Creating Buy-In

This post has unrelated digressions denoted in italics.

17 days ago I wrote about Kevin Yngve, my co-coach at Northwestern, and his particular style of Yng-Fu.  What ensued was a miniature journey of the soul that I am going to attempt to lay out, I will be using this post as a way of mapping out my thoughts and feelings and as a way to attempt to see if I can draw a conclusion about a topic that I have never grasped.

Creating Buy-In:

Moments after posting Yng-Fu Colin Reid, a god amongst men, gchatted me about how he also didn’t understand buy in, we commiserated about how this was a skill neither of us grasped.  We didn’t understand why everyone isn’t just internally motivated like us. 

Fast forward to the Illinois Alumni weekend.  After witnessing the most anemic effort by Illinois since the dark days of 2012, there was a lot of conversation about how to bring the fire into games.  What motivates a team?  What gets people chomping at the bit?  How do you get people to play with their hair on fire?  The few kids on Illinois who cared enough to even ask the question, it seemed as if the rest had already checked out for the year, started pressing the alums who had successful collegiate careers about how to get some fire.  The answers from my peers were all mostly along the same vein.  “You’ve gotta get angry,”  “You need a few people on the team who are fired up,”  “someone needs to make a play and spark the team,”  “no one is pushing the team to get going.”  I mostly kept quiet during this conversation because I disagreed.

My first impression was that the team was built faultily.  I reflected on how often Frisbee teams chase a player that they want.  It feels like every season the team I am on has some guy who needs to be convinced to play Frisbee.  We waste all this time trying to convince someone who’d rather be partying to come play Frisbee with us instead.  When they do show up the team gets a half-hearted effort and little buy in from them because that guy feels like he “has” to be there.  Maybe if instead of chasing athletes and trying to convince them to do something they don’t really care to do we could just take the kids who want to be there and try to make them as good as we can.   If we gave them our attention and just got to work, then we’d never have issues with fire or intensity.  If there are players who want to play for us with no pressure to play for us, then we’ve got a team that will never need to be fired up.  Rooted into the fundamentals of this thought was the idea that you can’t externally motivate someone else. (I could hear Walden’s cackle in my mind foreshadowing that this can’t be the final conclusion.)

Tangentially I thought about how I think complaining about poor practice attendance is a waste of energy.  Instead of wasting time and energy complaining about who isn’t at practice why not just worry about who is at practice and try to make them as good as you possibly can?  Make practice worth the while of people who do show up and maybe people will then be incentivized to show up.

Then I had the great fortune of riding home with Nick Pro.  We spent the trip talking about what gets a team to play with some heart.  I told Pro how I don’t like the “get angry” culture because it is too close to the line between positivity and negativity.  (An aside that may undermine my perspective:  As we all know anger is just one letter away from danger.  It may be more than coincidence that anger is just a D away from danger, and as my fellow alumni were trying to articulate “sometimes a team is just a D away from playing with fire”, which would in fact be dangerous.)  After this I told Nick about my idea about not chasing athletes, he countered that he thought everyone wanted to be on the team.  Furthermore he thought everyone was happy on the team and that no one was on the brink of quitting the team.  He didn’t see it as a constant struggle to keep people on the team and that practice attendance was higher than in years past so he didn’t feel like no one was half-heartedly in.

Bagging that idea for the moment I began telling Pro that I personally like a positive culture.  I think negativity is a poison that weighs a team down.  As I was in the car feeling this way an uncomfortable contrast was staring me in the face.

In college my goal as a freshman was to become a role player for Illinois.  My motivation was to a part of that team, to be relied on to accomplish a job, and to deliver on that reliance.  I feel that most of motivation was derived from a desire to belong.  It was a very internal fire; I was going to go until I proved everyone wrong.  There are several moments where people sold me short and they bothered me, they bothered me so greatly that I worked to make them eat their words.  Unfortunately Frisbee players have short memories and never remember their slights against you, so there is never any word eating.

1.      Fall of 2008, Charlie O’Brien (the captain at the time) said if I worked hard I “might” be able to make the A-team as a senior.

2.      Fall of 2008, Jason Mickey “all rookies are worthless”.

3.      Spring of 2009, Tom Rudwick said that unless you make the A-team as a freshmen you can never get onto the OLine.

4.      Fall of 2009, Ryan Smith “you could be a good B-team player this year.”

5.      Spring of 2010, Ryan Smith was a little hobbled at practice and said he didn’t want to throw with me because he couldn’t move around enough to get my errant throws.

6.      Fall of 2010, Adam Wright – “Are you worried that Hidaka coming back will ruin your chance at playtime?”

7.      Fall of 2010, Adam Wright – The handlers are the only reason Illinois can win this season.

8.      Everything Brad Bolliger has ever said to me ever.

These things bother me.  They get under my skin.  They motivate me to prove the speaker wrong.  They motivate me.  Knowing that this is what gets me going, I projected this outward towards my teammates.  I was motivated when people questioned my ability, work ethic, and manhood.  So in order to motivate my teammates I questioned their ability, work ethic, and manhood.  I gave them a hard time for not being able to do something.  I ripped on people for deficiencies in their game.  I was actively a part of the negative and “get angry” culture.  I would send out snarky emails when practice attendance was low.

So here I am now, an individual whom at two distinct points in my life is motivated in completely different ways.  Does this complicate everything?  If you were trying to motivate me you’d not only have to figure out what motivates me, but you’d have to know what motivates me at a given moment.

When I was voted captain of Illinois I reached out to Stupca looking for some advice.  He told me that the most fatal mistake of a coach is thinking that players struggle in the same way that they struggled as a player.  The deficiencies that hold me back are not those deficiencies that hold back my boy Sahaj.  If Sahaj is struggling with a throw, I can’t just assume he struggles with it for the same reason I do.  I can’t teach Sahaj to run an upline the way I run an upline.  There is an element of tailoring to your boy that needs to be done.

This brings me home to Pat and the biggest blown chance to truly learn something of my life.  “Learn what motivates someone, and use it.”

·         Andy Kilinskis needed someone to reassure him.  He needed someone to tell him that he wasn’t just a space filler on the field.  He needed to be told that he could take shots, that he could have a role as a play maker.  He needed to know that there is room for him to grow into.

·         Adam Wright just wants to feel like he fits in.

·         Drew Levorsen wants to make a statement.  He wants to feel like people are watching and that they notice him.

·         Neal Phelps just wants to play sports against people that challenge him competitively.

·         Ian Preston just wanted to have some pride in what he was doing.  He wanted to feel like if he worked hard then that was enough.  As long as he showed up and slugged out a day, he could hold his head high.

·         I still don’t know what was going on in Dane Jorgensen’s mind.

I think buy in, and what makes Yngve great, requires an acute awareness of who you’re talking to, where they are in life, what else they are worried about, what else they have weighing them down, what makes them have fun, and what they need to feel like they matter.  Then after accumulating this awareness, you need to tailor everything you say and do to their frequency.  If I am blasting on 96.5 FM there is no way Andy Kilinskis is going to hear me on 101.1 FM, and Bradley has no chance of hearing me on 1000 AM.  Can you as a leader make 23 people feel empowered to be himself all while having a team with a single identity?  Can you make everyone feel like they have a role to play, that they matter, and that they don’t need to change who they are in order to execute that role?  Yngve can.