Former Division 1 volleyball player and Eagle Hill Associate Victoria Blake tells Melissa how creating a culture of change led her college team to unprecedented success.

Melissa Jezior: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the cultur(ED) Podcast. I’m Melissa Jezior, your host. On this podcast I talk to top culture makers in the world today from different industries and backgrounds to unpack the visible and not so visible forces that make up this often overlooked superpower of organizations. This inspired me to learn from elite athletes and coaches to unpack their tips and tricks for building winning cultures.

Today I’m pleased to welcome Victoria Blake. Victoria is a colleague of mine here at Eagle Hill and a former nationally ranked high school volley player—who went on to play for an incredible four years at University of Wisconsin. That’s where they competed in the NCAA championships for a title and won their regional championships. Victoria, thank you so much for joining us today.

0:01:00

Victoria Blake: Thank you for having me. It’s always exciting to step outside of the day-to-day.

Melissa: I’ve been learning so much from these conversations and I’m fascinated to talk about your experience playing at a D1 level and how this really translates into your work life today. So to start out with, you’re a nationally ranked volleyball player in high school, broke a lot of records, I hear, at your high school, so much so that you got recruited by University of Wisconsin and finished high school early to join the team. I understand that a few days before you made this jump you got somewhat of a curveball. So tell me about this curveball that you got and how you handled it.

0:01:58

Victoria: One night I was actually sitting around and we were eating dinner with the family, and my sister, my mom and my dad were all sitting at the dinner table and the phone rings. It was the coach that I had committed to at Wisconsin letting me know that he was no longer going to be the coach anymore, he was retiring.

Yeah, so just a few days before I was actually supposed to move out to Wisconsin I had already packed up all of my things for college. They were sitting in the living room and ready to go, and I wasn’t sure if I really had a spot on the team or even a scholarship at this point. I had no idea how to navigate these waters.

Now, it’s a really awkward time because I had just gotten my diploma, so I had no idea what I was going to do for the next semester if I was not going to go to Wisconsin. Definitely an awkward time.

0:02:57

And I just remember thinking am I still graduating early and am I still going to start Wisconsin in just a few weeks? I already had, you know, packed, I’d already have everything. Everything was prepared, ready to go, just walk out the door and move into the dorm, that was all I was waiting to do, and now there was this huge change, and it was just a big…a big mess for a little bit, to be totally honest.

And we waited a few days. We waited a few days and then I got a call we had a coach at least, which was great news, Coach Kelly Sheffield, who was gonna come over from the University of Dayton to be our leader throughout this time. And he…he said he wanted to come over for dinner. And that’s really where it all started, was him deciding that he wanted to sit down and make sure that we were still a good fit for each other.

So we set up a dinner and he decided to drive up to the house. That being said, he was late. He had no idea where I lived, actually, so he drove to where I practiced, which was two and a half hours away from my home.

My mom had made dinner, so there was a lasagna in the, like in the stove cooking, probably burning. By this time it was like 10:00 at night. It’s super cold outside because it’s the middle of winter in Michigan and I’m—I remember this so vividly—I’m sitting at the computer in the kitchen Googling everything I can about this guy, who is Coach Kelly Sheffield, what is he. And I remember looking at these photos thinking he’s just this super scary guy. Like I remember seeing them and thinking oh, gosh, he’s Hulk, like oh no, oh no, what’s happening?

And we get a knock on the door, we open up the door, and this flood of burnt lasagna flows out and hits him in the face, probably, and he’s just a normal guy, and he’s just… I remember thinking wait, this is him? Like this isn’t scary. And I just remember the only thing that really shook me out of that moment of who am I looking at right now was shaking his ice cold hand, because again, it was January in Michigan.

0:04:03

Melissa: Awesome. So this new coach, Kelly Sheffield, you’d never heard of him, before, right? Was not a really well known coach. And here he is coming into this Big Ten team with a known coach, and a known coach who had recruited and trained the team. And I imagine he really needed to quickly gain trust. So tell me about your observations about how he did that and how he was successful, and maybe where he wasn’t.

Yeah. Definitely an odd situation to be thrown into. I mean, it’s basically like becoming the CEO of a company. You have no idea what’s really going on in there, and you show up your first day and you really just hope for the best. And I truly believe that’s the situation he was in. He ended up calling a team meeting. And everyone had just gotten back to campus after winter break. I had just moved into the dorms. I think my mom had actually just left campus that morning, so it was my first real experience with the team.

We walk into this meeting room and everyone’s sitting down. Keep in mind I still haven’t met some of the team at this point, so I’m still the complete newbie, all alone in the corner kind of thing. And everyone else is just as nervous as me because they also have no idea who he is or what he’s about.

And with this long meeting I just remember he pretty much started by saying, you know, I don’t like losing.

Victoria: Pretty great opening, because everyone was immediately on board. Nobody likes losing, so he had us at least that far. Now, where he lost a few of people, I think, is when he handed us a giant book.

0:04:57

It was a book really of rules, but he liked to call them standards of the team. And it was anything from what you should wear while you’re traveling, how you should sit in the front three rows of every class, how you’ll be 15 minutes early to every practice, every weight lifting session, anything—Lombardi time. Then I think a few of us sat back and thought, you know, oh wow, this is going to be a big change.

I can only speak for myself, I guess. I was brand new, but a few of the girls were probably very comfortable in the routine that they had created over the last two to three years, and here this guy is coming in, sitting down and saying change everything, even when you practice, even how you eat, dress, act, you know, everything needs to change. And it was a little bit of a shakeup at first.

I remember right away he had the senior on the team, Ann Marie Hickey—she was a great leader in general—but she really was truly important to making sure everyone on the team was also on board.

0:06:03

So she was what we would call the change champion, right? The one who’s willing to sit down, and have those meetings, and go out and get coffee with someone on the team, make sure that you’re doing okay—how do you feel about this? How do you feel about this? And then continuously reporting back to Coach and making sure everyone was on the same page.

Now that being said, not everyone was on the same page. And I don’t think everyone truly understood how this was going to have a great, positive impact until we started winning games.

Melissa: Why do you think he started out the meeting with this two and a half inch book with all these standards? What do you think he was…what message do you think he was trying to share in terms of—what was he trying to accomplish?

Victoria: So I think it was really just saying this is how things need to be run around here. And not only that. He wasn’t forcing it down anyone’s throat or anything like that.

0:06:58

We went through page by page and he wanted to make sure everyone was okay with the standard, whatever it was, and then everyone also agreed that the punishment or whatever the repercussion was going to be if you did not follow a standard was a reasonable thing.

Melissa: So, interesting. So that was in a way his first chance of saying all right, folks, this is gonna be a culture change, and here’s your chance to kind of opt in, right? Here’s your chance to weigh in and here’s a chance for us to kind of say as a group we’re gonna hold each other accountable for this new culture change.

So you mentioned that some people were on board right away and others weren’t on board right away. Tell me a little bit about maybe some of the folks that weren’t on board and how did Coach Kelly handle some of those situations and the team handle some of those situations?

0:07:51

Victoria: Of course you’re gonna get the natural tendency of testing boundaries. And we definitely had a few individuals on the team who were doing that. Now that being said, a few weeks after Coach came, one girl was asked to leave the team, and so boundaries were set, but whatever was going to happen in that team rule book is what actually. Whatever the repercussions for the actions that needed to happen did actually happen. So she was removed from the team.

I remember there was one senior on the team in particular, and she…she just loved the idea of I want to win, and he wants to win, and this is what we’re gonna do to win, so she was just on board pretty much immediately.

Melissa: [From moment one], yeah.

Victoria: Exactly. And I’m pretty sure there was a few meetings in the background happening to make sure she was on board, but she was totally there.

0:09:56

But there was one drill, and it was extremely dependent on the weakest player, which at the time, I will completely admit, was me.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Victoria: I was brand new. I had…was not playing at Division 1 college volleyball level. I was still very much a good high school player. And so people were actually really frustrated with me, and again, rightfully so. But you have this moment where Coach tells you, like this drill is not going to be over until you accomplish it, until you completely finish it. It dragged on for days.

And so I have a few juniors reaching out to me wanting to practice after in the gym, so I’m practicing with a few people who are teaching me pretty much everything they know, right, so I’m learning from them.

So it was a drill dependent on the weakest player. People were getting really frustrated because for the life of me I could not pass a volleyball, and that’s just what it was. Now that being said, it was a difficult practice, and so at the end of it our coach basically said like, you know, we’re gonna do better tomorrow, this was a really tough practice, we need to call it quits for the day.

Everyone, for the most part, gets around in a circle and just like you see at any, pretty much any practice for sports you start stretching, right? And someone breaks it down in the middle and you’re all stretching. Well, one individual on the team—I’ll even name her, Courtney Thomas—she…I love her so much. She actually has a family of her own now. But she stood to the side instead of joining the circle, and at one point she actually turned around so her back was facing the team.

0:11:56

And she was also one of the individuals who wasn’t completely on board with the coaching change, probably. And so Coach went up to her and said, well, why the heck aren’t you with your team? And was like, well, I’m a little frustrated. And I think the idea was that she needed to cool down. But he immediately said no, get your butt back in that circle, stretch with your team, give them your love, your energy, your support, because this was a tough practice. That’s what a good leader does.

And there was an instant where one moment she was like pouting in the corner and all of a sudden she was in the circle and she was talking to teammates, and even though she was frustrated as heck that Coach called her out on something, it was definitely a point of turn for her, that Coach was gonna hold her accountable and that’s how things were gonna be run from now on.

Melissa: I think about it in the corporate world. If you do want to create culture change one of the first things we always tell our clients is to get people to weigh in on how they would interpret that culture change just for that very reason, so that when it comes time to hold people accountable, it’s a little bit harder to argue with something you yourself helped to create or had the opportunity to weigh in on, so…

0:09:08

Victoria: I’m actually having that experience with a client right now. We did over a hundred and one interviews, getting buy-in from all of these people all across their department, and it’s been extremely successful so far, so it’s really neat to see how it applies in my day-to-day, even though it all started out at the University of Wisconsin in a small little meeting room, everyone sweating it out meeting Coach for the first time, so… [Laughs.]

Melissa: [Laughs.] So one of the things that I have really enjoyed in doing this podcast series and talking with incredible athletes and coaches is that one of the things that sticks out is there seems to be a difference between being a really good team and being a national championship team. So I’m curious as to what you think goes into that and how much culture you think plays a part in becoming a, like such a winning team. And tell us a…just tell us a little bit about your thoughts on that.

Victoria: At Wisconsin it was really just the little things. So Coach truly believed every standard in that book—where you sat in class, how you ate for a game or something like that, you know, the nutrition you were putting into your body, all of those things truly mattered.

Another thing he did have us do, and I definitely hold onto this in my professional career today, but we had this rubber band activity. And it was lovingly called “snap yourself.” So he had noticed that a lot of individuals on the team, myself included, when we made a mistake on the court we would immediately get angry. And it was like this internal anger. And in reality it…it manifested inside of you, but it’s contagious, at the end of the day, so he needed a way to get rid of that and really focus us less on anger of a mistake and more on the solution to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

Melissa: Mm-hmm.

0:11:56

Victoria: So when everyone was being negative one day at practice he came up to us all at the end, and we’re all standing around in a circle by the white board, and by the practice plan. And I remember thinking why…why is he just holding a bag of rubber bands? Like he’s the head c…like he doesn’t need…like why…like does he have paperwork to do?

Melissa: Yeah.

Victoria: Like what’s going on? And he puts a rubber band on everyone’s wrist and he says whenever you think something negative, do something negative, or say something negative, you need to snap yourself. So we wore this rubber band for 48 hours, and the entire team held each other accountable of snapping themselves, to the point where we…we actually created a hashtag—hashtag snap yo self.

So in our group chat if someone even said something negative just texting the team or something like that you would respond with a hashtag. And we all lived, I mean, together at the time, so they would have to snap themselves, and we would hold them accountable.

0:12:57

But I remember the next day it rained, someone stepped into a puddle, and she was just snapping herself all the way to practice, to the point where she showed up and her wrist was just bright red.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Victoria: And it was like what happened? Like what on earth? And she said it’s just been a rough day.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Victoria: And you don’t realize you’re making or thinking negatively or making negative actions or anything like that up until the point where you’re calling yourself out on it. And that’s the first step to realizing okay, my first reaction to serving a volleyball into the net is needing to snap myself versus thinking oh, I’ll just aim higher next time. Again, it’s such a small change, but I truly think that’s the difference between good and great. It’s not faking it until you make it, it’s rewiring your brain and everyone on the team doing that, too, for the greater good.

Melissa: So it kind of stops the behavior, in a way, and it…or makes you cognizant of it.

Victoria: Definitely. I do think another one would be this idea of… There was, I mean, you go from mid to bottom of the Big Ten to national championships, right, like you’re obviously the underdog. No one’s gonna believe in you at all, whatsoever. Everyone’s gonna call you crazy for having these huge lofty dreams of making it to the national championship.

And I remember Coach, he used to take articles that essentially put us down and made us sound quite awful, or predictions that we were gonna lose these really big games or things like that, and he would slip them in people’s lockers, or he would tape them up to the board before practice.

0:17:54

And it just, this fire in your belly at the end of the day ‘cause you were so mad that someone would say that. But not just mad—again, going back to the whole idea of having to channel it into action. That is something that I…I really do think is applicable today. Now that being said, no one’s saying like the company is gonna end or anything like that, right?

Melissa: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Victoria: But it’s the idea of, you know, Eagle Hill is a smaller company, and it’s this…there’s that fire in your gut because of it, and it’s really exciting to be here

Melissa: So tell us then about the impact that these culture changes had on the team and what happened as a result of all this culture change.

0:14:00

Victoria: You go from mid to bottom of the Big Ten to all of a sudden making it to the national championships, and no one believes that you’re gonna get there. People were calling us crazy. We had had a great season, and we were still ranked at the bottom of the NCAA tournament. Like it was just…it was crazy.

But at the same time you just, you stayed positive and you looked at each other, and you knew everyone was on the same page, and there was just this strength within the team, and this vulnerability that everyone knew everything about you, and they were gonna hold you accountable to it, and…or to this… They were going to hold you accountable to the team standards. And it just created this environment that you could be your true self, but your best true self. And then on top of that you could win together.

0:14:55

Melissa: So I know you were new to the team when you and Kelly were new together. What did you hear from some of your teammates about what the big difference from pre Kelly to post Kelly in terms of that culture and how it kind of brought you together as a team?

Victoria: I’m not really sure what they said, necessarily. Everyone was very—and this is so true—everyone was very forward thinking the entire time because now that we had a new coach nothing that happened in the past mattered. And Kelly never reflected back on the past, necessarily. I mean, even his opening line, right, like…

Melissa: I don’t like to lose?

Victoria: I don’t like to lose. It’s like okay, well, we’re not gonna lose from here on out, like here we go. And it was just this forward thinking, like okay, we’re not gonna lose, we’re gonna win.

Melissa: Mm-hmm.

0:15:59

Victoria: And to the point where, I mean, every single game he…he actually had this saying, and it was…it was “get on the train.” So it is your personal responsibility to get on the train before it leaves the station. Now that being said, after a big win he would say get on the train, it’s time to move on to the next game. After a big loss he would say get on the train, it’s time to move on to the next game. And that was really his mentality. So it didn’t matter, win or lose, we were always just moving forward, in his mind.

Melissa: That’s interesting.

Victoria: It wasn’t even just moving forward, though, because then you get to the NCAA tournament, and he has this whole thing that it’s not about survive and advance. And for any sports lover out there—

Melissa: Yeah, what does that mean?

A lot of sports fans out there are aware of this term “survive and advance.” And it’s the idea of when you make it into the NCAA tournament, or when you make it into any tournament, you need to survive the game you’re currently up against and advance to the next.

