Leadership Begins with Culture
[Music]
in july
of 2019 my wife and i welcomed our
second child into the world
maddox a beautiful baby boy weighing in
at 10
pounds 6 ounces it was so amazing
to see our oldest son interact with his
new little brother
and i was so proud of my wife
everything was going well until it
wasn’t
the next thing i knew i was driving down
i-75 and a torrential downpour
racing a helicopter that was carrying my
eight-day-old son to a children’s
hospital
the doctor at the yard told us he has a
bacterial infection
we have 12 hours to find the cause or
the damage would be irreversible
over the next week my wife and i split
time between our house with our
three-year-old
and in the hospital with our newborn now
as a college softball coach you tend to
meet a lot of people
by wednesday of that week my phone was
blowing up
with text messages emails social media
messages
all coming from current players former
players coaches from around the state
colleagues at work and of course
friends and family i was overwhelmed
in 2015 i took over the lake sumter
state college
softball program and i quickly learned
i was going to have to change the
culture off the field
to properly affect the outcome on the
field
sitting there in that hospital room i
realized we had accomplished exactly
what we had set out to do
change the culture create better people
not just better ball players in 2018
we broke the school record for wins in
the season had our best finish
in mid-florida conference history and
had our first winning season
since the year 2000. in three short
years we took one of the most down on
their luck programs in the state
and made them competitive how
realizing it all begins with people
and not necessarily athletes was the
starting point
the second realization was creating a
culture that welcomed everyone
for who they are one of the first
players we signed was a young girl named
rachel
when rachel arrived on campus in the
fall of 2016 i wasn’t quite sure what to
make of her
she was a commuter so she lived at home
with her family and not in the
apartments with the other players
her teammates weren’t sure what to make
of her either they knew that she was
homeschooled
and that her religion was the most
important thing to her very different
than most girls her age
a few practices go by and i notice
toward the end of each day that
rachel becomes reserved and tries to
isolate herself from the rest of the
team
during a team bonding exercise she
actually tells us that she gets homesick
during practice
and how all day she just misses her
family and wants to be with them
but remember rachel lives at home
my thought process was why fight this
kid why try to change her
instead embrace her for everything that
makes her unique
and wonderful being homesick means you
love hard
and players who love hard are the ones
that are willing to go the extra mile
for you
the next time i saw rachel getting into
her end of the practice funk
i just walked over and i said rach i
want to go home too
i miss my wife and son give me 10 more
minutes
and we’ll be on the road now how would
other coaches you know
have reacted to this kid
how would you have reacted to this kid
she appreciated the fact that we
accepted her for who she was and didn’t
try to change her
i considered who she was as a person
before
selfishly considering what i needed her
to be
as a ball player rachel responded to
that environment of love and support
by being a two-time all-conference
selection
she was a two-time njcaa all-academic
first team member
she was the first player from our
program to be selected as the state of
florida gene williams award winner
she finished her academic career with a
perfect 4.0 gpa
and in 2018 rachel was the only first
baseman
in the entire country at any level of
collegiate softball
to lead her conference in stolen bases
it all comes down to environment and the
question i pose to you
is are you creating a place at work
within your community on your team that
allows people to feel good about
themselves
every day they come in a study done by
gallup in 2017
tells us that 85 of people worldwide
hate their job
now that number goes down slightly in
the us to a mere 70 percent
of people who strongly dislike their job
or their boss
those numbers are extremely discouraging
as we see
the depression rates and suicide rates
continuing to climb
it’s time we start putting people first
and thinking of them as employees
or team members second
in savannah georgia there’s a summer
baseball team made up of college players
from all over the country
you may have heard of them they’re
called the savannah bananas
they’re known for crazy antics like
wearing kilts while they play or playing
in all bright yellow uniforms in front
of sold out crowds
every single night whenever you see the
bananas
they’re having fun doing what they love
jesse cole the owner of the bananas says
it’s all about the atmosphere
in a three year period the bananas have
won more games
than any other team in the coastal
plains league
jesse explains it this way he said we
don’t focus on the wins and losses
we don’t focus on the baseball but what
happens is
because of the atmosphere because
they’re having fun they play
better
an assistant professor at georgia
southern university named curtis sprole
heard this
decided he wanted to put it to the test
does culture
does environment impact on field
performance
what professor sprawl did was he
collected the data over that three year
period
