Adam Bradley is the founder of Lead Em Up, which is a curriculum for developing leaders through team sports. I recently joined the lead em up community, and will certainly keep you all posted on how i like it and how it’s working with our team.
They hosted a webinar yesterday about the art of building connected teams.
Stay with me on this, it’s a good lesson.
Adam uses an exercise called ‘going for gold’ to help players connect with one another. He says often players will hesitate to call a teammate out if they’re not trying their best or something’s going on in his or her life, because ‘i dont know them like that, coach’. That ‘like that’ phrase is important. This exercise is designed to help players get to know each other ‘like that’. So the exercise is simple. You pair them off with people they might not know ‘like that’ and give them 3 minutes to find things they have in common. When they find something they each clap twice and say ‘struck gold’, and then continue ‘mining’. It’s very simple, and he reports that the players love it.
Here’s what I found most interesting though. He says that if he had $20 in one hand and $100 in the other, which would be more valuable? Easily, the $100 is more valuable. But he challenges that and says we could go blow this $100 real quick at chipotle or the video game store , or anywhere else, and then it’s gone. Or we could leave it alone and it’ll stay $100. But with the $20, if we invest it, we can quickly make it worth waaaay more than $100.
His point is that we might have players who make a $100 connection, and those who make a $20 connection. But if the players who make the $20 connection then invest in that relationship (let’s say the both like blue gatorade), now they can connect on that connection. Maybe one brings the other the new flavor of blue gatorade. Or there’s a new flavor out that they go try together. Or they’re the only 2 on the team whose favorite is blue…the possibilities are endless. The point is, that little, seeminlyg insignificant connection can now help your team become filled with players who know each other ‘like that’ .
I will post the replay of the webinar here, it was filled with good nuggets.
