conviction that he knows what he is talking about, regardless of how many inspiring talks he gives them. “Do as I say, not as I do,” is the most improvised form of leadership. If the leader changes, the group he or she is leading changes. It is a human propensity to say and believe, “What is good for the goose is good for the gander.” If a particular type of human behavior is good for one person, it should be good for another.

It is my seriously considered opinion that the Petrine Ministry, and indeed the entire operation of the institutional Roman Catholic Church Episcopacy, has run tragically amuck, because for a long, long, long time the pope and the bishops have not been satisfied with simply doing their job, the little job, that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit assigned to them. And, to religiously validate their disobedience rather than repentant for their disobedience and that of their predecessors they have set up an incestuous intellectual and psychological Petrine petrie dish-nurturing structure that will insure that no one will be selected pope or bishop who is not a clone of those who made him a pope or a bishop. This means that today and for hundreds of thousands of yesterdays only a clone of someone who is not doing the job he was commissioned for by Jesus and has no moral qualms regarding his disobedience will be a Pope or a Bishop under the present method of operating in the Roman Catholic Church. Even a perfunctory knowledge of Church history over the last 1700 years will exposed the terrible and tragic consequences to the People of God for this structural institutionalization of Popes and Bishops who are not content with doing the little job, the little service to the Church, committed to them by Jesus.

– Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

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