What does it mean to be a dynamic leader in sports? What lessons from sports leadership can be translated into our own leadership journeys? As soon as these questions were introduced, our hands were reflexively in the air. Sports and leadership, leadership in sports….sports and leadership……leadership in sports! Tossing modesty out the window for a moment, who better could answer these questions than Alea Gage and Zach Blume: two passionate sports fans and players and two Fellows in the deep throes of leadership training here at the Coro Center of Civic Leadership? Well, here’s our best shot. . .
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Sports are a surprisingly powerful and influential medium. Lessons from sports can be applied to other walks of life. Nothing can make you feel so distraught or so jubilant as the fate of your favorite sports team or player. It is a world (and I’ll delve into a few clichés here) where the impossible is possible, and the probable never really happens how you expect it would.
Sports are also an endeavor that requires superb leadership for success. Turn on any sports commentary show, and you will invariably hear how the successful teams have “great, veteran leadership” whereas the unsuccessful are mired by an “utter lack of chemistry and leadership.” A sports team can have all the talent and expectations in the world (see the 2006 Denver Nuggets, the 2007 San Francisco 49ers, or any New York Yankee team of the last five years) but without the guidance and leadership it takes to nurture chemistry and teamwork, they will not succeed. All too often, players will become frustrated and confused with their roles, will quickly lose motivation, and the impetus to perform.
In my own personal experience playing sports, a leader is someone who leads by example and who understands his/her teammates. It is someone who will give their all on the court and who will practice modesty and composure off it. A skillful leader will help highlight the strengths of his/her teammates, and provide back-up for their inevitable shortcomings. A leader will help each teammate understand their specific role and value within the team’s structure, and will empower teammates to strive for more. A leader will foster class and maturity, camaraderie among team members, and the motivation for team members to watch the extra hour of film, to work on their jump shot after practice, to run their routes a few extra times, or to work to perfection the mystery of their knuckle-ball.
I can really only speculate on the role of leadership in the collegiate or professional ranks. But examinations of the importance of sports leadership on the professional level only reinforce my own first-hand experiences with leadership in sports. Leadership lessons from my high school basketball experience are lessons that are present within me to this day.
When I review all the characteristics I have included in the make-up of a dynamic sports leader, I realize that they are all traits that could make a powerful leader in the community (everything except for the perfect knuckle-ball of course). As we are continually subjected to the images of more and more disturbingly negative professional sports figures, it is important to take time to learn from the courage, humility, and class of some members of the sports world.
--Zach Blume
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As my experiences as a Coro Fellow have reinforced, there are two crucial and distinct manifestations of effective leadership: (1) the leadership associated with being a team player, inserting oneself after surveying the needs of the group and intersecting your strengths and abilities accordingly, and (2) the leadership associated with dynamism, the ability to cultivate a collaborative and cooperative environment through your abilities to guide and drive your partners or team players forward. My experiences in softball illustrate both these manifestations of leadership, but there is another variable at work here. Through my participation in sports over the years, I have not only witnessed but incorporated these leadership skills and styles into my own development. From the moment I learned to throw the ball, an awareness of leadership was already at play and becoming an integral force in my experience.
While we are surrounded with examples the intensely competitive nature of sports in the professional and pee-wee sports worlds, at its best, sports are a practice in framing achievement in an individualized and principled way, so the hero is not the big performer, but rather the smart, savvy and steady performer. Thought about in this way, sports afford the ability to appreciate performances above and beyond an individual’s skills, celebrating victories according to the level of challenge the task posed to the athlete.
Whereby knowing your own strengths and limitations helps you act in sync with the rest of the team, the rest of the team also benefits from understanding and capitalizing on your unique contribution. Under this arrangement, other players come to value your unique skills and contributions, as you do theirs. Given your strengths and limitations, you can engage with your teammates to help them close the gap and to work on yours.
Through my softball experience, I learned that my impact was individualized and a matter of choice, self-knowledge and self-awareness. Participating and contributing to the collective team morale did not hinge on my size, choosing to cheer and coach my teammates on or carry a bad attitude onto the diamond after a strikeout were choices that affected not only my own play, but reflected the depth of my commitment to my team. Finally, I learned to identify my strengths and shortcomings, whether they be size, strength or other factors, and how – in spite and because of those strengths and shortcomings – to stay competitive, crafty, positive and always on ball.
