The Five T's of Great Coaches - Part 4: Team Synergy

0:28This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome.

0:55The third T is for teamwork. work. Pretty much every single coach I talked to talked about team culture. How do you create this team culture that in turn plays a huge role in how well you can perform as a team, as a collective? And a lot of it has to do with the tone the coach sets, setting expectations, creating clearly defined criteria of what is acceptable and not acceptable. So if you look at Nick Saban in Alabama, you know, it's very clearly defined expectations of performance and behavior at practice, in the game, and outside. So sometimes punishing players is as much of a signal and affirmation of the culture as rewarding players.

1:44Another lever people use is the slogan for the team. Here in New England, Bill Belichick's team slogan is, do your job. Do your job mean I'm holding you responsible. If you do your job, everybody else is doing their job. But it also means stay in your lane and only do your job, not anybody else's job. And by the way, if you don't do your job, you're out. So there are many ways to interpret that. And some may say positive, some may not like it. And there's a self-selection that happens there. Contrast that with Pete Carroll. So Pete Carroll, the Seattle Seahawks coach, their team slogan is, I'm in.

2:20And that has different connotation. It connotes a team. It connotes commitment. It connotes personal connection. It is going to elicit a different kind of reaction. It's also going to attract a different kind of person. Who wants to work in a do your job? Who wants to work in an IMA? You have to ask yourself, what kind of organization do I want to lead? One of the other elements of culture is to create this kind of egalitarian mindset that we are all in this team. And no one is special. So if you look at Nick Saban, you know, he has the thing about structured accountability. Everyone has the same rules applied to them equally.

3:00No one is guaranteed playtime. No matter who you are, no matter how special you think you are, you're not guaranteed playtime. You've got to earn the right to play every game. Some of the challenges these coaches face when they have star players. Sir Alex Ferguson with, you know, David Beckham. In some cases, like Sir Alex Ferguson, he let Beckham go. He said, you know what, you may be the best player in the world, but I don't want you on my team. Or you have Phil Jackson working with Kobe saying, if you really want to be the leader of this team, which I think you do, you've got to change the way you show up.

3:35So how do these coaches recognize that star talent may at some time, at some moment, get too big for themselves? And how do you keep everybody in check and measured. That's part of the culture. If you look at some surveys of business leaders, close to 90 % say culture is critical to the success of our business. And then asked, to what degree is your culture where it should be? 16 % say it's where it should be. It's one of those things that we systematically talk about, say it's important, and then go on to neglect it. culture is also a magnet for talent. It's a self-selection that happens when you have a kind of culture.

4:17If you want to be a high-performance organization attracting high-performance talent, you need a culture that draws them to want to come there. And there's data showing that more than 80 % of talented people choose to join a company for the culture and leave companies for the culture. You know, there's now research showing that how people perform at work depends on how connected they feel to what they're doing. If my work is a job, the maximum I'm going to get out of it is being satisfied in my job. It's called job satisfaction. That leads to a certain level of productivity. If I'm engaged, engaged comes when you feel you have responsibility, autonomy.

4:58That leads to a higher level of productivity. You can go to the next level called inspired. And in an article that came out in Harvard Business Review in 2015, they showed inspired workers are more than twice as productive as satisfied workers. We have to ask ourselves, is there something we can do to put our culture to work in a way that elicits inspired work? And if you look at some of these teams, you can start by saying some players do it for themselves because if I play well, my record gets better, I'm more marketable, I can make more money. Some will say I do it for the team. I feel responsible and committed to the team.

5:37I really want to do it for the team. Another say, I do it because this is a calling to me. I do it for my coach. I do it for glory. I do it for something bigger than myself. What as a coach or a leader are you tapping into? I think some of the greatest coaches are able to go from job to engaged to inspired.

6:10Thank you.