Motivate Your Team! Cheer Up A Friend! Inspire Yourself!
Motivate Your Team! Cheer Up A Friend! Inspire Yourself!
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| Wooden's Wisdom - Volume 13 | Issue 746 |
| Craig Impelman Speaking | Championship Coaches | Champion's Leadership Library Login | |
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"YOUR BEST OUTCOMES REQUIRE THE BEST OF YOUR ABILITIES" Think about accountability in three levels. First, own the responsibility. Second, own the outcome. There is a third level: own performing to the best of your abilities.
The third level is where accountability becomes something more than completing a task. It becomes a mindset of continual improvement. The stated outcome is no longer the finish line; it becomes the starting point for the next level.
Booker T. WashingtonFew leaders demonstrated this third level of accountability (best of your abilities) better than Booker T. Washington who between 1890 and 1915 became the dominant leader of the African American Community and advisor to several Presidents.
In 1881 Washington was given a straightforward assignment: start a school in Tuskegee, Alabama. When he arrived there was no school—no campus, no buildings, no equipment, and no money.
Classes began in a small shanty and an abandoned church borrowed from the local Black community. Washington borrowed $250 from a friend and used it as a down payment on an abandoned plantation that cost $500. That land became the first campus of what would later become Tuskegee Institute.
The students immediately went to work clearing fields, repairing structures, and preparing land so the school could produce its own food.
The school needed permanent buildings, which meant bricks. The problem was that no one at Tuskegee knew how to make them.
Washington and the students began experimenting anyway. They formed bricks by hand and built a kiln to fire them. The kiln failed. They built another—it failed. They built a third, and it collapsed.
The school had no money left, so Washington traveled to Montgomery and pawned his watch for fifteen dollars. With that small sum he returned to Tuskegee and rallied the students for another attempt.
They built a fourth kiln, and this time the bricks fired successfully. The responsibility had been accepted and the outcome had been achieved—but Washington didn’t stop there.
Instead he asked another question: what else can we do to the best of our abilities?
The students refined the brick‑making process. Before long Tuskegee students were producing bricks not just for their own campus but for others throughout the region. In one season they manufactured more than 1,200,000 first-class bricks, and builders from across the South came to purchase them. The Tuskegee Institute flourishes today.
John WoodenWooden defined success as "peace of mind attained only through self‑satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you are capable."
He also said, "Never be satisfied. Work constantly to improve. Perfection is a goal that can never be reached, but it must be the objective."
For Coach Wooden achieving the outcome of an undefeated season was never the finish line; it was the starting point for the next level.
Carol Dweck and the Growth MindsetModern research supports this same philosophy.
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, author of the bestselling book Mindset, explains that people who believe their abilities can expand through effort and learning ultimately achieve far more than those who believe their talents are fixed.
As she writes, "Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?"
Her research shows that the highest performers are not satisfied with proving they can achieve a result; they focus on expanding their capabilities irrespective of "successful" outcomes.
Reflect on this idea of accountability. How are you doing? Write it down. Share it with someone on your team.
Yours in Coaching, Craig Impelman
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A Time to Talk When a friend calls to me from the road Robert Frost (1874-1963)
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