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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday October 9, 2000 Volume II Number 41
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FOCUS - Team Play
We bring two competing values to the marketplace. And I suppose, the tension between the two will always be with us.
On the one hand, we emulate the qualities of the rugged individualist. The Duke. Clint Eastwood. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Rocky. Mavericks all. The take-charge guy who can overcome the odds. Clear the decks. Single-handedly, bring down the bad guys. He’s a loner. Obeys no orders. He takes care of business – on his own.
Then on the other hand, we admire the whole process of co-operative effort. The give-and-take of teamwork. The synergy of shared skills. The mutuality of communication. The sub-ordination of ego. Accepting the hierarchy of organization – playing one’s role and knowing one’s place. The well-oiled machinery of corporate camaraderie, where the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.
Rugged individualists are rarely team players. Corporate troupers need committee meetings and dress codes and organizational charts and day-planners to know what to do. Business psychologists will tell you that the two are genetic opposites. Temperament, perceptivity, and work habits are woven into the fabric of their personalities and never the twain shall meet.
Let them be. Work around their weaknesses and emphasize their strengths.
But once in awhile, someone comes along who can forge the whole group into a tightly knit, powerfully committed, focused and directed unit. This rare person can paint the picture, point to the goals, articulate the vision, persuade the doubter, answer the cynics, challenge the faint-hearted, inspire excellence, rally the players – and accomplish things that most people call impossible.
We call it leadership.
* * * * * * * *
I was a sophomore in high school.
I can still remember walking those familiar three miles home from school that late summer afternoon along Whittier Boulevard - past the A and W Root Beer stand and on down by the Bowling Alley and the drive-through Dairy and Beach Boulevard and the Classic Car lot, where dream cruisers were lined up for sale. I knew someday I’d own one of those cars. It was a good day.
I made the team.
And in my right hand, I carried my football helmet. I walked alone, but on this, my first day on the team, I knew the set up: shoulder pads draped over the helmet with the facemask poking through the neck of the pads. The rest of my gear stuffed inside my helmet. The facemask served as a handle to carry the whole pack home. Football helmet in one hand. Books in the other. And walking down one of the most highly traveled thoroughfares in my hometown. Friends honked as they drove by, and I waved back by lifting the helmet and pads into the air and nodding. And I know the smile on my face was for real… I was a helmet carryin’ member of the junior varsity football team.
Life was good.
* * * * * * *
In 1971, the School Board appointed Herman Boone Head Football Coach at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia.
That would hardly be newsworthy, except that Bill Yoast just finished his thirteenth year as the winningest coach in the history of the school. No scandal. No moral failure. No accusations of abuse. No financial irregularities. Coach Yoast was a popular, no-nonsense coach – a good family man, well liked in the community and respected by his athletes. He built a winning program. And he was headed for the Hall of Fame.
But the Board, in an unexpected, unwelcome action, removed him from the position of head coach… and replaced him with a new-comer, a collegiate champion half-back and seasoned high school coach from across town - Herman Boone.
Federal Civil Rights legislation met the test of the Courts, and it was time for implementation. For more than a century - since the Civil War - segregation separated the races in public institutions – and in 1971 the federal government imposed its will on the States, and mandated integration in the public schools.
T.C. Williams High School was the first to be integrated in the State of Virginia. The fall of 1971 would be the first year in the history of the all-white school that the student body would be comprised of blacks and whites. This situation was forced on this local community by the federal courts.
The long time Head Coach Yoast was white. The new Coach Boone was black.
Not everyone was pleased.
* * * * * * *
At age fifteen, I had to make a choice.
Either the marching band or the football team.
I weighed my options carefully: the trombone and the marching uniform and the sheet music or the helmet and the shoulder pads and the playbook. High steppin’ to the cadence of the snare and bass drums or grindin’ out hits from the line at the snap. Synchronized half time shows or four quarters of blocks and tackles. Snappy tunes during the time-outs, or donning the pads and huddlin’ up with the guys callin’ the plays while the clock ran.
I pondered my options all during my freshman year. And by Spring Ball, I made up my mind. I checked into the locker room, and out of the band practice room.
And never looked back.
I heard about the parental fears… that football was a one-way ticket to a lifetime of bad knees. Concussions. Brute force. Primal instincts toward violence and aggression. Bruises and sprains and broken bones. A Darwinian survival of the fittest, reinforcing the uncivilized view that differences between people can be settled by physical dominance.
But even though I saw clear evidence that this parental concern had basis (I did see guys get hurt), I never really bought into the notion that football was a brutish alternative to wit and intelligence and wisdom and negotiation.
Football taught me some of the more basic principals of life and success. It taught me that preparation was as important as playing the game. That teamwork could amplify my efforts and have powerful results. That leadership and discipline and working for the common good mattered. I learned that running the distance built endurance. That running the sprints increased quickness. That climbing the steep hills built strength. That the quarterback should be listened to. That one ought to know the plays. And know one’s role in opening the hole in the line for the running back, or protecting the passer from the blitz, or following the blockers around the outside to find running room. And that the coach should be respected. And the referee makes the calls. And the rules are the boundaries within which excellence occurs. And the scoreboard told the ultimate story.