Melissa: Okay.

Victoria: Our coach hated that. Oh, my goodness, he hated it. We called it “dominate and conquer.” So it wasn’t surviving, it was dominating. And it wasn’t advancing, it was conquering. Because it was…it was just the idea that it’s…it’s not good enough to make it or squeeze by.

0:17:58

You know, we were the underdogs. We had to prove our worth. We had to prove everything. And you can’t do that by surviving and advancing. You have to do that by dominating and conquering. And they still use that term to this day.

Melissa: Oh, interesting.

Victoria: And I think he actually used it before Wisconsin, too. I’m pretty sure a few Dayton girls would know that one as well.

Melissa: So I’m trying to figure out, I’m trying to isolate, in a way, what the magic was if you think about it ‘cause we, you and I have talked about how it’s not one single player, right, that makes the magic of a team, and maybe not even the magic of one single coach, I don’t know. But what is it, do you think, that enabled Wisconsin to go from being in the bottom of the Big Ten to making it to the NCAA championships?

Victoria: It was a beautifully mastered culture change. Anything from how someone thought with the snapping of themselves, to how we were looking at games coming up, to how we didn’t look back.

0:19:06

I mean, I would really say those three things. But by doing that, our team was close. We had each other’s backs. We knew that nobody outside of our gym and our four walls believed in us, and it had to be on us.

And…maybe this is where it ties back to life at Eagle Hill even, right? It’s…our clients tell us all the time we know who works for Eagle Hill because they’re smiling when they walk down the halls. You know, the idea of that snap yourself comes in, right? Like people here are happy. They genuinely enjoy what they do.

But it’s more than that. It’s the fact that you know that your team has your back, you know that you’re working towards something great, the gold standard of consulting. That’s what we want to do. We’re all on board. We’re all here for it. And that’s what’s special, just like Wisconsin.

0:20:06

Melissa: I think we’ve touched on a little bit about this, but I want to ask the question specifically. Clearly you learned a lot from the time at Wisconsin, a lot from Kelly, a lot from your teammates. What…what would you say is the top learnings that you still apply to your…your work life today?

Victoria: So I’m just gonna be a broken record, I guess.

Melissa: Mm-hmm.

Victoria: Definitely that rubber band activity. Staying positive all the time is extremely important, just knowing that, you know, clients come to you with really difficult problems, things that they can’t solve on their own or just need a little support with. And it’s gonna be hard to figure it out sometimes, but you’ve got to stay positive and you’ll find your way through it. Having that trust in yourself and those around you is extremely important.

0:20:56

Looking back I do think another…another thing I took away from volleyball and has impacted my life in consulting is the idea of compounding wins, probably.

Victoria: It’s…you have a win. You have a really good meeting or something like that, and it’s that same idea. You have to get on the train, you have to move on and focus on your next one. But by doing that you will…you set yourself up for a lot of wins along the way. Even if they’re just small, or even if they’re big you’re setting yourself up for success along the way. So making sure you’re on the train and moving on to whatever it is next, learning the lessons, doing the preparation, everything on the train, on the way to your next game is extremely important.

Part of the reason I loved volleyball so much is because you could look at people also in the sport and say wow, I want to be like them.

0:21:58

So my gold star, if you will, in volleyball was always Kerri Walsh Jennings, ‘cause she was a mom, she was an Olympian, like she did it all. Now she’s starting her own volleyball clinics and like teaching everyone the game of volleyball. It’s amazing. And I worked at other places in consulting where that’s not necessarily the place where I can look around and see myself wanting to be whoever’s in that next role. But here especially at Eagle Hill you look around—I mean, like you’re a mom.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Victoria: I’m serious. Like that’s amazing to me. Like we have people in the office who have a life, but then they’re also doing these amazing things. And that’s something that I learned in volleyball I need. Like I need to be able to look at that next step and say wow, that’s something I really want to do, that’s amazing. And it’s something that I get to have here, which is really neat.

Melissa: Cool. So finally, a question we ask in all of our interviews, if you could have one superpower, what would it be and why?

0:23:00

Victoria: I would fly. And I would fly everywhere. One, just commuting in D.C. is very tough, I’m sure as—

Melissa: That it is, that it is. [Laughs.]

Victoria: —most people know. I would skip every Metro line that ever existed. I would never have to wait for a car or anything again to move. It would just…it would be great to be able to fly over D.C. traffic, but it would also be awesome to see things from a different perspective and a higher viewpoint, if you will.

Melissa: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Victoria. I loved learning more about your story, and thank you for joining us.

Victoria: Thank you.

0:23:33 [End of recording.]

How do you find your role on a team, and adapt your strengths to what the team needs for success? Melissa talks teamwork with Lindsay Henson, Director at Eagle Hill and former professional soccer player.

Melissa Jezior: Welcome to the cultur(ED) podcast. I’m Melissa Jezior, your host. On this podcast, we have conversations with top culture makers in the world today from varied industries and backgrounds to unpack the visible and not-so-visible forces that make up culture, an often-overlooked superpower of organizations. I’m intrigued to learn from elite athletes and top coaches about their philosophy on organizational culture, as well as learn some strategies and tactics for building and sustaining winning cultures.

I am here today with one of my esteemed colleagues, Lindsay Henson. She grew up playing soccer, was ranked as the top player in the state of North Carolina, and went on to play with some of the most successful teams in college sports, the University of North Carolina, and then after that she went into professional soccer and played along some really well-known players like Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach.

00:00:55

So, I’m really excited to sit down with Lindsay – Lindsay’s been with Eagle Hill for three years – and understand a little bit more about her journey in terms of how she got into soccer and some of the lessons that she has learned playing soccer into her day-to-day work life as being a working mom and kind of learn a little bit more about your journey. So, with that, I’m going to jump right in and maybe just let’s start with how did you get into soccer?

Lindsay Henson: So, like many things in life, I got into soccer by following my brother. So, my brother and I are two years apart, and so as – well, of course, I was really young. I was four when we started – when I started playing soccer.

Melissa: Oh, my goodness.

Lindsay: Yeah, tiny, right? One of those kids where the shin guards go up to the knee, and then like the shorts go over the knees, so you actually don’t see any leg?

Melissa: Yeah.

Lindsay: That was me when I started playing soccer. So, I of course started when I was four. And as my mom tells me, the rest was kind of history. I loved it, really–

Melissa: So, you loved it right from the beginning.

Lindsay: Right from the beginning I loved it, because it was something – I got to run around and chase a ball and hang out with friends. And so, I was kind of hooked apparently from early on.

Melissa: Early on. And so, did you immediately go into, like, the travel teams and you–

00:01:58

Lindsay: So, I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. And this is – I don’t want to say how long, but let’s just say pretty–

Melissa: Not very long ago at all.

Lindsay: I know. When I was a youth soccer player, right? And so, soccer was still kind of up and coming in the country, and while there were kind of grassroots youth programs, I would say the infrastructure we have today around youth soccer did not exist back in that day. But we did in Raleigh have what they used to call select club teams. And so, it’s kind of like travel soccer now in kind of the local D.C. world. And so, I tried out for – and I don’t know that – I don’t even think at the time they had a girls’ team, and so I of course tried out for the boys’ team. I was like, why not, I’ve been playing with boys since I was, you know, four, so let’s give it a go.

So, I remember in second grade I tried out for the Raleigh Caps. Funny story on making that team. Again, so my mom kind of reminds me, so I was the, I think I was one of the only girls who tried out for the team. And flash forward to like a week later after the tryouts.

00:02:57

My mom gets a call from the coach, and the coach calls and says, hey, super excited, we just wanted to let you know that we thought Lindsay was a great player, he’s going to add a lot to the team, we think he’s terrific. And my mom’s like, wait, what? What? And she’s like, that’s fantastic, but just to let you know, Lindsay’s a girl.

Melissa: That’s funny.

Lindsay: Yeah, so.

Melissa: And so, when did you start to realize then that you had this kind of amazing potential inside of you?

Lindsay: I don’t know. I might currently deny that I have that, right?

Melissa: I don’t believe it for a second.

Lindsay: I mean, I think I knew pretty early on. I think from – I feel really fortunate I played with the boys, right, growing up because playing with the boys, especially as I got into middle school, it was a very fast-paced game, they were very physical. You think about, you know, sixth-, seventh-, eighth-grade boys. I mean, they’re getting muscles and getting really fast and really strong. The game is very physical. And so, it really changed.

00:04:00

And so, I think at that point, like as I was kind of getting into that age range and realizing, I can still keep up, it’s gotten a lot harder, but I’m still able to keep up, and I think a lot of that experience shaped the way I played, because I knew I couldn’t compete from like a speed and physical kind of nature. But I could compete with how I played, and I was always very good about positioning, and I knew where to be, and I was able to make the passes and that kind of thing. So, I think it was around kind of that time frame that I realized, like, oh, this is fun, this is great, but really I would say even though it was really not until high school that I realized, like, oh, I might actually have some skills and then like do some skills in this.

Melissa: So, how did soccer then shape your decisions in terms of college and where you wanted to go to school and how you wound up at UNC?

Lindsay: That was an interesting process. So, transitioning into high school, I went from – I finally was like, OK, enough is enough. I need to move into playing with women and with girls.

00:05:01

And so, I switched clubs, and in doing that I was fortunate enough to get on a team called the Raleigh Spartans. And that was a great, great experience. So, then a coach of that team, his name is Izzy Hernandez, and he was our club coach, but he was also my high school team coach. So, I got really fortunate to kind of get to know him, and he got to know me very well as a player. And through that experience, we got a lot of exposure at different tournaments. So, it was about at that time we went as a team to the UNC women’s soccer camp. So, UNC has a long kind of a very well-known and kind of well-thought-of summer camp program. They do camp – I mean, it is run like a machine now, but they do a camp every week, multiple times in the summer. And so, our team went as a team one time. And it was coming out of that experience that I thought, OK, maybe I’ll play – maybe I’ll be lucky enough to play in college, right?

00:06:00

So, I got home from camp, and a couple weeks later, I get a handwritten note from Anson Dorrance, which is like, hey – and Anson Dorrance, for those of you who don’t know, he’s the head coach of the UNC women’s soccer team, which is, you know, UNC’s been this dynasty since I don’t even know when, like late ’70s or early ’80s, right. And so, I, me, little Lindsay from, like, Raleigh, was not that far from Chapel Hill, but still, I get this handwritten note from Anson just basically saying, hey, saw you play at camp, was really impressed, looking forward to, like, continuing to watch you play and grow as you kind of progress in your high school years. And so, it was that moment I was like, wow, maybe I can be good enough to play soccer somewhere, you know.

Melissa: And then when did you kind of like narrow the field and decide UNC was for you?

Lindsay: Let’s see. It was probably not that long after I got that [00:06:52].

Melissa: How did the transition go when you actually got into college, like clearly playing at a whole different level? Like, how did you seek help when you needed it? How did that go?

00:07:03

Lindsay: Yeah, it was rough at first. So, I went from my high school career, leading up to my high school career, I would say I was kind of one of the better people if not one of the best people on the team. And I was kind of used to that. When I got to Carolina, I mean, Carolina was full of people that were the most high-caliber players in each of their age groups. And I came in with a very strong class. There’s this thing called Parade All-American, which is the top kind of 20 kids in the country, and they’re given that award. And so, I think my class had multiple Parade All-Americans. And so, I come in, and I never forget, the first week at Carolina, one of the things, it’s called preseason, right. You come in before the season starts, and you start to get acclimated. And so, the first thing that you do is called fitness testing. And I failed I think probably three out of the five fitness tests, which I was mortified. You know, mortified.

00:07:58

I’d always been taught, you know, my coach in high school had always taught me, if nothing else, just be fit. So, I was mortified. And I had to go to a thing called Breakfast Club. And Breakfast Club is if you failed any of the fitness tests – yeah, this is not like the movie, right? This is not like the movie. So, you had to go to Breakfast Club, which is for that week, I think you had to go for a week, but until you kind of basically passed the test again, until you had the opportunity to pass it, you had to go and run extra in the morning. It was a rough start.

Melissa: So, tell me what – after playing at this amazing level in college, what did you really find to be the difference between – in terms of mindset, of the players that were really great and the players that were truly premier players?

Lindsay: So, we used to always talk about this mindset of, like, “refuse to lose.” I mean, we talked a lot about it at Carolina, too. It’s just like, you – Anson’s thing was building character.

00:09:00

He wasn’t just about building a great soccer team or building great individual soccer players. I mean, he basically was focused on building the character of the players and the team. And so, we had this – I mean, he used to say this thing called, you know, you’re just tough as shit. That was like his thing. You’ve just got to be tough as shit. And that was what he expected. And so, that mindset of “refuse to lose” permeated everything we did.

Melissa: So, have you found then that type of mentality has translated for you in terms of how you manage with your own teams and how you interact with your – I was even thinking about this when you were talking about how you managed your life with–

Lindsay: Yeah.

Melissa: Like, I imagine some of that comes back into play again now being a working mother, right?

Lindsay: Yeah.

Melissa: You’re doing many things at once.

Lindsay: Yes.

Melissa: So, I’m curious to hear how some of those have kind of like shaped you into who you are today and how you operate not only in your own life but creating teams as well.

00:09:56

Lindsay: Yeah. So, I think one of the first things that I think of when I think about that and how it’s kind of carried me forward to where I am now in terms of a working mom and all that is just kind of no whining. We had this thing at Carolina that was just, you don’t whine. [00:10:08]

Melissa: Can you tell my kids that?

Lindsay: Yeah, exactly. I’m like, just don’t whine. Like, if you need to whine, you just need to walk away and do it because it’s not acceptable here. Like, you may not like it, and you’re welcome to tell that to me. Please don’t do it in a whiny voice. Please don’t whine. Because nothing to be done about that, right?

Melissa: Yeah.

Lindsay: So, I think that notion of, like, toughness and – but I think how that translates, it’s like the mental toughness of adversity, adversity of when something bad happens at work and it’s like, OK, don’t sit and wallow around it, right, just what can you do to fix it or, like, how do you quickly get into solutions, like problem solving or – there’s nothing good to happen by just sitting and whining about things. My kids probably hate that that’s something that I really value. I heard this morning, so hot off the presses, bus comes at 8:30 to pick up my kids, right, and so we’re usually outside kicking the soccer ball around at 8:10.

00:11:02

This morning, I overhear my 11-year-old son tell my seven-year-old son, well, you know, if you just want to have fun playing soccer and not really get any better, you just keep doing what you’re doing and kick the ball against the wall with no purpose. But if you want to get better, like, I’ll play with you and I’ll help you practice. And I just thought, oh, my God, what have I done? I’ve got to tell you, I was so torn. I was like, part of me’s really proud of you right now, but some part of me’s feeling sad for my seven-year-old. But I just think that notion of, like, toughness and the will to want to get better and that kind of – I think that’s something that clearly I’m translating to my kids, for better or worse. But I think from a working perspective, like in the working world, I think the one thing that all of my soccer experiences have taught me is, as much as you can figure out how do you be adaptable to any new environment – I mean, I played on a ton of teams growing up.

00:12:04

I played on teams where I was the only girl with a team full of boys. I played on a team where I was 10 and everyone else was 14. I played on just a ton of different teams. And through that, one thing I was always able to do was fit in. And I think that’s really important. It’s not fit in to lose yourself, but it’s like saying, I’m confident and know what I can contribute to this team, and I need to figure out how to fit in fast. You know what I mean? So, I think that is a very applicable thing in the working world because we’re all in different teams. Like, you could be on three different teams in a day, but you could be on a leadership team. You could be on your project team. You could be on your peer team. There’s a lot of different teams that you play in every day. And it’s like, how do you fit in, and how do you be confident in what you’re contributing to that team, but yet also kind of enhance the team dynamic. So, growing up in my career, I was always the assist person. I was the person who liked to pass the other person who was going to score the ball. That was just what I liked, it was what I was good at, all that kind of thing.

