Practice the Art of Saying “We” tagged: , ,

Practice the Art of Saying “We”

Posted by in IMPACT Features

I have played a variety of team sports throughout my life, but I never played baseball. It wasn’t that I find it boring (okay maybe), have little depth perception (aka: “can’t hit”), or couldn’t imagine wearing pants with stirrups in July (still can’t). As I once told a friend, I can’t imagine playing any sport where they keep track of your individual mistakes. I find the “error” statistic abhorrent. If there was a “cha-ching” for every time I failed to properly settle a touch in soccer, one game would sound like the Wal-Mart cash registers on the day after Thanksgiving.

Competitive team sports—with a healthy dose of good coaching—teach a number of leadership lessons. Football players have to learn followership to play their positions, especially if they don’t always get the ball. As a wide receiver, if I’m not willing to run a deep route as a decoy that will then make another teammate open, I’m not a good teammate.

Hockey and soccer players are frequently gifted systems thinkers, because they are used to working within a system that has boundaries but requires each part of the system to utilize cooperation and creativity. Wayne Gretzky is famous for scoring goals and for saying, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”

I would never stoop so low as to use the cliché “there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’” (other than just now), but cliché’s exist because they contain a modicum of truth. That cliché alludes to a fundamental lesson from sports that I think leaders must embrace: a team wins and loses as a unit. Sounds basic, right? So basic, in fact, that a chorus of leadership axioms fill the mind of even the passive leadership material consumer. If it’s so basic however, I wonder why the same principle isn’t practiced in other leadership environments, specifically the home.

Leaders, do you think of your home as a unit that rises and falls together? Listen to the conversations among men and count how many times that things gone wrong in a given week are blamed on individuals within the home. “My kids made us late to church… my wife forgot to pick up the dry-cleaning…” Blame is isolating, demoralizing, and aggressive. The home is supposed to be a place of solidarity, joy, and intimacy. Excessive blame in the workplace can lead to a hostile work environment. Why should we tolerate a hostile home environment because we fail to apply basic leadership lessons among those closest to us?

Here’s your challenge for the week: take corporate responsibility for everything that goes wrong in the house (unless it’s your fault, then man up). “We ran late to church… we’re struggling to get everything done… we need to manage our money better… we need to be better parents.” All of the sudden, the family has equal shares in the misfortunes around the home, but more importantly, the sting of individual failure is alleviated. The feelings of isolation and low self-worth are diminished. The home gets a fresh shot of morale.

Don’t go too far, though! There is still room for individual praise. “My wife took the great picture I used for this blog!” (really) “My kids got straight A’s!” With enough practice, the “we” mentality of evaluating mistakes will bleed over into acknowledging the different team players that brought about team success. Team morale really goes up when the wins count for everyone and no one has to worry about who is keeping track of their errors.