Run to the Middle. Every. Time.

Winning in wrestling is about discipline. I learned that lesson over and over again through my time as a high school wrestler and as a coach. For my junior and senior years, our coaching staff was graced by the panther-like presence of a man we called Coach Shoops. We usually had three coaches, our head coach was the middle weight, and then the assistant coaches would be split one for the little guys and one for the big boys. Shoops was big and quick. He weighed around 200lbs and was constantly carrying around a med school textbook as he studied for whatever exam was next.

Shoops had a variety of little techniques he added to my repertoire. Because he was technically sound where I was quirky, and much quicker than I, I don't remember picking up too many larger moves from him. What I did learn was a style of thinking and gamesmanship that helped me win matches.

Like I said, winning in wrestling is about discipline. The head coach, Quilty, made sure we worked hard enough to have physical discipline, and were sufficiently drilled in techniques to have technical discipline. Shoops made sure we were ready to get inside our opponents' heads and grind them into the mat. He made sure we had competitive discipline.

Some of his ideas were a little quixotic, but worked with practice. It took me a while, but eventually I managed to get good at pointing towards an opponent's shoe to make them think it had come untied, so I could strike while their attention was away from defense. One of my favorites of his was The Handshake Maneuver. If you act scared while warming up and then give a dead fish handshake, your opponent will underestimate your confidence and technique. If you are reading a book at the side of the mat and give him the double-handed nerdshake, chances are he will underestimate your strength. If you make exceptional eye contact while shaking hands, he might still be looking when the ref blows the whistle and you can strike first. The Handshake Maneuver was straight up fun for me.

The most effective and hardest of his recommendations was that whenever the whistle blew, no matter the score, run back to the middle of the mat. Some matches this wouldn't have much affect because it would only be at the end of the first and second periods. Other matches you'd be going out of bounds every ten seconds and having to restart over and over.

In those cases, you could win a match simply by running back to the middle. The first time you do it, your opponent might just think it's weird as he staggers/crawls back the 10ft to line up. The second, he might be a little irked by your unnecessary expenditure of energy. By the fifth or sixth, all he's thinking about is what it's going to take to make you break. If your whole team is doing this, you can track the morale of the other team as it sinks further and further. I know from personal experience that it's not easy to run back to the middle. It's even harder if you're losing. But if you can be disciplined enough to do it, you will win the mental battle and eventually, the physical one as well.

I mention all of this because I think if you cultivate discipline in any area, it will give you almost superhuman abilities. This doesn't take skill or money. All it takes is dedication and a desire to perform (and perhaps peers and mentors to help you get back up again when you mess up). If you want your employees to aspire to excellence, you have to teach them the basics and the techniques like Quilty did. You also have to give them the hard-knuckled fight and gamesmanship that Shoops taught.

Brotherhood and Pain - A Call for Fellowship

I learned a lot through pain as a high school wrestler. That first week of practice each year was a revelation. We would start with warmups that were more intense than an entire soccer practice, drill basic techniques and more advanced counters for 45 minutes or so (never letting the heart rate fall), and then wrestle live until it was time for conditioning. That first week, it would be somewhere during the drilling that I would hit "The Wall" - my physical limit where my body said "I can't do this anymore!" and I would have to push through with mental toughness, visualization of success, and camaraderie from my mat brothers.

Each year I would turn in homework that week with a different handwriting than the rest of the year. My entire body would be so spent from exertion and musce fatigue that no matter how I sat, some portion would be holding me up and twitching from the effort.

Gradually my wall would get pushed farther and farther back. We would do less and less of the drilling and technique and more of the live wrestling. By a month into the season, we would be managing to wrestle live for more than an hour a practice. Together we would push our walls back and fight through sore muscles, head colds, parents who wanted to overfeed us, and all the other problems life can throw at you.

Each time you got your hand raised in wrestling, it brought a compelling feeling of success. Wrestling is a mano-a-mano sport where you are each the same size. Winning means you stand victorious when all you had to rely on was yourself. It is also a team sport.

People not on the team often made fun of us for wrestling. For being homos, for wearing spandex costumes, for caring so much, and for not eating whatever we wanted like the rest of the boys in high school. I had it easy (our team was state champs all four years I was in HS, so critics were kept mostly to snide whispered comments), but I can imagine how it must have felt to have those jokes amplified.

The only other team I have heard described the way I think of my wrestling team is football. With 90 players on the roster and 11 on the field engaging in carefully choreographed plays, you must place your well-being in the hands of your brothers every time the ball is snapped.

We build bonds as men together when we sacrifice, overcome hardship, and ultimately learn that we are stronger through fellowship and mutual reliance than we ever would be alone. We need more wrestling, more football, more fellowship, and more initiations into a common brotherhood.

