What Endures Beyond the Scoreboard

Jon Clifton:
[0:08] Today I'm with a three-time member of Congress, the founder of TeamMates, and arguably one of the greatest coaches of all time. Coach Osborne, it's great to be here with you today.

Tom Osborne:
[0:20] Thank you. I guess there are quite a few people would argue with that last statement that I've run the greatest because we lost Oklahoma too many times, but nice to be with you today.

Jon Clifton:
[0:32] Thank you. Tell us, of your CliftonStrengths, what was the strength that you would say that you use most often throughout your career to be successful and why?

Tom Osborne:
[0:42] Well, pretty tough question to start with. My strengths are Belief and it's kind of the number one and that simply means that you have a strong set of core values and some things that kind of help see your way through life struggles. Second is achievement and sort of like I feel something has to be accomplished every day. And thirdly would be Self-Assurance. I guess I have confidence I can do things. Fourth is relationships or relatedness I'm not sure how it's phrased but just care about family, care about people I know, care about relationships and so those are those are my strengths and I think as I think about them I think they're pretty consistent with the way I've experienced life, so they make a lot of sense.

Jon Clifton:
[1:53] In your most recent book you talk about in the 1960s when you are a graduate student, that you came upon a professor, Don Clifton, who changed your thinking in terms of leadership and psychology. Can you talk more about that moment?

Tom Osborne:
[2:10] Well, it wasn't so much a moment as just a learning process, because at that time in the Ed Psych department and in psychology in general, there was kind of a hardcore experimental wing, and they would start with rats and try to figure out why a rat would hit a certain bar for a certain pellet food or why they would turn right or left. And then you had Pavlov, and he was working with dogs. And I think the idea is, well, if you could understand rats and dogs and maybe chimpanzees, that eventually you'd be able to work up the phylogenetic scale to the point where you could actually figure out what was going on with humans.

And Don was not of that particular type. And I remember that Don talked about the fact that in the Korean War that 38% of the prisoners, the U.S. prisoners, died, and physically they were treated pretty well. They weren't beaten, they weren't starved, they weren't tortured, but it was a totally negative environment where people were encouraged to inform on each other. They were even encouraged to inform on themselves anything in their past that they were ashamed of. They would talk about it. If they did, then they got rewarded in some way, food or whatever. And so there was a total breakdown of trust, communication, and any sense of community among the prisoners. And as a result, about 38% of them just laid there in their bunks, turned their face to the wall, and they died.

And so Don thought, you know, if negativism can be that powerful, then maybe positive reinforcement on the other side of it would be equally powerful. And so he was probably the pioneer of what is now called positive psychology, and so I could see a lot of sense to what Don was saying and doing. I think he had an organization, I think it was called Project. You may know more about it than I, but I think he was engaging a lot of his students to do something in the community. And so I think that carried over a lot into my coaching in that traditionally, coaches tend to be very authoritarian, very critical, sometimes actually dehumanizing. And so we try to make sure that even though we corrected players, we didn't try to attack them personally. And we tried to do it in a way that was as positive as possible. So some guy might miss a tackle. You could start calling them names or you could say no Jones now you're normally a pretty good tackler, remember keep your head up, lock your arms, and drive your feet. Then next time he does it then you make a big deal out of it. That's exactly what we're looking for. And so I think Don had an impact on the way I coached and the way I tried to treat people over time.

Jon Clifton:
[5:46] Coach, one of your recent chapters ends with the power of hope. And when we study the needs of followers in our strengths leadership sciences, we find that hope is one of the things that people need most. What strengths do you draw upon in order to drive hope throughout every leadership assignment you've ever had?

Tom Osborne:
[6:06] Well, I guess the thing that you're looking at is that ... and sometimes, in coaching particularly, you have to demote a player from first team to second team or sometimes discipline that player. But I think you always wanted to make sure that that player understood that you cared about them and that you wanted the best for them and that whatever had gone wrong could be righted. And so I think probably, again, that has to do a certain amount with Belief.

