January 19, 2017
The Culture Journey Week #15 – Servant Leadership, Life-Lessons, Codes-Of-Conduct
Meeting #7 with Coaching coach – Servant leadership, Life-lessons, Codes-of-conduct
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Had our seventh meeting with Scott Hearon, the co-founder of the Nashville Coaching Coalition. We went through the chapters 6 through 8 of Inside-Out Coaching by Joe Ehrmann.
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Chapter 6 is about building community. In it is one of the best descriptions I’ve seen of what leadership and being a captain is all about:
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‘Biff tells the seniors they have now earned the right to serve the freshmen. Servant leadership is the antithesis of self-promotion, of competing for positions of preeminence. It’s the opposite of hazing. It’s downward mobility based on the belief that if you want to be a leader you must first know how to serve.
Next we invite the freshmen over and the varsity players give them an ovation. A couple of the captains will welcome them and let the frosh know how courageous it is for them to be here. They are admired and welcomed into our community.’
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What could our team look like if we taught our captains and seniors to lead this way? That is one of the goals for our upcoming lacrosse season.
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Chapter 7 is a discussion on teaching life lessons through sports. We did an exercise as a coaching staff where we each listed the top 3 educational points about life we want to teach the kids we coach. This was an excellent activity to better understand what really makes each coach tick.
This is also the chapter where Joe shares what his teams do on Homecoming week, specifically with regards to what they teach the boys about respecting the girls they are going to take to the Homecoming dance. This includes the boys writing a short letter describing how they will treat their dates and then several of the players are selected to share these with the team. Powerful, powerful stuff – if you want to see more details on this it starts on the bottom of page 179 of the book.
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Chapter 8 is about clear communication, and Joe reinforces the best way to do this is by having 3 different codes of conduct:
- Coaches’ code of conduct
- Parents’ code of conduct
- Players’ code of conduct
We did an activity where we rated from 1 to 5 how our communication with these 3 groups is on our team. The biggest eye-opener from this activity was we realized we put a players’ code of conduct in place at the beginning of the year, then rarely ever discuss it again the rest of the season.
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Next week we wrap up our sessions with Scott, have our kick-off meeting with the players and parents, and then in 2 short weeks we are off and running with practices!
I hope your seasons are going well – you have to fight every day for your culture – so start off 2017 fighting the good fight! It is worth it!
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I am excited to walk this journey with you. I welcome any feedback, ideas, and suggestions you might have as you read through this. You are also welcome to share this with any other coaches you think could benefit from it, and please have them email me at [email protected] if they would like to be added to this email list.
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If you are interested in diving deeper on building culture we have started a mastermind group that meets the first and third Wednesday of each month at 12:30 pm EST, see the details at: winningyouthcoaching.com/the-culture-bus-mastermind/. It is exciting to be with likeminded world-changers.