A New Football Season, the Same Leadership Question: Who Are You Under Pressure?

Football season changes the rhythm of Green Bay.

Expectations return. Every roster decision is examined. Every mistake has an audience. Every week offers a fresh test of preparation, trust and response.

The 2026 Green Bay Packers open the regular season on September 13 against the Minnesota Vikings. But the most important leadership lessons of a season are rarely confined to the scoreboard.

They appear in the moments after the plan breaks down: a missed assignment, an unexpected injury, a difficult loss or a decision that must be made before certainty arrives.

That is where football and organizational leadership meet.

Pressure does not create leadership identity. It reveals it.

Talent Earns a Place; Trust Makes a Team

A roster can be filled with talented people and still fail to operate as one team.

The same is true in business, healthcare, education, government and every other setting where outcomes depend on people working across roles.

Trust is what allows a player to execute an assignment believing the person beside them will do the same. It allows a coach to tell the truth without destroying confidence. It allows people to challenge a decision, receive corrections and return to work without carrying hidden resentment.

Dr. Fred Johnson has spent years working with NFL executives, coaches and players, including within the Green Bay Packers organization.

His work focuses on the human dynamics beneath performance: breaking default behaviors, building trust, raising expectations and creating sideways accountability.

Those ideas matter in a locker room because no game plan survives without relationships strong enough to execute it under pressure.

Sideways Accountability Changes the Standard

Traditional accountability tends to move down the hierarchy.

The coach corrects the player. The executive corrects the manager. The manager corrects the employee.

That structure matters, but it cannot carry a high-performing culture by itself.

Sideways accountability means teammates care enough about the mission and one another to speak up. They do not wait for the person with the biggest title to name every missed standard.

They address issues directly, respectfully and early.

This is not policing one another. It is refusing to let silence become permission.

On a football team, one missed responsibility affects ten other people. Inside an organization, the same pattern is easy to overlook because the consequences may unfold more slowly.

Yet unclear commitments, avoided conversations and repeated excuses eventually reach the customer, the culture and the result.

The Season Will Test Default Behaviors

Every team enters a season with a plan for who it wants to be.

Pressure introduces a competing plan: whatever people naturally do when they are tired, uncertain, criticized or afraid.

Some leaders tighten control. Some avoid conflict. Some blame. Some become silent. Others over-function and carry work that belongs to the team.

These reactions may feel instinctive, but repeated instincts become culture.

This is why leadership transformation begins from the inside out.

A leader cannot ask a team to respond differently under pressure without examining the behavior they model when the stakes rise.

The question is not only, “What does my team need to change?”

It is, “What does pressure consistently bring out in me?”

Preparation Is Behavioral

Football teams practice far more than plays. They practice communication, response and trust.

Repetition matters because knowing what to do is not the same as doing it when the moment becomes difficult.

Organizations often invest heavily in strategy while assuming leadership behavior will take care of itself. It will not.

If candid conversations, sound decisions and shared accountability only appear when conditions are comfortable, they are not yet embedded in the culture.

Leaders prepare for pressure by practicing before the crisis: putting the difficult issue on the table, clarifying who owns the decision, inviting challenge without becoming defensive and following through on the standard after the urgency passes.

What Will This Season Reveal?

Green Bay will spend the coming months watching a football team answer that question in public.

Leaders everywhere will answer it too, usually in conference rooms, customer conversations and decisions few outsiders ever see.

When the plan changes, will your people wait for rescue or respond with confidence?

When someone misses the standard, will the team speak honestly or talk around the issue?

When a difficult result arrives, will leaders search for blame or take responsibility for the next response?

A championship culture is not built by slogans, talent or a single emotional speech.

It is built through trusted relationships, repeated behaviors and people who hold themselves and one another accountable to a shared purpose.

The season is beginning. The pressure will come.

The leadership question is already on the table:

Who will you become when it does?