And so ... Yeah, we've really recently, particularly in TeamMates Mentoring, spent a lot of time talking about hope and that this is one of the most powerful things you can give a young person because so many kids today are growing up in circumstances that are really difficult. The breakup of the family has been difficult. Well over half of our kids are growing up without both biological parents, so over half have experienced a fairly significant trauma early in their life. And there's so many mixed messages out there from the internet, social media particularly, sometimes the movies, and sometimes music, lyrics, and on and on that are not particularly wholesome. And so a lot of them are growing up in circumstances, and they assume that the future is going to look at what they're experiencing now.

And if you can hold out the idea that this doesn't have to be the way it's going to be for the rest of your life, that it is possible to get an education, it is possible to move through this thing and come out on the other side of it. And so we have found that hope is probably the most powerful thing that a mentor can give to a mentee. It's just the idea that it doesn't always have to be this way. And there is some light at the end of the tunnel. And so we've really tried to emphasize the importance of hope in the mentoring process.

Jon Clifton:
[8:40] As someone who's been so successful with the theme Belief, what advice would you give someone else who also has Belief, who'd also like to lead in a similar way?

Tom Osborne:
[8:52] Well, the thing about it is that life can be confusing and you're going to have some bumps in the road and you're going to have all kinds of people trying to push you and pull you one way or another. So I think that it's important to have something that guides you through, something that's consistent throughout your life. And of course, my personal faith has served that role as well. But I think it's good that you sit down and think things through long-term, long-haul, what's important. And it isn't the rings and the watches. It isn't the financial rewards. It's more relationships and trying to make sure that you're treating people in the right way. And that in the long run, those players are not just good players, but they're people who can live a constructive life.

And so it's been sort of a guiding area of my life to steer me through. And the thing about coaching is that you're not here all the time. You're here, you win a big game, and you lose a big game, and you're down there and so it's pretty much of an up and down decision or up and down profession, and sometimes it's what have you done lately that determines that it's almost week to week. And so it's uncomfortable, but on the other hand you learn a lot.

Jon Clifton:
[10:36] When you think about Achiever, what was it that you were trying to accomplish as a coach?

Tom Osborne:
[10:41] Well a variety of things naturally. If you didn't win a certain percentage of games, you weren't going to be employed. So winning was important, but it wasn't the most important thing. The most important thing was really how we played the game. And I drew heavily from a guy named John Wooden. John Wooden was a basketball coach at UCLA. And at one time, John I think had won 88 consecutive basketball games, which was pretty unusual. And on a 12-year stretch, he won 10 national championships. But he never talked about winning to his players. And he talked about the process, you know. First thing, how you put your socks on so you don't get blisters, how you bend your knees on a free throw, how you pass the ball and so on.

So as I was saying earlier, we tried to break the game down into the components, the fundamentals, and how well we did those things. And then I think also part of that was team chemistry. I think if players felt cared for and really felt committed to the program, we would have some unusual team chemistry. An example of that was, I remember in 1997, I had two players, Jason Peter and Grant Wistrom, both All-American players. And they came in at the end of the 96 season, and they said, well coach, and I thought they were going to give me the speech. I've got to do what's best for me and my family. Because if they signed their name, they'd probably get $12 million just to sign their name. And they said, you know, we lost two games this year. I said, yeah, I knew that. They said, well, we didn't think that was very good. And I said, well, I agree with you. And they said, we're going to come back. And we're going to win them all. And they did. And without them, we would not have won them all because they were such strong leaders and they really set the tone.

And so the process was really important. I never talked about winning either. I just talked about the process. You could stand up in front of a team and say, well, we've got to win this game. You might get them all excited and run out of the room saying, yeah, we've got to win this game. But what does that mean? How does that translate into specifics? You know, you carry the ball high and tight so you don't fumble it. And you keep your head up when you tackle and you do those kind of things. So it isn't just pure emotion that wins games, it's the process.

Jon Clifton:
[13:54] You would get into the office early every morning. You'd stay late. You worked an incredible amount to achieve everything it was that you achieved. Who were you coaching for? Were you coaching for the fans? Were you coaching for the players, your staff, your family? Who'd you have in mind?