00:13:00

Melissa: Knowing you today, that’s still – I would still – yes.

Lindsay: Yeah.

Melissa: That still very much describes you, I think.

Lindsay: Absolutely. And, like, I want to set you up to score. I don’t want to be the person who scores, but I’m super happy to support you in that. It is very much how I am still today. Well, it’s a classic midfielder, right? I’m a midfielder. I played some defense, too, but, you know, the midfielder, like the persona of the midfielder is the one who, like, runs tirelessly, selflessly all over the field, chasing everything and then passing the other person the ball versus, you know, scoring the goal. But this woman, Ry Johnson, I was a sophomore in high school. Ry was a senior. And Ry was our scorer. She was the scorer. I mean, other people scored, too, but when you think about who really carried that load for the team, it was Ry. So, we did very well last season. We were getting into the conference tournament. And next thing you know, Ry broke her leg, was out for the rest of the season.

00:13:56

And I’ll never forget my high school coach coming up to me almost quite literally at the same time, after we got Ry taken care of, of course, and was like, well, so, your role needs to change now. And you’ve got to switch the mindset. I know you like being the person who gives the other people the ball and they score, but we need you to score. Like, we have a conference tournament to get through, we’ve got a state tournament to get through, we need you to change your role and think about that differently, and I need you to score goals now. And I’ll just never forget, like I appreciated his directness in that, because it wasn’t my natural – you know, it just wasn’t naturally kind of what I thought of for myself. But I think that is something, too, when you think about translating it, kind of in all parts of your life, I think being clear on roles, I mean, I think one of the things is really in good teams, people are clear on their roles. You know, there is a clarity around what is it that I’m going to contribute, and there’s also a willingness to say, that may not be what I need to contribute tomorrow, but today this is what I’m–

Melissa: I know what I’m contributing.

00:14:58

Lindsay: Exactly. And so, I also thought it was such an interesting thing. I was like, but I’m the team player, and I was like having this internal wrestling, like I can’t be the team player and be the, like, you know, the propped-up goal scorer. Was clearly not right, right? Like, I was off base in my thinking around that. But I just remember struggling with that. I was like, oh, but I don’t want to be the scorer. I don’t want to be [00:15:19]. Like, I’m the team player. I’m the assist person.

Melissa: So, how did that work then? I assume you transitioned roles.

Lindsay: I transitioned roles. I mean, I think, you know, it’s not a black and white, right? Like, I still kind of played my style, but instead of having a short and then passing it to Ry, who might be a little bit more open, I took the shot. So, again, it’s that mindset. It’s not a radical shift, but for me, mentally it was a radical shift. But practically on the field, it was not that radical of a shift. You know what I mean?

Melissa: Mm-hmm.

Lindsay: So, I think that’s something that is a clear, like – I’ve noticed about my soccer career and my professional career, something that–

Melissa: That makes sense.

Lindsay: –I think I’ve been able to pull forward, yeah.

00:16:00

Melissa: So, after you’ve been on so many teams, have you been on any teams where there wasn’t really a good strong team culture? And can you think of another place where there was really a good strong team culture, and what do you think contributed to both?

Lindsay: I would say in terms of teams where maybe the culture – and I would say it wasn’t that it wasn’t a good culture. It just wasn’t a good culture yet. You know what I mean?

Melissa: Mm-hmm.

Lindsay: And I would say that was probably my first year in the professional league. So, I played with the Washington Freedom. And that was an environment where you had the best players from all over the country and the world coming together to play with these eight – this new women’s professional league, and there were eight teams in the league. And the process to form the teams was that they basically split up the national team players and divvied them up against the eight different teams, and then they pulled in some of the top elite international players and gave those to the teams. And then they did a draft with primarily the rest of the U.S. field of the top talent.

00:17:00

And I think the challenge there is that that first season, we were just – a lot of us didn’t know each other. I’m fortunate enough to know Mia Hamm. She was on the Freedom. And so, I knew her, and I knew some other players, but you’re basically bringing this team together for the first time. People hadn’t played together. You had lots of people from different gen – you know, you had the Mias of the world and kind of all the age ranges in between up into 20-year-olds. And so, it’s just a – it took a while for our team to really find its groove and to figure out what type of team do we want to be. And then coming back the second year, it was night and day difference. We’d had the offseason to bond and to get to know each other, and I think coming back we had a stronger sense of, like, what are the roles we each needed to play, what is the culture we wanted from the team, that kind of thing. We wanted to, you know, have the kind of hallmark of work hard. We always wanted to – again, going back to that notion of, like, we wanted to outrun other teams and that kind of thing.

00:17:58

So, I think would be one where it just took a while. The best cultures – yeah. It’s funny, I’ve talked a lot about my UNC days, but to talk a little bit about a different team, which is this club team that I played for in high school. And that team, we ended up winning the national championship, which was a huge coup for a Raleigh, North Carolina, team to win a national championship, because at the time, again, there were certain – like certain states you expected to have those high calibers. Like Florida, Texas, California, right? Or, you know, maybe up in St. Louis. You’d have teams come from there and they’d win. But our team, we basically pulled players from all over the state, and we stayed together as a team for multiple years. And what I think was interesting about that culture and what made us so effective is we were definitely a team with no egos. You know, we were all kind of, you know, had very – just coming from different parts of the state and just coming together, we didn’t have a lot of egos.

00:19:00

We didn’t have – other than having them for ourselves, I don’t feel like people, especially when we went to that national championship, had a lot of expectations for us. In the semifinals, we played the team who had won it I think the year before and beat them. And then in the finals, we ended up playing this team from California who I think had won maybe the year before. So, each team had won it previously. And we’re like, oh, well, we’re the new man on the scene, I guess, right? And I think just again, that “refuse to lose” mentality we talked about, we were losing I want to say 80 minutes in, and soccer games are 90 minutes long. So, we had 10 minutes left, and we’re losing 2-nothing. And we’re like, OK, you know – it could have gone two ways. We could have said, all right, we’re going to lose this game, and, wow, good for us for making it to the championship. Instead, we scored two goals in 10 minutes and ended up winning in penalty kicks and won the national championship. So, I think that culture of – we were very selfless because, again, it was like, we were all kind of just, I don’t know, people didn’t have expectations for us. We kind of created them for ourselves. But we just refused to lose.

00:20:02

Melissa: I love that. That’s awesome. What’s your biggest takeaway, I guess, after playing in all these different teams and different levels of teams and different types of cultures that you really apply in your own teams today in a work setting?

Lindsay: I think the thing I would always want for our teams, and hopefully we’re creating that here with our teams, is this notion of play for others. Play for the others first, at least. Play for your teammates. Do it for your teammates. So, whether that means do your best on a project or facilitate – whatever it means, do it for your teammates. And this notion of, it’s so much more satisfying, you know, quote-unquote “win something” or to have an excellent client be wowed, to do it for your team versus doing it for yourself. And so, I don’t know, I personally get a lot more satisfaction out of that. And so, that notion of selflessness. I think the other thing, and if you know me and it probably comes out is, just don’t take yourself too seriously.

00:21:00

Be confident in what you bring to the team, but don’t ever take yourself too seriously, and don’t ever, like, I think don’t ever think that you’re above anything or above doing anything.

Melissa: Yeah. I know what you mean.

Lindsay: The other day, we had this project at one of our client sites, and we had – it was like all hands on deck in terms of delivering it. And I was going there to check in on the team. And so, the head of the project, I could see she was, like, struggling with something, and she was kind of looking at me, and clearly holding back, didn’t want to say something. And I was like, hey, what’s going on? You look like you’re working through something. She’s like, well, we need another note taker for the session. We don’t have enough, and we’re down one man. And I was like, well, so what do you want to do about it? And she’s like, well, do you think you could take notes? And I’m like, well, absolutely I can take notes. But it was just, you know, I think that notion of, we should all be willing, able, and want to jump in to help our teams in any scenario.

00:22:00

But it was funny for me, I was like, please don’t ever hesitate to ask me. We should all be 100 percent OK and willing and excited to help our team in any way, shape, or form.

Melissa: And so, what did you learn most about working alongside people like Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach?

Lindsay: I learned so much. But I think this notion of, you can be a fierce, fierce, fierce competitor and also be a great teammate, I think that was a – and they also, I mean, Mia Hamm, I mean, she was just an incredible athlete, incredible soccer player. I mean, she lifted everybody’s performance because of the expectations she had for her own performance. And so, I think that notion of that, it really rubbed off on me, too. I mean, and she wasn’t – I mean, she was definitely the leader of our team. But she wasn’t the one who was like, always in your face or always screaming at you or always, like, the most vocal on the field.

00:23:00

But, like, her performance was clearly setting the tone for the team. And so, I think that, too, of, like, you know, leaders can take many shapes, right. And so, you don’t always have to be the – a leader doesn’t have to be – look like the next and look like the next one. They can be very different.

Melissa: That’s cool. That’s very cool. Well, Lindsay, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your background. It’s been great. I’m so lucky that I get to learn more about this, because we work together on a day-to-day basis, but I think that kind of gives us all the time we have today. So, thank you so much for joining us.

Lindsay: Thanks for having me.

Melissa: Thanks for listening to our cultur(ED) podcast. If you like the show and want to learn more, check out our cultur(ED) website: culturedcast.com. And please follow us on iTunes. If you’d like to know more about our research, visit eaglehillconsulting.com/culture.

00:23:46 [End of recording.]

On this episode Melissa is joined by Cathy Reese, the head coach of University of Maryland’s women’s lacrosse team to discuss how core values and culture can yield success.

Melissa: Welcome to the cultur(ED) podcast. I’m Melissa Jezior, your host. On this podcast we have conversations with top culturemakers in the world today from varied industries and backgrounds to unpack the visible and not so visible forces that make up culture, an often overlooked superpower of organizations. I’m intrigued to learn from elite athletes and top coaches about their philosophy on organizational culture. As well as learn some strategies and tactics for building and sustaining winning cultures.

On this episode we’re joined by Cathy Reese, the head coach of University of Maryland’s women’s lacrosse team.

00:00:40

Melissa: Cathy, thank you so much for taking the time today.

Cathy: Oh, of course. It should be fun.

Melissa: Well, if you’re not from the Northeast or the Mid Atlantic region of the country you may not be aware that lacrosse is a big deal here, and the Lady Terrapin team is the biggest deal across lacrosse. I’ve just started myself to get into lacrosse because my 9-year-old daughter picked up a stick last winter, and has not put it down since. This past May the University of Maryland’s women’s lacrosse team won the NCAA championship, the team’s fifth since Cathy became head coach in 2007, and the program’s 15th NCAA championship overall.

00:01:22

I have to imagine that culture of the team is one of the driving forces behind the success.

I read recently a quote from Jen Adams, she’s Loyola’s coach, and Cathy, I think one of your former teammates and assistants and she said—which, I think Is a really telling quote and a great set up for our discussion on culture—she said “they are great players so they win”—except it doesn’t work that way. Because If that’s the way it worked then lots of teams would have lots of national championships.”

There’s something special going on at the University of Maryland, and I think it has to do with the people that are in charge and are leading. So that’s a pretty powerful quote. And I am excited to talk to you, and congratulations on all of your successes.

Cathy: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, Jen’s a special person, one of my favorite people, for sure, that I’ve had the pleasure to play with at Maryland. I was a senior when she was a freshman, and then we were assistant coaches together.

00:02:13

I coached her for 3 years and then we were assistants at Maryland together, and then we both went out—

Melissa: Oh, cool.

Cathy: —to Denver and back to Maryland, so we have a lot of history there, for sure, but she’s a special person, that’s for sure.

Melissa: Oh, that’s awesome. Well, I love the idea that it isn’t just about having a team of great players that makes you so successful. So tell us, what can you share in terms of your thinking behind the culture and the values you’ve established for your team, and how much do your core values and culture play into the individual players and the overall team success?

Cathy: Well, it’s interesting ‘cause I think I’ve learned a lot about this as I’ve grown over the years. You know, when I was—in 1995 when I was a freshman at Maryland and played for Cindy Timchal, who’s now the current head coach at the Naval Academy, I kind of walked out of a high school state championship program into Maryland, and we were right there competing for national championships.

00:03:09

And through our four years there, we won each year. And so you don’t really…you don’t really think about any of that until, you know, you’re now in the coaching position, and you’re moving on, and you’re like gosh, why…what makes these teams different than other teams out there. And they do, they’ve got great players, but I think it’s, you know, it’s the people that really matter.

It’s that everyone is totally bought in, selfless, and really believes that they’re fighting for something, you know, bigger than themselves, you know, that they’re all in, willing to do whatever it takes for the good of the team, to put themselves kind of to the side and recognize that even though we’ve got a group of 30 some players, every one role is important, everyone’s role is powerful, and we need everybody to be all on the same page if we’re gonna be successful.

So I think there’s a lot of these pieces that as a coach you learn over time, and you learn how valuable and important, you know, each of these lessons you’ve learned along the way has been. And ultimately, you know, here we are now, and having won the championship this past season.

00:04:08

We’ve got a really special group of people, and it, you know, everybody is just that, they’re all bought in, they believe in each other, and they’re ready to compete every day.

Melissa: So you mentioned totally bought in a couple of times, and getting everyone on the same page, which I could not agree more. Even in a business setting I think that’s a huge part of success. What… how do you do that?

Cathy: Well, I think a lot of it is, it’s…this is…this the way it is. For example, this year we have 12 freshmen that just came into our program. You know, we recruited them and, you know, watched them over the years. They’ve gotten to know our staff and the players on the team into our program.

And now they come in and they’re looking to what’s the norm, you know, what’s the norm for our organization, and what’s the norm for Maryland lacrosse, and how are the seniors and the juniors, who have been a part of this group for a couple years, how are they paving the way, how are they setting the way. And we have had years, our years that have been the most successful are the years when my leadership is the most powerful, you know.

00:05:07

And by powerful I don’t mean powerful as in bossing people around or doing this, but I mean leading the way, setting the tone, you know, letting people know what we’re all about and what we’re working towards. And so that’s been…that’s been something, you know, that’s, again, we’ve been the most successful when we’ve had the strong leadership. And I think it’s really important for me as their coach and leader of the program to really engage, engage the leadership aspect of all of our players and try to really build and develop them, because that sure trickles down and…and is a big part of our culture.

Melissa: That’s cool. So do you view yourself as the owner of the Maryland lacrosse women’s culture?

Cathy: Well, no I—oh, gosh, the owner? No.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Cathy: But I will—so this year, for example, is really different than where we were last year. So we had a very strong senior class last year, strong in a couple ways. I had a lot of people that played a lot of time on the field, you know, at game in. But I also had ten strong personalities that were very different but complemented each other well.

00:06:07

And so when I as a coach can work with those leaders to really let people shine in the areas where their strengths are, they’re able to bring the people along with them, you know, that are younger. And now for this year, for example, we graduated a lot of…a lot of seniors, and so my team’s a lot younger this year.

And so I think for our staff as coaches, we need to take a bigger role in that leadership piece, you know, and spending time and working with our upperclassmen and working with who will be our leaders this season, and just becoming a little more active, you know. A lot of times it’s been nice to kind of hand that over to the players, and now, with this year, when we have more of a younger team, our coaching staff needs to be more…more present and more involved in all of it.

Melissa: Oh, I have so many questions, I can’t wait to dig in. [Laughs.] So, you know, I love this idea of how you’re talking about your leaders. How do you identify who those leaders might be? What do you look for?

00:07:04

Cathy: Well, so the way that we’ve run it here is we’ll go through our fall season, which for us is about a 6 week season where we’re on the field doing stuff, and then the rest of the time outside of that 6 week window the girls are just lifting and conditioning and, you know, doing that sort of stuff. At the end of our fall segment we meet with each player individually and just kind of ask them a couple questions of who do they see as leaders on the team. I want to hear from them. You know, I want to hear who our players believe should be their captain, you know, of the team and why.