I do not know what form this future fellowship should take for me, I only know that I am open to it.  I will readily embrace the chance to build strong bonds with men in my life and to mentor those younger than I in their journey towards manhood. I am reminded here of two interpretations of manhood that I have considered seminal that lack this sense of mutuality - and hope to find one that does: If by Rudyard Kipling, and It Takes a Man by Chris Young.

Teamwork Combo-Platter

Hire the right combination of people and set up your professional environment correctly and your team has the best chance of producing incredible results.

Today I'd like to talk about creating smaller working groups for a particular project that use individual's personalities and preferences to your advantage.

My dad has done a lot of work with insurance companies analyzing the risk culture they exhibit, and which management strategies are best suited to their individual challenges and existing team. He often talks about the four types of approaches to risk that are most common to managers in insurance companies. I've used a basic version of his logic in helping formulate a lot of the culture I have tried to perpetuate as a manager. In simple terms, the four types of risk approaches outlined in the paper above are articulated in the following diagram:

In case this type of drawing doesn't scream applications at you, here are a few for a camp setting:

• Each summer we take the whole camp on several trips to the beach. This trip is fairly straightforward but carries several health and safety risks. Big worries include losing a kid, a car crash, or inclement weather. Medium risks include injuries (assuming it's like broken arm or less, otherwise, push that one into major worries category!), sunburn, or a venue being difficult. Small risks include scarce or incorrect food, or counselors not doing their job well enough. The leader needs to be someone who will proactively solve minor problems and won't freak out if things start to go wrong. I would put a type 2 person in charge if possible and send a type 1 and type 3 for counsel in emergencies.
• We run several theme days at camp where we transform camp into a particular magical world. This summer one of them was Spooky Halloween themed. These days are planned out over several weeks and incorporate sets, costumes, vignettes, an overarching story line, and often several completely new major activities. The biggest challenges include practical assessments of progress-to-goal in terms of set, writing, and costume construction and lack of buy-in from campers or counselors. For a team of people running one of these days you want a type 3 in charge of the day, with assistance from a type 2 and type 4. You would want the type 2 person to help push the timetables and a type 4 person to help with a lot of the creative engineering of the day. Keep type 1 people busy on smaller, goal-oriented tasks that let them feel stability and believe things are going well, don't let them near the brainstorming meetings if possible.

Over time the people who you manage will change, and it is important for you to look over your team regularly and make sure that you have all four of these types of people represented. Depending on your workplace, it may also be important to stack the team with more of one or more types of people since you know more situations will arise that call for a particular type.

The Nurturing Father Model

A little while ago I read an article that really hit home with me. You should check it out.

Lots of men harbor a secret about sports - when we see these men perform inhuman feats with their bodies, we know they are using physical discipline to cover for their lack of personhood. This is why no one in sports is surprised or truly tries to fix the brokenness that manifests in domestic violence, rape culture, and misogyny. Deep down so many of us are insecure. We believe that if we fail or show weakness ever, then people will see our inner gollum. We have never learned how to truly care for each other.

I was listening to a country radio show a few weeks ago and the DJs were giving one guy grief because as he was taping his wife and he having a discussion about how sweaty he was at night, it came up that he liked to cuddle. He vehemently denied to the other DJs that he ever wanted to cuddle or instigated it, eventually bowing to audio evidence to say yes once in a while for a few minutes he might be willing to cuddle.

So fragile is our position, so undeveloped is our limbic node that we fear the ground falling out from underneath us with any misstep.

I am left with simply a question and and hope: What can I and we as a community do to help realign our culture to create a nurturing father model? I hope that I can help contribute a sense of unconditional acceptance to those around me as I continue on my journey back to wholeness and rest.

Insulate Your Workplace

There are many variables in the world around us. From the social and interpersonal to the physical and environmental, there are thousands of factors that we keep balanced throughout every day of work and life. If, for even a minute, we stopped to consider all of the variables we are juggling, we would become unstuck, so our brains do a good job of hiding all of the calculations and action-reactions going on all the time.

I think that one part of why I enjoyed working at camp so much is that the number of variables shrinks so much that we are able to control more of what goes on around us and choose consciously what we want to do.

For children (who are by necessity discovering the world around them and placing themselves one lego block at a time into  an unfamiliar and scary world of variables) there is often little control over most environmental and social aspects of their lives. They don't get to choose their classmates, classes, classrooms, meals, homework, or often much else at all in a normal day.

At camp we let them choose, for hours a day, what to do. Obviously we are limited in some things based on the number of campers and sandbox property. However, the self exploration embedded in our mission statement and daily living provides a great guidepost for how you can motivate your employees in a non-camp setting.