Tom Osborne:
[14:11] Well, I had in mind that we prefer not to be fired. That was one thing. But yeah well it's just part of the deal. We'd start at 7 and most days we'd end up about 10 or 11 at night. But we tried to make sure it wasn't busy work. We were really doing what we needed to do. But there's a lot of facets to the game, and the difficult part of that is that it can place a burden on your family. And so I tried to make sure that our players, our coaches worked on Sunday night, Monday night, and Tuesday night. And then Wednesday I said okay go home. Wednesday night, Thursday night I'd take projector home and I'd be looking at film but have dinner with my family, my kids Wednesday and Thursday night. And then I'd do what I could during the offseason to try to make up for it. But I guess if I have one regret is that I wish that I could have spent more time with my kids. It was a profession. As I said, coaching here at Nebraska with a sports population, it was going to take a lot of effort. But I have good kids, and I'm very proud of them. And so Nancy had to carry a lot of the load.

Jon Clifton:
[15:44] What do you draw upon after a loss? When there's been a loss, the team's down, what strength do you draw upon in order to build them back up to get ready for the next week?

Tom Osborne:
[15:56] Well, we try to look at performance, not so much the final score. And so we try to make sure that over time our players understood that we're trying to play at a level of perfection. And so we split things up into 12 offensive goals, 11 defensive goals, and about 7 or 8 kicking goals. And for instance, one would be offensively no turnovers. And defensively, you're going to get three turnovers. And offensively, you're going to average five yards per play rushing the football. And defensively, you're going to hold them to three yards or less. And on your average punt return, you're going to average 10 yards per return. And so those are all kind of minute things. But our players might win a game by 40 points, but if they didn't meet half their goals they didn't feel very good about it. And so we try to break the game down into things they could control. And sometimes you can't always control the final score but you can control effort and you can control consistency and how you practice and those kind of things. So the process became very important to us.

Jon Clifton:
[17:22] If there was an aspiring coach that came to you and said, I'd like to build a strengths-based team, what would that look like? And what advice would you have for that person?

Tom Osborne:
[17:34] Well, I think it'd be a good idea if you know what makes a player tick, if you know what their strengths are. You probably would handle a player a little bit different than somebody that had a different set of strengths. Some kids respond pretty well to criticism and a more authoritarian approach. And then some people, they're pretty fragile. If you raise your voice to them, they're going to retreat. And so I think that it certainly could make you a better coach. I came also to realize on my staff, you know, when you talk about an assistant football coach, you assume, well, they're all the same. But some guys are really good with X's and O's. Some guys are really good at interpersonal relationships. Some are really good recruiters. And so you try to make sure that each coach is using his strengths to the fullest, and because not every assistant coach has the same outlook, same strengths.

Jon Clifton:
[18:57] People with Relator often have an unusual ability to build deep relationships with people throughout their life. How did you use that in your recruiting and in the development of the players that you had on your team?

Tom Osborne:
[19:10] Well, I think sometimes in recruiting that players are deceived. I'm not going to use the term lied to, but there's a very strong inference that, well, you know, if you come here, you're gonna start as a freshman. And you're gonna be so important to us that if we need to, we'll build our whole offense around you, our whole defense, and a lot of things that are really difficult to deliver on. And so we pretty much told them how it was, that yeah, there's gonna be four or five other guys at your position, and this is not gonna be easy. And we lost some players in the process because we weren't telling them what they wanted to hear. But on the other hand, I think there was a note of authenticity to what we were saying. And so I think a lot of players trusted us. And they realized that they were probably being told some things from other quarters that were going to be hard to deliver.

And so as a result, when we recruited a player, he was apt to be here for four years. They rate recruiting classes, and that's based on who comes in as a freshman. But if they're not there two years later, you didn't have a good recruiting class. And so they stuck with us. And generally speaking, there was good team chemistry. And I think players understood that we cared about them as people, that we certainly cared about them as football players. But we wanted to make sure they graduated, make sure that they were supported in every possible way we could support them. And so the good thing about coaching, those relationships continue. You know, you have them for four years, but I still hear almost weekly or daily from some former player that hadn't played for me for 30, 40 years. So that's been the good thing, the gratifying thing, the relationships.

Jon Clifton:
[21:26] We didn't have the benefit of CliftonStrengths while you were a coach, but how did you use Don Clifton's strength psychology throughout your time to develop players at the University of Nebraska?