--Alea Gage
Friday, February 22, 2008
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Sports and Leadership Part I
What does it mean to be a dynamic leader in sports? What lessons from sports leadership can be translated into our own leadership journeys?
As soon as these questions were introduced, our hands were reflexively in the air. Sports and leadership, leadership in sports….sports and leadership……leadership in sports! Tossing modesty out the window for a moment, who better could answer these questions than Alea Gage and Zach Blume: two passionate sports fans and players and two Fellows in the deep throes of leadership training here at the Coro Center of Civic Leadership? Well, here’s our best shot. . .
For a perspective on sports and leadership, we (Zach and Alea) decided to draw from our experience as Coro Fellows. Tuesday evening, November 13th, we had the pleasure of interviewing Lori Shannon, founder and owner of See Jane Run, a chain of running stores focused on empowering women to engage in physical activity. While we appreciate expanding our knowledge of innovation and creativity in the business sector, we identified very strongly with the relationship Lori articulated between integrating sports into her life and embodying the confidence, skills and vision to emerge as a self-aware force in the professional realm and in the community.
Lori recalled the experience of announcing her commitment to running her first marathon. Describing herself as “your average woman but not your average runner,” she acknowledges that for some, like a particular running shoe salesperson she encountered, running a marathon seemed beyond the realm of possibility, given her physical stature. Lori implored us to be bold, to display the confidence to express our dreams to the world in order to make them a reality.
Furthermore, in a sport dominated by images of thin and sculpted bodies, many women who are raising families and establishing careers are left out of this equation. Lori posits that the purpose of sport is not achievement in the traditional sense, but accomplishment in a very personal way. With this thinking, she opened her first running store in San Francisco to not only redefine who an athlete is and what an athlete looks like, but what a winner looks like within the framework of self-accomplishment. Lori shared with us the sense of strength and focus she feels after running, a sense of strength she has internalized and translated into the other realms of her life, both personal and professional.
Lori’s story emphasizes that the traits developed through sports correlate to the qualities of strong leadership: strength, will, focus, sense of self, sense of the possible, a desire to push the boundaries, challenge the status quo and re-envision oneself and one’s surroundings. For Lori, running marathons has taught her that life’s endeavors are endurance events. We heard this same rationale from Larissa Roesch and John Iannuccillio during an interview at Dodge & Cox, who argued that sound investments consider a company’s performance in perpetuity and feeling a sense of ownership in one’s investment leads to conscious and measured risk-taking. Likewise, Lori believes that risk taking in sports translates to increased faith in oneself and one’s abilities as well as fosters a spirit of determination and perseverance.
Drawing from our own experiences of hands-on leadership and personal development in sports as well as the learned knowledge gained through our interviews with achievers in various sectors, our definitions of leadership are expanding to include the interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, inner confidence and the ability to act on it, personal inspiration that translates into our work in the world.
As soon as these questions were introduced, our hands were reflexively in the air. Sports and leadership, leadership in sports….sports and leadership……leadership in sports! Tossing modesty out the window for a moment, who better could answer these questions than Alea Gage and Zach Blume: two passionate sports fans and players and two Fellows in the deep throes of leadership training here at the Coro Center of Civic Leadership? Well, here’s our best shot. . .
For a perspective on sports and leadership, we (Zach and Alea) decided to draw from our experience as Coro Fellows. Tuesday evening, November 13th, we had the pleasure of interviewing Lori Shannon, founder and owner of See Jane Run, a chain of running stores focused on empowering women to engage in physical activity. While we appreciate expanding our knowledge of innovation and creativity in the business sector, we identified very strongly with the relationship Lori articulated between integrating sports into her life and embodying the confidence, skills and vision to emerge as a self-aware force in the professional realm and in the community.
Lori recalled the experience of announcing her commitment to running her first marathon. Describing herself as “your average woman but not your average runner,” she acknowledges that for some, like a particular running shoe salesperson she encountered, running a marathon seemed beyond the realm of possibility, given her physical stature. Lori implored us to be bold, to display the confidence to express our dreams to the world in order to make them a reality.
