Former CEO of NFL Players Association: DeMaurice Smith

D. You were the former executive director of the NFL players association between 2009 and 2023. I want to talk a little bit about leadership under pressure. You led the NFL players through lockouts, creation and societal upheaval. A lot happened between 2009 and 2023. What did those moments teach you about leadership, especially when the stakes are high and unity is fragile?

No, no, great question. And I mean, what it told me about leadership was you have to have a North Star. You cannot find yourself in the middle of an event like, like the lockout or, or Ray Rice or Bounty or Deflategate and, and not have a pre existing North Star because what you find being the titular head of an organization in the middle of, you know, an event like that, something that's tumultuous, something that's disruptive, I tend not to call, I tend not to be a big believer in crisis leadership because every day in my job was a crisis. So I think it's better just to think about leadership. You have to have a pre existing North Star. And so for me, the pre existing North Stars were always, we have to tell our guys the truth. I'm always going to make decisions based on fact. I'm going to do my best to remove as much as of my emotions and my feelings from it. And then the last thing is to always bring it. Bring your A game. And for me, you know, athletes, you know, being around athletes for, for a long time, being a college athlete myself, that, that mental dedication to bring it, you know, bring your best at every moment is something you just have to have before you get into a situation like that. Because what I found was, no matter all of those things that, you know, that happened over a period of years, it seems like it was only 74 years instead of 14 years. But what you find once you're in the system, if you have those North Stars already set, you realize that all of your bandwidth is taken over by managing the situation. All of it. You know, every bit of my, my mental thought, every bit of my legal thought, you know, how we were going to deal with this with the media, how do I deal with this with the players, how do I deal with, you know, the owners, how do I deal with, you know, a guy like Roger Goodell? You know, those things are all balls that are in the air that, that you're juggling. You don't have time, if you find yourself in the middle, you don't have time to develop a North Star while you're juggling 10 balls or juggling 10 chainsaws. So I think it's really important to have those. And that's really, I mean, I've had those for years. You know, I was a homicide prosecutor for a long time. And you have one of those jobs that's protecting the public. You, you obey, you know, an oath, you take an hold yourself to a higher ideal that is more than just winning. So fortunately, I brought a lot of those things into the NFL. PA and then the last thing is just making sure that everyone else abides by that North Star. Thank you.

Okay, so next one. So the business of power. How did you. Well, let me take a step back. You led players through two collective, collective bargaining agreements, if I'm not mistaken. So I want to talk about the business of power. How did you navigate the balance between player empowerment and billion dollar ownership interests? And what lessons do you think other industries can learn from that power dynamic?

That's a great question. I mean, very few people talk about the business of power. And it's something that I think most people misunderstand. They think power is how strongly you go in and negotiate something or how forcefully you say something, or you know, God forbid, how many, how many likes you have on Instagram, on social media. The business of power is understanding your leverage and also understanding the leverage from the other side. And that, that is a honed skill. And part of that comes from being ruthless about the power you have and frankly, the power you don't have. And on our side, you know, the, the power dynamic on our side is we have extremely young players, they only play for three years, and as a result, there is an unwillingness among most players to engage in using the power that they have, which for any labor union, it's the power to withhold your services. That's the major power that a labor union or workers have. It's to deprive management of your skills and of your services. And we call that a strike. You know, the major power on the other side for the owners is just locking the doors and locking you out. So, you know, those are the two things that exist, you know, at least theoretical in the ether. The real business of power is understanding to what extent is their leverage going to be used for the lockout and to what extent is our leverage ever going to be used for a strike. And that starts with being, again, ruthless about the strengths and weaknesses on your side and then turning to the strengths and weaknesses of your opponent. So managing that power means understanding, you know as well as you can from an empathetic standpoint, understanding the Other side. I'm pretty ruthless about knowing what I know, knowing what my strengths are, knowing what our weaknesses are. And some people don't like, some people really don't like a person to be brutally honest about those weaknesses. You know, I'm also a student of history, so I studied the, you know, the strikes from, from the 90s and the 80s for the NFL players, looked at the lockout from, from hockey in 2007 and you get a pretty brutal but honest understanding of the weakness and the vulnerabilities on the player side. And I always thought that the worst mistake I could make was to misperceive what power I thought I had or we thought I had on our side and go into a war or to a conflict, grossly overestimating your power, that's disastrous. And I think that, you know, looking at what happened to Hockey in 2007, looked at what happened to the players in their previous strikes, you know, the owners broke them. And again, I don't know whether there was a misunderstanding of the strength or whether it was a lack of will from the players. It frankly doesn't matter. You have to understand and game out what you think the power dynamic and how it's going to play out on both sides. On the owners, it's exactly the same. They do a much better job of remaining a monolithic block. They have their own issues and it's important for somebody on the other side to figure out what those issues are and to certainly figure out the tensions between the owners. But at the end of the day, the final thing that is the most important is understanding who has the power to get the deal done. And again, that is not intuitive. And more often than not, the people who have the power to get it done aren't the people who you think have the power to get it done. And, and that again is a, is a very dangerous situation. For example, you can find yourself negotiating with someone who doesn't have the power to deliver on their side. So again, one of these days I think I'm going to teach a class on the business of power. Primarily because it is one of the least understood dynamics in business.

