We believe that there is no algorithm for leadership and so we interview great sports coaches from around the world to try and find ideas to help all of us lead our families, our colleagues, and our teams better.

The best ideas from those interviews are in this newsletter.

We hope you find one or two things here that you can bring to your dinner table, locker room or boardroom table for discussion.

Latest Interview

Tom is a rodeo rider who won the USA National High School championship twice. Then from 1985 as a pro rider, he qualified for his first National Rodeo finals, going on to win the event in 2001. He was captain of the 2002 of the USA team for the 2002 Olympic Command Performance Rodeo where they won a silver medal. He retired in 2005, and took up coaching and led Ranger College to the men's Rodeo championship in 2007, a fact even more impressive given that the team had been in hiatus for the 23 years prior.

He is a two times winner of ProRodeo Hall of Fame Mentoring Award and in 2009 was inducted into the Rodeo Hall of Fame.  He has also founded the Wild Horses Building Champions charity whose focus is the prevention of suicide and drug abuse for local youths through equine therapy

Interviewing Tom was a real highlight for me. He has a background that is far far different from anything that I have experienced; and yet his thoughts on leadership and life are universal.

Some of the things he said that stayed with me afterwards were:

• His belief that the outside of a horse is a good for the inside of a person and the terrific story he shares of working with a young man with autism to illustrate this.

• His focus on fairness and the way he believes the organising bodies and stakeholders that administer rodeo need to be more transparent and consistent so that the western way of life thrives.

• And his story of going to Indian boarding school and how that shaped his love of horses and the western way of life

Listen here on… Apple | Spotify  | Google

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Leadership Insights

Kathy Delaney Smith retired at the end of the 2021–22 season after 40 seasons as head coach of the women's basketball team at Harvard University. At the time of her retirement, she was the longest-tenured women's head coach at a single school in NCAA Division.

We have >1200 insights across many other Leadership topics like setting up new team cultures, establishing team values or helping people with their inner voice. They are indexed, searchable and can be downloaded to share.

Some of them are free but others require a one-time purchase or subscription.

Leadership Skills

This episode is on the topic of Care and how the Great Coaches use it in their approach to Leadership, and it features audio quotes from 14 Great Coaches.

The key points are:

• Caring for the person, beyond their ability to perform as an athlete or an employee, will help you be a better leader.

• Bringing care into your leadership style, means that there will be times when you must be more than just a coach, at times you will need to be a friend, a teacher, or a mentor. Your ability to navigate these different roles will influence your performance as a coach.

• If you want to bring more care into your relationships, a first step is to start by meeting the other person where they are, not with your own agenda. This will help you understand the barriers that might be holding the person back.

• The benefit of having a deeper sense of care for your team is that it will allow you to ask more of them.

• Building relationships based on care can be exhausting as the leader so it’s important to ensure you have routines to help you recover and maintain your energy.

Ideas

Tiger Woods spent 683 weeks as the worlds #1 golfer. And when he was interviewed about his key strengths as a golfer, he said it was his ability to forget his last shot. In fact, he gives himself 10 steps after making a bad shot in which to process it and then move on. It’s a terrific skills to posses and this article explains how he tries to do this.

Partners

If you are looking to improve your own leadership skills, then you can reach us at elevatedleadership.com.au

Our team of executive coaches, including The Great Coaches host, Paul Barnett, brings a wealth of experience as International CEOs who have faced the challenge of stepping forward in uncertain moments.

Contact Us

If you have any feedback you can contact us [email protected] We love hearing from the people around the world who listen. We read out comments each week at the end of the podcast and are always looking for guests, does anyone know Coach K?