Relentlessly Positive, Personal and Specific

Before the game I approached the other coach. Usually we share a few friendly words with the visiting coaches, but I wanted him to understand what he was up against.

So after we exchanged handshakes and said hello, I pulled him aside out of earshot of our teams and said, “Look, I just want you to know we’ve lost every single game this season. We’ve been getting crushed actually. I don’t think the boys are frustrated, and we certainly focus on teamwork, hard work and fair play, but honestly we’ve been getting killed. By everyone. I just thought you should know. So maybe if it looks you’re having a runaway win, please keep that in mind.”

He looked at me and said, “We have too! We’ve lost every game!” Perfect. And so with that understanding between us coaches we opened up another U11 boys soccer game on a beautiful Saturday.

And sure enough, the game was fair and competitive. From the opening whistle both teams had their share of small frustrations and grand triumphs. There was more generous passing, more vocal encouragement between the players, and less complaining about positions. In fact, several players were asking – nearly begging – to play defense. It was a glorious moment of camaraderie.

Early in the second half, we found ourselves in the strange, and foreign, position of leading by one goal. Coach Scott and I agreed we were quietly cheering for the other team to score. And wonderfully, they did score to tie it up. In the end, we astonished ourselves and won the game. Afterwards, the moment of both teams slapping hands and congratulating each other felt honest and earnest. I heard very few complaints about either the referee or opposing players.

I’ve participated in a number of coaching clinics, and read quite a bit of material on youth coaching, and developing talent. Curiously, there remains a fairly large minority of parent volunteer coaches nationally who have the perception that learning constructive coaching techniques from experts, and attending coaching certification and counseling is unnecessary and without value.

And yet, these same studies reflect that once coaches adopt “relentlessly positive” approaches to both skill development on the field and social development with their teammates, some pretty remarkable things happen. To begin with, while up to 26% of kids nationally quit sports, only 5% of kids quit the game when they have a coach trained in Coaching Effectiveness Training (CET). Not only that, those children who started the season with lower self-esteem and played for a “relentlessly positive” coach showed a greater increase in self-esteem over the season.

I had an interview last week in New York with child psychologist Joel Haber who affirmed these methods and reminded that positive coaching still needs to be personal and specific, not just positive. Saying “great job!” isn’t nearly as effective as say something specific such as, “I like the way you always stayed in front of the attacker when defending. You stayed in front of him and pushed the ball to the outside. He never had a chance to get by you. That worked great.”

Joel also reminded me of the downside of negative coaching. When a child leaves the field during a game and you point out something they did wrong, it leaves a powerful emotional wake. It not only conveys the message that you were disappointed, it won’t increase their learning and performance later either. When they go back on the field, their head will be filled with what not to do, instead of what to do. It has a paralyzing effect.

When we leap

leaping

Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records.
– William Arthur Ward

It’s an astonishing thing to observe people who encounter obstacle after hurtle after challenge, and yet seem to only gain strength and confidence and power after each, seemingly insurmountable, roadblock is set before them. There’s a great scene in the animated movie KungFu Panda II in which the bad guy – an evil peacock – laments, “How many times do I have to kill the same panda?!” because the Panda, of course keeps getting stronger throughout the movie, until the end in which he’s catching blazing cannonballs and throwing them back. All because he’s found inner peace.

Terry Fox was like that. He developed cancer in 1980, and while still in the hospital, decided to run across Canada to raise money and awareness for cancer research. We lost Terry to cancer but only after he had run a couple thousand miles across Canada…on a prosthetic leg. His mother Betty Fox kept Terry’s legacy and spirit alive for the last thirty years.

In the book Born to Run, we learn Scott Jurek had such an alchemy moment at the 2005 Badwater Ultramarathon. It’s a 135 mile ultramarathon. Run in Death Valley at temperatures typically approaching the mid-120s. After Scott collapsed after (only!) 55 miles in a ditch in 125 degree heat in a catatonic stupor, he laid in a bucket of ice and searched his mind for ten minutes. Then stood to run the next 80 miles in record time to win the race.