Yeah, I can. This is just a side topic, you know, I'm in software sales, you know, and we have to negotiate to get a deal done. And you need to figure out who, who has the influence, who is the decision maker, because a lot of times the decision maker isn't the hands on keyboard person doing the work. So I think that really resonated with me.

It almost never is. And What I try to, you know, teach our players. The best analogy I know of is when you go in to buy a car, right? And you sit down with the car salesman, and you're there. I mean, you're literally there for a day negotiating over this car. And what always happens at the end always happens at the end. Well, I have to go check with my manager. And then you realize that you have expended all of your capital with someone who doesn't have deal authority, and they set it up that way, and that's to put you at a disadvantage. So, you know, if you think about that car selling analogy and take it to, you know, the last deal that we did is in 2020, is going to be a $150 billion deal. I mean, 150 billion. And at the end of the day, you really have to appreciate all the intricacies of what's going on, you know, just. Just to get in the room. But then once you're in the room, that. That other dynamic of power that you're constantly dealing with is, you know, we might have 50 issues on our side that we care about. Everybody sort of simply says, well, you know, you can just ra to 50. It's not that easy because you're constantly trying to figure out is, okay, one might be more important than 20, but 20 might be really important to the other side. So you're constantly trying to engage in this sort of jumbled matrix of trying to leverage everything that you think is important, everything that they think is important, and then trying to leverage it into a thing at the end that looks like a deal that you can live with. And what you learn quickly is, no deal is perfect. No deal is a deal where you get everything that you want. And the most important thing that I realized after the first deal was, regardless of where everybody is, all the way up until the signing of the deal, both sides, within days, have deal regret. Deal regret. Everybody does. I mean, I do. Everybody does. And that plays out in a power dynamic in one of two ways. You know, look, I can always beat yourself up. It's like a. It's like a lacrosse game. You come out of it and you think, man, there's just five or six things that I think we would have done differently, man, had we done a couple of those things in the first quarter, we wouldn't have been struggling in the fourth quarter. I mean, you always have those things, and those are things that I think that you can grow from, because those are purely analytical data points where you just try to make yourself Better. The other deal regret that I think is destructive is the deal regret that happens where you just shrug your shoulders and you say, well, I just wish we hadn't done the deal. Because what that does is that's not analytical, and that's not designed to make you better. That's just you giving into your feelings and your emotion. And what happens after that is you start to blame people because you. You just thought that you could do better. No, I mean, you know, every athlete can feel a certain way after the game. You can feel great if you win. You can feel terrible if you lose. I've been in track meets where I felt terrible after I won. That's different than film study the next day, and those are the two differences. Film study the next day is sort of that ruthless analytical deconstruction of everything that's happened in order for you to get better the next time. That feeling after the game, after you lost and feelings are raw and you look for people to blame, and you wish your goalie would have made a couple of stops, you wish somebody would have done a better pass. None of that. That is constructive. None of it. And that's the difference. Right? And it took me a while to understand that both. Both aspects of deal regret are 100% ingrained in every deal. But you take the analytical part of deal regret, and you use it, and frankly, the. The, aw, shucks, I'm upset. I got my feelings hurt. Part of deal regret, you take that, you put it in a bag, you put the bag in a box, you put the box in a boat, you row the boat to the deepest part of the lake, and you drop the box in the deepest part of the lake, and you never think about it again. And that is, I think, something that, thankfully, I learned to get a little bit better at as a leader heading into the last deal.

