The Coordinator Move
Going where the problems are instead of where the prestige is
Every January, the NFL coaching carousel spins up. Head coaches get fired. New ones get hired. And somewhere in the shuffle, you’ll see a headline that makes you do a double-take.
Former head coach takes coordinator job. Former head coach becomes position coach.
From the outside, it looks like a step backward. A demotion. Maybe even a little sad.
But watch what happens next.
Some of those former head coaches become the most valuable people on the entire staff. They’ve sat in the big chair. They’ve felt the weight of final decisions. And now they’re whispering in the ear of a first-time head coach who’s figuring it out in real time.
They’re not out front anymore. They’re not at the podium. But they’re everywhere that matters.
That’s not a step back. That’s a different kind of leadership.
Going Where the Problems Were
I lived this at Storable.
When I joined, the SVP who hired me gave me a gift I didn’t fully appreciate at the time: the freedom to go wherever the problems were.
So I did.
I operated as a scrum master. Then an engineering manager. Then I was coaching product owners. Whatever needed attention, that’s where I went.
He kept apologizing. “Sorry to ask you to punch below your weight class,” he’d say.
I wasn’t punching below anything. I was reconnecting with delivery. I was in the trenches laying down foundational improvements that teams would build on for years. I got to see the direct impact of the work in a way that’s hard to see from the altitude of a bigger title.
That work contributed to a $2B valuation.
If my ego had gotten in the way—if I’d been worried about what my title said, or what “weight class” I was supposed to be fighting in—none of that happens. I’d have been too busy protecting my position to actually be useful.
Not Everyone Can Do It
Being the person behind the person takes a specific kind of humility.
You have to let go of the identity that came with the bigger role. You have to be genuinely okay with someone else getting the credit, making the calls, standing in the spotlight.
Not everyone can do it.
Buddy Ryan was famous for this—in the wrong direction. Defensive coordinator who acted like he was running a separate team. Undermining the head coach. Running his own agenda. The opposite of what I’m talking about.
But the coaches who figure it out? The ones who show up with humility and pour everything into making the person in front of them successful? They change organizations.
The Doors That Opened
Being part of shaping an organization valued at $2B provides a different kind of validation in the industry. That matters. But it’s not the real payoff.
The real payoff is that I became a better executive because I lived in every part of the organization. I wasn’t theorizing about delivery challenges from a corner office. I was in the standup. I was coaching the product owner through a difficult stakeholder conversation. I was feeling the friction firsthand.
I gained lenses that a more traditional “upwards at all costs” approach would have never allowed.
And those lenses changed my trajectory.
I wasn’t just on a CTO track anymore. My next role was COO. Why? Because I had actually operated across the business. I understood how the pieces fit together—not from org charts and dashboards, but from doing the work.
That only happened because I was willing to “punch below my weight.”
Let Them
If you’ve been in leadership for a while, you might get this chance someday. A chance to step out of the spotlight and into something different.
It might feel like a step backward. Other people might see it that way.
Let them.
If you can let go of the title, let go of the ego, and just go where the problems are—you might find it’s the most rewarding leadership work you’ve ever done.
Stay courageous,
Josh Anderson
The Leadership Lighthouse
P.S. Bob and I dug into this on the latest Meta-Cast. He shares his own story of stepping down from a senior leadership role, and we get into what separates the leaders who navigate this well from the ones who can’t let go.
I often skim your articles when they show up in my inbox, and occasionally there are nuggets of gold in them. But I would be much more willing to read them and more deeply if they didn't sound like they were written by an AI.
If it was written by an AI, it makes it feel like you aren't bothering to really do the work yourself that you're putting out in the world. Words are cheap.
If it isn't written by an AI, it still has that clipped, "make every line pithy", cookie-cutter style that I don't love when AI does it and I don't love when humans do it.
Again, you do occasionally have great things, but I know I, for one, would prefer to hear them from you, and not from some AI prompt.