“I’d rather have fewer people doing more work than more people doing a little more work.”
Bill Belichick, Suiting Up Podcast
Context
Rabil and Coach Belichick are discussing how being a head coach is like being a CEO and how there is a huge laundry list of responsibilities that the HC is responsible for. Coach Belichick then begins to list off all the things a HC needs to be accounted for and Rabil is impressed and curious about how Coach Belichick is able to keep track of all of it including his personnel:
Rabil:
You keep the leanest staff in the NFL so with all those obligations… how have you developed a group of guys that are underneath you that are managing all that kind of stuff?Coach Belichick:
My philosophy, really, is that less is more, so I’d rather have fewer people doing more work than more people doing a little more work.As long as everybody is busy, as long as everybody feels productive, they feel good about what they’re doing and they feel like they’re contributing.
I think when people have lag time and kind of not enough to do, then that leads to getting distracted and complaining or being less productive. So even though you have more people, sometimes less work gets done.
I’d say from a “getting everyone on the same page standpoint” which is critical, the fewer people you have to manage the easier it is to get everybody on the same page.
So if you’re talking to ten people it’s hard to get all ten people doing the right thing and now you make that number twenty instead of ten, it’s even more difficult. And if you have five people supervising another fifteen people, now you’ve got another layer there where you’re not dealing directly with everybody and now you’re dependent on other people to relay the message the way you want it done.
