Finding ‘Our Kind of Guys’: How Chris Petersen Built A Winning Team Culture on Intangibles and Character

In doing some research for a book I’m writing I rediscovered this excellent article in Forbes magazine on how former Boise State head football Chris Petersen built and sustained a winning culture during his time at the school. Despite being written in 2013, this article holds up almost a decade later for any sports coach or business leader because it covers so much valuable information on talent acquisition and building winning team culture that it is worth revisiting.

In particular I love how much the entire program is aligned, from the vision connecting to their talent acquisition strategy to the way they taught their players, that you really start to see why the team had so much success under Coach Petersen. It’s my belief that this all starts with a complete understanding of who they want to be as a team, and the great alignment they were able to achieve in their player evaluation and selection process, all of which centered on having an emphasis on finding players with intangible character traits that aligned to the program’s core values.

Player Evaluation and Recruiting at Boise State Under Chris Petersen

Emphasis on Intangibles, Character Assessment in Recruiting New Players

In fact, Boise State might be the only sports program where the first criteria in recruiting new talent is not how well they play the actual game, but whether they align with the program’s core values. According to Petersen, instead of focusing on raw football talent, the emphasis is on intangibles.

Evaluate the Talent and Character of People to Find the Right Type of Player

Petersen does a great job of pointing out the flaw in focusing too much on talent and not giving enough consideration to the ‘human’ side of a person that is about to join your team and attempt to fit into the organization’s culture.

“If you fall in love with talent, you’re making a big mistake. You have to fall in love with the person first and foremost because you can only change someone so much. We have to be mindful of falling into the trappings of looking for great [football] talent and instead go recruit an OKG and make him a football player.”

This is a crucial issue that gets overlooked in talent acquisition so much in both business and in sports because people get so enamored with someone’s ability and talent that people forget to ask whether the candidate embodies the beliefs of their culture and is the type of person they want on the team. This is crucial question to consider not only in football and athletic recruiting, but in any business or organization as well.

Boise State Among the Best in College Football in Talent Development

Making a Commitment to Developing Football Talent

The Broncos have been so incredibly successful at it because they have made a conscious commitment to being the best in the world at one thing - developing football talent. By taking the traditional notion of recruiting the most gifted individual available for a specific position and forgoing it in favor of intangible characteristics, the Broncos have insured above all else, the student-athletes who come play for them embody the beliefs inherent to perpetuating the culture.

If culture is the most important thing, then the only way to perpetuate it is by bringing in people who will continue the culture you’ve built. To achieve sustained runs of success, it’s vital that organizations and their leaders understand the influence, both good and bad, that every person has on the culture your team worked so hard to build.

‘OKGs’ - The Key to Boise State’s Success in Player Evaluation and Development

Defining ‘OKGs’: Character, Attitude, Effort, Toughness, and Football Intelligence

The first step to finding these intangible character traits and “OKGs” is by simply defining which personality traits they want in their perspective players and candidates.

Every Boise recruit is evaluated in a number of areas, including: Character, Attitude, Effort, Toughness, and Football Intelligence (FBI). More particularly, Petersen seeks both players and coaches who exhibit a “High Performance; Low Ego” work ethic.

Finding and Discovering the Intangibles and Unseen Character Traits

But how can one start to uncover these pieces of a person’s personality? Boise employs simple approaches that everyone uses, but utilize them in a slightly different way.

When it comes to determining whether a recruit embodies such traits, it is obviously difficult without having prolonged interaction during an actual game time situation. As a result, the Boise coaching staff leans heavily on a recruit’s transcripts to determine if they have the mental edge necessary to acclimate to the program’s culture. This is why even though Boise State University is not known for its academics; strong performance in the classroom is a prerequisite to become a member of the team, regardless of how physically talented a football player the recruit may be.

Most college coaches and programs are simply looking at transcripts to make sure students can get into school. But Boise State was utilizing players’ grades to dig deeper to get more of an understanding of what those players’ personalities were really like and if they possessed the ‘mental edge’ the team was looking for.

Embracing and Continuing the Winning Team Culture at Boise State

Finding People That Embrace the Team’s Core Values

Even if an organization develops a superb talent evaluation system, the fact remains that finding personnel who are capable of embracing the organization’s core values is simply not enough without a concerted effort to indoctrinate those concepts on a continuous basis. At Boise State, Petersen has made the program’s mission as much about producing great football players as he has developing them into even better people. To this end, every week the student-athletes meet to discuss the values and principles of the organization, as well as listen to guest lecturers from a cross section of professions outside sports that provide unique perspectives on a particular topic.

Teaching the Culture: The ‘Whole-Part-Whole’ Instructional Method

The article mentions how Petersen ensures the culture is being properly engrained in each member of the team using the ‘Whole-Part-Whole’ instructional method, where he “teaches players the big picture, then has them go do ‘the parts’ with their respective positions coaches and learn how individual elements of the team’s culture apply to them, and then brings them back to the whole again.”

This whole-Part-Whole teaching method is an excellent way that Petersen “doesn’t just preach the culture, he makes sure players know and live the culture.” The fact that players are meeting on a weekly basis to discuss core values and principles of the organization shows that culture is not just a buzz word they throw around in team meetings, press conferences, and hang on the wall. They are actively discussing, learning, and growing their team culture within each player on a weekly basis.

Chris Petersen has one of the greatest head coaching records in modern college football history during his time in Boise. Seeing the valuable lessons in this article on how deliberate their organization was in finding their type of guys and the importance in protecting and growing their team’s culture, it’s easy to see why.