he then took all the ncaa division one
players
and compared their stats to that of when
they played for the bananas
he then did the same thing for the
entire league specifically
he looked at ops a player’s on base
percentage
plus slugging percentage one of the most
telling stats when evaluating offensive
performance
in professor sprawls works after running
the data for the entire league
the only team that showed a significant
positive relationship
for improving players performance was
the savannah bananas to this point
professor sprole’s research shows a
direct correlation between environment
culture and on-field performance
there’s a saying in the sports world
feel good
play good so simple
but yet so underutilized by all those in
different kind of leadership positions
looking back at that same gallup poll it
told us the alarming number of people
who hate their job worldwide it gave us
another piece of information
of the 1 million u.s workers polled
75 percent have quit a job
because of their boss or immediate
supervisor
it wasn’t their position or their
colleagues in the workplace
but management and how they conducted
business
and it all comes back to culture and
environment
which is created by leadership
now inspired by the events that took
place while my son was in the hospital
and too much of my family’s surprise
i wrote a book it’s called the island
an unconventional way of coaching people
not players
i wrote about our program and our
culture and how it’s changed and why
it’s important
most people already have this image in
their mind when they think of coaches
they think intensity veracity
anger and of course yelling
there’s actually a chapter in the book
titled yelling is barbaric
and it was an important chapter to write
because it gives opposing views on
yelling and why we refrain from doing so
with our athletes
now i grew up around yelling from a
coach who was also my father
and in my father’s defense he yelled
just as many good things
as he did bad things do i yell sometimes
yes but i absolutely hate it and it is a
last-ditch effort to get someone’s
attention
i’m able to get to that level with my
players because of the relationship i
build with each individual person
they know me and they know the values
i’m trying to instill in them and they
know that i only
come from a place of love if you do not
have that relationship with your players
yelling can spread like a cancer and
tear
a team apart the problem with consistent
yelling is it desensitizes the athletes
they come to know it as normal and it
creates an environment
filled with negativity remember
feel good play good
during our first fall game at lake
sumter our shortstop had a ball hit to
her
and it went right between her legs
she stopped what she was doing after she
committed the error looked straight at
me in the dugout
once the inning was over i walked over
to her and i said why did you stop going
after that ball
she said i made an error aren’t you
going to yell at me
she had been conditioned by previous
coaches
that making an error meant you were
gonna get berated
now how does that fix anything when one
athlete’s getting yelled at
the other ones hear it and they tighten
up not wanting to make the same mistake
and we all know what happens when we
think about not making mistakes
we tend to make those mistakes now for
the first four years at lake sumter
my father was my assistant coach and we
got along very well
most of the time when things didn’t go
as planned he would revert back to his
old school ways
i once threw my own father out of the
dugout
in the middle of a game because he was
being too negative
the negativity was spreading to the
players and they became afraid to move
or even talk and you can’t be successful
in that atmosphere now my father is as
old school as it gets
but he constantly worked at being better
about what he said
and how he said it after four years my
father left the program for higher pay
and less responsibility and i never
understood why
but he went back to the high school
level and was coaching football
as well as softball one day i asked him
how football was going in his answer
stopped me in my tracks
he said i don’t get it all these coaches
do
is yell at these kids and expect
different results when the kids
don’t even hear them anymore
i was so proud of my father for seeing
things from a different perspective
after all these years
there was a study done at brigham young
university by david c barney
and alema toiley that looked at the
correlation between coaches who
consistently yelled at their athletes
and the athletes responses the study
asked 124
former athletes 11 questions
the second question asked was what was
your immediate response
after being yelled at answers range from
angry mad to disappointed
and even fearful
previous research has shown athletes are
more negatively affected by being yelled
at than actually motivated
and the implications of the study stated
that coaches who consistently
yell at their athletes are not going to
yield the results that they want
it’s time we stop looking at people
as employees pencil pushers
and dollar makers and simply look at
them as
people remember the golden rule
treat others as you would want to be
treated
as for my son maddox he’s thriving at 19
months old
and he’s just like his mother so
beautiful
but will stare daggers through your very
soul when he gets angry
and i’d like to end with this coach your
players hard
but love them as people even harder
thank you
you