I’ve watched my mom, Bev Hunter, conjure resilience and calm in the storm of cancer. Harnessing the cumulative strengths of her community, her faith, her research-driven analytical mind, family, and joie de vivre, she has transmuted obstacle into power, challenge into growth, fatigue into enlightenment. Erik Weihenmayer uses that term Alchemist to describe just such people who turn adversity into strength, a challenge into innovation, a smack-down into power.

I certainly agree we have the ability to surprise ourselves. If you watch kids, they do it all the time while testing the boundaries of their own possibilities. And then they move on to the next challenge. We often reflect that what seemed daunting and impossible at the time, seems small, easy and controllable in retrospect.

But the key is to take the leap, sign up for that daunting project, or impossible race, or mythic challenge you might think is beyond you. Build those capacities, strengths and creative resources now, because you never know when the world is going to sign you up for something beyond your control.

Conjure hope. Change the world

“A good leader inspires others with confidence in him; a great leader inspires them with confidence in themselves. ”

RobertDesnosNick Morgan told me this story.  In 1944 Robert Desnos, born 1900 in Paris, had become a poet and member of the French Resistance and subsequently arrested by the Gestapo.  While interred in Auschwitz he and his companions and friends watched over the weeks as their fellow inmates were gathered in groups on trains to be taken away.  The Gestapo said nothing of their fates but everyone knew, as no one returned, that they were being sent to die.  One day the guards came to gather Robert and a few hundred others into the trains.

Everyone knew with sullen despondency what was to happen and the train was silent with loss, and fear.  In a flash of impulse Robert reached to the man next to him and grabbed his hand.  “I will read your fortune!” he said.  And told the man he would live a long life, with marriage and children.  He grabbed the next man’s hand and read a fortune of wealth and entrepreneurship and joy, and again and again he grabbed each man’s hand and conjured a fortune full of life and joy and expectation.  In each case throughout the train he offered a reading of hope and long life and joy.

The Gestapo became disoriented and unsure of their charge to execute the men and stopped the train.  The guards became tentative and unsure of how to proceed in the face of this jubilation and turned the train around.  No one died that day.  As Susan Griffin writes, “Through the power of imagination, he saved his own life and the lives of others.”

A beautiful story indeed, and imagine how this vision of joy might translate to your work, to your life.  As John Hope Bryant says: there are only two things in the world, love and fear.  At the point of greatest despair, if you can conjure hope, it will resonate around you and change the world.

The bicycle of relationships

best-cycling-poster-817-1My wife and I often like to go running, sometimes together, sometimes not. Recently we were home on a lazy Sunday with our seven year old daughter and it was getting late in the day. We were losing daylight for us to trade runs, one after the other. So I suggested our daughter, Annie, go with us on her bicycle. And so she did.

We were a little skeptical at first that she would be able to ride the five or six miles we wanted to run. But there she was, the entire journey, happily pedaling in front, in flip flops, singing and encouraging us to keep up. With us sweating and running behind, she clearly had no problem leading the way. On a bike, our little daughter was considerably faster.

Steve Jobs has a wonderful presentation he gave years ago in which he invokes a study showing how humans on bicycles are more efficient travelers than even the highest in the animal kingdom, the condor. He references a Scientific American study which found humans to be fairly average in terms of locomotion efficiency, but off the charts when on a bicycle. Jobs called the computer the “bicycle for the mind.”

I think the same is true when we add communication and trust to relationships. I had an interview with Howard Behar, former President of Starbucks who said, “At the end of the day it’s probably the only thing that matters in any organization. Whether it’s your family or your work, trust is the engine of a great life.”

Trust can be the bicycle to drive great relationships.

In an interview with Paul Stebbins, CEO of World Fuel Services, he talked about a powerful early life experience involving trust. Stebbins had worked for a gas station in Texas for almost three years, starting at the age of 13. The gas station owner was a local man, known to everyone in town. On Paul’s 16th birthday, the owner threw him the keys to the shop, asked him to close up as usual at 9:00 p.m., got in his car, and drove home. Paul recalls being deeply humbled and appreciative of this act of complete trust:

If I do anything, as long as I live, it will be to have that same trust for somebody in my life as well. It certainly changed my view of the world, and I’ll never forget it. I was, you know, ten feet off the ground and so proud that somebody would actually trust me with that. But I felt a real sense of responsibility, and that’s ultimately the core of it, is the risk to give somebody the freedom to be responsible is a remarkable thing.

