Before every season, Dallas Eakins sits down to think about what kind of “infection” he wants to spread among his players.
It’s not the image you expect from a pro hockey coach. But that’s how he puts it.
Dallas has coached in some of hockey’s highest-pressure environments. He’s the former coach of the Anaheim Ducks and Edmonton Oilers. Today, he’s GM and Head Coach of Adler Mannheim in Germany. He knows that in locker rooms it’s easy for the germs of fear, panic and “don’t screw up” to get airborne. Early in his career, that sometimes happened.
“They will never care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”
He’d come in armed with systems, standards and structures. His expectations, he thought, were crystal clear. But when the team hit a rough patch, he could feel it:
Players were complying with the plan, not owning it.
They were doing what was asked, but they weren’t bringing the honesty, grit or collaboration that was needed.
Looking back, Dallas is blunt: He was leading from systems and standards first. Care came second.
Over time, he switched the order. “They will never care how much you know,” he says now, “until they know how much you care.”
He still runs a tight ship. The standards are high. But now he starts with care, gets disciplined about consistency, and lets trust show up as a byproduct. And when that happens, something important shifts:
Accountability stops being something he does to the team and becomes something the team does with and for each other.
That’s the journey this article is about. And it’s one that’s seen over and over, from NHL locker rooms to university parking lots to a sweaty beep test in a Swedish sports hall.
.jpg)
Coaches West: Jeff Daniels & Dallas Eakins (right), American Hockey League (AHL), 2013 All-Star Skills Competition. American Hockey League (AHL), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A Consistent Pattern
In every case, the pattern is the same:
01.
Start with Care. Really know your people and their experience.
02.
Be Disciplined to Stay Consistent. Show up the same way in the highs and lows, while holding high standards.
03.
Let the Team Hold the Line. They naturally hold each other accountable because they feel the care and see it, consistently.
01. Start with Care
Really know your people and their experience.
Care is not a motivational speech at the start of the season. It’s not saying, “My door is always open,” and then being permanently unavailable.
Care is deeply unglamorous and wonderfully specific.
When Dallas talks about caring, he means:
- Know players as humans: their families, their histories, the stuff that keeps them up at night.
- Notice when someone walks in a little off. Take the time to check in.
- Understand that the same message lands differently with a 19-year-old rookie than it does with a veteran on his fourth team.
That’s not “being nice.” It’s gathering data.
Because the minute you understand someone’s reality, you can design the way you lead them.
I felt this viscerally on a very different stage: move-in day at my daughter’s university.
We arrived on campus with our car full of bins and feelings. My inner soundtrack was looping: I hope she’s going to be okay. Is her room okay? Are the people okay? Is she okay? It was chaos – traffic, honking, parents doing the slow drive of mild panic.
And then we met the red-shirt crew.
A team of student volunteers swarmed our car – waving, smiling, introducing themselves, asking my daughter about her program and residence, unloading everything into carts.
Within minutes, our car was empty and her stuff upstairs. More importantly, she was smiling. The energy in her body had changed. So had mine.
In 10 minutes, nothing fundamental about her life was different. Same dorm, same unknowns. What changed was this: a group of people had clearly thought about her experience and built around it.
That’s care as a verb.
Leaders who start with care:
- Plan for how people feel on day one, week one, month one.
- Name realities in the room (“you’re new”, “this is a lot”, “this stretch is brutal”) so people don’t have to pretend.
- Ask questions that make it about the person, not just the task.
It doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means people don’t have to waste energy hiding where they really are. And that’s what sets you up for the second move.
02. Be Disciplined to Stay Consistent
Show up the same way in the highs and lows, while holding high standards.
Care gets people to lean in. Consistency is what convinces them you mean it.
This is where Dallas’s “infection” metaphor comes in. Before walking into the room, he’ll ask himself:
“What do I want people to breathe in from me today?”
If the team has lost five straight, it is easy for a leader to walk in tight, reactive, and unintentionally spread panic. If he lets media chatter or his own inner critic become his story, the team will inhale that anxiety.
So Dallas works on his internal hygiene:
- Is this thought helping, or just scaring me?
- Is this my story, or someone else’s?
- What is actually true about how we’re playing?
The goal isn’t to be robotic. It’s to be predictable in the right ways:
Players may not know what the next drill is, but they know he’s not going to humiliate them, disappear emotionally, or swing wildly from praise to blame based on one result.
That kind of consistency is a form of care. And it unlocks something important: People start to take more risks, tell more truth, and tolerate higher standards because they’re not bracing for who’s going to walk through the door today.
I saw a similar pattern with the women’s floorball team I worked with at Pixbo in Sweden.
Every season, we ran the dreaded beep test. At first, it was all the usual things: tight shoulders, nervous jokes, the temptation to disappear. Everyone knew it mattered, but it felt like a test to survive.
So we focused on being boringly consistent in between:
- Clear expectations about effort.
- The same type of debrief after good days and bad.
- The same message: You matter on your best day and your worst day.
By year two, beep-test day felt different. Players were still nervous, but they walked in ready. No mysterious “sick days.” Less avoiding eye contact. A quiet pride in even showing up for it.
Consistency didn’t make it easy. It made it safe enough to go hard.
03. Let the Team Hold the Line
They naturally hold each other accountable because they feel the care and see it, consistently.
When care and consistency have been there long enough, something lovely happens:
Accountability stops being a solo act.
Back to that beep test. As players started to drop out, they didn’t head for the showers or go look at their phones. They started cheering for whoever was still running.
I remember one player who carried a lot of anxiety. When she finally hit her limit and stepped out, you could see the disappointment in her whole body – hands on knees, head dropped.
Within seconds, two teammates were at her side. One put a hand on her back. The other said something like:
“You were further than last time. You’ll get past it next time. We’re right here.”
That’s not, “Oh well, who cares about the test?” It’s, We care about you too much to pretend this doesn’t matter. And we care about you too much to let this moment define you.
That’s what it looks like when a group starts to hold the line together:
- They protect each other’s dignity and the standard.
- They challenge each other from a place of belief, not frustration.
- They don’t let someone quietly slide below what they’re capable of.
In Dallas’s language, they’ve “caught” the culture. Players are now the ones asking, “Is this who we are?” after a bad period. Veteran guys are the ones pulling a rookie aside to say, “We don’t do it that way here, and here’s why.”
The leader hasn’t stepped back from standards. If anything, the bar is higher. But the weight of holding it no longer sits on one pair of shoulders.
Bringing It Back to Your Team
So if you’re a coach, manager, captain or the unofficial “glue” on your team, here are three simple questions to sit with:
- Where, specifically, do people first experience your care?
If someone new walked in tomorrow, what would show them, “You matter here. You’re not just another body on the roster”? - If we followed you around for a month, what patterns would we see?
Not just on your good days, but on the tired, stressed, messy ones too. Would people say, “I may not love every decision, but I always know which version of them is going to show up”? - Where have you already seen the team hold the line together?
Think of one moment where teammates raised the standard with each other, so no leader was required. What groundwork did you already lay to make that possible?
At the end of the day, if we want people to tell the truth, hold high standards, and stay in it when it’s hard, they must feel we’re in it with them, not just watching from the bench.
Care is what signals that.
Consistency is what proves it.
And trust – the kind that leads to real, shared accountability – is what grows from there.