Tom Osborne:
[21:39] Well, I think knowing Don and knowing a little bit about his research did lead me to believe that positive reinforcement is much better than negativism. And so even though we corrected a player, I remember having a couple of assistants that were pretty tough. And once in a while they'd come down pretty hard on a player. But when they walked off the field they'd often times have their arm around that guy. And so we wanted to make sure that the players understood that even though this was demanding going out there in 100 degree weather and practicing twice a day, it's not easy. But part of what we were putting them through was because we cared about them, because we wanted them in the fourth quarter of a game to be able to perform well, and wanted to make sure they could do their best. So we tried to make sure that it wasn't a negative environment and was one that players understood that we loved them and we cared about them.

Jon Clifton:
[22:52] You tell a great story about the advice that you give to a quarterback if he had just fumbled and the way to speak to him positively when he comes back on the sidelines. Can you talk more about that?

Tom Osborne:
[23:03] Well yeah, there's a tendency if you watch much TV, you'll see probably most of the time when that guy reaches the sideline he's going to get a good tongue lashing. And of course nobody feels worse than that quarterback. I mean he just fumbled the ball out in front of 80,000 people or however many, and he didn't want to fumble, and so just chewing him out is not going to be productive. And so the main thing is just say, you know, remember, carry the ball high and tight, take care of it, make sure you put it away. And you're a good player, and you don't normally do that. And so just remember in the future to make sure that ball's high and tight. And so you can correct and you can make sure people understand what you want, but you don't have to get personal. You don't have to call them a bunch of names and say you're the stupidest quarterback I've ever coached. That's not going to help at all.

Jon Clifton:
[24:15] There are a lot of us Nebraska fans that wonder if you retired too early from football. Do you ever wonder that yourself?

Tom Osborne:
[24:24] Well, not too much. I guess the thing that was good about it ... see, I told Frank Solich about five years ahead of time, I said, Frank had a chance to go to Wisconsin as the offensive coordinator. And I said, I'm going to go five years, and then I'd like to have you be the head coach. And I couldn't control that for sure. And so the five years came, and I felt I had to honor my commitment to Frank. And so, yeah, I probably could have coached longer. But on the other hand, I didn't go out feet first, where most coaches do. No matter how much they win, eventually it catches up with you. And so that part was good. But the reason I ran for Congress, I think I just had a lot of energy and a certain amount of restlessness, and I thought I still could do something. And so I did that for a while, and then became AD.

Jon Clifton:
[25:35] Now, it sounds like throughout your coaching career, you often leaned on Belief. When you made the transition to Congress, or even as athletic director, was there another strength that you drew upon, like Self-Assurance or Responsibility? Or was it also Belief that you were using in those leadership roles?

Tom Osborne:
[25:54] Well, I suppose that any time you run for office, there has to be a little bit of Self-Assurance because you know you're going to be a target of whatever criticism, whatever people can find in your past that might be negative, that's going to be brought forward. So a certain amount of Self-Assurance just to put yourself out there.

Jon Clifton:
[26:18] You made some really difficult, I would say, controversial decisions in your run for governor. Was that Self-Assurance that you had in mind at that particular time? Self-Assurance is often known as, of course, the theme that will be contrarian or iconoclastic or at least someone that goes against the grain. And you made some, again, tough positions. Was that the theme that was influencing you at that time?

Tom Osborne:
[26:42] After looking at Congress, so many people's vote was almost determined by the amount of contributions they'd received from certain areas. So I limited the contributions to $300, not very much, from any individual. And I did not take large corporate sums. I did not take money from PACs, from the special interest groups, because I wanted to make sure that the voters knew that whatever I voted on or however I voted would be based on my best judgment, which at times probably wouldn't be quite what they agreed with. But at least it wouldn't be something that was bought and paid for. So anyway, and I suppose that has to do a little bit with Belief, just a set of standards. It wasn't I was trying to be holier than thou or anything like that.

But I also found later on when I ran for governor that if you didn't take money from special interests, they would immediately turn against you because they feel like they had no leverage with you, you know, if you didn't take the PAC money. And that, in terms of getting elected as governor, probably worked against me because most of those groups endorsed the other party and didn't endorse me. But anyway, I just felt that such things as term limits and trying to handle and get some control over the financial structure of the electoral system was important and to get it back more like it used to be when the country was founded. People were merchants and farmers and they went to Congress for four years, six years, and then they went back home and they went to work and you didn't have a whole cadre of people who were professional politicians their whole life.

