This month we are going to pick up where we left off: how to tell our own story.
As many of you know, I am a Texas Tech Red Raider alum. I am “red till I’m dead” in fact. And for those of you who pay any attention to college football standings, you know that at one point in the season, our football team was ranked #2 in the nation. This was a first for us. A first for me. I have never had the satisfaction of knowing what it feels like to have a football team that matters. And college football is a big deal in our house.
So, I have a point here . . .
Now Can You Tell Your Story?
I fundamentally believe that part of the reason our team has broken into the elite club of “teams that matter” is due in part to the head coach at Texas Tech-Mike Leach. He is a good football coach--but not in the way you might think. Yes--this unlikely hero to Red Raider fans plays the game of football in a way that has been described as “eccentric”, “crazy”, “dastardly” and simply “radical” compared to the standard college football coach. But from where I sit, he has done more than that. He has given us a storyline.
In the past, The Red Raider storyline has been more about who we are NOT than who we are. We are the second rate team of the Big 12 behind the power houses of UT and OU. If you listened to a group of TTU lifers you would hear things like “Well, I just hope we don’t get blown out by UT this year”. Ouch! We go into the new season assuming we won’t get to the Big 12 championship but maybe we will get a decent bowl game bid. Our pathetic past has a number of possible story lines--we could refer to ourselves as the unloved stepchild of the conference, the puny underlings of the big bad Longhorns and Sooners. But.....Mike Leach has a different idea in mind. We are PIRATES. Pirates? Really. Hmmmmmm... OK tell me more.
--Mike
Leach
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For many organizations the story gets defined from the top down. That means then that the leadership of an organization plays a central role in defining the story that gets told. Mike Leach is fascinated by pirates and can engage you in a three hour conversation about pirates and their famous escapades. Just ask his team, who, after an upsetting loss to UT in 2004, was sat down for a lecture on pirates. Leach’s fascination with pirates is authentic -- it is not manufactured for the purpose of storytelling. He really likes pirates.
And you will remember from Millie’s tutorial last month, “new ideas are really just new combinations of old ideas. New ideas don’t simply magically emerge from old ideas, though. The trick is finding new relationships between and among the old ideas. Young puts it this way: ‘the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.’ The only way you can see the relationships is to get everything together so you can move it around, try different combinations, and look at it from different perspectives” I find this BRILLIANT.
Coach Leach is the epitome of Texas Tech,” said David McDaniel, a senior from Leander. “Somebody once called us the ultimate rebel school, and that’s what we’re all about. We never let up, and we do whatever we want to do, and Leach is a perfect example of that.
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If you pause or hesitate when someone asks you “what is your story?” then you don’t know your story. Story is beyond the obvious--all organizations want to be successful and make a profit.
Story is about the values of the organization. The way things “get done around here” and the spirit of how the organization conducts itself. Story inspires and motivates. It attempts to tap into the best of who we are.
This works the same way with how organizations tell their story. Bravo CC has a story to tell and it is something that Millie and I pay a lot of attention to as we practice our business. In fact, at key checkpoints during the year, we re-visit our story to determine if we are being true to the story we want to tell. We also recognize that over time our stories change given the circumstances. But the core values do not change. They are ever present.
Our core values? We want to inspire people to learn more, to be their best selves, and we want to do it in a cheeky, irreverent way. We are loyal to our clients. We seek connections with people so that we learn from them just as they learn from us. We are true believers of what we teach and we seek to practice all we teach in each and every relationship we are in. Finally, we always want to have FUN doing it. That is the reward.
Couldn’t have said it better myself:
“When there is a genuine vision (as opposed to the all-to-familiar ‘vision statement’), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to. But many leaders have personal visions that never get translated into shared visions that galvanize an organization… What has been lacking is a discipline for translating vision into shared vision - not a ‘cookbook’ but a set of principles and guiding practices.
The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared ‘pictures of the future’ that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. In mastering this discipline, leaders learn the counter-productiveness of trying to dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt.”
-- Peter Senge
Below there is a downloadable form that lets you walk through your story. You can do this as an individual. You can do it as an organization. You can even write your family’s story. In fact, I am going to do it with my family and hang it on everyone’s bathroom mirror. I am sure my 9 year old will just LOVE doing it (eyes rolling).