And so I have them vote for players. I have them rank them in order. And then we as a staff go through and kind of calculate and analyze everybody’s votes and see where it puts us. And then some years I’ve had, gosh, 2 captains, some years we’ve had 4 captains, some years I’ve had a leadership council because we have a variety of players who were named, you know, in those meetings, and so we want to make sure that we’re including everybody because if we’re talking about them they have something to bring to the table. You know, they’ve got something to add if there’s a player on the team that looks up to them in a leadership position.

00:08:08

Every year’s different, but I like to get through part of the fall so we can see, and the freshmen can see, who’s really stepping up, who’s kind of taking over, who’s taking the other players under their wings and who’s moving forward with it.

Melissa: One of the other things that I admire about you is not only, you know, have you created this winning team, but—and you identify clearly leaders on your own team from year to year—but you’ve also been creating a generation of strong female leaders. So I read about some of your protégés having moved into coaching at all levels—you know, high school, club, collegiate. You know, Kathy Rudkin at Severn, Meg Taylor at Navy—

Cathy: Oh, yeah.

Melissa: Colleen Dawson, head coach at my alma mater, William & Mary. So tell me about how you…what are your views on developing leaders?

00:08:55

Cathy: Well, I think this could even go back to when Cindy coached at Maryland and I had the opportunity to play under her. And there’s so many Maryland alumni that are out there in coaching, whatever age, whether it’s, again, high school, youth club, college. And I think, you know, when people would ask how is it that Cindy did that, and I think a lot of it was because we were really passionate about what we did. We were passionate about our program. We loved what we did. We loved the competition. We loved being a part of it. And you want to continue that when you enjoy…when you enjoy doing something like that.

And so, you know, when I took my first coaching job I actually graduated, and Cindy brought me on staff at Maryland. And I hadn’t even thought about college coaching. You know, I didn’t even…that wasn’t even something that was like a career, you know, a picture of that for me when I started out college. But because the opportunity was there, and I loved my experience at Maryland, it was a no-brainer. You know, look at this. I can learn from the best, I can be around such great players playing a game that I love, working with awesome athletes. And so it just kind of was one of these things I think still transitions till today.

00:09:57

You know, these guys graduate from playing for me, and playing here, and I want them to be passionate about what they do, whatever it is that they choose, you know. If you love what you do you want to do the best you can at it. And, you know, these guys love the sport of lacrosse. They love competition. They love their teammates. They love being part of a group that they believe in. And so I think, you know, when you are passionate about that, you know, it’s something you want to continue.

I think these guys, too, when we’re in college we talk about the importance of relationships. You know, if it’s not just about wins and losses. And lacrosse is such a small piece of everything that we do. But the relationships that you make are what’s important. You know, these are what’s gonna last forever. The people are important.

And so when you enjoy being in a profession like I am right now, where I get to work with people in and out, coaching a sport that I love, watching, for me, these women come in as 18-year-olds who have no idea what’s going on, to go through college and not only, yes, win championships, but just grow into these totally awesome women that get to continue to go on and do amazing things, whether it’s coaching or whatever career path they choose.

00:11:04

And then to build families. It’s so rewarding. And so I think that’s something that’s really cool, when you can be passionate about people, and have a respect for the game and your teammates. It’s something people want to continue in.

Melissa: You know, I think what, isn’t there a saying that if you’re passionate about what you do then you never have to work a day of—

Cathy: Yeah.

Melissa: —you never work a day in your life or something like that. It sounds like—

Cathy: Something like that, yep.

Melissa: Yeah. So I recently had the opportunity in one of my last podcasts to ask Anson Dorrance, who’s the UNC women’s soccer coach if he thought leaders are made or born. And I’m curious what you think.

Cathy: Huh, good question. You know, I think…I think it’s… probably say there’s a little of both. And that’s just looking at my own family with that.

A lot of these players that I get in here, I can tell when they come in their freshman year, how they carry themselves, how they interact with their team, their passion, their commitment, their dedication, their drive to what they’re doing, and I can say you know what, she’s gonna be a great leader, you know, as she goes through her college career, and she’ll be a captain when she’s a senior, ‘cause you can tell that that’s how their personality…how they kind of command themselves and respect from their teammates and stuff.

00:12:12

But I don’t know. From my own kids I would say it’s probably I’ve seen…I’ve seen both and I’ve seen them both kind of continue to grow and develop.

Melissa: Yeah, you know, it’s funny, I was reflecting on this question myself, knowing I was gonna ask it of you, and I actually came up with a very similar answer. And I do think it is a little of both. It’s like some people have the natural inclination, but you also, I think, have to help define and develop those inclinations. So I agree. I think it is a little bit of both.

So tell me a little bit—tell me about your recruiting process. I’m curious to how you recruit and whether or not do you just assess for technical skills, do you look for cultural fit as well? How does culture fit into your recruiting process, if at all?

Cathy: So well, for us, lacrosse recruiting, you know, our rules have changed over the past couple years, so the process has changed a little bit. But regardless, you know, we spend time evaluating talent, you know, talking to coaches, learning…learning about players before we’re even able to talk to them.

00:13:12

And then the opportunity opens for us to speak with them and get to know them, and we’ll spend some time with them, whether it’s, you know, phone conversations, campus visits, having them and showing them around, getting to know them and getting to know their family. And for me, you know, just really telling people what we’re all about. Here’s how we operate, this is what we do, this is…this is how I see our program, this is where we see you fitting in.

You know, I’m not gonna ever sit here and tell you you’re gonna be a superstar, but we’re gonna work for this and, you know, go through kind of our values and our beliefs as a team when we meet. And there’s sometimes we could end up, you know, with conversations and we leave and we’re like wow, this…this kid is the perfect fit for Maryland lacrosse and there’s others where we’re like maybe this isn’t the right fit, you know. And so I think it’s more, it’s a process. It’s definitely a process. It’s not a one-time thing. It’s a journey from the day you start evaluating talent to the day you kind of close…close the deal.

00:14:03

And even then when you have a player that says hey, I’m gonna come play for you, I want to be at Maryland, the relationship still continues to grow, you know. So over those next months, before they even get here, they are continuing to feel connected to the program, learning about the way the team works, and getting to know other players on the team, and their future teammates, and all that good stuff, which really can kind of include them and welcome them into the program. So from the time and then they step on the campus, and they are, they’re already a part of it, you know, ‘cause they’ve been around it for so long.

So it’s definitely a journey and a process, you know, it’s not something that the real quick decision’s made. But as they say, for every sport in college and when all of, you know, the kids choose the colleges they want to go to, you want to find the right fit for you, and somewhere where you’re, maybe your culture, cultural values and beliefs and everything that you kind of stand for align, you know, for the…with the program that you’re choosing, ‘cause that’s an important piece of it.

Melissa: Mm-hmm. So how formalized is your culture? You talked about those core values and making sure they’re…people find what they’re aligned. How formalized is it at Maryland?

00:15:08

Cathy: Well, formalized…I don’t…you know, that’s kind of a tough word with it. But I will say that, you know, when I played here from ’95 to ’98 I didn’t know any different, you know? And then you just kind of kept going, ‘cause this is the way things were done, this is who we were, this is what we were all about. And…and then I went on to be an assistant coach. And then I took a chance and took a head coaching position at the University of Denver, where it was starting point for me.

You know, I was really trying to build a program out there. And things that I had assumed were the norm are not. And so that was a real eye-opening experience that okay, you know, there’s different whatever it may be, you know, different things that we just…we just did at Maryland that we needed to kind of build into it, you know, and develop, and really work on these relationships and examples, and setting the tone, and setting our expectations and our goals and where we are.

00:16:00

And then when I had the chance to come back to Maryland some things had changed, and I could see it ‘cause it was more glaring, you know, than when you can come back to something and—

Melissa: Oh, yeah. You can—I know what you mean, yeah.

Cathy: —and there were some changes that I wanted…wanted to make, and so we had a lot of team meetings in that first year of just saying all right, this isn’t…this isn’t how we’re gonna do things, you know. We’re gonna come back to recognizing who we are and recognizing that, you know, we’re all in here for the same goal. We’re not, for example—I can give you an example.

Melissa: Okay.

Cathy: Have division by classes. I’m not big on that. I don’t have freshmen carry balls, and freshmen move goals. And I know that’s a standard in a lot of programs, but for me it’s not. Like we’re all coming in here, we’re all competing to be the best that we can be, and frankly, I don’t care what year you are, you know? And so this is…this was something for us that we needed to just…to just get back to who we were and remember that, remember what our goals are, remember that it’s not all about you, you know, it’s about a whole team of people and what can we do to be as successful as we can be.

00:16:55

So I wouldn’t say…I think it defined, it’s more of a part of who we are, you know, something you practice every day, something that you’re…you’re determining who you are by your actions, and what you’re doing, and how…where kind of the mental state of everybody in the team is as far as something that’s really formal and written down on paper. You know, we do go over, in the beginning of the year, just to bring everybody together this is what we’re all about.

You know, we’re Maryland lacrosse, and we can bullet point some things and say, you know, your…our teammates…our teammates are important, you know, and we’re gonna make sure that we’re communicating with each other, we’re looking out for each other, we’re believing each other, we’re representing our program well, we’re speaking, you know, about our teammates, and support staff, and coaches in the right way, and, you know, different things like that that I guess could be called a little more on the formal side. But I do think it’s more of the tone is set every day when you’re around it, and, you know, you’re a part of something every day.

Melissa: Yeah, I hear you. I think…I definitely am a big believer that in order to set a culture you have to be very intentional about it, and if you’re not intentional about it, it will still happen, but it will happen around you. And it may not be—

00:17:59

Cathy: Right. And I—

Melissa: Yeah, go ahead.

Cathy: Yeah, and I think that’s part of what I really learned, you know. And I don’t…I don’t think I knew that as far—till I took my own head coaching job and went to a different place. Because this is what I was around for nine years. You know, I was around things being done a certain way and everything. And then I went to a different, you know, different institution and that was not at the same level as Maryland as far as, you know, level of competition, but things were done differently, you know.

Then I learned, okay, I’ve got to create some of these things. I’ve got to make sure that we’re stating it, we’re talking about it, we’re addressing things when they happen so we can make those changes. ‘Cause you can’t really assume, you know, assume that anything is gonna be a certain way without stepping in and addressing it.

Melissa: Mm-hmm. And I’ve read that family is also an element of your culture, and it’s one I can actually relate to. It’s one of our core values here at Eagle Hill. And at Eagle Hill I actually work with my mother and my father, so the core value—

00:18:49

Cathy: Oh, wow.

Melissa: [Laughs.] —is something that’s really a natural extension of what’s already happening. But I’m curious, like why do you think having a familial culture is so important to an organization and what advice might you have to an organization that actually doesn’t work with their family members like I do to cultivate this type of culture?

Cathy: Well, I guess when I think of the word family, I mean, they’re the people I care about more than anyone else in the world, right? Like these are the people who, you know, you would, you’d just do anything more—anything for.

And I think that at the end of the day it’s people that matter, you know. It’s people that matter. It’s the people that you…you are with every day, you work for, that you get to work with, that you’re surrounded by. And, you know, for me in my job, I…my assistant coaches are not only great assistant coaches, they’re good friends. You know, we work together well. I respect them and, you know, I think they’re part of my family.

00:19:44

And when you can really care about the people around you I just think the environment that you’re in, and that you’re creating is one that’s like living proof of respect and just caring and loving and doing anything for each other, and being willing to do whatever it takes to help the people around you be successful.

And that’s, you know, how I think about—I have four kids, so between my husband and my kids and, you know, they’re the people that, again, mean the most to me. And if we can have an environment there where we care so much about the people around us then you know you’re working for something that’s worth it.

Melissa: That’s awesome. I love that.

Melissa: And I think if you can find that balance with your people who you work with, too, it’s an amazing—it’s a secret sauce, I think.

Cathy: Yep. For sure.

Melissa: So just changing tacks for a second, in the business world we often feel that companies sometimes struggle when they have a great culture and they hire somebody that turns out to be what we call a brilliant jerk.

00:20:40

Cathy: Mm-hmm.

Melissa: So in other words they can do their job. They are fantastic at it many times. But they’re really not very fun to work with. Have you dealt with kind of the sports version of a brilliant jerk, and what have you done about it in the past?

Cathy: Yeah, well, we try to hopefully hit all of that stuff in the recruiting process—

Melissa: Agreed.

Cathy: —because it’s important that you…you—well, at least for me to remember that no one’s better than our culture that we have here. You know, no one is that good, you know, that they can kind of supersede or go above who we are, you know? And so I think as we go through the recruiting process, when we can be just upfront and honest about how we do things and how we go, we’ve—some people who maybe we’re not right for as well can see that, and they opt to go a different direction, which is…which is great.

00:21:30

You know, as we go through I think the big piece when you’re a part of a team—and I have 39 athletes on our team—is, you know, the leaders really, and the culture and the way that the team operates daily sets the tone for it all. And so the other people are either in or they’re not. And if it’s not right for them, you know, unfortunately in college athletics there’s people transfer.

I don’t know if it’s fortunate or not fortunate, you know. People leave and find another program that maybe their values align better with. And that’s one of the things where it is what it is, but it’s the best thing that needs to happen because if, for example, Maryland is not right for you then I don’t want you to be here either, you know.

Melissa: Mm-hmm.

Cathy: ‘Cause there needs to be a better fit where you’re happy, and you’re getting what you want out of your experience, too. So I think a lot of that is kind of defined by the leadership, by the people on the team, you know, by just how we’re setting the tone, and work ethic, and everything, and the way that we recruit, and the way that we have conversations that could be pretty tough through the recruiting process. And then kids that want in are bought in, and they’re all in, and if they find out once they’re here it’s not right for them, you know, they’ll…we’ll talk about different possibilities and options for them to kind of go check out a different route.

00:22:37

Melissa: Cool. And I’ve also read that when you’re not coaching you run a development—you run development programs. And I read that one mistake you think a player can make is to focus too much on competing and not enough time on continually developing their skills, learning, and improving. So tell us about this and why you think it’s so important.

Cathy: Well, I think…so and I’m going through this with my own…my own children, you know, and there’s just so many sports now that want your attention year-round. And I just think it’s so valuable for kids to be able to play multiple sports and for… They’re just that, they’re kids, you know. That I want, for my own kids I want them to be able to play three sports and, you know, try…you know, my daughter’s trying, you know, playing middle school field hockey this year too in addition to soccer and lacrosse.

00:23:22

And, you know, just to do these things to let them gain that experience and explore all of those options. Where a lot of sports these days are trying to get you to commit to doing one thing all the time year round. And so—

Melissa: I know, from the age of like five, many times. [Laughs.]

Cathy: —and a lot of the club programs, too. Emphasis on like competition. And there’s so many tournaments, and there’s so many games out there, but yet when are they learning the sport and when are they getting better? You know, just kind of making sure you’re finding that balance between you’re continuing to grow as a player, you know, and learn that, but still have the thrill of competition, because everyone loves to play games. And so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

But I find it tough as a parent who’s involved in this profession to find that balance for my own kids. I can’t imagine what it’s like for parents that aren’t involved, you know, and have kind of the insight that I have to some of these things to feel like they’re getting pulled in all these different directions. I just…it’s a lot to think about, and it’s tough. It’s tough for these kids to be able to find ways to manage it all.

00:24:18

Melissa: So a question that we ask all of our guests, what is the one word that comes to mind when you think culture?

Cathy: Oh, my.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Cathy: That…I guess… Success.

Melissa: Ooh, I love that.

