In 9 Words, Kansas City Chiefs Tight End–and Taylor Swift Boyfriend–Travis Kelce Just Taught a Hard Truth About Leadership

Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end, perhaps best known for his romantic relationship with Taylor Swift, and usually an affable guy, underwent a seeming personality change during the 2023-2024 NFL playoffs. In a wide-ranging interview last week on the podcast Bussin’ With the Boys, he explained why. At the core of his explanation were these nine words: “I felt like it was making our team better.”

It’s an age-old conundrum. As a leader, would you rather be popular, or be effective? Like it or not, you’re likely to face this question if you start a company or otherwise take on a leadership role. Intellectually, you know the right answer. You should do what’s best for your organization and accept that being a good boss means that some of the time, people won’t like you. But it can be a big step from knowing that’s what you should do to deliberately doing things that will make you unpopular but may help your team succeed. 

That’s exactly what Kelce did during the playoffs. The podcast’s co-host Taylor Lewan, who played offensive tackle for the Tennessee Titans until he was released in 2023, asked Kelce about his apparent personality change. “In years past, I’ve never seen you really chirp that much in the field,” Lewan said. “You kind of do your thing. Happy-go-lucky guy. This year, it seemed like anybody and everybody could catch hands–verbally.”

Kelce bumps his coach.

“Even coach Reid,” added podcast co-host Will Compton, a retired linebacker who played with the Titans, the Washington Redskins, and the Las Vegas Raiders, among others. Compton was referring to an incident during the Super Bowl when a highly emotional Kelce was caught on camera screaming into the face of head coach Andy Reid. He also bumped Reid, who momentarily lose his balance. There was no audio record of the encounter, but Kelce said he was urging Reid to put him back into the game. He also later called the incident “definitely unacceptable,” and that he wished he could have taken it back the moment it happened. Even so, his behavior was widely disparaged by the public and on social media, and Kelce’s popularity took a serious hit as a result.

“That didn’t look great,” Kelce acknowledged to Compton and Lewan. But then he explained himself. “You ever…want to win so bad that you just take it up a notch? Like, your aggression has to go up a notch so that everybody around you feels like, ‘This guy wants it, this guy wants it. And if he wants it this bad, I need to match that.'” 

With the Chiefs, he explained, “it got to that point in the season where it was like, man, I just don’t think we have the right mentality to attack a team from the jump, ready to get in a bar fight.” As a leader, he felt he needed to change that mentality and help the team get into the right mindset to prevail in the playoffs–and ultimately win the Super Bowl. 

And so, to help push the team into the right frame of mind, the formerly happy-go-lucky Kelce turned himself into an aggressive hardass. “Sure enough, everybody didn’t love seeing that side of me in the playoffs,” he acknowledged. “I could just see how everybody was talking about it on social media and everything. But at the same time, I felt like it was making our team better by leading the guys and being that for the team.”

A loss to the Las Vegas Raiders, and an epiphany.

Kelce said his aha moment came on Christmas Day, when the Chiefs lost to the Raiders 20-14. “We got our asses beat,” he said. He added that Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce “had those dudes ready to brawl, right there on the field.” Kelce said he loved that approach to the game. “And I was like, man, if we play with that kind of edge, or that kind of toughness?…We won’t be stopped. And it ended up like that.”

Think about this for a minute. Kelce is 34, and likely in his last few years of playing professional football. He is already making plans for his post-NFL career. He plans to go into entertainment–he particularly wants to be an actor–and he’s fully aware that his high profile as an NFL star, not to mention as Swift’s romantic partner, have opened doors for him that would have been closed otherwise. He knows that his enormous popularity is a bankable asset, one that has already led to a starring role in the upcoming FX horror series Grotesquerie. And yet, he was willing to lose some of that popularity to help his team reach new levels of success.

There’s a growing audience of Inc.com readers who receive a daily text from me with a self-care or motivational micro-challenge or tip. Often, they text me back and we wind up in a conversation. (Want to learn more? Here’s some information about the texts and a special invitation to a two-month free trial.) Many subscribers are entrepreneurs or business leaders who know how much more important it is to be effective than it is to be likable. Like Kelce, they are willing to sacrifice popularity to help their teams reach their biggest goals–because they know that’s what the best leaders sometimes have to do. Would you be willing to do the same?