Platano Power

The Dominican Republic is united like no other event could unite them. It’s the international baseball tournament and they are hoping to win again after the undefeated 8-0 run to the championship in 2013. On my weekend trip to the capital, every TV set there and in the city of San Juan de la Maguana was tuned into the tournament. Baseball is the national sport (well, apart from dominoes) and everyone is following along looking forward to the moment of victory.

Backing up a bit, the baseball team here is the shining gem in the community. Last year Bridges (the company I am working for here) got a member of the community to donate a piece of flatish land to the youth center they were building. After making it much closer to flat, they installed a backstop as well as cement stands on both sides. Though far short of even the most rundown fields in suburban US, it is unequivocally the nicest field in the area. Between the field and the 40 donated gloves, catcher’s equipment, and real bases, the youth of Derrumbadero have the most luxurious baseball set up for miles. And they play like a team that has won divine favor.

I’ve been to four or five games so far, and Derrumbadero has won every single one. The first game I witnessed I only saw the last three innings (they play 7 innings here), where we went from losing 4-3 to winning 7-4. The second, we came from behind 3-0 in the first to blow out the other team 17-10 or so. The third, I played first base for the first four innings, as it was the younger kids and they wanted to show off their Americano (my first game of baseball ever!!!) We came from behind 5-0 to win it 7-6 with two runs in the final inning. Next came a sunny Sunday game that gave me terrible sunburn on my legs but was worth every second of pain. We got down 7-0 in the first two innings and then suddenly turned on the power. By the fourth, we were up 8-7, and after getting up 15-7, coasted to a 16-12 or so win.

There are around 50 or 60 kids in the town who play on the two teams. There is little here in the way of adult supervision, role modeling, or attempts to build life-long learners out of the children. However the two managers of the teams are somewhat remarkable in how they run things. At once fun and firm, these young men are only a few years older than most of the players, and the same age as some of them. At 22 or 23, they are both part time students at a university a hour or so away. They keep track of the lineup, hold onto the extra baseballs so they don’t all disappear, and most importantly enforce team spirit and make sure the boys are all building each other up instead of fighting. One of my favorite moments watching one of the managers, Xavier, was when he got dressed down by the only father who ever watches (presumably because he had a broken arm, as I haven't seen him since his cast came off two weeks ago) because he had let two of the boys tell another boy that he hadn’t run hard enough for first base. The father insisted that teams don’t treat each other that way and that it was Xavier’s job to make that happen. Xavier took this lashing with his head held high and then replied that the father was right, he’d made a mistake, and it wouldn’t happen again. And true to his word, the next time something like that happened at a game that weekend, Xavier called a pause in the game, got the whole team around him, and told them they were one group and one family, and if someone needed to be told something like that, he would be the one saying it.

After the Dominicans came from behind 5-0 to defeat the USA, I admit I was a little upset, since I like winning. But I was also excited, for another win on the world stage at baseball would be great for the DR! I hope Platano Power takes them all the way to another undefeated championship!

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.