As a manager it is important to give your employees a chance to do meaningful work with people they like. Sometimes there are jobs and chores that have to happen regardless. But there is almost always something for which it makes sense to give latitude to employees for how they pursue the ultimate goal. I would recommend using this type of framework to figure out if something can be made into an insulated work space for self-exploration, realization, and ultimately motivated accomplishment:

1. Agree on the starting point - meet or brief working group on where you are now.
2. Give benchmarks that you require, whether timetables for completion, details about reporting progress, or important components that are required for completion.
3. Agree on the substance of the final goal.

Make steps 1 and 3 as specific as possible. The more latitude you can give your employees in proceeding in between, the more empowered to explore how they work want to work. When they feel that they are responsible for a meaningful task and have the agency to make decisions within a framework that is provided, they will respect your authoritarian outline whilst working to keep pace with peers and impress their superiors with the product.

Leading through Values

When you lead people through values, you give them the tools and agency to make their own choices. Sometimes this will mean a person makes a mistake or has an error in judgement, but for the most part, giving people a set of values to hold onto is like giving a sea captain a compass. Yeah, you could give them extremely detailed step by step instructions for reading the stars, common and uncommon markings along the shore and across the sea, or you could give them a tool that helps them find a moral north.

At camp we have a couple phrases that we use to guide us through all things. First and foremost (and mentioned within a minute of the official beginning of staff training) is that "Camp is for the Camper". If what you are doing is not for the campers, that doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means it isn't heading in the right direction. Rather than managing individual behaviors, it makes it easy to ask a counselor or squad of goofballs to reconsider if their choices are putting campers first.

One caveat I do have is that there is a moment where the humility and 'campers first' mentality begins to head towards dehumanization of the workforce. If you are using your values as a cudgel to get your employees to place their own identity and well-being below that of some larger and unifying goal, then you are risking their health and have a possibility of overextending them.

Therefore it is the job of the manager to be an active curator of values; to balance results and sacrifice; to redirect people before they overextend. We had a bunch of counselors who quickly bonded at the beginning of the summer and started calling themselves the "FOMO Crew" because they were staying up so late together. One the one hand, they were forming bonds together that are sharp and deep. Chemistry that resulted in one of the most powerful and functional cultures of the summer (the Newctown Boys, our very own joke boy-band). But there was a moment where as a manager, several days after I had heard about their tendency to stay up together, where I had to call out several of the boys for their lackluster performance in the morning and discuss (somewhat cheekily, as is my custom) why that was. Rather than reacting with anger at a job undone, I tried to channel their chemistry into something productive. Use your verbal aikido skills to take something that is positive (group chemistry) and ask them to do that positively, rather than living for the nighttime without the kiddos.I think if I had headed off a couple of the boys in 2014 earlier, or had my assistant director do the same thing, there would have been a much more functional culture on that front in 2014 as well.

Spiritualism and Industrialism

Been having a series of discussions with a couple people about what benefits humans have from spirituality and religion that we have replaced with a reverence and idolatry of technology. As we have replaced collective activities in space (fewer mandatory community events, many people exist in separate bubbles, connecting only by choice through the internet and as their children's schedules dictate) with collectively reinforced beliefs through our own filters (facebook news feeds, online news filtering, getting to hear and read only things you already agree with) we have lost something fundamental and meaningful that we had before the industrial revolution because we had to focus on things closer to home.

This discussion has often started as a discussion about the divinity of Christ, or the differnces between Abrahamic and Christ doctrine in the bible - and out of that has come an active discussion on the ability of humans to be something more than their parts when combined. As in Christ was wholly human but able to make decisions that were divine - and so was able to be more through the use of the holy spirit than he could be by himself, much in the same way that through fellowship and compassion, we can be more together than we are individually.

These discussions have also focused on the reductionist tendencies of Donald Trump and the Tea Party / libertarian ideals espoused by many in the far right in America today. If we use politics to separate, and blame people for their life circumstances rather than asking what we can all do to make each other's lives better, then we are falling into a trap that will bring us backwards and make us less together than we would be alone.

David Brooks wrote a great article in the Times this weekend on this idea: The Governing Cancer of our Times

Queen Elizabeth II had a great speech in 2011 about a similar theme: UK and N. Ireland Peace

Losing and Gaining Employee Trust - Say Yes When Possible

Rank and file employees' trust in the good intentions of their bosses is a very fragile. It is slow to be earned, and accumulates through micro-choices, but can be lost in an instant when efficiency or bottom-line thinking supersede the human factors inherent in managing staff.