Something happens during hell-week. Everybody’s lungs hurt. Everyone’s muscles ache. Up-down. Up-down. Over and around. Hit the sled. Run the mile. Throw the ball on the run. Catch the ball on the run. Turn the ankle. Fall on your elbow. Take a face-plant at full speed, and smell the wet grass through your facemask.
And then on Friday night, when you put on those colors with all the guys who’ve been through the whole thing with you… something powerful strikes you. The sound of the crowd welling up as you break through the banner and the cheerleaders shake their pompoms and the band strikes up the music under the bright lights… well, you feel ready. It’s been worth the effort. And those guys in the other colors on the other end of the field, well, they are about the find out who you really are.
The trombone stayed in the case. To this very day.
* * * * * * * * *
When Coach Yoast got the news, he saw a thirteen-year career evaporate. His perky daughter Sheryl, a football aficionado in her own right, was counting the career wins left to put her father into the Virginia Football Hall of Fame. This political turnabout derailed all that, and the entire town went into an uproar.
Coach Boone met face the face with the demoted Yoast. The black coach asked the veteran white coach to stay on, as his assistant.
After some painful soul searching, and careful scrutiny of Herman Boone the man, Bill Yoast, over the strenuous objections of the white community, determined to take the high road. He would stay. The two put their heads together, and mapped out a strategy for the most potentially explosive football camp in the history of T.C. Williams High.
On a hot August Virginia afternoon, parents brought their sons to the bus for football camp. The great racial divide separated the T.C. Williams High Titans. As the boys loaded up on two busses, whites filled one. Blacks the other. Boone waited until the busses were full. Then he jumped up the stair of the first, and stood before his captive white audience, ordering them all to get off. He repeated the same speech in the second bus, ordering all the blacks to join the whites outside.
“You will now pair off… black and white… each of you. I will see no white with another white on this trip. And I will see no black with black. We are going to learn to work together, no matter what it takes. We are the Titans.” And these boys, with suspicion, and fear, and confusion in their eyes, knew this was a coach to be reckoned with… and they obeyed his order.
On the campus of a major university, the
boys, for the first time, learn to live with fellow Americans of
another race. They run.
They drill. They jump when
the coach says jump. They run
though their plays. They eat and
sleep in the same quarters. The
tension runs high, with an occasional break out of overheated rage.
The two ever-present coaches are there… modeling cooperation and
building the Team. They are tough.
Direct. Harsh.
And the boys learn.
Three o’clock in the morning, the alarm rings, rousting the Titans out of bed and into the dormitory yard. Coach Boone blows the whistle. Blurry-eyed teenagers yawn and stretch as the coach informs them that they will now engage in a cross-country run, designed to condition and train them to prepare for the fourth quarter when most games are won or lost.
“If you are ready to fight with all your might, conditioned to maintain your strength and your quickness and your agility in the fourth quarter, men, you will win football games.”
No one dared groan. Coach Yoast stood beside Coach Boone, his arms folded, nodding in agreement.
“Let’s go!”
And off they ran.
And ran. Into the night. Through the forest. Over the creek bed. Into the shadows. Up the hill, and down the glen. And around the bend. Into an open field, marked by a hundred gravestones… maybe several hundred in the mist of the moonlight.
“Do you know where we are?” asked Coach Boone.
No one knew. Not even Yoast.
“Gettysburg.” He paused, and looked out over the mist.
“It was on this battle field just over a hundred years ago,” Coach Boone explained, “that fifty thousand men died… in hand to hand brutal combat, they fought and died so that we all could live together in freedom.”
He turned to his weary team, breathing heavy from the run but listening, and maybe for the first time, understanding.
“If we can not come together as a football team, if we can not understand one another, if we cannot form a powerful unit, able to join hands and do what it takes… then these men,” and he pointed out to the battlefield of Gettysburg, filled with aging tombstones rising out of the earth as shadows in the mist, “then these men all died in vain.”
As Coach Yoast looked on, he knew he was working for a winner.
The Titans came together, and made history. They won thirteen times the season of 1971, and did not lose a single game. The first year the school was forced into de-segregation, they took the state Championship. They learned to see past black and white, and to bond as human beings. Against all odds.
The town of Alexandria will never forget the Titans of ’71.
So they made a movie.
Denzel Washington is riveting in the part of Coach Boone. Will Patton plays Coach Yoast.
It’s the highest grossing movie of the weekend - “Remember the Titans.”
* * * * * * *
You are a leader. You’ve got a solid streak of rugged individualism… you know how to go it alone. You can handle yourself. But you also know, you need the team.
On this Monday morning, you are quite aware of the dynamics that can put a wedge between you and your team-mates. And between the members of your team. Left alone, those differences have the potential of taking down the entire enterprise.
Part of your role is to keep the team together. To inspire their confidence. To articulate the direction and keep your goals in view.
And you may be wondering if it is even possible to bring these people in your sphere together and forge out a winning team. Consider Coach Boone. Remember Coach Yoast. Leadership inspires team effort.
Today you’ll be callin’ the huddle. And in the huddle you will map out the game plan. Consider the skills and abilities of your team players. Encourage them. Remind them of the reward of winning.
Listen for the cadence of the marching band. Hear those of us who are in the bleachers, cheering you on.
Today, on this Monday morning, lead your team to the end zone. Put some points on the scoreboard.
And don’t forget to celebrate.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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