MSU Head Football Coach Mark Dantonio on Leadership, Recruiting and Leading in Tough Times

Morten Anderson…I heard it first from Morten, the kicker. He was a great kicker here. So I give him credit for it. Unconsciously confident. They don’t know

Morten Anderson…I heard it first from Morten, the kicker. He was a great kicker here. So I give him credit for it. Unconsciously confident. They don’t know what to do. They have no clue. They don’t know up from down. They walk in here and they don’t know this guy from that guy, they don’t know anything. They just can’t get on the field in our case and can’t go to work for you.

Gradually they move to the second level, the third level and then sooner or later they’re at that fourth level. That’s just a maturation process, I think. But you’re gonna succeed possibly at the highest level. You can react. When there’s a problem, you can react. I don’t care if that’s on the automotive line or I don’t care if that’s on a football field. You’re instincts take over and your reactions become better and better and better, and you get very, very confident.

So we work very hard at doing that in our little setup here with everything we do from a classroom setting, to how we drill the drills, to how do we take them through the paces. We’re just constantly trying to get to this level of whatever, and then reintroduce something new and bring it again.

As Nick Saban said, we’re constantly just trying to throw it up on the wall, see what sticks, come back to the bucket, and throw it up on the wall again. I had an opportunity to go see President Bush. This is an opportunity to talk. I thought this was very real to me, and whether you agree with him as a person or though it was very, very… It sorta hit me.

As a leader you’ve gotta be an eternal optimist. You can’t drag yourself down through this wash right here after you lose by one point. You can’t drag your head down through here and come down here and say, Well here we are again. It’s not gonna work.

You have to be the eternal optimist. You have to walk in as the leader of any program or any business and tell people that everything’s gonna be alright. You can have your down times, but don’t have your down times around your people. You’ve gotta promote optimism. Everything’s gonna be fine, we’re gonna move forward. You have to be able to do that, some way. That’s gotta be in your personality. You gotta be able to take charge. You gotta surround yourself by the truth, to the best of your ability.

Again, I’m talking to our recruits right now…in this day and age, to accelerate our recruiting, in everything that’s going on out there with society in general, with social media and all the glitz, people get very, very complacent very, very quickly. So all the guys rubbing people on the back and patting them on the back and telling them that they’re the best and all that kinda stuff, you gotta tell them the truth.

I tell our recruits, You need to find the truth. Find the truth. There’s good and bad in everything. There’s no perfect place, there’s no perfect job. You got to find the truth. Once you find the truth, you’ll know how to approach the issue. When you get there, wherever you’re going, you’ll say I knew that coming in and I’m ready for it.

It’s when they get blindsided when they come into a place or a program or a job and they’re blindsided. It’d be like you didn’t tell them the salary they’re working for. You came in and said, Huh, I’m working for that? The two don’t mix. So you gotta tell people the truth.