Whether it’s youth sports or his team at Regions, his coaching style remains the same

It’s not hard to see the similarities between sports coaches and business leaders. Both are motivators and mentors who inspire others, set goals and strategies, and seek to instill a winning culture. 

Let me share a personal story. I studied Taekwondo for many years. I could only take one class a week because it was the only one that fit my hectic schedule. My son was going through cancer treatment at the time. The Friday morning class was the only one that aligned with time off from work and his chemotherapy schedule, when my parents could watch him while I trained.

This wasn’t just any old class; it was exclusively for black belts. And they train hard. I had not yet achieved the rank of black belt, so I had to convince them of my commitment. I did, and eventually I was allowed into these physically exhausting training sessions.

It normally takes three to five years to achieve a black belt. I did it in less than a year. 

The discipline and commitment needed to reach the pinnacle of the sport have made me a better business leader and a mentor to up-and-coming martial artists. When you’re obsessed with something and fully committed to it, great things will happen.

That sentiment is also shared by my next podcast guest, Antonio Howard. He’s the senior vice president and HR technology manager at Regions Bank, one of the nation’s largest full-service providers of consumer and commercial banking, wealth management, and mortgage products and services.

Whether it’s coaching youth sports or leading a team at Regions, Howard believes in letting individuals’ natural talent come to the fore on its own.

Watch our full conversation or continue reading for some quick takeaways.

“The Rebel”

Howard grew up with the nickname “The Rebel” because he asked a lot of questions in order to understand the how and the why. “When things are presented to me, I want to understand them,” he explained.

But don’t call him a lifelong learner. That’s not what he says he is. Rather, when he’s faced with a new topic, he wants to understand every aspect of it.

Further underscoring his “rebel” moniker, Howard describes himself as an introvert with extroverted personality traits. Both personality types came to the fore when he was a youngster in school and began getting homework assignments.

He didn’t quite see “home” work the way others do. It was something to be done in school, not at home. “It made no sense to me,” he said. “So I would not do homework at home, I would figure out how to do homework in school.”

Howard and I grew up in a time when there were rigid structures around learning. We would go to school for six or seven hours, then get anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes of homework. We would come into class the next day and go over the homework assignment, and that would factor into our final grade. That process didn’t work for Howard, raising the question: How exactly did he navigate his way through school?

Refusing to bend

Howard would do the bulk of his homework assignments during the first period of the day. “I got really good at that,” he smiled. “Mentally I refused to be in school that long and take work home.”

I have to hand it to him. Howard simply refused to bend. The curious thing I learned from our conversation was that it was never about homework per se. It’s that it didn’t make sense to him. There’s a difference for someone like him who thinks in time blocks. He freely moves from one subject to another, but never commingles them.

He’s that way at work too. He’s protective of his personal time when he’s away from the office. “I would never be the guy who works 80 hours” a week, he said. “I’m very linear.”

A big driver for Howard is that things -– tasks — have to make sense or he’s not going to do them. How does that translate into how he thinks of himself as a leader of other people? The answer ties back to the sports coach/business leader analogy I shared earlier.

“I don’t want you to be like me”

Howard coaches kids’ sports (i.e. soccer and basketball) and he has a message for his players: “I don’t want you to be like me.” By that he means it’s his job to maximize their talent.

He leads teams at Regions with the same approach. “I learn who you are, how you work, what you do best, what you may not do best,” he said. 

“I wouldn’t take a kid in his first year of soccer and say ‘You’re going to play striker’ because he’s not going to find success there. I put him in a position where he can get exposure to the game, understand what he’s good at, then I would put him in those positions to be successful.”

“Closet techie”

Teaching and instructing have long been in Howard’s blood. When he was in elementary school, he would teach kindergarteners how to read on Apple computers with floppy disks. While he’s always had technology in the background, his HR career was mostly in compliance.

“I was a part of every system implementation of every employer that I worked for throughout my career,” Howard said. “So I knew the technology, but I would never call myself a technology person.”

And he doesn’t have to be. Neither do the people on his teams. Soft skills – the appetite for learning new things — means more to Howard than technical skills. “You can teach skills but you can't teach drive. You can’t teach wanting to do the right thing.”

Spoken like the true coach he is.

Everybody has the capacity to learn

Howard is a firm believer in the old adage: Treat people the way you would want to be treated. That sentiment extends to job candidates and employees. And he owes it to an incident that happened early in his career when his expertise was in finance.

He had spoken to someone about a job opportunity when a role in HR came up in the discussion. With his background in numbers, the person thought Howard would be a great fit because his potential to learn was there.

“Everybody has the capacity to learn,” he said.

That’s an interesting way to look at it. A while back I wrote an article on LinkedIn about hiring high performers, and the value proposition I raised is: I don't care about someone’s technical skills. It's not really the most important thing. What is most important is a person’s aptitude for understanding and an attitude that aligns with the values of the organization.

So it really boils down to these two things: Aptitude and attitude.

What are the qualities you look for in a hire?