In 2024, during Mike Macdonald’s rookie season as head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, the team finished 10-7. Although it was a respectable start, the Seahawks did not make the playoffs, and Macdonald had not yet proven himself to be a top-tier coach.
It was interesting then that at the start of the 2025 season Macdonald didn’t try to quickly establish himself as a guy who had all the answers. Just the opposite, Macdonald acknowledged to his team that there were things he needed to do better than the previous season.
Was that really the right thing to say?
It could be argued that Macdonald should have reassured the team that his relative inexperience was not a concern and that he had already figured out all the solutions that would propel them to a much more successful season. There is a saying, “Fake it until you make it.” This approach calls for you to hide your vulnerabilities until you have fixed them and are fully prepared for the task at hand.
Let’s start with the obvious. Faking it is not a sustainable strategy. You might get away with it for a short period, but it doesn’t take too long for people to figure out that you don’t have the experience or skills to back up what you are saying. A football locker room can be a brutal place if the players start to suspect you to be a fraud. When this happens, your ability to lead is dead in the water.
The other significant issue with faking it is that it can take a huge emotional toll. Constantly keeping up with the lie of who you are pretending to be is incredibly exhausting and can harm your mental health. Living an authentic life is living a healthy life. Research shows that people who accept and express their true feelings have lower rates of sadness and anxious thoughts.
Inauthenticity is not an issue that Macdonald deals with. He is as authentic to himself as anyone you can ever meet. This can especially be illustrated by his decision to be a football coach. Described by many people as one of the smartest and most analytical people they’ve ever met, Macdonald cast aside his analytical side when he made the decidedly low-odds decision to choose a career in coaching over finance.
There are not many people who could look you in the eye and tell you that a career in coaching football has a better statistical probability of achieving success than one in finance. This list of people includes Macdonald’s father, Hugh. In an interview with the Baltimore Ravens team website, Hugh discussed how he tried to dissuade his son from the decision to pursue coaching. He said, “Coaching is a tough, tough world. I encouraged him to go into business at that point. I was really not initially for it.”
At the time of their kitchen table conversation, Macdonald had just graduated with honors from the University of Georgia business school and had a prestigious paid internship lined up with a financial consultation firm. The other offer, for far less money and security, was to coach the freshman football team at Cedar Shoals, an inner-city high school in Atlanta.
Macdonald went back and forth on the decision. He ultimately chucked aside the analytics and chose what was authentic for him, coaching football. Macdonald explained, “I ended up just being like, ‘What are you doing? This is where your heart is at. If you’re 40 years old and you didn’t give it a shot, you’re not going to be able to live with yourself.'”
At Cedar Shoals, Macdonald went beyond just coaching the freshman. He would also join the varsity sideline to help out with the defense. His ability to quickly analyze the game helped them to be the number two defense in all of Georgia, and it was the first step in a career that ultimately landed Macdonald in Seattle to coach the Seahawks.
However, it was something else that foreshadowed his time in Seattle. It was Macdonald’s “No BS” approach to being authentic and honest with his players. The Cedar Shoals varsity coach Xarvia Smith talked about how Macdonald quickly made an impression on the kids there. “That school is really, really tough to get those players to trust you.” He added, “They loved him, and he got their trust. That just showed me he could really coach.”
Flash forward to Macdonald’s sophomore coaching season in Seattle. Standing in front of the team before the start of the season, Macdonald made the vulnerable decision to come clean with his previous season’s failings. The Seahawks fan site 12th Man Rising reported on the appearance that star Seattle defensive tackle Leonard Williams had on The Richard Sherman Podcast, where he said about Macdonald, “He pretty much in front of the whole team just was like, hey man, I feel like I’ve gotta work on this, this and this. I wasn’t good enough at this last year, and I’ve gotta get better.”
The honest and authentic approach that won over the high school kids at Cedar Shoals did the same in a professional meeting room. Williams explained, “It kind of made everyone in the room kind of relax their shoulders and not be so uptight, because you’re kind of like, ‘OK, the head man is willing to critique himself and trying to get better and finding ways to get better.’”
Every coach in every sport goes to practice every day and asks his players to get better. But how many of them talk to their players about their need to also get better? If you can’t be honest with them about your own shortcomings, how can you ask them to do the same? If you can’t be vulnerable and adopt a growth mindset, how can they? If you don’t hold yourself accountable, how can you do that with them? Short answer. You can’t.
Oh, and how did that season turn out after Macdonald came clean with the list of things he needed to work on? They won the Super Bowl. It turns out that the analytical whiz kid might have known something about following his heart that the statistical data couldn’t prove.
