The movie Remember the Titans provides an excellent study of leadership principles and challenges in the imperfect, fluctuating environment typical in real-life leadership scenarios. The movie goes a step beyond the usual case studies in that it not only details the progressive adaptive responses and solutions to the challenges, it also exposes the usually unchronicled interplay of personalities and emotional issues that trigger them. This added dimension renders the movie not only more realistic than the standard textbook cases but also more instructive.
The film is set in 1971 Virginia amid racial tensions generated by the integration of a black high school with a white one. The Caucasian head coach Bill Yoast is replaced by African-American coach Herman Boone, who was originally hired as YoastÆs assistant and is unexpectedly put in the head coach position in a major role reversal. Boone is now expected to deliver a perfect winning seasonù13 games with no losses. Boone pays Yoast a visit and invites him to become the assistant head coach; Yoast, clearly opposed to the idea, responds ôWork under you?ö Boone replies, ôIf thatÆs the way you see itö (Bruckheimer & Yakin, 2000). Boone is subtly pointing out that YoastÆs perspective is simply the way he is framing the situation and is not the only way of looking at it. The role reversal provides immediate adaptive challenges for Boone, who had not expected to be head coach, as well as for Yoast, who allows himself to be demoted to assistant head coach.
Resistance in the form of racial tension between black and white students, the hostility of white parents and YoastÆs fans against Boone, and the conflict between players who want to be segregated and those who want to integrate adds an undercurrent of pressure to the adaptive challenges already faced by the characters. Boone largely either ignores the resistance or does an about-face and tackles it head on, as when h...