The Über-Secrets, Part I: Champions Aren’t Built One at a Time
Bonnie St. John has spent years living, working, and training with world class performers as an Olympic skier, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a White House economic official, and a consultant to hundreds of global companies. Her most recent book is How Strong Women Pray.
I really couldn’t say “no” when Warren Witherell asked me to give a speech at a graduation ceremony since he was the man who made me an Olympic ski champion. He was the founder and headmaster of the nation’s first high school to train ski racers—Burke Mountain Academy in East Burke, VT—and he gave me a full scholarship to train with the best of the best despite the fact that my leg had been amputated since age five. I had been racing against other amputees and already won six medals at national championships. My dream was to qualify for the U.S. Paralympic team.
It was a tough year at Burke Academy. 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 many days writing letters to sponsors for help. Months later, once my leg healed and the snow fell, I found out that all the other kids were much better skiers than me. In sum, I was far away from home, broke, and 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 Witherell asked me to come to Colorado, I went. He picked me up at the airport, and we drove five hours to Crested Butte. Now he is a man who trained numerous world champions in snow skiing and water skiing. Not having seen him for 20 years, it was like 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.
Of all the things he told me, what I will remember most is this, “I never built champions one at a time. I always created ‘communities of champions.’” The insight into creating communities of champions in sports parallels what I have seen in the places I have worked—the White House, Wall Street, IBM—as well as the hundreds of organizations I have visited as a speaker and consultant.
What can you change in your environment to make it a champion-building community? Take out a piece of paper and review these points while brainstorming on how to improve your own community of champions.
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?
Hire 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.
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?
Even if you feel there are some jobs that have no long-term career path, you can provide incentive by promising to help them with a job somewhere else after a couple of years. It may seem odd to recruit great people with a plan for them to leave. However, if your team earns a reputation as a stepping stone to greater things, you will attract more highly motivated people than if your jobs seem to be a dead end. Your team can be like The Procter & Gamble Co. or Microsoft—places where people work for a while and then are more attractive to other employers. Getting a spot in a stepping-stone job is very competitive.
Make sure they have the resources they need to be champions. If you expect top performance, but give your team no or insufficient equipment 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.
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.
Train your team to cheer for each other. Assign new people to work with more experienced people for advice and support. Teach more experienced people how to give advice and support and reward them for doing so. Focus not on creating each champion, but creating the environment where champions are built.
Witherell’s insight into building communities of champions inspired me. Yet, I recognized that working in a community of champions is not always an easy and comfortable place to be. Striving to do your best can be exhausting and even stressful. It isn’t an easy way to live. But for me, I would never trade it for anything else. I can’t stand working in an environment where people don’t care about the results, complain, and dislike coming to work. Being pushed to be my best in a community of champions makes me feel more alive, feel better about myself, and look forward to what the future holds.
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