Cathy: I mean, I think… I’ll go with that, you know, I think because, you know, culture can…and not if you’re looking at success as a…like a, I don’t know, like a national championship or not in my sport, but yet when I think of our culture, if our team is all on the same page, believing and acting, you know, doing the things that we want to do the right way, then I think we’re a successful program.

Melissa: And this is a question we ask all of our new hires. This is a fun, kind of silly question, but if you could have a single superpower, what would it be?

Cathy: I would 100% heal people.

Melissa: Oh, that’s a good one. It’s hard to argue with that one. [Laughs.]

00:25:13

Cathy: Yeah, my oldest son has Type 1 diabetes, and I just watch the struggles, you know, that these kids with all these different things go through. And my god, if I could take any of that away from them, that would be my superhero power in a second.

Melissa: That would be amazing. Well, Cathy, thank you so much for your insight. And I’ve heard later this year you’ll be inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame. It is clearly well deserved.

Cathy: Thank you.

Melissa: And I hope you can truly savor the moment. You’ve really done some really amazing and impressive things.

Cathy: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yes, it’s a lot of fun. And thanks for taking the time to talk today. It was great.

Melissa: Yes, likewise. You have a great day.

Cathy: You too. Bye-bye.

Melissa: Take care.

Thanks for listening to our cultur(ED) podcast. If you liked the show and want to learn more, check out our cultur(ED) website, culturedcast.com. And please follow us on iTunes. If you’d like to know more about our research, visit eaglehillconsulting.com/culture.

Melissa sits down with Anson Dorrance, one of the most successful coaches in collegiate athletics, to discuss how to build a lasting culture in a high turnover environment.

Melissa: Hi. Welcome to the cultur(ED) podcast. I’m Melissa Jezior, your host. On this podcast we talk to top culture makers in the world today from a variety of industries and backgrounds to unpack the visible and not so visible forces that make up this often overlooked superpower, culture. Right now we’re in the heart of the women’s World Cup, and this inspired me to learn from elite athletes and coaches to unpack their tips and tricks for building winning cultures.

Today I’ll be talking to Anson Dorrance, the head coach of the women’s soccer program at the University of North Carolina, and one of the most successful, if not the most successful, coaches in the history of college athletics. Well, thank you so much for taking time today. I’m looking forward to chatting with you.

Anson: Hi. I’m looking forward to it myself.

Melissa: So it’s been fun for me because I went through the process, as I was getting ready for this interview I read about you and I watched some interviews that you gave, and I have to tell you I was positively blown away by your numbers.

00:01:00

And I think, ladies and gentlemen, hold onto your hats, ‘cause I’m about to blow you away with this one man’s accomplishments. Anson has 40 years in his coaching career and he’s lost less than 70 games. Think about that for a second. And he’s won more than 800. He was the first coach in NCAA history to win 20 championships coaching a single sport. In fact the Lady Tar Heels have won 22 of the 36 NCAA soccer championships.

He’s led a team to 101 game winning streak, coached 13 different women to a total of 20 national Player of the Year awards, member of the UNC Hall of Fame and the Soccer Hall of Fame, and he’s coached some of the best players in soccer history, including Michelle Akers, Mia Hamm, Tobin Heath, Crystal Dunn, and one of my colleagues here at Eagle Hill, Lindsay Henson. And I can’t forget to admit he also had 5 players on stage at the World Cup last week. So Anson, you are quite an accomplished man and I’m sure have lots of great insights to share with us.

00:01:56

Anson: Well, you’re very kind with that introduction. Thank you very much.

Melissa: So I hear you’re about to begin your 41st season as head coach of the Tar Heels in the fall. And one of the things that really interested me the most about you, Anson, after reading about you and talking to Lindsay Henson here at Eagle Hill, and one of the phrases that she associates most with you and the team culture, was “refuse to lose.” Lindsay said refuse to lose really stays with her today, and not just as a memory, but really and truly as her mindset and how she shows up in all aspects of her life. So how do you inject this mindset into your players? Maybe you can let us in on the secret.

Anson: Actually, it’s probably the core of our success. When I was a young coach our legendary former basketball coach, Dean Smith, used to let me come watch his basketball practices, and the thing I liked most about watching his teams train was the amount of data they would collect in a typical practice. Everything counted. So we stole this idea, we soccer-ized it, we took it to a new level.

And this was a game changer for us in practice, because before you came to practice the next day you could go to our bulletin board and in 28 different categories you would see where you ranked on the team. All the different elements that are critical for our success in a practice and a game were recorded by the managers and then posted on the bulletin board.

Melissa: So let’s talk a little bit about these 28 factors that you identify and grade on or rate on every day. I think right now in the corporate world we’re in a place where we’ve got so much data, but not yet a lot of insight. And I think companies and managers are trying to figure out how to identify the right data at the right time and present it in the right ways. So how did you find and figure out what the right 28 categories were to be able to provide feedback on?

Anson: It was all trial and error. We had no idea if this was the best stuff. We had sort of a vague idea that in order to be effective you had to be great 1 v. 1, so we have 5 different 1-on-1 ladders. 1-on-1 is your ability to beat someone off the dribble or stop them.

00:04:02

But it doesn’t mean like we stumbled upon all the great things immediately. So we’re always looking for a cutting edge idea that we think can move us forward.

Melissa: And where do you seek these new ideas? Do you have a method that you use or are you a big reader? Do you like to talk with a lot of other coaches? How do you find these new ideas?

Anson: Well, actually, I’m reading all the time, but most of the ideas we bring in practice don’t come directly from the reading, they just come from us looking at this thinking you know what, this isn’t working. And for us to see what’s working all we have to do is to go to our test. What is our test? Our test is the game we just played or the game we have to play next. And so we’re constantly reviewing our own performances and constantly trying to tweak it to change it. But a lot of what goes on, I think, that takes us and our teams to our potential is our capacity to motivate the players that are in our environment.

And so often time it’s not just the training environment that’s critical for us, it’s how we can get into, again, the mindset of the players to get them to change a certain mindset or a narrative that’s protecting them from getting to their potential. And in changing that and sending then in the right direction all of a sudden a substandard player goes to a different level because now she’s finally accountable for performance, whereas earlier she had a narrative that protected her from being responsible and accountable, and now all of a sudden we expose that, and now she’s selected to be more accountable and her game goes to a completely different level.

And so almost everything we present is done in ranking form. So if we have 30 players in the roster, in the 28 different categories everyone’s ranked from 1 to 30. They get to see exactly where they are on it. And then all of these different categories have different values. Some are much more important than others, and we make very clear which ones are.

00:05:54

In fact some are made so clear that on the first day of practice this August, there’s some players that aren’t going to be practicing with us because they failed the initial test to get them into training, which is a beat test which measures their cardiovascular efficiency. So not only do we have 28 different categories, but all the categories have different value, and some of the value is extraordinary if you don’t achieve in it you don’t even get to practice with us. And so that sends a very positive message to the players as to what we value most.

Melissa: That’s really interesting. So I have also read that you sit down with your players once a year to kind of do an overall player evaluation. I assume that’s where you probably look at a lot of this data. And I know that that’s something in the corporate world that’s been a really hot topic lately, are performance reviews and giving people real time performance feedback. And it’s often a sore subject, too. I think this is often where employees will interpret feedback in a negative way. So how have you been able to take those conversations that you have using this data to create a more positive motivational environment around feedback?

Anson: First of all we do it 3 times a year, not once.

Melissa: Ah, interesting.

Anson: We do it early in the fall. Then we do it post season in January, and then we do it at the end of the spring as they’re about to go on their summer break. So we have these more formal reviews basically 3 times a year. And keep in mind the data that is collected and posted on our bulletin board every day is a daily review, so they are getting constant review.

And here’s what’s critical in the performance review. In the performance review a lot of the review is done by themselves, because what most of us have is we all develop a personal narrative. And what this means is we develop a narrative to protect us from pain. So if a kid comes in and they haven’t done very well that season, and this is a post season review, they all have a protective narrative that’s usually, in my environment, organized and I guess constructed in a loop with their parents.

00:08:02

Because obviously if I want to be protected from the chaos of the universe and I’m a player in this environment, who are the people that are going to completely agree with anything you tell them on tell them on the problem?

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Anson: It’s your mom and your dad. So you call up your mom because obviously she’s sympathetic, or your dad if he’s the more sympathetic one, and you talk about the injustice of the universe, about how you’re kicking everyone’s ass in practice, even though that’s absolutely not true, because you’re looking at the data every single day after practice on the bulletin board and you’re ranked in the bottom 5% of the team, and all this sort of stuff is telling you you’re not working that hard. But when you talk to your mom you’re claiming that you are, so like, you know, Mom, I can’t believe it, you know, I’m kicking everyone’s rear end in practice, and I’m just not given a chance at the game.

Melissa: [Laughs.] Life isn’t fair.

Anson: And life isn’t fair, right. And of course your mom totally agrees with you. And now all of a sudden there’s this circular narrative built with the player that now the player’s feeding off of.

Now the player’s thinking gosh, you know, Mom, you’re absolutely right. So even though they’ve done nothing but lie to their parents about their performance, now they’re fed all this garbage that’s based on the lies you’ve told your parents that’s created a narrative that you’ve been cheated.

So it’s critical in the player review that we do 3 times a year is you review all the data with them. But now they get to rank themselves in 7 out of the 8 categories that we’re going to review. And here they are. Because we recruit extraordinary talent. But what’s shocking to us is how often extraordinary talent never gets on the field.

So the review we have with them after we’ve looked at all the data is we want to rank them, and they rank themselves in these categories: self-discipline, competitive fire, self-belief, love of the ball, love of playing the game, love of watching the game, grit and coachability.

00:09:56

And so if they claim they have a 4.5 in the beat, which is professional level in terms of cardiovascular fitness, and yet their beat score was a 30, and the qualifying line to get on the field is 40, I will debate it with them. Now there’s only one of those things that I won’t touch, that whatever score they give themselves I will not argue with them, we’ll just put it down as they’ve told me.

Melissa: And what’s that?

Anson: Self-belief. I will never interfere with a person’s self-belief. If they think they’re God’s gift to the game, I will never try to deconstruct that. And as a woman you can understand the huge perils of deconstructing a woman’s confidence. If a woman is incredibly confident, I am never going to touch that. And even if it’s delusional I still won’t touch it.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Anson: Because one of the hardest things to construct in a young woman, and actually women in general—and I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here—is confidence.

I mean, what’s amazing to me is the lack of confidence in so many extraordinary women I’ve trained. And most of what we do in our environment is construct confidence. I will never touch that. I will never be negative about a person’s constructed confidence, and I will never judge them on it.

And the only one they’re not allowed to touch is coachability. And so if I tell them they’re, you know, utterly uncoachable what I’m saying is every time I tell you this, you know, you, your reaction to it tells me you just don’t think that that’s what they should be doing, and your fight with me in this area is going to prevent you from reaching your potential. So they’re not allowed to touch coachability. That’s my evaluation of whether or not they’re responding to anything I’m telling them. And I’m not allowed to touch self-belief.

But the average of those numbers will tell them what their potential is. Because obviously almost every kid we recruit on scholarship has the dream of playing professionally, so almost every one of our scholarship kids does sign a professional contract.

00:11:56

But there’s some that aren’t going to make it, and they just, they don’t believe it. But when we average it out, I’m telling them at your current rate of effort and commitment you’re not going to sign a pro contract. And obviously our history is so good at projecting this they have to make a change if they want to get there. And when they don’t sign a pro contract it’s not because I haven’t told them the areas where they have fallen.

But here’s the coolest thing about evaluating people with numbers. I can sit there and post the numbers, and now what happens to my relationship, it’s me and the players against the numbers.

Melissa: Mm-hmm.

Anson: Because now all of a sudden I’m not being critical of them. Their numbers are critical of them. So now she and I can sit on the same side of the desk, put the numbers up there on the screen and say you know what, I think you’re better than this. And of course they’re going to agree with me, I think I am better. But here’s what you’ve got to do. But now they’re listening to me on what they need to do to get to their potential, because the numbers are not a subjective evaluation of performance.

I’m sitting with them and we are parsing the data together. So what’s criticizing them? Not me. It’s the data. So who am I in this player conference? I am the person that can help them do better with the data. What I consider most valuable about objective review is there’s no subjectivity.

And even in their review of where they stand in self-discipline, competitive fire, self-belief, love of the ball, love of playing the game, love of watching the game, grit and coachability, with basically 2 exceptions—well, actually, with just 1 exception—every one of their grades is their own, so when they average it out they are doing their own evaluation. Yep, I don’t work very hard. Yep, I don’t compete because they’re giving themselves numbers underneath a 4, which is what is required of them to start, and they are telling me they shouldn’t start, and I’m agreeing with them, because I don’t start them.

00:14:00

So basically that’s the construction of our player conference, which takes me out of the subjective mode. And so what I’m also telling them at every opportunity is live our core values. To live the core values is incredibly challenging because this is a review of their character. And the core value review is not done by me, it’s done by their peers.

And so I want to be able to write them a brilliant recommendation into any part of their future. Just give me the tools. So live my core values and then they’ll see the quotes from the core values that are in their recommendations that are getting kids into Harvard, and Stanford and all the elite companies in America. We’re sending our top athletes all over the place and a lot of that is because they are living the core values in the most positive way and I’m writing that into the recommendation.

00:14:52

Melissa: So I’ve read a lot about you and your team’s core values, which I am a huge believer in core values. I think they’re an amazing thing that really sets the tone for a whole organization. And one of the things I’ve seen recently is that we, in fact we did a study on this and found that 47% of corporate America does not know their organization’s core values, which, if you think about it, on one hand is extremely surprising. I guess on the other hand not so surprising when you think about all of the newspaper headlines these days dealing with corporate bad behavior.

But I think it’s an amazing thing to hear you talk about how strong your core values are, and the quality of character of your players. How do you make sure that these core values are living and breathing in your organization and don’t just exist on a piece of paper?

Anson: Well, I’m one of these guys that, you know, loves to read. I read every business book that, you know, makes the New York Times top 10 bestseller list. And the thing, what’s interesting about reading all these books is what they’re all telling us is you’ve got to have a set of core values and you’ve got to live by them.

00:15:57

And I’m thinking great, we’ll have all these core values. And of course my whole evolution has been trial and error. So, you know, we had this insipid, you know, core value about working hard, but there’s nothing motivational about this core value of working hard because that inspires no one. And so I had all these ridiculous core values that I was expecting everyone to live by, but no one really lived by them except if it was a coincidence. There was nothing inspiring about them, and I was thinking gosh, none of this stuff works.

And all of a sudden, in a New York Times magazine years ago, there was a woman that was writing about her experiences studying Russian literature at Columbia. And she was telling a great story, and she said when she was at Columbia they just hired a Russian exile poet by the name of Joseph Brodsky. And they brought Brodsky in and Brodsky sat down all of his PhD candidates and master’s candidates in Russian literature and assigned them all of this Russian literature and poetry to memorize.

And she and her colleagues were insulted, and this cabal got together and basically said I don’t think Professor Brodsky understands who he’s dealing with here. We’re the best of the best. We are the most elite students in the United States in this area and now he’s assigning us work to do that elementary school students are done in the United States. I just don’t think this guy understands anything about the American educational system and doesn’t understand who the heck we are, so let’s go in and let him know this just is not what we were expecting.

So of course they all go storming into his office and told him, you know, Professor Brodsky, I’m sorry, we’re not going to do this. I don’t think you understand who we are and what Columbia’s all about. And he said, well, if that’s the case none of you guys will get your PhDs and master’s degrees.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Anson: They all left the office with their tails firmly between their legs and they got to work. And all of a sudden in this New York Times magazine article she’s talking about the extraordinary transformation that took place in her life when she was asked to memorize all of this literature and poetry.

