My stumbling - a quiet gym is a losing gym

My senior year high school basketball coach was intense. He was & still is an absolute “hardo.” His name is “Coach D,” a former ACC college coach transferring all of his intensity to high school basketball to raise his family in the small town of Charlottesville.

Coach D had extraordinary expectations because he knew my senior year basketball team had big dreams of playing at the next level. He used to put us “on the line” if the gym was not loud and boisterous during practice. If we didn’t bring the verbal energy, then Coach D would extract the verbal energy in conditioning drills.

At the time, I didn’t understand why I had to be hollering and constantly encouraging my teammates every minute of every practice. Why was Coach D so “maniacal”?

Upon reflection, I think he might have been on to something: 

The Science:

Behavior is contagious. We are not always an individual making rational, isolated decisions within the vacuum of our own moral, rational framework.

A groundbreaking study by Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School followed 12,076 people for thirty-two years and found that when someone became obese, the odds of that person’s close friends becoming obese TRIPLED. Dr. Christakis summarized: “You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you.”

We are inclined to imitate the behaviors of others. As Jim Rohn famously states, “we are the average of the people we spend the most time with”.

Business Application:

The environment of the tribe (i.e. business) we lead is EXTRAORDINARILY powerful. The environment is more influential than we might realize.

Everyone naturally wants to “fit in” with the tribe. We must be hyper sensitive to the norms because it dictates the behaviors which produce the results.

Seth Godin defines culture as: “people like us do things like this.”

Maybe my coach was strategically setting the behavioral norms of the team?

He was bending the culture. He was setting very clear expectations of what he wanted in practice. He set the expectation of what people like us do: we have loud, high energy, supportive practices! 

As we are establishing our values throughout the organization, the “things like this” is evolving and becoming more clear. If we can set an environment for people do things in a humble way, in a hungry way, and with a collaborative poster together, then we’ll continue to climb toward our vision.