Getting Lost and Bending the Map

It’s summertime, and a nice time to immerse in a good book. It turns out that any book outside of our realm of work, particularly fiction, is valuable to our mental flexibility and creativity.

This past weekend I read Laurence Gonzales’ Deep Survival: Who Live, Who Dies, and Why. The book is studying the traits and behaviors of those who manage to survive calamities – plane crashes, lost-at-sea epics, mountain climbing disasters … – yet there is a strong metaphor for the types of behaviors among organizational leaders which allow them to rise up, with resilience, and survive economic and market storms, or maybe just company politics.

Maybe something goes wrong in a product roll-out. Like the introduction of Febreze, in which P&G banked on a market bonanza based on their unique and proprietary product, which they were certain would be a success. Then Febreze bombed. The folks at P&G created a new playbook which resurrected Febreze and made it the $1 billion dollar brand it is today. Their marketing and development group brought Febreze back from the brink of product extinction. But it doesn’t always go that way.

Gonzales identifies five stages survivors typically go through before turning the corner and building an action plan that allows survival:

  1. Denial – the first instinct people have is to deny the position they are in and stick with the mental maps they have built in the planning and early execution phases.  We each have a mental map we are following and if things don’t go to plan, we ‘bend the map.’  That is: re-create was is actually happening to fit into the mental construct we created originally. We deny the realities emerging around us, and instead reframe what is happening to match the original plan.
  2. Panic – Truth starts to set in, but there is no plan B. This is the stage in which people typically succumb to the rising sense of panic within and exhaust energy and resources.  People lost will often sprint to false peaks, dash in directions that fit the map they have ‘bent’ in their head.  The beginning of the end can start here if disastrously they break a leg, lose food, abondon gear, etc…Those in the late stages of critical hypothermia will often take off their clothes, falsely believing they are too hot.
  3. Adherence to an invented plan – what happens next is people create self-imposed rules.  Conditions changed, they feel isolated and try to create predictable rules to follow. The problem is, often these self-imposed rules are created in a vacuum. You are already on the precipice of disaster and the rules created have less to do with actual environmental circumstances, and more to do with creating a false sense of control. He cites the example of a firefighter lost in the Tetons who won’t make a fire to generate warmth and dry his clothes because open fires are banned in the National Park.  Or the example of 11 survivors of a plane crash who believe, falsely, that help will find them if they stay put.  A seventeen year old girl separated during the crash knows no such group-think and follows her instincts to civilization.  At this point, there clearly is no ‘plan’ and it’s the inventive and creative who figure novel ways to adapt and survive.
  4. Deterioration – by this point those lost are desperate and have squandered valuable resources and can lose the ability and willingness to make gainful efforts to survive, find help, and build strength.
  5. Resignation – finally once options are depleted the lost can lose resolve and will.  Those that survive at this point are often carried forth by the draw of someone waiting: a loved one, or an unrealized dream. If you have read Unbroken by Laura Hillebrand, Louie survives the Japanese prison camps, in part, for his deep love and longing to be reunited with family and friends back home.

Fantastically, often when people are lost in the wilderness very few will retrace known steps back to the car or point of departure even when the path they took is clearly understood.  Even when we know the five mile path back where we came from will lead to the car, we think, “just up ahead, around the next bend or over that river, there must be a shortcut back to the car.”

Interestingly, those who possess great survival instincts typically early on in the dilemma show very sharp mental acuity – Steve Callahan‘s boat sank abruptly in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, at night, with no warning, and yet in the first minutes he quickly gathered survival gear, deployed his lifeboat, and took a second to marvel at the clarity of the stars and the weather.  Steve even found humor to offset the deluge of panic rising. All in less than a couple minutes. Awoken from a dead sleep. In the dark.

Possibly above all other attributes including ingenuity, clarity, focus, etc… Gonzales points to Resolve as the defining characteristic of survivors.

