Recent comments to posts about productivity have clarified for me that the Auburn program is building people with competence, character, and commitment. Years from now, you will realize how important these past few years have been … but it really started even before you got to Auburn. It started at home and was impacted by every challenge that has come your way.
How you respond to the challenges is what builds the three essential qualities for successful performance whereever you are headed after graduation.
Knute Rockne and Notre Dame’s leaders realized they cold help student athletes acquire and develop their character through the performance of their duties and responsibilities on the field. They also knew that a great athlete began at home, where parents and life experiences shape character development.
One’s character is formed through the development and discipline of both a person’s intellect and will. The role of the mind is to understand the true; the function of the will is to choose to act correctly, or to do the right things. We learn to think and act through instruction, practice, experience, correction, reflection and other such means.
Striving to perform well is an excellent learning and character building experience. These processes also aid us to appreciate better each one’s own role as a member in organizational pursuits, while helping each to better understand the importance of goal setting, teamwork and individual and collective achievement.
Many coaching staffs consider at least three major criteria in their recruiting, selection and team formation processes. These three criteria might be defined as:
1. Competence – talent, skill, size, speed, capability
2. Character – the will to win, desire, coachability, social behavior, values
3. Commitment – willing to pay the price, dedication, reliability, duty, responsibility
Successfully selecting and recruiting top talent is fundamental to team building — whether the team is the Notre Dame football team or the team working PR for Citibank or the team working for American Red Cross or Christian Children’s Fund.
Team members must already have developed much of “The Right Stuff” before they join the team. After early adulthood, there is usually only very limited further development and improvement possibility if such attributes are not already well-established, cultivated and developed by that time in life. That’s why all of us who are responsible for hiring new talent to join our marcom teams dig into a candidate’s personality — we are looking for the clues that tell us you have the right stuff.
Or on the flip side, we are looking for clues that tell us there are attitudinal or behavioral characteristics that are potentially damaging. An astute coaching staff realizes that even very talented athletes can do more harm to the overall team capability, cohesion and spirit than their specific physical talents may contribute.
Such athletes, even though perhaps very talented, may be rejected or, if recruited, might be subsequently “cut” from the team.
In staff selection, as in so many other pursuits, one’s first loss may be the best loss.
Staffing errors must be minimized.
When recruiting mistakes are made, it is usually felt to be a good idea to terminate the relationship reasonably early. Trying to make major modifications to the behavioral and belief patterns of adult persons is usually an extremely difficult and time consuming process which in the end quite often fails.
So, hiring slowly and carefully, yet terminating quickly but kindly when mistakes are made, is a rule that should almost always prevail. One who decides in haste too often must repent over prolonged periods.
As Jim Collins so succinctly said in his book Good to Great, an organization must not only get the right people properly positioned on the bus, but it must also be sure to get the wrong people off the bus.