Jon Clifton:
[29:08] According to the Gallup poll, Congress's approval ratings are really low today. What advice would you have for leaders in Congress today?

Tom Osborne:
[29:17] Well, I don't know if you're going to be able to get people to vote themselves out of a job, but term limits would really help. And, you know, there are some people, there are some good people there. I remember one guy, a guy named Robin Hayes from North Carolina, and he had to take a vote that was really going to be damaging. It was the correct vote, I think, and he did what was correct. But I remember he had tears in his eyes. Because he knew that that vote would quite likely cost him his job. And there are a few people like that, but not very many. And so I think the structure of Congress could be improved upon. And it still beats most places around the world. But you need people who are there for the right reasons, not for their own ego or not for financial reasons, but for serving people to the best of their ability.

Jon Clifton:
[30:35] You talk about a pivotal moment in your childhood when your dad went to World War II and that being something that inspired you to create TeamMates. Can you talk a little bit more about that pivotal moment and why it inspired you to help others?

Tom Osborne:
[30:53] Well, I was 4 years old when word came over the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. And I don't remember that so well as I remember my dad's reaction. He jumped out of his chair and he said, I'm going to get into this thing. And I really didn't know what it was, but I knew it was kind of a big deal. And so he left when I was 4 and came home when I was 9. So he was gone for five years and landed over in Normandy and across Belgium and Germany. And I know that during the Battle of the Bulge we thought we didn't hear from him for two, three, four weeks, and I know my mom worked in an ammunition plant down in Grand Island and she'd come home there'd be no letter and she'd cry. And so it was a difficult time. And in my class at school, I think there was only one other young person who didn't have a dad gone. All of them had dads at home and moms. And so I remember having a sort of feeling that I was not very worthwhile and somewhat isolated.

But I did have an uncle who lived across the road, and he took an interest in me and would take me hunting and fishing. And so I saw at that point some of the power of mentoring, having somebody who you could count on and somebody that cared about you. And so I think that carried over into, I wouldn't say that was in the back of my head when we started TeamMates. The main thing that I saw was I saw the changes in the players we recruited. Because when I started back in 1962, almost every player we recruited was from a family where he had both a father and mother, and both biological parents were there, and the family unit was much stronger. As time went on, we began to have to go to one city to talk to the young man's dad, and maybe in other cities talk to the mom. And then the drug culture hit in the late 60s, early 70s, and we began to have to drug test our players. And as I mentioned, a lot of the messages kids are receiving were pretty much antisocial.

I remember getting up in front of our team one day, and I just said, how many of you guys would be willing to serve as a mentor to a 7th or 8th grade boy here in Lincoln, Nebraska? And I thought it would be good for the mentees, but I thought it might also be good for the young men who were mentoring to serve somebody who couldn't do anything for you in return, at least on the surface couldn't do anything for you in return. And so we had 22 hands that went up, and we matched them up. The Lincoln Public Schools cooperated, and we became a school-based mentoring program. And now we've grown to over 10,000 matches in about 191 school districts across five states. So it's like a lot of things that start. You thought, well this is going to begin and end with 22, 25 football players. And it just kind of took off and grew from there.

Jon Clifton:
[34:46] Now, TeamMates is considered a strengths-based organization. What does a strengths-based organization look like to you?

Tom Osborne:
[34:55] Well, at best, we try to make sure that the mentor and the mentee have taken a StrengthsFinder, a strengths index. And we try to make sure that we're matching mentors and mentees that have some common interests, have a somewhat common view of the world. And so we think that strengths has certainly been a big factor in determining who would fit well with who. And so you can almost doom a match to failure if you have somebody who's really aggressive and carries the conversation all the time and is trying to fix somebody. And you have a young person who's very shy and sometimes reticent, maybe a little bit withdrawn, and they just don't react to that type of personality. And so the matching is done primarily at the school level with the building coordinator. And that building coordinator knows the young people. And then they interview the mentor and try to make sure the match is good and that the match is supported. And so we use StrengthsFinder extensively and try to make sure that we have strong matches.

Jon Clifton:
[36:30] Coach, thank you for everything that you've done for our state. Thank you for everything that you've done for Gallup. You've been a great adviser to us. And thank you for leading so many strengths-based organizations.

Tom Osborne:
[36:41] Appreciate it. Thank you.

Transcript autogenerated using AI.