It's truly an honor to interview you because you will go down in history as somebody who reshaped the role of athlete advocacy in American sports. You already are. Have done that, but you'll be in the history books, truly. I want to talk about beyond the field. You helped redefine the role of athletes as activists and leaders. How do you see the future of athlete advocacy or, excuse me, influence evolving in politics, culture, and business?

Yeah, you know, great question. You know, Wayne, thank you for the kind words. You know, when you're in it, you're. You're just kind of in it. You know what I mean? I do have a book coming out in August which has been mostly ptsd between you and me. But I think it'll be fun. And I talk a little bit about that. I think it could go one of two ways. I think what has been a very positive movement of athlete activism and empowerment has literally been an extension of the women's rights movement, the civil rights movement, the student movements of the 60s and the 70s. And it's this idea that if you really boil it down to its essentials, it's this idea that we have a voice. We have a voice that needs to be heard. And if we're disciplined about that, we can use that voice to effectuate change. And I think that that will continue. At least I hope that it does. I think that there are, however, a couple of headwinds that, that jeopardize that. And I think that if we make the mistake of identifying ev. All of the good and bad things, frankly, if we make the mistake of identifying everything that's happening with NIL as being synonymous with athlete activism, I think we could find ourselves in a very tough spot down the road. And simply because I am a. I just, I just reduced NIL to its, its most common factors. And that's simply that if you're going to use someone's name, image and likeness, you can't use that for. You can't use that for free. That's just, that's just capitalism, right? And, and so that's no different than a painter selling his work or an actor selling his film or a dancer putting on a performance. And I think it's important that instead of looking at NIL as something new and something emerging on, on the sports landscape, I think that's a mistake. This landscape just for so long refused to pay people for their. For what they own, right? And so what I worry, though, is that people will then nonetheless equate NIL with player activism. And I think that's a worry because, you know, you and I have jobs, and some of those jobs do put you in leadership positions or put you in, I should say, high profile positions, right? We're just going to work. We're just going to work. So I don't think that, you know, if there's a gymnast who's got a great nil deal or an athlete who's got a great nil deal, or a baseball player who's got a great nil deal in college, I don't think that means that we've anointed that person a leader or an activist. Do you see what I mean? Because what I worry is that person is just going to Work. Right. And we shouldn't hold them to any greater obligations than I would hold you for going to your job from 9 to 5 or me going to my job from 9 to 5. What that also means, though, is that when we are looking for athletes to be leaders or athletes to be activists, it doesn't matter how much money you're making, it doesn't matter how many likes you have, it doesn't matter, you know, what's your profile on LinkedIn or on some other social media platform. It shouldn't matter how many commercials that you had. I mean, I look at the activists that, you know, frankly, I think did a great job, but also paid a huge price, you know. You know, Kaepernick did the right thing without any sort of regards of how much money am I going to make from this. Kurt Flood did the right thing, you know, being a, being a leader fighting for free agency for his fellow players, just like Kirk Flood, and I'm sorry, just like John Mackey and Oscar Robertson. So what I hope doesn't happen, I hope that people don't equate the two things and then come up with a false narrative that because I don't have a huge nil deal or I don't have a huge following, I can't be a leader. No, no. And, and on the same side, I don't think that it's fair to say that, okay, you've got an athlete in college, you know, making a million dollars on his nil deal. Now I've got to expect him to be a leader on X, Y and Z, or everything that he does is some referendum on, on his political choice or, or whatever. You know, I mean, for example, I mean, I read recently that, you know, some eagles went to the White House, some eagles didn't. You know, Saquon was, was playing golf with the president. And this has all this sort of things that go along with it. Hey, man, if he wants to play golf, knock yourself out. Right? Knock yourself out. Now if there comes a day when you have to stand up for your union, I still need you to do that. And I don't care who you played golf with. Right. And I don't care, frankly, what your political affiliation is. When we're looking for union leaders, I'm not looking for Republicans or looking for Democrats. I'm looking for guys who are willing to fight on behalf of players that they're in the locker rooms with today and players who are going to be in the locker rooms 25 years from now. And so that's you know, I hope that part of it continues, and I. And I hope that this focus on the, the, the, the renumeration doesn't become the, the bellwether of whether you're a leader.