Survival of the Fittest

Friday my MGMT professor pulled together Frank Beamer, Seth Greenberg, and Pete Hughs (V Baseball Coach) to speak to our class about leadership, and how each has managed their player’s and organizations to be successful.

Each coach had their own approach, as Greenberg said, “your style of leadership has to fit your own personality, you have to be comfortable in your own skin.” But on the whole, a lot of their ideas were identical.

Three likenesses between the programs: people, relationships, and trust.

Greenberg had an analogy for success in the first respect.

As a note, perhaps some of this is cheesy, but I’ve been an athlete/sports fan my whole life so the coach speak is second nature, just “another language.”

Anyway “You’ve got to have the right people on the bus.” You want to be leading the right people (in Greenberg’s case, attitude is not as important as talent is, no matter what he says. I was respectful enough not to ask how Jeff Allen snuck on his o so holy bus) It is up to the leader to choose whom to recruit, so the team reaches their goal. “They have to be in the right seats.” No brainer. Different people are suited to do different things well, but it really takes effort, often times through mistakes to find out what these skills are.

Secondly, all the coaches preached about relationships. Without speaking with their player’s I really can’t say for sure how much effort these guy’s put into this aspect of leadership. I can see building relationships to be difficult in a sport like football, with a season of fourteen or so games, and a roster of one hundred guys.

But it’s true that people don’t care how talented you are until they know you care about them. No one is willing to follow until they have a relationship/connection with the leader.

So once you have that initial relationship you need the trust there to really commit. I’m reminded of hypoxic set’s in the pool over the summer.I would swim 25-50 no breath, and hell yeah it hurt, but when the coach said up. I did the set.

My first week back at school, at the end of a Sunday masters swim the coach had us go off the blocks and sprint to the wall, followed by rest and a no breath, free return to the block, 25yds. I couldn’t do it but once. I was racing that weekend and didn’t trust that the coach had everything in line. Trust was missing.

Here’s a few things to think about.

If you have a problem, ask yourself, how many people live in China?

Answer, 1.3 billion. So no matter what happened to me 1.3 billion people don’t give a s**t.

Courtesy of Pete Hughs. He better know how to HTFU.