This morning I will be making a guest appearance along with my teammates Jenny and Jeff on FNN:15. FNN:15 is a webcast hosted here at FORUM Credit Union by our master of training, Andy Janning. The 15 minute webcast takes place every other Friday morning (on paydays) and is available to all credit union employees. The webcasts cover a variety of topics. Today’s topic – leadership. I am to share a success and a failure related to leadership from my experience at the credit union. I have plenty to share, especially the failures, but this is one topic that I try to avoid – not the failures, but leadership. Two topics that I try to avoid speaking about lately – leadership and social media. Why? Because there are no easy answers, no right or wrong answers, and there are so many voices already talking about these topics what else do I have to add? Seriously, search for leadership or social media on Amazon and you will get a ton of hits.

Keep in mind we only have 15 minutes so I am thinking with bumper time at the beginning and end that leaves us with 11 minutes. Divided by three and you get why I don’t like my chances of being able to clearly articulate my leadership tidbit. Thus, I will be referring interested people (both of you) to this post for details on my leadership tidbit. Here it is. Consistently maintain high expectations for you and your teammates. If I am forced to pick just one tip on leadership this would be it. If you think of great leaders you have seen or encountered they likey did just this – they held themselves and their teammates to a standard of excellence. It sounds so easy, yet is so difficult to consisently achieve. Why? Because it is easy to drift to the human nature comfort zone of accepting good or okay performance instead of excellent performance or it is easy to drift in to a comfort zone where you hold some teammates to a higher performance standard than others. This last situation is where you can really lose your star teammates because nothing is more frustrating to a star teammate than seeing their leader hold a fellow teammate to a lesser standard. There are numerous complimentary behaviors that surround this concept of maintaining high expectations such as frequent conversations with your teammates when they meet these high expectations and telling them when they fell short of these expectations. Frequent, honest, two-way conversations, even when neither one of you feel like a conversation, is a key ingredient to keeping on top of this leadership tidbit. Want a story about how I learned this and a funny side story, then read on…

I first remember learning this leadership tip from my high school basketball coach. It was the start of the basketball season my junior year and we have nine returning seniors and they were all good ball players. I knew our coach liked to have 10 players on his varsity roster. Most teams has 12, but he liked to have 10. I was your average high school basketball player, okay probably less than average talent, but I absolutely loved the game and I knew I wanted to be on this winning team. I went to my coach before the season started and told him I wanted the 10th roster spot and that if I were to earn it that no one and I mean no one would out work me or out hustle me in any team meeting, practice, or game. He looked at me and asked why don’t you want to play JV ball where you can start and get a lot of minutes and then you can play varsity next year after the nine graduate? I told him that I wanted to be part of this winning team and that I would rather sit on the end of the bench and contribute to the team in all of the intangible ways that I knew I could than play on the JV team. He believed in me and I was the 10th man on the roster. He told me when he granted me the roster spot that he was going to hold me to the same expectations as the nine talented seniors and he consistently did throughout the entire season. He worked and worked me and I became a better ball player and most importantly a better person because of it. He had the respect of the entire team. I rarely and I mean rarely played and it was the best basketball season of my life. I had a great time and truly believe that I contributed to the success of the team. Now here is a funny side story. During one game, we were up by quite a few points midway through the fourth quarter. My classmates in the stands started chanting, “We want Doug, We want Doug, We want Doug”. The chant became louder and louder. I was getting embarassed as the chant continued. Next thing you know here comes the coach down the bench to my spot at the end of the bench. He looks at me and says, “if they want you so bad, why don’t you go up there and sit with them.” Then he laughed. I still chuckle about this when I reflect on the memory. I can’t remember if I got in the game or not – that is not what is important – the life lessons learned are.

Oh, and if you are curious we won most of our games that season including sectional. It was a sectional championship before class basketball – those of you with an appreciation for Indiana High School Basketball know there is a difference. However, we lost in regionals. Some guy by the name of Steve Alford was better than us. He was Mr. Basketball in the State of Indiana that year.