She said it completely transformed her cerebral fabric. It completely transformed her feeling of the Russian people, the Russian countryside, Russian literature, and it transformed what she and her colleagues were discussing on a regular basis, constantly quoting stuff they had memorized because now it was a part of who they were. And I was thinking you know what, that’s what I’ve got to do.

So what we did is we took our 12 core values and we assigned a motivational quote attached to each one, and we ask every one of our players to memorize all of these motivational quotes attached to each core value. And then we also have them evaluate every teammate on whether or not they were living each core value, and we did it on a 4 point scale, sort of like a GPA, so 4 is obviously a 4.0, it’s an A average, so 4 is an extraordinary example of this core value. If you gave your teammate a 3 in this core value it meant they lived this core value most of the time.

00:18:56

If you gave them a two it meant they occasionally lived this core value. If you gave them a one they rarely lived this core value. So all of a sudden I was collecting all this data on all of the kids and what their teammates thought of their character. And in the old days I never shared any of this data with any of my kids. Then all of a sudden—

Melissa: So what made you change?

Anson: Well, basically I had this girl—I shared the data with her, and she’s sitting across from me in cold silence, and I’m thinking oh, my gosh, I shouldn’t have shared this with her. And I said are you glad I shared this with you? And in a very low voice she said yes. And I said why? She said because Anson, I have to change. And all of a sudden I saw this transformation that was phenomenal.

And then what was really cool is in the spring of every player’s senior year we have our final banquet. Every senior gets to have a parting speech and basically almost like an advice to all the kids that are left in the program on, you know, what they should do to become extraordinary.

And she gave the most wonderful senior exit speech I’ve ever heard. And what she talked about was when I shared with her basically everyone in the room’s opinion of her and how she felt she had to change, and then basically she did. And it was just extraordinary.

So from then on we’ve shared with everyone where they are. And we’ve made all kinds of mistakes on this because originally we would actually share where they ranked among the 30 players in character, and that, you know, I didn’t think ended up being very positive. So now what we share is we share the top 4, we share their names and their ranks and everything, and then we share a one line statement not of where this girl ranks, but of where she is in the core values. And as far as I’m concerned, if her average is over a 3.0, in other words she lives these core values most of the time, we completely embrace her, because that’s what we want everyone to live.

00:20:59

And then she doesn’t feel inferior, because she knows the top 4 are extraordinary. Now her challenge is to basically approach the top 4. But there is a line, and if their average is under a 3.0 in that line and you’re on scholarship, we try to get that girl to transfer, and if she’s not on scholarship we try to get her to quit the team.

And I learned about this when I was working for Franklin Covey. I was the warm-up band for Stephen Covey and Hyrum Smith. But the real star of the show was Jack Welch. And what was interesting about Jack Welch is he would sit on the stage in a comfortable chair, interviewed by someone from Fortune also sitting in a comfortable chair, and he would just answer questions. And that’s why, for the rest of my life, I am dying to have that as a speaking engagement.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Anson: I don’t want to give speeches anymore. I want to sit on the stage and—

Melissa: You want your own comfy chair.

Anson: Yes. Exactly right. And I want to sit there and I want to get $100,000 for sitting there and just answering questions.

Melissa: Me, too.

Anson: Then I don’t have to prepare—yeah, I don’t want to prepare a speech. I just want to answer. Like this interview. Podcasts for me are great. I don’t have to do a bloody thing except answer your questions.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Anson:I love it. Anyway, so Jack is up there, he’s answering all these questions, and he is great. And here’s what I’m learning from it. Almost every single time he would tell everyone in the room to fire the bottom 10% of their workforce. And of course everyone gasps, and everyone is now throwing their hands into the air. And of course these are, you know, very successful CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and their top managerial staff, and every one of them has paid like, you know, $20,000 to be in the room, and of course they’re righteously indignant with this incredibly successful man telling them to fall on the bottom 10% of their workforce.

And they all have these stories, oh, I spent, you know, time with this one person that was, you know, one of my bottom salesmen and then within 6 months he was my top salesman. And of course he’s nodding and he’s not contradicting anyone. And then he patiently waits for, you know, this self-righteous CEO to finish and then he basically calmly says, well, if you’d taken that energy that you invested in your bottom performer and you invested that in your top performers, your bottom line would be better.

00:23:04

You’re not a social worker, you’re not an anthropologist. Your commitment is to the widow that has invested a life savings in your company to make sure her dividend is good enough so she gets to eat every day, so that’s your moral imperative. It’s not to save the world or to save people.

Melissa: Mm-hmm. I love that.

Anson: It’s to save your bottom line. And I’m looking at this thinking, you know, well this is all I’ve done my whole life. All these kids that were substandard, I would kill myself to try to get them there, burning just so much energy on these people that didn’t end up helping me much anyway, but I did transform them to a small degree. But the amount of energy it required was overwhelming. So now what I do, if they’re below that black line, I meet with them, I talk about how wonderful it would be for them to transfer to Stanford and destroy their program.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

00:23:52

Anson: And obviously, so now I—obviously I don’t talk about having them destroy a program.

Melissa: No, I know.

Anson: But basically I try to get them out of my system. And I’ve learned that you’re not going to change everyone. And here’s the other thing that Jack was so good about explaining to me. He says, you know, when you do fire someone, they are going to hate you for the rest of their lives, but they don’t want to work for you. And how do you know they don’t want to work for you? Because they’re not working for you, which is why they’re in your bottom 10%.

So what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to set them free. Maybe when you fire them they’re going to finally find an environment they love and you’ve actually helped them. So please don’t think in firing them you’re not doing them a positive service. You actually are. Because hopefully they will find someone eventually that they’re going to enjoy working for, and a culture they willfully support, and you’re actually doing them a favor. Now will this help them change their opinion of you? No. They’re still going to hate you for the rest of their lives. But you’re actually giving them a very positive opportunity when you fire them.

00:25:00

And he is so right. All these kids that I’ve convinced to transfer have gone someplace and maybe played more minutes, and then some of these kids now and I have connected in the most positive way, just because now they’ve looked back and seen that I’ve treated them very well.

Melissa: Perspective, yeah.

Anson: That’s correct. And now they know, and certainly in these other environments they had the same struggle. And so now what they’ve realized, you know what, it wasn’t the coach, it was me, and so their perspective changes.

And so I learned a lot from Jack. But the thing I learned most from him was how he would calmly sit there and listen to, you know, aggressive self-righteousness and not indict the person with his self-righteous opinion. He would calmly nod and make it seem like he was agreeing with the person, and then in a very calm and mature voice just say well, your moral imperative is not this substandard employee, your moral imperative is that extraordinary, you know, widow that’s trying to live on basically her investment in your company.

That should be your perspective, is your bottom line, and here’s the way you construct the most aggressive bottom line. And he would say it calmly and, you know, with warmth. And it just gave me a completely different perspective, because my perspective is everyone on my roster, not the one individual that’s hurting my roster. And so it was really, it was eye-opening for me.

Melissa: I love that. So tell us, how do you convince some woman to transfer or to quit the team?

Anson: Well, to transfer you let them know that—and usually a person that wants, the person that’s really below the line is someone that isn’t playing much, usually, and so as a result, you know, behind your back they’re whining about everything under the sun, which, by the way, goes completely counter to our first core value, which is we don’t whine. And then they’re all forced to…they’re all forced to memorize—

Melissa: [Laughs.] I like that core value.

00:26:57

Anson: We have to do it, yeah, ‘cause, you know, it destroys everything, you know, teams, companies. And they’re all forced to memorize this, “The true joy in life is to be a force of fortune instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.” So any time we catch anyone whining in our program they’re forced to recite that. Every one of them has memorized that. And so we just don’t tolerate any kind of whining in any part of any practice, and hopefully there’s no whining behind our backs either. So that’s our first core value.

Melissa: I did look at your core values before this, and I was impressed, and I also thought they were extremely comprehensive. In fact thought maybe I should adopt these, these are fantastic. [Laughs.]

Anson: Well, they are good. And obviously you’re going to have a different set just based on your own culture. And we’re not…we’re flexible. We added one last year and it’s a fabulous one, and I’ll read it to you. It’s basically about accountability. And so what we’ve written is this is the biggest challenge for Millennials. And of course you hire Millennials.

Melissa: We do.

Anson: And what’s written here is, “Now is the period to escape the protection of loving parents.” We don’t want you to get hurt, so right now even in that line I am addressing the narrative. “Now is the period to escape the protection of loving parents that don’t want you to get hurt.” You have 4 years to get ready for the chaos at the university.

And now we bring in our own university people. Mark Cohen, an award winning UNC assistant professional of English and comparative literature, when asked who was the best teacher you ever had and why, said this, “The best teacher I’ve ever had is failure. Samuel Becket said it best, ‘Ever try, ever fail, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better,’” And here’s the quote they have to memorize. “Some want to be exempt. They do not want to excel. They do not want to exert. They want to be considered excellent for desiring to be held exempt from all accountability.” Now that’s typical of the Millennials.

00:28:57

They don’t want to be accountable. Now here’s the rest of the quote. “And what protects them from all accountability?” And here it is. “Their own narrative that is not interested in exploring their potential but is crafted to keep them comfortable while recruiting every possible excuse along the way.” So how do we want to live? Paraphrase, and obviously we’re bringing in our culture. To paraphrase Alex Ferguson of Man United fame, “We want to take responsibility for our own action, our own errors, our own performance level, and eventually for every result.”

So this is where we’re trying to drive them. We’re trying to drive them to be accountable and to take responsibility for everything because in a typical narrative you don’t. In a typical narrative it’s laced with protections about why they haven’t achieved their potential. And usually it blames someone else. And you don’t want them to blame anyone else. If they take responsibility it’s amazing the things that they’re going to accomplish as soon as they take responsibility for everything.

Melissa: So you talked a lot about trial and error. And one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is, is a leader made or is a leader born? So assuming that you might say that a leader is made, given all the trial and error that you yourself have had, what advice might you have to someone trying to build their own strong culture and their own organization?

Anson: Actually, I don’t think you can make a leader, I think they’re born.

Melissa: Wow, okay. That’s interesting.

Anson: The irony is I speak in moral leadership conferences, and any soccer coach alive, and I always warn them if one of them raises their hand and asks me do you think you can develop leaders I’m going to say no. You can just make—

Melissa: Tell me why.

Anson: Well, because of my experience. I’ve never developed a leader. Now I’ve had leaders and I’ve given them opportunities to lead. But basically we all live on a leadership continuum, from people that can’t lead worth a lick, people that are extraordinary leaders, and all we’ve done is we’ve moved them down the continuum a little bit, but not much.

00:30:58

I mean, that’s why it drives me nuts, you know, when I look at all these different people that claim to be developing leaders. In my experience it’s a crock. I have tried so many different ways to develop leaders. I’ve had so many train wreck failures in leadership I don’t know, I could write a book on failing to develop leaders. I’ll give you my favorite example.

Melissa: Okay.

Anson: And this will crack you up. And you’ll appreciate this because you’re a woman. One of the toughest things with women is to get them to lead verbally, because what every woman in the room understands, as soon as a woman leader opens her mouth everyone’s going to think she’s a bitch.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Anson: So as a result no woman wants to take this mantle on because they know what everyone’s saying about them behind their back. So it’s almost like a gender pressure against leadership. Now obviously I need verbal leaders. And so I’m thinking, well, I’m going to correct that this year. Here’s what we’re going to do.

So I get all my leaders together. And by the way, I have a leadership class that meets once a week all off season for 1/2 hour called my leadership council, and it’s my leadership training platform. It’s my laboratory of the human spirit for leadership development, which is the most failed leadership platform in the world, because I’ve never developed a frigging leader out of it.

So anyway, so here is one experiment I tried 1 year. So what I tried 1 year is I said listen, the press is going to call me next year and they’re going to ask me who my leaders are, and I’m going to sort of mention all of your names. But let me tell you what the truth is. If I say you lead by example, what I’m basically saying is you’re not a leader because leading by example is not leadership, you’re just my best frigging player. But I’m going to, you know, I’m going to conform to the B.S. language of the media and the world by saying you lead by example. But you’re not a leader.

00:32:54

Now if I say you are a leader, here’s the way you’re going to have to qualify. You have to lead verbally. And I know all you chickenshits are afraid to open your mouth, but I’m going to need some of you to open your friggin’ mouths because we can’t have a bloody, you know, committee meeting in the middle of a freaking game to solve our damn problem. You guys have to lead them verbally on the field. And so basically I had this one wonderful kid that is listening to me, and she must have nodded inside because by George, the following year she was…she was a verbal leader.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Anson: She would, you know, say something before the game, she would be saying stuff throughout the game, and finally, when we’re about to end, at the end of the NCAA tournament, and my real leaders came up to me and said Anson, you’ve got to get so-and-so to shut the F up.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Anson: And I said you know what, I agree with you. So I pulled her aside and I said, you know, so-and-so, I’m sorry, but shut up. [Driving] all of us freaking, you know, batshit crazy, just keep quiet.

So anyway, we got her to shut up and we made a nice run. I think that team won the national championship. But basically that’s one of many failed experiments that I’ve done with my leaders. But now honestly—

Melissa: So then—go ahead.

Anson: Go ahead.

Melissa: No, you go, you go.

Anson: Okay. I’ve had some great leaders, but they were leaders before I got them. Now did we give them an opportunity to lead? Yes. Did we tweak their leadership a little bit and maybe help them to a small degree? Yes. But these were leaders. Because I have tried to completely change someone and I haven’t.

So what’s critical for you, and actually the hiring process is everything for you, and so this is where, again, this is something that Jack Welch used to say, and I loved it. He would say every one of you guys are underpaying HR. HR is the most important arm of your company. Your companies will succeed based on who you hire.

00:34:56

And so what all of us do is the vice president that’s the least highest paid in any company is the HR person because they’re basically dealing with whiners and, you know, litigants and everything else. That’s a mistake. If you guys learn one thing from me today, make sure your HR person has incredible insights into hiring the right people because your HR person is going to determine whether or not your company is going to be successful or not. And obviously it sounds like, Melissa, you do your own hiring. Is that true?

Melissa: Yes. I do. But my HR person is also fantastic and plays a huge role in it, so I agree with your concepts.

Anson: Well, yeah, because basically I’m listening to this guy and he’s absolutely right. And that’s where we run into problems, too, because we see this kid that has huge talent. Of course we’re all excited by huge talent and so the temptation is always to recruit talent. It’s a huge mistake to recruit talent. What you have to recruit and who you have to hire is character. But talent is just so overwhelmingly tempting.

So in your case, you know, someone with an incredible high IQ or some Harvard graduate that finished, you know, summa cum laude.

Melissa: Right.

Anson: I mean, it’s so tempting to hire that. But if this person’s going to be toxic to your culture and is going to be so incredibly selfish, that’s not the person to hire. And so what is critical is, you know, who we end up recruiting.

And for me, because talent is so attractive and because you look at talent and you think I have taken that talent to a world championship or an Olympic gold medal, I have to sign that kid, and all of a sudden they come in and they’re toxic, and then yeah, you’re playing them, but, you know, you don’t know if playing them is helping you or hurting you because everyone hates them, everyone hates playing with them even though they are good players. And so for me it’s all about trying to figure out a way to sort out their character before you hire them.

Melissa: So do you incorporate your core values back into your recruiting process?

00:36:53

Anson: I wish I could. But if we started having all of these, you know, kids take the, you know, Angela Duckworth grit test or, you know, some sort of, you know, psychological profile or take my core value test, we’d lose them, and the word would get out that, you know, that’s how we’re evaluating them, and it would kill us. And so I wish there were ways for me to sort out their character before I brought them in because that would have a huge impact on the kids we would end up offering scholarship money to.

Melissa: So how do you identify culture fit for your organization right now?

