By Chris Taylor
NEW YORK (Reuters) – In the world of professional sports, it is still considered newsworthy when a woman occupies the corner suite as the boss. But for Amy Trask, it is old hat.
The former CEO of the National Football League’s Raiders team is now not only a football analyst for CBS Sports, but chair of Big3, a three-on-three basketball league populated by former National Basketball Association stars.
Trask sat down with Reuters to talk about how far women in the boardrooms of professional sports have come – and how far they still have to go.
Q: You smashed a lot of glass ceilings in the sports world, so what has that path been like for you?
A: I never spent a moment of my career thinking about my gender. I’m cognizant of the fact that I worked for an owner, Al Davis, who hired people without regard to race or gender or ethnicity. Others don’t always have that great fortune. But Al Davis wasn’t concerned with that, and that sent a powerful message.
Q: Professional sports leagues have been trying to make progress in this area – is it enough?
A: I started my career with the Raiders in the 1980s, and the first time I attended an owners’ meeting, I was the only woman in the room.
Within a few years, I saw more women joining the executive ranks, such as with the Chargers and the 49ers. So I saw tremendous growth over the course of my career.
Is it enough? No. But what will really excite me about women being hired, is when it stops becoming newsworthy.
Q: Your book is called “You Negotiate Like a Girl.” What negotiation advice would you have for up-and-coming executives?
A: The best I ever received in my life was from my mom, who told me from when I was a little girl, “To thine own self be true.” I used to roll my eyes, but it was great advice.
My own view of negotiations is that it doesn’t have to be treated like a game or a battle. Instead of sitting across the table from each other, sit side-by-side and figure out a way to make it work.
Agree to yield on issues that aren’t as important to you, and they can do the same, and then you can focus on the issues that really matter to both of you.
Q: The Raiders are known as a hard-charging culture, so what management lessons did you take away from that?
A: The biggest misconception about Al Davis is that you couldn’t disagree with him. If that was the case, I would’ve been fired two weeks into the job. I remember once he walked into a room where I was sitting with a colleague, and lit into this man. I told him, “You’re wrong.”
I’ll never forget the look on his face. He yelled, and I yelled, and it got so loud that everyone in the building gathered outside. Afterwards, he said “OK, I got it.”
And then we worked together for 30 years.
Q: You’re now chair of the Big3 basketball league. What is that venture like?
A: It’s been a wild new experience, having come from the NFL, which is a staid, solid, established business. In football if you wanted to make a little rule change, it had to go to the league office, and competition committees, and then maybe you might eventually get before ownership for a vote.
When I joined Big3 with Ice Cube and Jeff Kwatinetz, I remember we didn’t like a rule, so after a game we sat down and changed it within 10 minutes. It’s basically like working for a startup.
Q: This COVID era has been hard on women in the workforce in particular, so what advice would you have for female executives?
A: This is an unprecedented time, and what I would suggest is that everybody – both employers and employees – take as flexible an approach to this as we can. We’re all learning new things as we work our way through this. Things we have always done one way may have changed by now – and that’s OK.
(Reporting by Chris Taylor in New York; Editing by Lauren Young and Matthew Lewis)
