Build a Team, Not Just a Roster

What does leadership look like in 2025? 

One of the most important elements in leadership is building a team of people that share and fully buy into a common cause.

In politics, business, academia, and college sports, we are in an era where what is transactional supersedes what is aspirational — what is best for the team. As a Trustee at a $9.9 billion university, a national consultant on Name Image and Likeness (NIL) for college athletics, and in 20+ years coaching a major college football team, I’ve watched team-building change over time.

In college sports, both coaches and players have become de facto independent contractors, available to jump from place to place to the highest bidder. It is an unrestricted free agency that would make anyone in the NFL, NBA, MLB or NHL run for the hills. That puts tremendous pressure on coaches. It is the challenge of our time. Highlighting the mental and physical toll it takes is one of the reasons I wrote the book “Blitzed! The All-Out Pressure of College Football’s New Era.”

In business, now that NDAs and non-compete clauses have become more and more difficult to enforce, an unrestricted free agency mirrors the chaos in college sports.

As a leader of a company, how do you put together the people who will work in unison to advance the success of your organization?

I’ve heard a common refrain from a number of C-suite leaders on Penn State’s Board of Trustees in our own discussions about the hiring and retention of university administrators:

“You have to pay for talent.”

They state this as the fundamental truth to success. Just keep paying for top talent everywhere you can, and it will form a successful team. We’ve seen salaries escalate upward in key positions of leadership at our university and others around the country. But excellence has not always followed spending.

There are talented hired guns to be found just about anywhere. Any fool can throw money around to grab a talent-laden roster. That’s easy. But it comes down to the concept of “Team versus Roster.”

A group of people who work together is not automatically a team. That is a roster.

A true team requires common cause, common goals and common values that must be based in unique/uncommon core foundational values. A team is achieved when the leader knows who they are, communicates it effectively and takes actions to reinforce the loyalty and performance of people who adhere to the pursuit of excellence.

Sports history is littered with examples of talented rosters that underachieved in the pressure-packed moments. They never truly became a team. As a coach, I witnessed talented rosters that never quite met their potential. Other years less talented rosters attained success that far exceeded expectations.

In academia, perhaps the greatest crisis management failure in modern collegiate history occurred at Penn State. An examination of the written and oral accounts of the Trustees’ handling of the pressures of a breaking news crisis in 2011 showed a fractured board. It was a roster of successful and talented people. But when the pressure of self-preservation tested the concept of team, the trustees tossed out values of due process and careful deliberation.

Panic and the primacy of personal concerns over the collective good fractured unity of purpose.  They failed to respond in real time to an exploding media story, and allowed a faulty narrative to take hold.

How could that happen?    

It was a roster that never bothered to build itself out as a team. And the reliance of concentrated power in the hands of a few people left the school woefully understaffed in legal counsel, and without a crisis management/communications team on retainer.

The decisions they made proved not to be based in fact. Disastrous decisions damaged Penn State and proved costly — to the tune of over $300 million.

The corporate world is not immune to similar missteps.

How do you navigate the new transactional world and avoid the rocky shoals that can wreck the ship of even the most steady-handed captain?

For 17 years with Penn State football, I served as both a coach and the recruiting coordinator. The recruiting coordinator oversaw the acquisition of talent at the player level. We had several Top 10 recruiting classes, top 5 classes and three #1 classes. In other years we finished farther down the rankings but found talented team players who formed the core of championship teams.

Another pressure on a recruiting coordinator is to juggle the egos of assistant coaches. Each coach has a geographic area to recruit. The more players they sign from their area, the more they get noticed by a national media covering the sport. Getting noticed means each coach’s agent can promote them as a great recruiter.

No one ever grades a coach as a recruiter for the players they don’t recruit. They don’t get credit for seeing past a player’s “hype”, avoiding a bad student or catching a character flaw and then wisely choosing to recruit someone else.

But that is as important in recruiting a team as anything else.

Hall of Fame NFL coach Bill Walsh once stated: “Good talent with a bad attitude is bad talent.”

Avoiding bad attitude players, no matter how gifted they may be, is critical. Do not delude yourself into thinking you can reform everyone. The efforts of reformation projects draw time and effort away from the pursuit of excellence. Reformation projects also often require compromises that don’t go unnoticed by others. That sows resentment and damages your credibility within the organization.

So, can you still build a team in the era of roster-building?   

Absolutely.

The first step is to establish what you stand for and what your goals are. What will success and excellence look like for your organization? Where is the intersection of those goals with your values? That intersection is your destination.

Once you’ve located the destination, plot your course.

With the course and destination defined, build your team.

You will find there are plenty of people who can be part of your team who will work in commonality of purpose. You just have to communicate what that commonality is on the front end.

Do not become so enamored of the talents of the one person that you feel you absolutely must hire. Whether in business or sports, there are a lot of talented people who possess the talents to help you win. But they must be the right fit for your team.

Don’t be afraid to have current members of your team interact with prospective team members. We stayed away from recruiting some players based on feedback from respected current players who sensed potential problems.

To get the right fit, communicate before you sign them. Let them know who you are, what you stand for and what is expected of them. Be confident and honest as you paint your vision to them. Don’t shy away from telling them some hard truths before they sign.

If you’re honest and they sign with you, you’ve got the right person. That upfront honesty helps avoid big problems later. If they go elsewhere, you will be able to find others who will deliver for you and do so in a way that makes the sum of your team greater than the individual players.

In the fall of 2024, Penn State’s women’s volleyball team won the National Championship. Did they have the most talented roster? Probably not. Did they pay out the most in NIL money? Definitely not. Did they lose recruits to other schools that made promises of playing time and more NIL money? Yes.

So how did they win the title?   

In the offseason between 2023 and 2024, Coach Katie Schumacher-Cawley and I had several conversations as she built her team. Repeatedly her theme had been one that is part of the DNA of championship teams: This is who we are, this is what we stand for. If you want to be part of it, get on board. If not? Go somewhere else.

I’ve heard similar stories from high school football coaches describing the recruiting philosophy of Notre Dame’s resurgence in 2024. I witnessed the same themes in recruiting players to Penn State football for nearly two decades and saw it as a player as part of a National Championship team.

Achieving Team over Roster is the fundamental challenge for all leaders in an era of the transactional over the aspirational, of a time when false bravado and bluster get more attention than poised and substantive excellence.

But it can be done. And in an era where the margins between excellence and failure are often razor-thin, it is more important than ever.

Written by Jay Paterno.
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