In this series of blogs, we are reviewing the new book from Jon Gordon and Mike Smith, You Win in the Locker Room First. This is a great book filled with tips, reminders and suggestions about how to build a team culture and create a winning attitude with not just players and coaches, but the entire organization.
The first blog in our series focused on the first two C's the book mentions, Culture and Contagious. This blog will highlight the next two C's in the book: Consistency and Communication.
Both Mike Smith and Jon Gordon talk about how consistency is the key to building trust among your organization. Staying true to who you truly are and being fully present in the moment with players and staff on a consistent basis will help you build the foundation for a strong culture. One of the best ways to remain consistent is to continue to try and improve and show your team your commitment.
Communication forms the foundation of any relationship. And when there are voids in communication, negativity has a tendency to fill those voids. The goal with communication is to have healthy and honest conversation. Being able to listen is extremely important as is being able to ask the right people the right questions. Both Mike and Jon talk about the importance of communicating on a one-on-one basis as much as you can with every member of the organization to get their buy-in and support.
Mike advocates creating themes in messaging for the team and then echoing those messages over and over. He suggests making sure to model the messaging as well as verbally repeat it to really hit home with the players. And sometimes it doesn't hurt to bring in outside voices to reinforce the message and present it to the organization in a slightly different way.
The next two C's in the book that we will tackle next week are Connect and Commitment.
