What Makes a Champion?

My family is blessed that we get to send our children to an excellent school. The school has outstanding academics – almost 100% of the kids go on to college. It maintains a high expectation for behavior – school uniforms, required haircuts, drug testing next year. But it receives national attention for its sports programs. Last year Sports Illustrated selected them as the number one school in Georgia and 16th in the nation. Last year they won 7 state titles. Today, they won the GHSA State championship in Football.

So what makes these kids so consistently compete at a high level? Toughness, commitment, and determination for sure. But even more than that, it is a love for each other, respect for their coaches and the game, and a willingness to put the goal above themselves. These qualities are modeled and expected by the coaches and faculty.

The tough academics, high behavior standards, and expectations of excellence attract a certain type of family. It attracts a certain type of leadership. It results in a consistently high level of performance that has resulted in a high level of success.

What if, instead of coddling employees and settling for just good enough, we put the same expectations on a project team, a department or an organization? Would we be able to raise the level of performance to extraordinary levels over time?

Have you been part of a team or organization that was extraordinary? What made it extraordinary?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “What Makes a Champion?”

  1. Hank says on December 14th, 2008 at 7:52 am :

    You and your children are gifted. In general schools throughout the United States prefer mediocrity; they were designed to produce obedient factory workers. And that translates into preference for mediocrity in the industrialized work place.

  2. Sean Stickle says on December 20th, 2008 at 8:38 am :

    Expectations are all very nice and well, but without a means and a method to achieve the high goals, expectations are merely a form of sloganeering.

    You’re familiar, of course, with Deming’s red bead experiment. The findings of that experiment are rather applicable to schools and business alike. All the encouragement and expectations in the world are bollocks if the means are not present to distinguish common cause low performance from special cause low performance.

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