Andy Reid isn’t just the elder statesman of the NFL coaching world — he’s a proven winner.
He leads all current league coaches in career victories with 273 regular-season wins and is sixth among active coaches with a .651 winning percentage — though he’s headed into his 27th season as a head coach, while all the others in front of him have been an NFL head coach less than a decade.
Reid has won three Super Bowl championships so far with the Kansas City Chiefs and his team is an annual contender for the NFL’s top prize.
The Chiefs have made it to the Super Bowl in five of the past six seasons, winning three times.
Last year, Kansas City became the first franchise to ever play for the chance at three straight Super Bowl titles, though the Philadelphia Eagles spoiled that opportunity at another historical milestone by beating the Chiefs 40-22 in Super Bowl LIX.
The culture set by the 67-year-old Reid, though, has roots much deeper than just Kansas City’s dominance in recent years.
The Athletic’s Rustin Dodd took a deep dive into how Reid cultivated a winning culture after taking over as the franchise’s head coach in 2013, as part of a longer look at program builders across various sports.
Dodd compared the turnaround of the Chiefs — which was facilitated by Reid, the former BYU player and assistant — to a corporate turnaround, using a framework taught by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School, to help explain how a “Turnaround Leader” — someone who improves a struggling company — finds success.
How Andy Reid built a winning culture in Kansas City
Dodd explained that at the core of Kanter’s teachings about Turnaround Leaders, confidence is a key function to the success — not just the Turnaround Leader themselves, but in invoking confidence from others.
Dodd then outlined four lessons that Reid established early on in Kansas City, well before MVP quarterback Patrick Mahomes was drafted by the Chiefs — fundamentals that lock in step with the concept that Reid not only carries confidence into the workplace but fosters and builds it in others as well.
- Lesson 1: You don’t want to dwell on the past. But you do need to learn from it.
- Lesson 2: Start with culture. In a losing organization, it’s always worse than you think.
- Lesson 3: Let people know where they stand. Then move forward together.
- Lesson 4: Everyone knows communication is key. But is it good communication? Is it consistent?
Former Chiefs punter Dustin Colquitt explained how Reid helped establish not only a culture of winning, but a respect for every employee.
“He knows how to treat everybody the same, which is differently,” Colquitt told Dodd. “He embraced every guy and their personality and what they brought off the field. A lot of coaches would be like: ‘I don’t care what you have going on outside, we got to focus in here.’ And he said: ‘We care about you, whatever you have personally going on off the field.’”
Reid also employs a straight-forward, honest approach in his expectations and work ethic.
“You gotta be honest with your players,” Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy told Dodd. “They know how to read whether you’re honest or not. And then you gotta practice hard. I think that’s one of the things we’ve always done with Coach Reid.”
How those values are reflected in the Chiefs organization today
The Deseret News has been on hand at four of the five Super Bowls that Reid has coached the Chiefs in since February 2020, including the past three.
During that time, his players and coaching staff have echoed the principles that define a Turnaround Leader when talking about how Reid’s leadership helps get the most out of players and fellow coaches.
Time and time again, players emphasized how Reid, himself a former offensive lineman, loves teaching.
“Any chance he gets up in front of us — team meetings or on the field and he’s coaching us up — you can kinda see the way he approaches things,” former BYU safety Daniel Sorensen said ahead of Super Bowl LIV in 2020. “He likes to break things down, he likes to teach, he likes to take those opportunities to teach. He does it in a personal way.”
Focusing on fundamentals and opening up strong lines of communication are also important to Reid.
“Obviously, it starts with Coach Reid and the culture that he’s built,” Mahomes, a three-time Super Bowl MVP, said last February. “I think, throughout this entire team, you have a lot of guys that love the process of starting from the bottom and having to build your way back up there. And we understand what it takes to get to the Super Bowl, and we know it’s not easy.
“Instead of just trying to go out there and go through the motions, guys know that they have to put this work in to get to this position. It starts with Coach Reid and the culture that he’s built, but the team has a lot of guys that want to do what it takes to win.”
In talking with the Deseret News ahead of Super Bowl LIX in February, Chiefs owner Clark Hunt outlined two reasons why Reid is so successful in Kansas City
“One, is he’s incredibly consistent. If you talk to the players that played for him, you know 10-plus years ago if they came into a Chiefs practice today they would probably say, ‘Boy, this reminds me of exactly the way that Andy ran it eight to 10 years ago,’” Hunt told the Deseret News. “It didn’t matter whether it’s preseason, regular season, playoffs, Super Bowl, he has the team focus on the fundamentals, focus on all the details week-in, week-out.
“And then secondly it’s how he relates to the players and his coaching staff. He builds a personal relationship with them, the players know that he cares about them as individuals. And as a result, they’re willing to go out there and put it all on the line. At the same time, he’ll hold them accountable.”
