BU Today: The Patriots’ biggest change in the last year was hiring a new head coach, Mike Vrabel. One of his immediate catchphrases became “No naps!” his way of telling his players not to get complacent. How important is the leadership position for an organization seeking to turn itself around quickly?

Edson Filho: Leadership matters. When you hire a good leader, you’re able to establish higher-level goals because of how that new leader establishes a motivational climate. They establish confidence, and when they model confidence, it impacts motivation, impacts confidence, and impacts cohesion.

BU Today: But an old leader can model confidence, too, right?

Filho: There is a life cycle perspective on group dynamics. It starts with a period of growth, a period of maturation, and they go through a life cycle as a leader. Bringing in a new leader resets the cycle, helps establish new goals, and you go from there. The short answer is yes, a new leader can help set new goals. That life cycle is not only in sports, but in organizations, in relationships. You grow, hopefully to your potential, but there is a point where you reach maturation and maximum potential and then there is a natural decline.

BU Today: But a new coach still has to win over team members to be effective, doesn’t he?

Filho: Team members usually embrace turnaround. To bounce back, and to bounce forward, something needs to happen. Cohesion is about coming together and sticking together. We need to have a real belief in our goals and our values. If cohesion is there, when things get tough, we stick together. That’s cohesion by definition.

BU Today: Kristin, you teach a class where this conversation we’re having is particularly relevant.

Kristin Smith-Crowe: I teach a class called People, Teams, and Organizations, and we use the Olympics in 2008 as a model. The US men’s basketball team had won the gold medal every year. But then in 2004 they famously did not win. So they brought in a new coach, Coach K [Duke University head coach Mike Krzyzewski], and he did a couple of things. He focused them on a specific goal—to win a gold medal. It was suggested that previously, the players were not as focused. He made the goal meaningful to them—to do it for your country—and by playing together, you are going to be a better player. What’s important about that is the players are so elite, so high-status, what can you offer them? He gave them meaning and purpose.

BU Today: Are there other team examples, maybe outside of sports?

Smith-Crowe: GM [General Motors] was troubled in the 1970s and 1980s—poor cars, their market share was slipping in the US, foreign cars were rising, the US factories were not run well. Toyota approached them. It wanted to understand the US market and manufacturing, and GM agreed to a deal, to learn how Toyota efficiently and cost-effectively produced high-quality cars. GM reopened a plant, the NUMMI plant in California, and Toyota ran it. There was a team-based model, with the common goal of producing high-quality cars.

BU Today: Why was this important?

Smith-Crowe: No one at GM previously had set a goal of producing high-quality cars. Previously they rewarded employees based on tenure and quantity. But Toyota gave the common goal of quality and gave workers more autonomy. A worker could stop the assembly line if there was any problem whatsoever. GM workers never had that authority. So it was about giving everyone a common goal to work toward. Organizations can get that really wrong. It’s not easy to have everyone aligned.

BU Today: Can a big turnaround happen quickly in business, like the Patriots did?

Smith-Crowe: For teams, one thing you can do is a relaunch. You say, this endeavor we’ve been on isn’t working. Let’s clear the slate, and start again. What’s our goal? A leader can do that and provide direction. At some point a team needs specific goals to work toward. If they didn’t change the people, there are things they can change. What is the hierarchy, who has status, and who is calling the shots. Communication is key. Are problems being communicated?

BU Today: Is there something else a new leader can do to turn around results quickly?

Filho: Another thing that helps is role clarity. Role acceptance. Think about performance potential. If you give an organization all the things to excel, that’s one thing. How much time pressure do you have? Are there quick fixes? You have to look at the team, the players’ roles. The star player or leader can sometimes be a negative player. Which ones do I have to bring with me and which ones do I have to let go? Think about their values and their goals. Leaders establish the climate, establish new norms, new goals. That is important.