Creating Championship Cultures and Environment
I have worked in education my entire career. Educators are trained masters at creating systems and processes that drive behavior and performance.
For an educator to be successful, they have to know how to meet, train, and manage classrooms of up to over 30 students, and do so in a quick and efficient way.
If you welcome new students without systems to manage their expectations and behaviors from day one, you risk losing them all year.
Brett Ledbetter is an author and speaker who works with some of the world's best athletes, coaches, and athletic programs. In his book What Drives Winning Environments, he tells the story of how University of Minnesota football coach PJ Fleck uses How University, or How U, to define everything he expects from the people in his football program.
Through How U, Fleck seeks to leave nothing to interpretation.
There are three key ingredients to creating an effective How U:
1 - Define
2 - Manage
3 - Model
We use the DEFINE, MANAGE, MODEL process to guide what we do.
DEFINE
We leave nothing to interpretation. If we have a system, process, value, belief, or guiding principle, we believe in clearly defining it so everyone is on the same page.
Any and everything that we expect, we define in a clear and meaningful way to try to eliminate confusion.
Defining expectations is a proactive approach to leadership and driving high-performing schools and cultures.
MANAGE
Once you have clearly defined goals, processes, and systems, you have to manage them.
We manage our expectations by looking for opportunities to praise Above-the-Line behavior and looking for ways to teach and train when we observe Below the Line behavior.
Education is about teaching and training. Discipline means to teach and train.
Baseball coach Tim Corbin says, “What you allow will come back either positively or negatively. And I just think the allowance of behaviors, good or bad, is really the setting of what’s going to come forward.”
MODEL
Practice what you preach. Your actions speak louder than words. We believe in modeling what we expect. We believe in representing the standards that we set.
Modeling is what people see. You can say what you want, If we want the people we lead to follow us, we have to model the expectations that we have defined and managed.
As a leader, when someone watches you, will they see your words match your actions, or will they receive mixed signals?
This book is about how we define, manage, and model Above-the-Line and Below-the-Line behavior so that we can solve problems and drive performance at a championship level.
I will spend some time building up my ‘How U’ curriculum. The goal is to create a document through which you can define, manage, and then model your expectations for yourself and the people you teach, coach, and lead.
For more How U resources, click here: How U
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