BalanceMag: 5 Tips for Creating a Community of Champions by Bonnie
From BalanceMagazine.com
Champions aren’t Built One at a Time:
Five Tips for Creating a Community of Champions
I really couldn’t say “no” when Warren Witherell asked me to give a graduation speech at the school where he was working… he was, after all, the man who made me an Olympic ski champion. So I found myself on a plane to Denver, Colorado thinking about the impact that Warren had had on my life.
W2, as he was fondly called, was the headmaster and founder of the nation’s first high school for training ski racers—Burke Mountain Academy in East Burke, Vermont. Despite the fact that my leg had been amputated at age five, he believed in my dream of becoming an international ski champion and gave me a full scholarship to train with the best of the best as the first disabled athlete at his special school. I had been racing against other amputees and already won six medals in national competition. Being at Burke Academy was my passport to get good enough to qualify for the U.S. Paralympic team.
Senior year in high school can be tough for anyone, but being at Burke redefined the word “tough.” On the first day of school, I broke my leg—my only good leg. I didn’t have enough money for race expenses, so I spent my rehabilitation time writing letters to sponsors for help. Right after I got the cast off my real leg, my artificial leg broke in half….and then got lost in the mail when I sent it off for repair! Once my legs were working again and the snow fell, I found out that all the other kids could ski on one leg better than I could. In sum, I was far away from home, broke, and very, very frustrated. I learned that when you cry in your ski goggles, it freezes.
But I stuck with it. I trained with all the two-legged kids, got stronger, and most importantly, learned to race. In 1984, I represented the USA at the Paralympics in Innsbruck, Austria, and won bronze in the Slalom, bronze in the Giant Slalom, and placed 7th in the Downhill race. In the end, I was awarded the silver medal for overall performance, ranking me the second fastest woman in the world on one leg and the first African-American to win medals in any Winter Olympics.
So when Warren Witherell asked me to come to Colorado to speak at a ski training academy there, I had no choice but to go. He picked me up at the Denver airport, and we drove the five hours to Crested Butte through switchback turns and breathtaking vistas up the mountain pass. We talked and talked about our lives in the 20 years that had passed since I was a senior in high school.
I began to realize that this was my Tuesdays with Morrie moment: a chance to go back to one of my greatest mentors and pick his brains now that I am older and wiser. Warren’s career in that time period had included writing several books that changed the face of coaching and competing in Alpine skiing as well as coaching world-class skiers in water skiing during the summers. He had impacted not only the competitiveness but also the characters of thousands of young people during his career. I listened to his reflections at the edge of my seat.
Of all the things he told me during that five-hour drive, there was one thing that stuck out, a unique nugget of wisdom I wanted to share with leaders in every field. He said simply,
“I never built champions one at a time.” And Warren knew how to build champions. “I always created ‘communities of champions,’” he said. He explained that you can only push one person so far. In a community, people push each other, cheer for each other, find new ways of increasing performance, and reach new heights. He created not only Burke Mountain Academy as a community for champions, but created similar circles of excellence for college team programs and other coaching communities.
Yet, a “Community of Champions” is not a natural or easy group to coalesce. The dictionary defines champion as “the person left standing after everyone else is vanquished.” By that definition, a community of champions is an oxymoron.
As I travel to hundreds of organizations as a speaker and consultant, I see some organizations having more success than others at creating a place where champions thrive and reach new heights. Here are five tips for creating your own “Community of Champions”:
1) Create a vision focus, not a penalty focus. Rather than playing cops and robbers with your team (enforcing rules, disciplining infractions) create an inspiring vision, a mission toward which everyone can strive. Seeking top performance is very different than trying to maintain a minimum standard. You still need rules and discipline, but where is the majority of your energy and attention going…to the best performers or the worst, to reward or to reprimand?
2) Recruit into the vision. Let people know that you are building a community of champions when you bring them on to the team and share your “big picture” with them. If you hold up a larger goal, you will attract a different kind of person. And as the percentage of people who share the vision increases, others will jump on the bandwagon—or leave.
3) Make sure they can win. If they put in their absolute best, will they move to a leadership role? Will their commissions go up enough? Will they earn more control over their schedule?
4) Make sure they have the resources they need to be champions. If you expect top performance, but give your team insufficient resources to do what you ask, you lose credibility. Your team will start to think it is just words, not a real commitment to excellence. Everything doesn’t have to be perfect, but meet their best with yours.
5) Let them push each other to greatness. The most important thing, Witherell told me, was to set it up so that members of the team are cheering for one another, helping each other to perform better, and learning from one another. Warren showed me a video of team practice from the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team, a legendary force on the college circuit. The sound of clapping is deafening. Either you have the ball and are shooting, or you are clapping for whoever has the ball.
Bonnie St. John has spent her life living, working, and training with world class performers as an Olympic skier, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a White House economic official, and a speaker and consultant to hundreds of companies, organizations and associations. For more information please go to www.bonniestjohn.com
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