Culture Of Winning

In an interview with the New York Times, Bill Carter, co-founder of Fuse, a youth marketing agency, talks about lessons he learned early in his life while playing lacrosse. In both high school and college he was part of extremely successful programs. His high school team was the dominant program in the country. "I don't remember losing more than three games in all of high school, he says. I was in this culture of winning where all the coaches, the players, the kids in that school and the administrators expected us to win." He described his experience playing for legendary coach Hank Janczyk at Gettysburg College in much the same way.

During the interview Carter captured the essence of the most crucial lesson he learned during his playing days when he said that "every game was judged not only on whether we won or lost and what the score was, but on how we played." He now applies this concept to the way his firm evaluates their business pitches. "If we win, he said, I still evaluate the pitch and whether it was the best portrayal of who we are, or whether we won for some other reason. And when we lose new business pitches or don't do an exceptionally good job for a client in the client's eyes, I can still evaluate it based on factors other than the final result."

Carter's firm does well for the same reason that his lacrosse teams were successful. A laser like focus on excellence is the key to establishing a winning culture in any organization. The best coaches never let either wins or losses knock them off stride. They are constantly looking for ways to improve their team's performance. They are never satisfied!

I was convinced that Carter had been part of something special when he described the practices at Gettysburg as being "unbelievably competitive" every day. If every member of a team is willing to do battle each day in practice, special things are possible. When you listen to athletes from top programs discuss their college sports experiences, it takes awhile for any mention of trophy ceremonies to surface. Recently some of my former players at Texas were asked to share reflections from their years as Longhorns with the current team.

All of the former Longhorns were part of teams that had advanced to the Final Four or won a National Championship. Despite the fact that they represented three different teams, their messages were strikingly similar! The notion that "excellence was a way of life", as one player put it, was a recurring theme. The same player expressed (in all caps for emphasis) that the reason her team was so good was "BECAUSE WE PUSHED EACH OTHER EVERY DAY TO GET BETTER." They talked about struggling together, overcoming failure, not giving an inch, and being gritty to describe their mentality........in practice! And the only mention of a trophy was made by a player who took pride in the part HER TEAM played to set the stage for the NEXT TEAM to win a national championship!

That kind of athlete is a vanishing breed. Too many of today's youth lack the ability to focus on excellence day in and day out to achieve something special. They are not results ORIENTED, they are results OBSESSED. They have not been empowered to develop internal motivation because their systems have been overwhelmed by outside forces seeking to control them. It is crucial that parents reward their child's effort and competitive spirit particularly during the elementary and middle school years. A highly successful businessman and entrepeneur once told me parents need to understand that this period of a child's life "is not the big game." Instead of focussing on doing whatever it takes to "put them ahead of where they are", as one teacher puts it, parents should reinforce the qualities that their children will need when there is real competition.

Your child can max out on private lessons and participate on "select" teams every season, but in the long run the cream always rises to the top. The best athletes are going to play. Some will reach the promised land of college sports and most will not, but either way eventually they're all going to have to compete with the Bill Carters of the world!