Many would call John Wooden the best basketball coach of all time. His UCLA team was able to win 10 national championships in 12 seasons with four of those years being undefeated seasons. Surprisingly, John Wooden did not measure success on the basketball court by wins and losses. He measured his team’s success on preparation. His job was making sure that everyone in the organization was giving as close to their full effort as possible at every practice every day. Winning was not under his control, his team’s preparation was.
What would John Wooden have to say about Christian higher education today? I daresay quite a bit, but a few remarks and stories about Coach Wooden seem especially applicable to today’s Christian college.
Your Organization is not Defined or Limited by Your Facilities – Just Your Work Ethic
When John Wooden took the head coaching position at UCLA in 1948 he did not receive a bright shiny basketball arena to practice and play games in. The facility that he started in was a dusty, under-lit, smelly old gymnasium affectionately known on campus as the “B.O. Barn”. Not long after coaching at UCLA for a few years, the crowds at games were getting so large they were no longer able to use the facility at all for games and had to play home games in other school’s gymnasuims. Other coaches would have given up any hope of success under these circumstances. Many coaches would have said we can only be as good as our facilities allow. Many would say that we can only recruit and retain top athletes if we have top facilities. Not Coach Wooden. Unbelievably, Coach Wooden won his first two national championships practicing in the B.O. Barn and playing without a home facility. Coach Wooden outworked his competition, plain and simple. As a Christian institution of higher education in a competitive market, you need to be willing to do what your competition can’t do or won’t do. Pay less attention to the facilities you lack or the quality of students that you wish you had and outwork the competition. Don’t let your facilities define who you are.
Organizational Culture is More Important Than You Think
“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation. Character is what you really are. Reputation is what people say you are.” – Coach Wooden
Institutions of Christian higher education do not have character, they have culture. Your culture defines what is punished and rewarded at your institution. Culture is the patterns in which your faculty, staff, and students interact. Culture is the actions that your institution is willing to tolerate. Your culture is who you really are as a Christian institution. Restated for Christian higher education, Coach Wooden’s quote could say,
Be more concerned with your culture than your reputation. Culture is what you really are. Reputation is what people say you are.
How much time, energy and money do you spend every year on your institution’s reputation? How much effort goes into convincing others that you are great? Are you great? Greatness has nothing to do with what others think of you. “Are you great?” is not a question that is answered by others but by your culture. If you have an untrusting siloed culture or a bitter faculty and staff, you may be putting the cart before the horse. Put the hard work into building an exceptional university culture and then work on your reputation. It’s much easier to sell something that is true.
The Details Matter
“… trivial matters, taken together and added to many, many other so-called trivial matters build into something very big: namely, your success.” – Coach Wooden
Coach Wooden believed strongly in controlling what we can control and not spending time on things that are out of our control. We can’t control the other institutions’ work ethic, we can control our own. We can’t control the look and feel of our competitor institution, but we can control how clean the buildings are that our campus tours take students through. We can control how prospective students are treated when they are on our campus. We can control the quality of instruction that our faculty members deliver. If every overlooked detail on your campus costs you one first-year student, how many students did you lose this year? Your focus on things that are out of your control may be costing you more than you think.
“Develop a love for details. They usually accompany success.” -Coach Wooden
So what would John Wooden’s Christian college look like?
John Wooden would work to lead a school with an exceptional campus culture. He may not have the “best” Christian college in terms of facilities, systems, or endowment, but in the area of campus culture he would make sure he was at the top. He would focus on making the most of the campus and infrastructure he had. He would squeeze every last drop of value out of his campus resources. He would spend his time thinking about the “small” details that matter to students. He would create an institution that leaned into hard work. Sounds like the kind of place I would trust with my kids!
–Nick Willis is a partner at TG Three
Do you need help with changing your campus culture? Do you wonder how to move towards a high-performance leadership team that focuses on the right problems? TG Three would love to talk to you about how we could help.
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