Jim Citrin Leadership by Example

Unlike many sports stars, who flounder once their athletic careers inevitably come to a close, Roger Staubach made perhaps the most successful transformation from sports champion to business leader ever achieved.

The example his story sets is widely applicable for anyone committed to achieving success.

A Born Sportsman

Staubach, an only child, grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and loved sports as a boy. "I had an instinct to play sports and devoted a lot of time and energy to them," Staubach says. He started playing baseball at seven years old and later moved on to football, but it wasn't until his senior year in high school that he played quarterback for the first time.

He thrived in that position and won an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he became arguably the greatest quarterback in the institution's history. Staubach won the Heisman Trophy in 1963 during his junior year.

Despite his success, he wasn't selected in the 1964 NFL draft until the 10th round. Most teams were frightened away by Staubach's navy commitment, which required him to work for five years in the service before breaking into the NFL.

He finally got his chance on the field when he joined the Dallas Cowboys in 1969 as a 27-year-old rookie. Staubach became starting quarterback in 1971, and for the next nine seasons he led "America's team" with distinction, guiding the Cowboys to six NFC championship games, four Super Bowl appearances, and two NFL championships (winning Super Bowls VI and XII). He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985.

Lessons from a Business Star

Today, Staubach is chairman and CEO of The Staubach Company, a market-leading global real estate advisory firm with 1,200 employees in 58 offices representing 2,200 clients. The company completes more than 5,000 transactions a year with values approaching $20 billion. It was one of the first real estate firms to focus on the users, as opposed to the owners, of office, industrial, and retail space.

How did Staubach make this transformation, and what are the key lessons from his life and career? Their power derives from their simplicity and clarity:

• Preparation

The most important thing Staubach did in his professional life was lay the groundwork for his post-football career a decade before he retired. "When I started playing pro football," he says, "I knew that if I was injured I was still going to be a young guy with a family to support.

"So to prepare, in 1970 I started working in the off-season for the Henry S. Miller Company [the largest independent real estate brokerage firm in Texas, founded in 1914]. I also knew that if I just retired one day cold-turkey, it would be very difficult to start over again from a standing start." Henry S. Miller Jr., son of the company's founder and CEO of the firm, was Staubach's mentor. "He gave me a desk, a phone, and really taught me real estate," says Staubach.

Staubach's role model for planning was Cowboys coach Tom Landry. "Coach Landry was a great leader," he says, "and his greatest strength was in preparation. He was an industrial engineer. He had carefully set goals that were reasonable, believable, achievable, and measured. His philosophy was that spectacular achievements come from unspectacular preparation.

"If I hadn't had those years in the trenches with the Miller Company, it would have been very difficult to transfer my eleven years in the NFL to starting over again in business," Staubach continues. "If athletes want to have a successful post-sports career today, they need to invest the time to be able to transfer their experience from one field to another. That means that they've got to give up the golf tournaments and all the things that athletes often do in the off-season."

• Hard work

Along with sound preparation, another central tenet of achievement is the easy-to-support but difficult-to-achieve quality of hard work.

"No matter what you do in life," Staubach says, "success is not going to happen easily. It's a result of hours and days and weeks and years of constant work and dedication. You have to pay the price and you can't quit."

He continues, "There are a lot of things you learn from sports that you can transfer to business, but if you don't pay the price and devote the necessary time and energy, those qualities simply aren't transferable."

• Teamwork

"I think teamwork is an absolutely critical quality in business today," says Staubach. "It isn't just about people who fall into step. It's about those who respect the importance of people other than themselves. I've known some CEOs who have been great role models for me, and the common denominator is how they treat people with respect. I've also seen a lot of arrogant executives who may have had some success, but for whom it's all about them. That's not a sustainable model.

"As an athlete or in business, if it's all about you, you might be able get away with it for a while," Staubach believes. "Even if you have a lot of talent, you'll have only limited success -- it's just the wrong formula.

"Take Lance Armstrong out on his bike. He had a team working with him building his bike, training, [drafting him] on the road, and performing many other functions. There was very much teamwork at play.

"Life is like an HOV lane," Staubach concludes. You've got your goals and ambitions and you want to get there, but you've got to take someone with you."