The following quote from the book is taken from Joe Simpson’s account of descending Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes with his partner Simon Yates. Simpson suffers a broken leg and slides over a cliff into a crevasse. Believing his partner to be beyond reach and dead, Yates abandons his partner.

“Still hanging on his rope, Simpson began to experience a sense of wonder and even joy at his environment, that same spiritual and mystical transformation reported by many other survivors. It is always followed by a certainty of survival and a renewed commitment. With dawn came light, and with light came revelation: ‘A pillar of gold light beamed diagonally from a small hole in the roof, spraying bright reflections off the far wall of the crevasse. I was mesmerized by this beam of sunlight burning through the vaulted ceiling from the real world outside… I was going to reach that sunbeam. I knew it then with absolute certainty.”

Between Not Doing and Doing is an act of bravery

superhero“Annie, Fynn sees through your eyes.”

“What?” says my seven year old daughter Annie.

“When you are leading a horse, you need to actually lead. Fynn sees through your eyes. So, when you call him to follow, you need to look where you’re going and lead him down the path, at your speed, not his. When you turn and look at Fynn, all Fynn sees is himself. He needs to see where you want to go.”

Little Annie learned to lead a horse by confidently looking forward where she wanted to go and asking Fynn to follow. And so a thousand pound horse named Fynn followed my daughter down a path through the woods.

At the intersection of what you have never done, and what comes naturally, is an act of bravery. This is the cusp, the edge, the apex of valor and daring. To cross the divide from Not Doing to Doing, takes courage. This is the essence of bravery. Here it is in action:

The Dividends of Giving

helping-handsIn the wake of hurricane Katrina, numerous people throughout the gulf coast area had lost homes, and were in need of basic food, shelter and care. With sporadic electricity available in the region, cash became critical to sustaining people’s lives.

Serving customers from Texas to Florida, Hancock Bank was one of the primary banking providers in the region. But without power at their banks or ATM facilities there was no way their customers could get access to funds to buy basic needs like clothing, food and shelter. Even if some of their branch locations were able to open, often either the customer had lost their identification in the storm or the bank itself and had power and access to people’s account information.

A few of the managers at Hancock Bank did something remarkable. Reminded of the original charter of the bank to serve communities first, profits second, they established makeshift human-powered ATMs. They decided to provide $200 cash to anyone who asked for it. That’s right. Without either proof of identification or verification of account information, Hancock Bank gave up to $200 to anyone who asked for it in exchange for a written IOU.

During those critical weeks following Katrina, Hancock Bank employees literally laundered money from destroyed ATM machines and gave out millions in increments of several hundred dollars each. Of the millions they gave out, asking only written promissory notes in return, less than $300,000 (1%) was not returned. And in the months that followed the disaster, their cash deposits from existing and new customers ballooned 40% as customers repaid the loan and new customers joined. Andrew Zolli tells the story here.

Shortly after that Hancock Bank Chairman George Schloegel was elected Mayor of Gulfport, MS with over 90% of the vote.

Beat Your Own Awesomeness, Lead by Doing

einstein-making-a-differenceFirst ask yourself, “Do I behave with high integrity?” The majority of us would respond that yes, we do.

Now ask yourself, “Do my colleagues share my same high level of integrity?” A far fewer number of people would agree that their colleagues and peers possess our own elevated level of integrity.

Why? Because we confuse our intention with our action. We can get intoxicated on how fabulous we are and confuse that with the actual impact we are making in the world. It’s the same reason 80% of executives believe their company creates a superior product in the marketplace, while only 8% of their own customers would agree. Or why 86% of MBA students believe they are better looking than their classmates. Or why almost all of us think we are better drivers than everyone else.

To overcome our own awesomeness, and to lead from a place of credibility, try these two tricks

First, Lead by Doing: If you ask the five people on your team, each individually, how much they each contributed to the last project, the total will be well over 100%. Because we all overestimate our own value. Get over yourself. You aren’t above doing the dishes, cleaning the sink, or taking out the trash. True, others around you have become better at managing projects, or generating marketing copy, or advising on the user experience…but by walking a mile in someone’s shoes you’ll learn quite a bit about the effort and value of everyone’s contribution.

