Archives for September 2017

If you’ve read this blog or chatted with me about my take on program building, you know that I am a big believer in principle based athletic programs.  I think having core values/principles as the foundation of your program is essential to building a championship culture.  While many groups/organizations/teams have adopted core principles and put them on t-shirts, posters and the like, many of you may play off these values as just a gimmick or trendy activity to do with your athletes.

The truth is that if you only identify your core principles but do nothing to reinforce, encourage, reward or promote, you don’t have core principles, you just have poster principles.  The sad thing about that is that when we neglect to infuse core principles into the fabric of our program habits and routines to the point we identify with them collectively, we not only miss out on the benefits of instilling a championship culture, but we also cast doubt on future efforts to do this valuable work.

How, might you ask, is the practice of adopting and promoting a set of core principles anything more than a self-fulfilling prophecy?  The truth is that we know that having core principles and being mindful of them helps immunize us from stress in a way that is scientifically proven.

Social psychologists have created a test called the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) to create stressful situations for subjects and then measure their responses.  In short, subjects are asked to give an impromptu 5-minute speech in front of a panel of judges who are told to simply look at you sternly and offer no positive feedback. This is followed by a mental arithmetic task, while still in front of those judges, subjects are asked to count backwards from 2,083 by 13 with the judges instructing to go faster.

In almost all subjects, when subjected to that experience, their cortisol levels spike. But, if they first reflect on a core principle that is very important to them and write a brief description of why it is important to them, they can go through the TSST without the typical spikes in cortisol levels.

If having a set of core principles that are central to the identity of your program will help your athletes better endure the pressure of competition as well as the obstacles that lie ahead, then the question arises, what ways can you help your team reflect daily on those principles?

Our Athletic Department and Positive Coaching Alliance’s core principles of the E-tank Principle, the ELM Tree of Mastery and Honoring the Game are things I’m hopefully able to share and reinforce with my coaches and programs.  And, when things get difficult in this job, reflecting on WHY I do what I do helps create a perspective that allows me to better execute my mission.

My friend Randy Jackson has been way out in front on this and has been the coach of the year in Texas as well as the Metroplex coach of the year in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.  Randy’s process is manyfold but I think the foundation of what he does is to start every single day with 15-20 minutes of what he calls “Leadership Training.”  Each and every day, they will find some story, news highlight, video, etc., that reinforces the lessons they want to instill in their players.  

To do this, he assigns his coaches topics for each week of the season.  The coaches are responsible for putting a lesson together for each day of the week that they then put into a “Champions Notebook.”  That notebook then serves as the curriculum for their program.  When teachable moments turn up, such as the “locker room talk” comment during last year’s Presidential campaign, they took the opportunity to discuss how that was contrary to the standards of their program.

Other things I have done include putting the values on t-shirts, pennants, posters and other promotional material.  We had a poster made and put in almost every classroom in the school and told teachers that if our players weren’t living our core values, please let their coaches know.  We made our players memorize and recite our core values in order to get decals on their helmets, etc.

There are lots of ways to promote the culture within your program.  What may work in East Texas may not in Southeast Portland, however, we can all seek continually to find ways to fascinate our kids and to promote our collective values within our programs and community.

 

I came across a quick video with Daniel Slatton, former Professional, World Cup and Olympic soccer player, where she talks about having team standards versus rules.  As Duke and Olympic Basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski said,  “Standards are not rules issued by the boss; they are a collective identity. Remember, standards are the things that you do all the time and the things for which you hold one another accountable.”

There are definite “rules” we have to enforce that are given to us by the school district, state governing body, etc.  We have to enforce those but, once kids have cleared that bar, the difference between maintaining standards and enforcing team rules can be striking.  Maintaining high standards rather than enforcing rules allows us to focus on the behaviors that we want rather than pointing out those we don’t want.  I think this is very helpful in situations where an athlete may not have the same frame of reference as you and I (especially with kids unfamiliar with the unwritten rules of the middle class, see Ruby K. Payne’s A Framework for Understanding Poverty for more info).

An example that I used in my programs going back to a particularly difficult group of wrestlers I had was that, “The behavior we expect in our program is the same that we expect in the classroom.  If you wouldn’t do/say that in my classroom, I don’t want to see/hear it in the wrestling room.”  After instituting this “standard,” I instantly saw a drop in the number of behavior incidents that I had to deal with and when I did have to correct behavior, the kids better understood why I was upset with them.

In our athletic department, we want every team to have a set of principles in place that serve as the foundation for our programs.  Standards should be the principles of your program in action.  If culture is belief, behavior and experience, then your principles are the stated beliefs of your program and the standards are the behaviors you want to see in your program and from your athletes.

Two great resources on how to use standards to further develop your program is Jeff Janssen’s book How to Build and Sustain a Championship Culture and Brian Cain’s MVP Process.  In Janssen’s book, he dedicates Chapter 7 in the book to the topic of developing standards of behaviors.  Here is a quick excerpt from his book that can be found on his blog:

Emanating from your Core Values are your program’s Standards of Behavior. These Standards revolve around the specific actions expected of each team member in a variety of contexts. The Standards of Behavior, in essence, are the daily choices and actions that either maximize (support) or minimize (undermine) the chances of your Vision becoming a reality – and your Values being practiced and upheld.

To have a Championship Culture, your Standards of Behavior must be set at a very high level. Rather than complaining about these high Standards or looking to subvert them, your coaches, captains, and team members should fully embrace them because they are necessary for high-level success. The high Standards are seen as an edge and as important differentiators in outworking, out-training, and out-competing your opponents.

Duke men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski says it best when he talks about the importance of establishing and embracing standards in a program. “A major part of becoming a team is the establishment and collective acceptance of your standards, based on your team’s makeup and centered on your unique goal. Once a group of individuals formulates and agrees to their standards, they become united, single-minded in purpose.”

Brian Cain’s MVP process concludes with coaches/athletes identifying what living one’s core principles looks like in 3-4 key areas of life.  I have used Cain’s MVP process in my own program and highly recommend going through all of his 12 Pillars of Peak Performance.  Here is an example of what we used while I was the head football coach at Redmond High School.

Hope this helps.  As always, be sure to post to our Facebook page or tweet at me @nathanstanley on Twitter.