The following comes form "How to Build and Sustain a Championship Culture" by Jeff Janssen. I'm not sure there is a more important word in leadership today than culture -- creating the identity and standards your want your program to live by. Jeff's book is the best I've read on the subject and here is an abbreviated list of 4 steps in establishing a team's standards of behavior:
1, Include
your leaders with a meeting before the standards meeting
Before
your standards meeting with your entire team, I highly recommend you sit down
with your key leaders to discuss their thoughts and insights on the process.
You want to all be on the same page going into the meeting so that you
understand each other.
2, Involve
Instead of Impose
As
with your vision and core values, be sure to involve your team when
establishing your standards of behavior. It will value their perspective and
help garner their commitment. As leadership author Stephen Covey once said, “No
involvement equals no commitment.”
Similarly,
Coach K says, “In putting together your standards, remember that it is
essential to involve your entire team. Standards are not rules issued by the
boss; they are a collective identity.”
3, Create
and clarify your standards in writing
It
is important to put your Standards in writing to help clarify and codify them
for the short and long term. Unwritten standards are easily forgotten and can
become an easy excuse when someone breaks them because they can say they weren’t
clear about them.
4. Sustaining
Your Standards
While
establishing your standards on the front end is a critical part of developing a
Championship Culture, the key part is sustaining the standard throughout the
course of the season. Many teams talk about the standard at the start of the
season but don’t meticulously maintain them throughout the course of the
season.
“It
all starts with everyone buying into the same principles and values… If you
don’t define the expectation for everybody in the organization and the
standard, what they’re supposed to do and how they’re supposed to do it, then
how can you know whether someone is mediocre or a high achiever… We clearly
define personally, academically, athletically what the expectation is for every
player and they have to be accountable to it.” –Nick Saban
There are some great books that I think can help coaches and teams, and as I've mentioned before, one of the best I've read in recent years is "How to Build & Sustain a Championship Culture" by Jeff Janssen. One of the areas that Jeff gives great detail to is the standards you set for your team -- your non-negotiables. Do you have a set that you have developed with your team? Have they been discussed what they are and more importantly why they are significant to the success of your team? How do you evaluate these standards? How you holding each other accountable?
Here are just a few thoughts on standards from Jeff's book:
“A major part of becoming a team, then, 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.
Standards are not the things that we ought to do, they are the things that we
already do- they compromise who we are.”
-Mike Krzyzewski
“There’s
probably not enough attention paid to this issue. I learned a number of
valuable lessons from Parcells and Belichick when they came to the Jets.
Everyone was under evaluation. The doctors, trainers, equipment men, travel department,
security, public relations and groundskeepers all were under the microscope.
Too often, people who are in contact with the players have little or nothing at
stake professionally breed a losing culture in the building.”
–Pat Kirwan,
Former NFL Assistant Coach
“Ideally
you want your standard of performance, your philosophy and methodology, to be
so strong and solidly ingrained that in your absence the team performs as if
you were present, on site. They’ve become so proficient, highly mobilized, and
well prepared that in a sense you’re extraneous; everything you’ve preached and
personified has been integrated and absorbed; roles have been established and
people are able to function at a high level because they understand and believe
in what you’ve taught them, that is, the most effective and productive way of
doing things accompanied by the most productive attitude while doing them.”
–Bill Walsh
