Submitted by Tyke Crowley on
Part IV -Creating a Culture of Success: Ken said that one of his favorite quotes is by Bill Walsh (former head coach for the NFL San Francisco 49ers) which is “Winning doesn’t just happen.” Ken goes on to say, “Bill Walsh says that you have to create a culture of success. You display leadership from the top down, while empowering and including everyone. As an example, we match freshman players with a varsity player as a mentor during preseason. Most teams don’t do this. They keep their younger or less experienced teams separate from their star players. No, no, it’s important to include them right away so they feel a part of the program. We also start working on juniors to begin displaying leadership roles by saying, ‘This is your team next year.’ We ask them to step up and start assuming leadership roles. We do this slowly at first with small things. By imposing these programmatic routines, we have an internal development system to include everyone, set examples of leadership, and test abilities to become a leader. This is the difference between having a team, a program and a culture of success.”
Can you image how to create a culture of success within your business, your organization or your team? It would be easy to include all staff in meetings, assign mentors to guide less-experienced employees and allocate increasingly larger responsibilities to junior staff members to prepare them for leadership. It is all about creating an environment of inclusion and ownership. In his best-selling book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini shows if people assume ownership for their actions, they are more committed, create additional reasons for their new beliefs and actually assume new values in their identify of themselves. Ken is aware of this powerful tool to create a culture of success, which he relates to knowing people’s strengths and weaknesses.
He says it all comes back to one critical skill. In concluding, he tells one final story about recognizing people’s motivational pattern. “It is not a one size fits all. You see how people relate to coaching techniques. I have seen players deflate and become a shell of themselves when ridden too hard, and other times, some players need to be challenged to their face. I believe that you need to work at something for a while because it takes time to notice these things about people. You need that face to face communication to develop a judgment about how best to reach a certain player or staff member. This is why it is so important to develop those communication leadership skills.”
We offer a special thanks and deep appreciation to Ken Tucker for meeting with us and sharing his secrets of success. ~Tyke Crowley, President of Life Path Insights