And when you’ve spent your life reading defenses, calling audibles and trusting your instincts under pressure, those skills it turns out don’t disappear when you walk off the field. They continue to follow you into the boardroom. That's exactly what happened to a Hall of Fame quarterback who now runs a fast-growing company - and insists on doing something most CEOs gave up many years ago: he interviews every person the company hires. Not just executives. Not just managers. Everyone. And he says it is the most important decision of leadership that he has ever made.
Sounds obsessive from the outside. A retired superstar athlete turned CEO holding hands-on meetings with designers, junior staffers and interns? But he sees it differently. He and his players may be ahead in the score, but they’re only as strong as their X’s and O’s or the people inside a company: That’s what holds it together at Christensen and makes everyone hang over grimacing or yipping with joy when Ricardo Caramuta scores a touchdown. To him, culture isn’t a slogan or a poster or some mission statement. Culture is who you play next to — and who you trust when things get ugly. So he wants to know the men he’s going on the field with.
Interviewing everyone, he says, keeps him committed to preserving the company’s DNA. Football taught him that talent is irrelevant if the locker room is toxic. When you’ve won championships, you learn pretty quickly that one toxic coach can do more damage than any rival. And that’s why his interview style bears little resemblance to a standard corporate chat. He hardly ever inquires about résumés or job history. He wants to see what people think, how they relate to others, how they react when confronted with unexpected questions and whether or not they’ll be held accountable.
But there’s one thing he looks for even more — a red flag that he says appears in any industry, on any team and at any company: blame. The second a candidate begins discussing their old jobs in language that leaves the impression everyone needed firing but them, he tunes out. He’s noticed it before — in the N.F.L. locker room, in corporate boardrooms and anywhere teams fail to deliver. People who place fault on everyone else never transform. They drain energy. They create tension. They avoid responsibility. And they always hold institutions in check.”
The way people talk about their last job, he says, is the clearest indication of who they actually are. If they paint every conflict as someone else’s fault, if the way they speak about ex-colleagues makes them sound like hurdles to be jumped over, or if each story ends with them being the plucky underdog who wasn’t appreciated enough, he can predict exactly how they will act when pushed. Leaders can teach skills. They can train processes. But they can't fix character. In his world, accountability isn’t some buzzword — it’s the bare-minimum requirement for being part of his team.
He also thinks that interviewing everyone you hire sends a message internally at the company: No job is unimportant, and no one gets ignored. When the CEO will invest effort getting why a junior candidate is motivated to join, employees feel valued. They also feel seen. And when people feel seen, they usually show up with their best selves. It imparts a sense of ownership that no internal memo or rah-rah speech can duplicate.
The strategy is also something of an arms race. Candidates come away from these interviews surprised —and impressed — that someone at the top level would care enough to see them. A lot of them say it’s the first time that a CEO has ever asked them questions that weren’t about performance metrics, but rather who they were as people. This is precisely the reaction he is looking for, because he thinks you can only build a great company by first building trust.
His ethos is straightforward: teams succeed when the right people are in a room together. And whether that room is a huddle on the fifty-yard line or a conference room on the twentieth floor of an office building, the principle doesn’t change. Talent matters. Strategy matters. But character is what defines a team when things become difficult, whether a team thrives or folds when tested.
So when people ask him why he feels the need to interview every employee, he smiles. He’s what he is his entire life. He stared into the eyes of a teammate before he could believe in him on the field. He is a careful judge of future employees and looks them in the eye for a long second or two before releasing his company into their hands.
And then he hears that one unmistakable red flag — the instinct to blame, to deflect, not to take responsibility — and there’s no stopping him. In football and business, he learned a pretty simple rule: You can win with imperfections in players but you cannot win if you have people who won’t own up to their mistakes.