Furthermore, in a sport dominated by images of thin and sculpted bodies, many women who are raising families and establishing careers are left out of this equation. Lori posits that the purpose of sport is not achievement in the traditional sense, but accomplishment in a very personal way. With this thinking, she opened her first running store in San Francisco to not only redefine who an athlete is and what an athlete looks like, but what a winner looks like within the framework of self-accomplishment. Lori shared with us the sense of strength and focus she feels after running, a sense of strength she has internalized and translated into the other realms of her life, both personal and professional.
Lori’s story emphasizes that the traits developed through sports correlate to the qualities of strong leadership: strength, will, focus, sense of self, sense of the possible, a desire to push the boundaries, challenge the status quo and re-envision oneself and one’s surroundings. For Lori, running marathons has taught her that life’s endeavors are endurance events. We heard this same rationale from Larissa Roesch and John Iannuccillio during an interview at Dodge & Cox, who argued that sound investments consider a company’s performance in perpetuity and feeling a sense of ownership in one’s investment leads to conscious and measured risk-taking. Likewise, Lori believes that risk taking in sports translates to increased faith in oneself and one’s abilities as well as fosters a spirit of determination and perseverance.
Drawing from our own experiences of hands-on leadership and personal development in sports as well as the learned knowledge gained through our interviews with achievers in various sectors, our definitions of leadership are expanding to include the interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, inner confidence and the ability to act on it, personal inspiration that translates into our work in the world.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
LEADERSHIP 2.0?
Coro Center Executive Director Jeff Sosnaud and Finance and Development Director Patrick O'Heffernan met recently with Steve Wright, Director of Innovation for the Salesforce.com Foundation. Salesforce.com sells the world's most popular customer relations management service (CRM), service, used by both for-profit and non-profit organizations. Jeff and Patrick visited to discuss ideas for the Fellows Program in Public Affairs Innovation Week scheduled for February 2008. The conversation quickly turned to what is civic engagement in a Web 2.0 world – "Web 2.0" in this case standing for the combination of web-based social-networking sites, wikis and other host services which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users, and rich media sites like podcasts and RSS feeds and online video posting and editing.
Web 2.0 has impacted electoral politics, through "gotcha" videos such as the "Macaca Moment" video on YouTube and other sites that ended Senator George Allen's career, online small donor fund raising that now rivals money from lobbyists and "fat cats", and online organizations such as the environmental site, Care2.org, which enables 7.7 million people - over 2% of the U.S. population – to organize social and political campaigns on behalf of the environment.
Wright pointed out that for the daily civic engagement of citizens in their community, whether they perceive it to be their school district or the global environment, three things are important:
- data transparency: that the peoples' data are transparent and accessible -- except for some exceptions in national security and personal privacy areas --what the government does and the records it keeps should be readily available online to the citizenry
- data accessibility: that not only is the data available, but that it is in standard formats that enable any citizen to download it, analyze and use it.
- information literacy: that all citizens have basic knowledge in how to find, access and download the peoples' data.
When asked about the custom of most citizens relying on experts who understand the topic and how to read and use the data, Steve agreed that experts and their expertise are important. But he added, so is the wisdom of the crowd. If you make the peoples data available only to experts, you will miss out on the creative power of ordinary people who can bring new insights and understandings that experts, because they are focused, cannot see. He argued for a combination of the wisdom of the crowd and expertise.
If Wright is right that civic engagement in a 21st century Web 2.0 world is trending toward a combination of the wisdom of the crowd and the wisdom of experts, is there a Leadership 2.0 requirement emerging and what does it mean for the qualities and skills that make up a leader?
Does a Web 2.0 world mean that a leader needs to be proficient not only with the tools of analytic thinking, research, presentation, public speaking, negotiation, but with a whole new set of tools ranging from social entrepreneurship to posting YouTube videos? How does a leader in a Web 2.0 World use the "wisdom of the crowd" while still creating a coherent vision for people to follow? How does a Web 2.0 leader foster open decision making and decentralized authority and inspire people to a common goal? And, finally, what does this mean for
The conversation at Salesforce.com's conference room that day ranged from the need to keep the leadership tools of the past because they are still necessary and still have impact, to how to add new ones that embrace an online and open source world. Wright argued that leaders need the kinds of tools Coro teaches, plus an understanding of the laws governing information, an understanding of the technologies of open source and social networking, plus how to get things done in this environment.
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