These pivotal moments are easy to identify in retrospect, but can be difficult to avoid as they spring into existence. Two easy examples, one from several years ago and one from today:

• Staff had been arriving back from their days off sporadically tardy, and it was becoming a drag on both the administrative end of things (scheduling them for an activity or responsibility is tough when you can't be sure they'll be back on time), and for the individual counselors who were being screwed over by their peers. As an administrative team, we had a productive and appropriate brainstorming session as part of our weekly long staff meeting on Sunday afternoons, and we came up with an adaptation to the days off scheduling (starting/ending at 9:15am instead of 9:30am). The change was shared later that evening at the weekly all-staff meeting. While staff followed the new rule, I learned in the end of summer feedback forms that this was a particularly discussed and maligned decision. Staff felt like we'd had one way of doing things, and we were screwing them over by changing the rules to their time off mid-summer. While we fixed the short-term, non-vital problem, the damage we did to their trust in the administrative staff proved irreparable. To be honest, this is just one example, as is to be expected in a long and exhausting season, there were many other micro-choices in that summer that also contributed to the overall distrust (more of an 'us versus them' than a 'we're a happy family' - we're not talking like huge trust issues here, just the subtleties of maximizing intrinsic motivation). 
• This evening was the last night of the first session, and traditionally we have had counselors stay on duty for an extra half hour in order to get a little extra time in with their campers on the last night. Instead of being off-duty at 9:30, they are free starting at 10:00pm. Right as all of camp was heading back to their cabins around 8:30pm, a bunch of the administrators gathered and it was realized that none of us remembered letting counselors know that Friday nights are a little different. Right as we were about to decide what to do (expediency was required), a first-year counselor piped up from the edge of the conversation group and said "I think most people were split on this, we were talking about it a couple days ago and staff was about half and half" - I replied "Well I'm glad you guys were thinking about it, that's the kind of question someone should ask Ad Staff, since we hadn't remembered and it would have been great...." Here I hope/think we made the right quick choice and I sent around the most easy-going and chill member of administrative staff to let people know that they would be covering until 10:00pm. Because a counselor had given us the information (or in the first case had we asked the counselors what they thought) we were able to make a choice that we wanted for camp and do it in a way that would assuage any potential backlash. 

I guess the moral of this post is one effective way of maintaining employee trust (and thus intrinsic motivation to perform at their highest level) is to find room for their preferences and desires to be expressed and met when possible. Or - Say yes when possible

Tower Building

Tower Building Write Up


Did this activity today and it was incredibly well received. Had the counselors add their blocks one by one, and then break up into groups to help each other come up with six items to put on the second block. Then they added them while sharing their favorite, then broke into groups again to do the third block.

In the end, the debrief included everything I could have possibly wanted about how the tower metaphor applied to each person individually (and uniquely) and also that we as a staff build a tower together each day of camp. People really responded well to the metaphor wrapped in a literal tower!

My favorite response someone gave was Jake saying "Guys you realize that all of these 72 blocks say things that each of us is capable of doing on a day to day basis? This means we can all be amazing counselors, we just have to try" (Paraphrased...)

Managing Them Out of a Distraction or Irrational Behavior

When adding a millennial to a working team or project, they are just as able as any other generation to observe a task or process in place and then place themselves inside.

When working in a small group of two-four people, everyone is constantly making micro-judgements about many aspects of the group. From the work ethic to the process/product balance, employees use many environmental and managerial signals to determine what to do and when. Since employees must balance their energy level, life outside work, and social situations, we know that they are often distracted or irrational in their approach to work.

Millennials have several unique characteristics that make managing them out of their distraction or irrational behavior easier:

• The language of the internet is chock full of things to be explained. No one is more open to learning than someone who is teaching, so getting a millennial to teach you something about the nearly infinitely new internet age makes them ripe for guidance. Education is a two way street and they are an expert.
• Since the distraction can sometimes be technology induced, but many jobs require computers and being available 24/7, this can pose a nasty conundrum. This is where establishing a culture makes all the difference. Most jobs have an existing culture of how they use technology, so rather than creating a culture, you have to change things. See post on the process of cultural/organizational change. If you change your culture to create times where your staff are free from technology and instead have to rely on each other as people, you will have a much stronger team. Which is more, your millennials are hungry for this kind of deep social interaction. The narrowness of social engagement online causes this.
•  Millennials like to be liked. Use that to your advantage instead of complaining that they have inflated senses of worth. You could go touchey-feely and write your millennials personal notes. You can go parody and make a twitter "wall". You can go statistician and prepare a report for them of the value they bring to the company. You can post positive results of recent customer surveys. You can create an annual social event designed specifically for millennials. You could pay them a pension.