ENGLEWOOD, Colo. -- It's all been tried, or most of it, anyway.

To stand in front of more than four dozen highly competitive, highly accomplished Type A people -- who may or may not have personal agendas, goals, thoughts and problems swirling through their minds -- and try to deliver a message is at the heart of how a coach deals with his team.

Mike Shanahan spent 14 seasons in front of the Denver Broncos as head coach; Josh McDaniels spent less than two. Most anyone who has held the job in the franchise's 59 years of existence has fallen somewhere between the length of those two tenures, and all have tried to get their points across.

"How a coach communicates, reaches players is always important," Broncos general manager John Elway said. "Your players are going to come from a lot of different situations, they all may need a little something different, but you always need everybody in the organization pointed in the right direction, all working to the same thing. It's an important part of the job."

Or as former Broncos cornerback Champ Bailey said: "You try to do it one way, all the time, with every guy, that isn't going to work, just no way. You have to have the things you believe in and be able to know what it will take to get those values and teaching points to each guy, I really believe that."

Coaches often use a pile of statistics to make their point in-house before saying numbers don't tell the whole story in public. Some use video -- one former Broncos assistant would show animals winning survival-of-the-fittest battles with other animals -- while some put motivational sayings all over the building. And, of course, some still use an old-fashioned, high-volume delivery with a tossed chair for good measure. Or all of the above.

But day after day, week after week, what to say and how to say it is always on the docket.

"I don't overthink it, to be quite honest with you," said Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, who is the league's fifth-longest-tenured coach in his current job. "I need to be what my group needs me to be at specific moments. So sometimes they need repeat things, so it gets repetitive; sometimes there are new and different challenges that the journey presents so the message better be. Over time, the faces I'm delivering it to change and have changed, that's part of ball. So I don't over-analyze that too much."

Asked how much time he spends on what he might say in a routine team meeting, Tomlin made it clear he keeps the discussion to the task at hand.

"Very little," Tomlin said. "I've been doing it for a while so it probably requires less."

Broncos linebacker Von Miller said during training camp he got a taste of what coaches have to deal with. Miller had been making a point to younger players earlier that week only to discover the message had not been received. "Now I know how the coaches feel," Miller said.

"And I think it would be tougher when the team is losing or things aren't going well and people get frustrated. I think you need good leadership in the locker room, too, and you can stay together."

Tomlin was tested in that regard early in the season as running back Le'Veon Bell's holdout hung over much of the discussion for a team that started 1-2-1. The Steelers have won six consecutive games since and are now atop the AFC North at 7-2-1.

The Chargers, the Broncos' opponent last weekend, opened the 2017 season 0-4, but then went 9-3 the rest of the way; they opened this season 7-2 before Denver's 23-22 victory over them Sunday.

"We stayed the course and we had a plan," Chargers coach Anthony Lynn said. "We had a standard. Things didn't go our way early, but that doesn't mean you take your ball and go home. You stay the course, you hold guys accountable, they hold each other accountable ... I do believe that culture kind of carried over and that was good to see. You can't carry wins and losses over, but you can definitely carry the culture over."

Broncos coach Vance Joseph, as the team tries to dig out from its 3-6 start entering the bye week, has also used the word "culture" to describe his optimism about the way the team has played, even in many of its losses, including a three-point loss to the Los Angeles Rams, a two-point loss to the Houston Texans and a four-point loss to the Kansas City Chiefs.

"We have that culture to fight and continue to fight," Joseph said. "That's our mentality, to keep battling, correct what needs correcting and make sure everybody from coaches to players to everybody is working toward our goals."