Anson: Well, it’s hit or miss, I mean. And but here’s the dilemma for us. Every coach wants their kid to play at the University of North Carolina. When we call them and ask them about the character of their kid, they’re not going to say oh my god, the kid’s toxic. You know, she’s a great athlete and she’ll kick everyone’s ass on the field, but outside the field she’s a royal pain in the ass. No one tells us that.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Anson: And you speak to a parent, you know, they’re doing the same thing. And of course on the recruiting visit they’re on their best behavior. One thing I loved about what Dean Smith did, though, our legendary former basketball coach who was the coach for Michael Jordan, is when back in the days when people didn’t commit early, whenever he took an in house visit he would study how the kid treated his parents.

Melissa: Oh, that’s interesting.

Anson: And if the kid treated the parents poorly he wouldn’t offer them a scholarship because obviously if the kid doesn’t treat the parents poorly the kid’s not going to treat him well or his culture well. So he had his own methodology for sorting out character selection.

Every now and again I’ll work with these different groups that are sorting out a way to test character, and there’s some group I’m working with, but right now I can’t remember them, although I am doing some work with Angela Duckworth on performance. And she runs a character lab. She’s the woman that wrote “Grit.”

Melissa: Mm-hmm.

Anson: And she and I are good friends, and so I’m going to work with her, and I’m hoping through some of her psychological profiles she can sort out character because I would love to have that as a tool that I can use before a kid gets here. But right now for us it’s hit or miss. And I’d love to tell you something differently, but I just don’t have an effective tool yet.

00:39:00

Melissa: Yeah, that’s definitely, I mean, I think recruiting and hiring really good culture fits is a, it is a hard, hard thing. It is an elusive holy grail in a way figuring out—

Anson: No, it really is.

Melissa: Yeah.

Anson: Yeah. It’s hard.

Melissa: So 2 more quick questions for you. What’s the 1 word you think of when you think about culture?

Anson: Positivity or optimism.

Melissa: Oh, I love that. And my last question, and this is a fun question that we actually ask all of our new hires when they start at Eagle Hill, is if you could have 1 superpower, what would it be and why?

Anson: I would like to be able to see the future.

Melissa: Ooh, even your own?

Anson: Absolutely. Because what it tells me is it tells me about potential. And again, this solve the problem you and I were just talking about.

Melissa: That would. That definitely would solve the problem. [Laughs.] Most certainly.

Anson: Well, actually, I mean, I’ve got a lot of others that I can throw out there for you, because let me tell you about potential. And this is what I tell all of my kids.

It’s similar to, you know, me telling that player that, you know, if I say you lead by example what I’m saying is you’re not a leader. We have other things like that. I also tell them if I tell the press you have great potential what I’m saying is you’re not worth a shit right now.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Anson: So basically we have this hidden language the players know that I’m using with the press that’s designed to sort of protect them, but also designed to let them know they’re not good enough yet. But also, the other superpower I would love, if I couldn’t see the future, was I would love to be able to see an individual’s character.

Melissa: I’m with you on that 1, yeah.

Anson: So I would love to have that superpower. But also I’d love to be a mind reader. In other words, I’d love to be able to read the narrative that that person is using—

Melissa: Telling themselves.

Anson: —to protect them from being responsible for success. Because if I can deconstruct the person’s excuse-ridden personal narrative, I can help them get to their potential.

Melissa: I love that. That’s awesome. Anson, thank you so much for taking time. I really have to tell you how much I was looking forward to chatting with you today. I think you’re such an impressive guy and I love everything you’ve accomplished. You are definitely an inspiration. So I really, really appreciate it.

00:41:08

Anson: Melissa, it’s been a joy. Thank you. And obviously continued success and—

Melissa: Likewise.

Anson: —please call me any time. Take care.

Melissa: Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to our cultur(ED) podcast. If you liked the show and want to learn more, check out our cultur(ED) website, culturedcast.com. And please follow us on iTunes. If you’d like to know more about our research, visit eaglehillconsulting.com/culture.

Melissa sits down with two-time Olympic gold medalist and FIFA Women’s World Cup champion soccer powerhouse Abby Wambach to talk teams and culture. Just how important is culture to a team and what’s the secret sauce to a constructing a powerful culture?

Melissa: Hi. Welcome to the cultur(ED) podcast. I’m Melissa Jezior, your host. On this podcast we talk to top culture makers in the world today from a variety of industries and backgrounds to unpack the visible and not so visible forces that make up this often overlooked superpower, culture.

Right now we’re in the heart of the women’s World Cup and this inspired me to learn from elite athletes and coaches to unpack their tips and tricks for building winning cultures. On our first podcast in this series I’m pleased to feature Abby Wambach, the highest all time international goal scorer in soccer history.

Well, Abby, welcome to the cultur(ED) podcast, and thank you for joining us. I have to tell you I’ve been so excited to talk to you. I’ve been—I read your book. I really, genuinely loved it. In fact I’ve been telling my husband about it, I’ve been telling my kids about it, I’ve been telling my colleagues about it. In fact I want my 13-year-old daughter to read it because I think it has so many great messages, and so it’s just, I’m really excited to talk to you today, so.

00:01:03

Abby: Yeah, the same. I’m so excited to be here, and thank you for reading the book and wanting to talk about it. You know, it’s a labor of love, something that I’m really proud of, and I’m glad that your daughter, and, you know, I have 2 daughters of my own, a 13 and 11-year-old, so this book is for sure something I’ve [been super] into and we are like trying to put—throw it down their throats, [essentially].

Melissa: [Laughs.] That’s awesome. I’m with you. I’m so with you. I think, you know, obviously your soccer accomplishments are like in a league of their own, like a 2-time Olympic gold medalist, you know, FIFA world, women’s World Cup champion. But I have to tell you I had one of the proudest moments on your behalf last Saturday. Actually, maybe even on behalf of all women. I was chatting with one of my daughter’s friend’s dads at a swim meet and I was telling him how excited I was, that I was getting to interview you this week. And he says, oh, oh, Abby Wambach. Wait, isn’t she the highest all time women’s goal scorer?

Abby: Mm-hmm.

00:02:01 And I was like oh, actually, let me tell you, no, she is the all time scorer period across both women and men. So it was like on your behalf I was so proud to say that to him. So I can imagine how this book must feel like such a labor of love and an accomplishment. It’s really cool.

Abby: Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate you and I appreciate you fixing, you know, being somebody out there that’s editing both—

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Abby: —[versions] of my record, so that’s great.

Melissa: But that’s actually, I think, why—that was what got me so excited at the concept of talking with you about your new book, “Wolf Pack: How to Come Together, Unleash Your Power and Change the Game,” is I think you’ve managed to take something that so few people have accomplished—there are not many elite athletes in the world, and you’ve taken something so unique and not only made understandable and relatable, but something I think that everybody can rally behind. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about the concept of the “Wolf Pack” and how you came up with this concept, and what it means.

00:02:58

Abby: Well, so first of all, I’m going to start at the beginning. When I retired the president of Barnard College emailed me and asked me to participate and be the commencement speaker of last year’s graduation, and reluctantly I said yes. And I say reluctantly because, you know, I was nervous. Like I actually have not graduated from college yet, so I thought they would know that, like is this, isn’t that kind of a prerequisite [of a] commencement speaker at college graduations?

And then I wanted it to be good. You know, I’m a competitor. And it’s not like you can win a gold medal, but I really wanted it to be good for these women because this is a watershed moment in these women’s lives. And I remember trying to figure out—and my wife and I, you know, my wife is an author, so she’s like the number one person I go to with all of my stuff, especially when it has to do with words and writing.

00:03:53 And so we were talking about different ideas and how to shape the speech. And I had been obsessed with this TED Talk that I had seen about these wolves [being rangers] into Yellowstone National Park, and there was something that screamed inside of this story, something that was true to me, that felt true to me about these wolves, and the ecosystem, and how so similar I feel women and our experience right now is in our world, right? And how do we transition from that fear of change to progress, how do we go from there to there.

And so I thought wow, this is such a beautiful metaphor for what women are experiencing right now that if we could somehow intertwine some of the teachings that I have had throughout my life that made me, that differentiated me as a champion, then I think that we could kind of tie this all together in a little bow while using these messages of what, you know, a fairy tale is supposed to teach us.

00:04:56 You know, I want this book to serve as the new bedtime stories for woman and girls everywhere, because we all read certain stories. And listen, women. and little girls, and boys, and men, we are given messages every single day about how we’re supposed to be acting, what it means to be a girl, what it means to be a boy, and all of these things. And it’s really freaking confusing, truth be told, right?

Melissa: Yeah.

Abby: Because I think that as [we’ve] come down along the line of evolution, gender is going to be on a much wider spectrum, right? And as we see sexuality be given a big, much wider spectrum, so too will gender. We just have to get a little bit further down in the progress [world]. So combining this idea of an understanding about the messages that were taught about what it means to be a girl, and then using my unique experience of playing on the national [team], plus the lessons that I’ve learned in many ways by playing in this all women’s badass ecosystem, and then kind of tying it all together with this cool wolf story, the wolf pack story.

00:06:12 And I…I don’t know if it’s a great speech. I think it was a good speech. I think that I knew it was going to kind of be made or, or, you know, kind of make or break how I performed it, because essentially it’s a performance.

Melissa: Right, yeah, yeah.

Abby: And I think that it came off well, and I think that the graduating seniors were grateful that I was the person that that year was chosen. In the end that’s how it kind of got turned into the book “Wolf Pack.” The actual book itself is a little bit more expanded, and it goes a little deeper into the philosophy that I write about. But one of the most important things about this book—and I can’t highlight this enough—is the note to the reader which is in the first page.

00:06:57 You know, I think that we are in a place right now where powerful women are trying to figure out the feelings they have about the way that they interact with the world and then the way that the world responds to them, right? And I think that this is a unique opportunity for women, and this is a unique opportunity for men. You know, this is an invitation for men to understand what women’s experience is like.

Because when we’re talking about gender and we’re talking about misogyny, and we’re talking about patriarchy, and we’re trying to solve for it, we have to get really honest with the fact that men haven’t really been finding themselves inside a work that has been written from the perspective of a woman, because they’ve never needed to, right? To need to understand what women go through. This is important because men have to start putting themselves in the…with the perspective of women.

00:07:57 They have to put themselves into the experience of somebody who’s been oppressed or somebody who’s been marginalized. That is the way we actually get somewhere. Because I think that…I think that that is a really big thing. And I’ve just actually, in the last 24 hours, started to get the language around that. I’ve been thinking about this especially because of what happened yesterday with the women playing, and beating Thailand 13 to 0, and a lot of people having an issue with it.

And it’s like actually, we all have to figure out from our own perspective how we were raised, what we know to be true, what we believe to be true, right? And that’s what this book is. This book is a compilation of the things I believe to be true. And I really mined what I do know, and what I do know in truth. I mined it for its gold and it turned into this book, and I’m proud of it. So that’s the longest answer in the history of the world.

00:08:57

Melissa: No, no, let’s build on that, because I think you bring up some really interesting points. And part of what I found like really inspiring about your book was one of the quotes you mentioned was from Ava DuVernay, the first black woman to direct a film nominated for an Oscar for best picture, right? And she says—and I love this quote—is “regarding glass ceilings I’m most bolstered by folks who create their own ceilings and I’m less interested in banging down the door of some man who doesn’t want me there.” And I think this is an attitude that I really identify with in the corporate world, and I’m interested in how you see that playing out on and off the field.

Abby: Yeah. You know, Ava said it perfectly. That’s why I chose her. But I think that when I watch our women’s national team play that’s exactly how I see them. And that’s exactly how I felt. It was like, oh, we’re not actually over there following the rules that you set out and put down, and these unwritten and unspoken rules that we’re all supposed to follow by. Like we’re over here creating our own thing, because that’s our right.

00:10:00 We’re allowed to do whatever [we] want. We’re allowed to do what we need to do in order to achieve the level of success that we want to achieve. Because that is how greatness is made. People who are innovators and are trying to do things and create progress, the first thing to any kind of innovation is an idea, and it’s a belief that something different and more beautiful and true is possible.

So, you know, that is what Ava has been doing in her own way, you know. And I think we all have to figure out, right, like what is important to us, and to also figure out what kind of marginalization, what kind of messages we have been swallowing for our entire lives that we don’t even understand now. We don’t even know that we have these, let’s call it, implicit bias.

Melissa: Mm-hmm.

00:10:52

Abby: And we can’t even point them out. We just believe things to be true. Like oh, that’s just the way it is. How many times have you ever said that? How many times have you thought that? Tons.

Melissa: Yeah.

Abby: And we have to…if we really want to actually create a sense of equality, we all, especially those who are marginalized, have to figure out what it is that we really believe. And when you are a marginalized person, we are more prone to figuring out what we believe because we’re being tested against it often.

So this is a charge for men out there, this is a charge for women out there to actually figure out, draw the line back to where you started to come to believe certain things about what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man. And by the way, I also understand that gender does [run on a spectrum]. I identify as a woman and so I’ve written this book from the perspective of a woman. The leadership philosophy in it is universal.

00:11:56 So, you know, forgive me if it’s too female for some folks, because I do understand that there’s some non-gender binary…nonbinary people that can’t completely identify as a woman, but it is written from that perspective. I think it’s very, very important for folks to understand that though all the philosophies in here are universal, women have not been taught them, right?

Women have not been taught that you are allowed to [be] imperfect. Women have not been taught that they’re allowed to fail, right, and still be able to move forward. Women have not been taught that they can be grateful and also demand what they deserve. So that’s why this is super important to have this conversation so that we can actually say oh, okay, yes, men can agree to everything in this book, but apparently the things that I’ve written about in the book have been taught to men for all of history.

00:12:59

Melissa: But I think, though, that it’s really—if I’m hearing you correctly, and I completely agree with you—is that it’s not just about the idea of encouraging women to think this way, it’s really encouraging everyone to say hey, if you do hit a roadblock, right, spend more time and energy on creating what you want than spending time on asking others to change, right? Like own it. Take it as your own and do something about it.

Abby: Yeah.

Melissa: And I think that’s a powerful message and I think one that organizations are trying to, I think are focusing on, is trying to help people figure out how to bring their whole selves to work. And one of the other stories that really struck me in terms of people who were able to bring their whole selves to work was the new coach of the national team, Pia, about how she came on board and really worked on shifting an existing culture, and it was an already strong and successful culture, but she managed to bring her whole self to her job and really create this amazing sense of inclusion.

00:14:00

Abby: Yeah.

Melissa: So for our listeners, you can tell the story that you shared in the book of what it was like—

Abby: Oh, right. Right, right, right.

Melissa: —when Pia showed up for the first time? I thought it was a great, great story.

Abby: Yeah, well, it was first [meeting] ever. We hadn’t really ever met her. We knew of her. We knew of her. So she shows up and then we just said, you know, we’re going to win, we’re going to play beautiful soccer, and then all of a sudden she pulled out this guitar, right? And as an American, we are very serious. You know, you are on the national team, you’re representing your country, and so everything is very serious. So the idea that this woman would bring a guitar felt almost like a circus act. My initial feelings were like this is ridiculous, you know.

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Abby: But as she kept playing I just noticed a lot of us kind of started to lean a little bit more in, and lean a little bit more on. As time went on we realized music, for Pia, is a great love of her life.

00:15:02 And over time we realized that that was vulnerability, that she was showing us who she was without having to talk, without having to tell us, but showing us. And she was stepping into a different kind of power, a different kind of female power that we’d never seen. And I think that it brought us together so much. We love those ideas of those times where she would get her guitar out and play for us. It was amazing.

Melissa: That is very cool. And I do, I love the idea that she created, like she really did bring her whole self and created, as a result, it sounds like, this culture of inclusion that ultimately led to so much success. And I think that’s exactly what so much of corporate America is trying to achieve right now. You see so much of it continuing to play out in the news about diversity and inclusion. And I think she’s just a great example of this microcosm that she created of success by doing just that.