Now, Only Do What Only You Can Do: Now that you know the reality of what it’s like to get the monthly newsletter out, or write 500 words of PR copy, you understand it isn’t a cakewalk. In a conversation with Lisa Vos of Melbourne Business School, she explained that the next key to developing oneself if to find our most compelling signal in the noise and to accentuate it. That is, in order to develop distinct value, we need to emphasis and develop that which only we can do with distinction.

Turkeys, Flash Freezing and Cafeteria Trays

swanson_dinner2In late 1953 the Swanson brothers had a glut of turkey.  Swanson were turkey wholesalers and had overestimated the market.  They thought they would make a killing that year on Christmas turkeys sales. Not so much. So now they had 235 metric tons of turkey riding around the U.S. in refrigerated rail cars and the executive team was wondering what to do.  Meanwhile the CFO is showing charts of what it cost to have all those turkeys rolling around on refrigerated rail cars per day.

Gerry Thomas, a sales executive at Swanson, had been flying around the country and had just seen what Pan American airlines was doing with compartmentalized in-flight food offerings.  He and the executive team at Swanson coupled this notion with Clarence Birdseye’s new flash freezing technique, and then added the catchy product label “TV Dinner” that fit beautifully with the cultural explosion of television.  Their great market opportunity was the eight million moms who were joining the workforce after WWII, who were also enjoying an abundance of electrical home appliances like ovens, refrigerators, freezers, and of course televisions.

Turkey Glut Crisis + New Technology + Market Inflection = Bonanza of Realized Value

Swanson thought they might sell five thousand units the first year.  They sold ten million at .98 cents each.  Big hit, and now you understand how the intersection of technology, inspiration, marketing and resources made it happen.  But does that formula work again today?  Here’s the difference now:

Resources are scare, not abundant: From water to textiles to lumber, the availability and premium placed on the natural resources we use to create the consumer products and comestibles are in high demand and, in the case of fossil fuels and water particularly, are increasingly precious.

Talent is global, not local: Historically if you had a local workforce that was obedient, diligent, and brought expertise and skill to bear executing on top-driven strategies, you had competitive advantage.  The future is most certainly now in terms of the ability to connect need with a globally-dispersed labor force –  highly talented, motivated, and comparatively cheap by U.S. standards.  And all connected by the cost of the internet, $0.

Innovation is democratized, not top-driven: No longer can firms rely on the the wisdom of a handful of insightful strategists at the top of a pyramid, when meanwhile companies like Rabobank or Best Buy are doing a better job of catering to customer need by creating mechanisms to actively listen to, and incorporate the interests of customers, and know-how of line personnel.

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

In the Name of Love

martin-luther-king-jrMichael Stallard told me this story of the band U2. From the beginning U2 has maintained a mantra of “music can change the world because it can change people.” The strength of the band’s identity and commitment to each other has driven its success. When the band’s members suffered one personal challenge after another, the band slowed down its touring and took a break to support one another.

In 1987 the leader of the band, Bono, was threatened with death if U2 played their song “Pride,” a tribute to Reverend Martin Luther King, at a concert in Arizona. Bono recalled that, as he entered the third verse—“Early morning, April 4; a shot rings out in the Memphis sky”—he closed his eyes, not knowing what would happen. He described what followed:

Some people want to kill us. Some people are taken very seriously by the FBI. They tell the singer that he shouldn’t play the gig because tonight his life is at risk, and he must not go on stage. And the singer laughs. Of course we’re playing the gig. Of course we go onstage, and I’m singing “Pride (In the Name of Love)”—the third verse—and I close my eyes. And you know, I’m excited about meeting my maker, but maybe not tonight. I don’t really want to meet my maker tonight. I close my eyes and when I look up I see Adam Clayton standing in front of me, holding his bass as only Adam Clayton can hold his bass. There are people in this room who’d tell you they’d take a bullet for you, but Adam Clayton would have taken a bullet for me. I guess that’s what it’s like to be in a truly great rock and roll band.