John Wooden is the legendary basketball coach of the UCLA Bruins. He coached the team that won 10 NCAA national championships over a 12 year period. No other school, men or women, have ever won more than 4 in a row.
During that time they won an NCAA men’s record 88 consecutive games. Obviously, he was doing something right. It did help that they had players like Lew Alcindor, now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton.
In 1973, Walton had just won the national championship and was also named the national college player of the year. At the start of the next season, he thought that the rules might not apply to him. He hadn’t cut his hair.
Coach Wooden had a rule that players had to be clean-shaven and have hair no longer than 2 inches. When Walton turned up shagged headed with facial hair Coach Wooden told him he has 15 to cut it off and be ready to start practice.
Walton started to complain and Coach Wooden just said he had 14 minutes left.
Culture
Having your hair a certain length can seem arbitrary and silly, but what Wooden was doing was creating the culture he wanted to have in his team.
He believed as a coach that you had to focus on yourself and control what you were doing. Part of this philosophy came out around how you presented yourself. He wanted the team to be disciplined in how they looked and dressed.
Culture doesn’t just happen, it is made up of millions of little moments. Some planned, some organic, but the biggest part is the stuff you allow to happen.
Allowance
The things you let people off with will define your culture more than the things you decide to do. There is a saying in anthropology, it is not what you are that defines you, but what you are not. Anthropology is the study of humanity concerned with culture, societies, and linguistics.
You can see that it is very easy to define yourself as what you are not. Coach Wooden said our team does not have facial hair or long hair. It tells a story of who they were as a team. What you are not can be what you wear, how you talk, and how you interact.
Choices
As a leader in your family, team, place of work, or social group, what you allow will define the group.
Research conducted by Harvard social psychologist Dr. David McClelland found that – the people you habitually associate with determine as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.
The good thing is you get to choose what you allow and don’t allow. Do you allow bullying? Do you allow low standards (however you define them, and they need to be clearly communicated)?Is there one rule for some and another rule for others?
The choices you make and allow will create the culture in your team. And the culture in your team ensures that when you are not there they still perform at the level you want them to.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 