Abby: Totally.

00:15:55

Melissa: So the other thing you mentioned is one of your responsibilities when you were a co-captain was building team culture, so—and a culture, by the way, that was so strong, like books have been written about it. So I’d be curious, like let us in on the secret. Like what do you, how did you do it? Like what—[laughs]—I can tell you every CEO wants to build a culture as strong as you did. How did you do it?

Abby: Yeah. Well, the first thing is I stepped into an already existing strong culture, so I can’t lie and say that it was all my doing. You know, there was this very solid structure and culture that was there decades before I arrived. And that is because, you know, I followed in the footsteps of Mia Hamm, Michelle Akers, Carla Overbeck, Eva Heindricks, Karen [unintelligible] 00:16:51, women who singlehandedly, in ways, changed the dynamic of women’s sports and the way that women are viewed in sports.

00:17:03 And then how did they do that? How do you create culture? How do you maintain culture? And then how do you evolve with what’s going on in our modern days, right? Because early days it’s like I think that we all can remember a time when the coach or the boss stood on a chair in the locker room or stood on a desk in the office and told the team, and tried to inspire them, and tried to motivate them. And though inspiration is still necessary, I don’t believe that it’s the job of one person to create culture. I believe that the more modern way of leadership is to get the best people in the room and let them create the culture, let them create the system.

00:17:51 You know, and I have to share this, and it’s not to slight Sheryl Sandberg in any way, because “Lean In” was so important back in 2013, but we are…it feels like it’s almost an archaic idea where women should be like trying to mold themselves and fit themselves into a man’s business world, right? We are so far beyond that now that women need to step into their full selves, their true power, because it’s the women and the femininity that women can bring with them to the business world that can solve so many issues that the business world is experiencing.

So, you know, I think a lot about culture and I think about how the younger generation has to be not just inspired and motivated, but individually motivated. You have to reach out, and it’s harder to manage. It’s harder to lead. It’s harder to captain teams than it ever was because you have to figure out how each and every single person is motivated, and what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses, and how you can [use] each person’s strengths and compound those strengths on top of each other so as to not expose the weaknesses, right?

00:19:06

Melissa: Mm-hmm.

Abby: I think that just recently I was doing this event with Mia, and I was kind of [dosing] myself a little. I was like, oh, I wasn’t the best, I wasn’t that technical. And she just kind of shut me up. She goes, Abby, don’t do that, like don’t do that to yourself because where your weaknesses lied is exactly where my strengths took over, so if it had not been for your weaknesses, I never would have had a role on the team, right?

Melissa: That’s interesting, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Abby: And I think that we lose sight of that because all we do all day long is that we go around trying to protect our failures or our quote, unquote, weaknesses rather than saying oh, those weaknesses are actually where somebody else’s strengths might lie. So then this weakness isn’t necessarily something to be ashamed of. It’s something to like look for in other people, like where can somebody else help me here, right?

00:20:02 Because nobody does anything alone. And I think that kind of culture will allow managers, CEOs, people to understand how they can get a group of people that all come from different places, that have different levels of education, that believe in different things and have different politics, whatever it is we’re talking about, there is a way to bring people together. But you can’t do it without making yourself vulnerable first. You can’t do it without knowing who you are first. You can spot a fake a mile away.

Melissa: Oh, absolutely.

Abby: At least I can.

Melissa: Oh, no, I think you’re right, mm-hmm.

Abby: Yeah. Long story short.

Melissa: Okay, so building on that and building on those concepts, I’m curious like how big of a factor do you think culture is and the ability to show up and accept some of the vulnerabilities that you talk about, and the ability to bring your whole self, how much do you think those things play into the differences between a winning team and a losing team?

00:21:00

Abby: I think that culture is everything because culture sets mindset, right? And mindset has everything to do with winning and losing. The way that you [attend], the way that you practice, the way that you are every single moment, every single day at work determines outcomes of big moments, right? It’s not the game days that determine the outcome. It’s like it’s the previous 3 months. It’s the previous 6 months. It’s the previous 4 years.

Like what is your business doing consistently well? And that is the stuff that will determine success or not. It’s not about scoring more goals or having more on your bottom line, or having more sales on your spreadsheet. That’s not what determines success. That is an outcome, right? For me, I believe that in order to fundamentally break down all of the things that will allow your team more chance at success, mindset is one of the most important things that is very embedded inside of what the culture is, right?

00:22:08 And mindset is created by each and every single individual. So on the national team, when we would go out and train, it didn’t matter what we were doing, every single time we were going out to train we were going out to become better, not I’m trying to be better than her, never like that. It was like I am trying to get better today. I want to make sure we gain today. And the only way I’m doing that, right, the only way that I’m making these gains is if I’m pushing my body, and my mind, and my heart to its limit every single day.

And the faith and the trust that gets built between a person on her right and a person on her left that is doing that kind of work every single day, that is what’s called mindset, and that is what culturally allows a team to [arrive on] the podium or have certain successes, whatever they might be.

00:23:05 It’s the belief system that every single day they’re going to bring it. It’s not just bring it when it’s the tournament time. It’s—

Melissa: Every day.

Abby: —the sacrifice and all of that every single day. So consistency at a high level is kind of my definition of true success. It’s not winning championships, it’s consistently being able to be excellent.

Melissa: So one of another, one of my favorite quotes in the book was—and I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I really love this quote and the subsequent quote that you mention after. But it’s “I’ve never scored a goal in my life without getting a pass from someone else.” And I’ve watched footage of you scoring a goal. Maybe you can tell us what happens when you would score a goal.

Abby: So a couple of months ago I was watching some videos, and when the kids get in trouble I force them to watch some of my old goals, and it’s real fun for them.

Melissa: Oh, yes. I may have to adopt that. [Laughs.]

00:23:57

Abby: Yes, so my 11-year-old, Emma, she’s like who are you pointing to? And I just said, you know, I was like that’s actually a really great question, and it’s an important one because I think that noticing these things is exactly what I’m trying to teach my daughters. Like I’m trying to teach them the little micro movements and the micro things that I witness from powerful women.

So I told her, I said, you know, before every goal there’s something that happens beforehand. Somebody has passed me the ball. Some defender has cleared to fall off the line and passed it out to a midfielder, who passed it to the final assist giver. I’m pointing to all of those people.

I’m also pointing to the bench player who happened to stay after practice late with me 2 times that week. I’m pointing to the coach for drawing up the play. I’m pointing to every single person who had an impact on that specific moment because in soccer, you know, the game is fluid, and everybody is kind of trusting, and it’s like this, an amoeba-like structure that’s happening throughout the entirety of the game.

00:25:02 So there’s an immense amount of trust that goes into it, and with any kind of trust, when good things happen, we have to celebrate that, and we have to champion each other. So essentially this is the story that I believe everybody can relate to, right? Everybody understands what it’s like to score a goal on some level, right, to have any kind of success.

And if you are the goal scorer you better be pointing, pointing to the coach, pointing to your midfielders, right? If you are the person who gets the promotion, you’ve got to be acknowledging the folks that got you there, you know, whether it was a mentor, whether it was somebody who allowed you the opportunity to get the job, whether it was your parents or your brothers or your sisters. It doesn’t matter who, it just matters that you acknowledge any success that you got, because nobody’s ever done anything alone in the history of the world.

00:25:55 And I think that that’s an unforgettable thing, especially with how autonomous we’re making our lives with social media and technology. I believe it’s almost a lost art, the art of gratitude and the art of thanking somebody for their experience or their influence in that moment of your life.

Melissa: And I think it’s so important, too, in terms of creating that, like, positive team culture that you’ve been referencing, like yes, it is a lost art in many ways, and one I think that is so essential to building trust and support across any team.

Abby: Yeah, and ask yourself this, like ask yourself this one question. What kind of a team do you want to play on, you know?

Melissa: Yeah.

Abby: Like do you want to play on a team where everybody’s like out to get each other? Do you want to play on a team where like we’re all competing against each other and there’s no positivity, and it’s like sinister? Nobody wants that.

Melissa: Nobody wants that, yeah.

Abby: Create the environment that you want to be a part of, right? And before you can do that, before you can figure out exactly what kind of environment you want to be a part of, you need to know who you are.

00:27:00 And there isn’t enough personal work that’s done in the world. There isn’t enough holistic personal work that is done for people to figure out exactly who they are so they can actually start figuring out the environment they want to create around them.

Melissa: Let’s flip the script here for a second and talk about failure for a little bit. You know, I think in theory failure is something that people are okay with. In fact I think in corporate America we’re talking a lot more about needing failure as a necessary component to innovation. But I think sometimes, you know, people are fine with it intellectually. I think it’s a whole different story when that failure becomes really personal. So maybe you could tell us a little bit more about your philosophy on failure and how you think corporate America could benefit from following the same philosophy.

Abby: Well, I think that for women and men failure takes on a very different look. I think that men, for all of time, have been able to fail. And I think it was Michelle Obama that said men fail up, right?

00:28:00 For women it makes perfect sense to me that women are so afraid to fail because there’s a scarcity mentality that’s been planted inside of us and among us. And it’s a numbers game. When you think about a table and there’s 10 seats around that table dedicated to a board or whomever, and 2 of those seats statistically are being given to women, it makes real actual sense why women would be more afraid to fail, because that would give them less chance of getting one of those seats at the table, right?

Melissa: Mm-hmm.

Abby: And for men it makes sense, it makes people understand like, oh yeah, like I’ve got more chance and more opportunity, so inherently I’m going to feel more comfortable about taking more risk, where women aren’t. And that’s why this message, and this philosophy, and this leadership tactic that I’m trying to [impart] in women is that it’s like we can take ourselves out of the game.

00:28:59 Not only by not even playing, but then when we do make a mistake, or we do fail, so many women take their balls and go home, right?

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Abby: We can’t do that. We have to step in and say you know what, this was a mistake and I’ve learned from it, and I’m going to make this into one of the best things that ever happened to me. And I think that women too often worry that this is going to be their demise, this is going to be the moment, because we all are made up of this imposter syndrome as well, because we haven’t been around as long as men in the business world.

So for me I think that there’s a ton more work. And it’s a mindset. It’s a switch in my mind that you literally can make right this second that any failure of your life in your past and any failure in your future you can use as evidence and an opportunity rather than an end line.

00:29:56 And that is in your mind. You can train it. And it’s not easy. I’m not saying that it’s going to be with a snap of your fingers. It’s going to be hard. You’re going to struggle with it. It’s going to be something that you might have to, like, have an existential crisis around.

But the more you do it, the more little failures you can point to and say okay, this is an opportunity, this is an opportunity and turn it into fuel, you will find yourself in 6 months, in 12 months, in 2 years a much stronger person and somebody who’s more capable and willing to take risks. The people who are capable and more willing to take risks are the ones that innovate more, are the ones that are more creative, are the ones that actually [feed] higher. You know, it takes money to make money situation, and that’s exactly what this is.

Melissa: So I read that you jokingly said, after being selected to the Hall of Fame, that that honor means you’re officially a has been. But somehow I suspect the best is still yet to come from you, Abby, so what’s next?

00:30:53

Abby: Well, I think that I’m in it right now. You know, I, for so much of my life, being a professional athlete, there was always something that was next. There was the next Olympics, the next World Cup that I was training for, right? And I think I’m trying to disassociate myself from these massive end lines. Do I have goals? Of course. But I’m trying to rebalance the skills of my life to make them not so…that there’s not like this finish line with a checkered flag.

Like I want to have a beautiful life and I want to create a beautiful marriage, and continue to create a beautiful marriage, and raise beautiful children, and have amazing experiences. And, you know, I’ve written 2 books, and this “Wolf Pack” book has been nothing short of a miracle for me because it’s brought a different kind of life to the context of what I knew to be true and what…and it forced me to actually do some real personal work, right?

00:31:57 Because when you actually put something in print you have to be damn sure what you’re saying is true to you. You have to be damn sure. And it doesn’t have to be good. I’m not saying that [every book] that has been printed in the world has to be great. I’m saying it has to be true. And it took a long time for me to really uncover not only the truth of what I believe about the world, and about women, and about my experience, but how I came to believe it.

I think those 2 elements are very, very important for people to map out what they want for their life so that they can go about achieving some of the things that they want to get done down here, because life is short. So that’s kind of, that’s what I’m doing now. I have a leadership company that I started this last year and I’ve already taken 20 women through a 10 month long program inside of—

Melissa: Very cool.

Abby: —[a private] school which is a, you know, it’s the passion of my life because I do a lot of speeches, and I go into the corporate world, and I talk about women’s leadership, and empowerment, and pay equity, and all of those things.

00:33:02 And that was awesome, and it’s great, and it pays the bills. But the truth is, is going in on a one off situation at one of the women’s conferences or one of the yearly conferences these corporations have per year just felt a little…there was a void. I’d wonder am I actually making a difference, right? Is this actually moving the needle? Am I actually doing something here?

So that forced my hand into creating an actual leadership program that is… So essentially I’m going out and speaking about women’s rights. That’s checking the diversity, box, right? And creating these leadership programs, and offering them, and going around the country talking to women over a long period of time. That is me trying to check the inclusion box because that’s the thing that I don’t think all corporations really, truly get and have figured out, right?

00:33:55 Because diversity is hiring, you know, having a specific number of women versus men that you’ve hired, or diversity is hiring a trans person. And then the inclusion part is making sure that those women are able to use their voices. And not only that, but they’re actually getting into the top tier levels of management, which is where we see the biggest cutoff in the separation between men and women—

Melissa: Yep.

Abby: —in the business world. So that’s kind of what I’m doing. And I’m parenting. And right now specifically I’m going to be watching the World Cup today, and—

Melissa: [Laughs.]

Abby: —you know, just super happy to be alive, super happy that soccer gave me a platform to be able to really do good work in the world and work that I’m very passionate about. And yeah, I couldn’t be happier, actually.

Melissa: Oh, that’s fantastic. So 2 more quick questions for you. What’s the one word you think about when you think of culture?

Abby: I think…I suck at doing one words, but I’m going to try.

Melissa: [Laughs.] Okay, you can…it has to be one word—it doesn’t have to be one word.

00:34:58

Abby: I think it’s figure out-able.

Melissa: Figure out-able.

Abby: I think culture is figure out-able. It’s physical as hell, but I think that, you know, every company, and every country, and every generation, like we have these cultures that we are kind of working within, and every person has a role in that.

Melissa: Okay, last question, and this is kind of a fun, silly question, but it’s one that we ask all of our new hires when they start at Eagle Hill. What’s the one superpower you wish you had and why?

Abby: Hm… Okay, well, I have 2 answers. One is a very practical, boring one because I travel so much, so it would be for sure time travel.

Melissa: Same with me. I’m with you on that. [Laughs.] Wouldn’t that be so easy?

Abby: Totally. Totally, and would just like make my life so much better, so much easier. But my real answer would probably be to fly.

Melissa: Very cool.

Abby: Yeah.

Melissa: Well, Abby, thank you so much for joining us today. I loved learning more about your background and your philosophies, and kind of putting a voice to all your cool ideas that you’ve put together in “Wolf Pack.”

00:36:08 I really think you talked about all the personal work that you did and it really shines through because it is, it really, really is a great little book, and I loved it, and I loved your messages, so I wish you so much luck and success, too, moving forward.

Abby: Awesome. Thank you for having me and good luck with everything, okay?

Melissa: No problem. Thanks so much, Abby.

Abby: Okay.

Melissa: Thanks for listening to our cultur(ED) podcast. If you liked the show and want to learn more, check out our cultur(ED) website, culturedcast.com. And please follow us on iTunes. If you’d like to know more about our research, visit eaglehillconsulting.com/culture.

00:36:45 [End of recording.]