The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

#325: Ron Ullery

Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com

Be part of "Mindful Monday" - Text LEARNERS to 44222

Coach Ron Ullery began his football coaching career at Centerville High School in 1977.  He was the Offensive Coordinator (and play-caller) for my four years as the quarterback for Centerville (1996,1997,1998,1999).  He was promoted to Head Coach in 2000.  In his 14 years as head coach, he compiled a 107-45 record. Eight of his teams advanced to the Division 1 (big school) postseason.  He is currently the Offensive Line coach at Springboro High School.  This episode was recorded in front of the Springboro football team, coaches, and administrative staff.  He's coached high school football for 43 years.

Notes:

• Leaders who sustain excellence =
  • Understanding how hard it is to be excellent
  • Knowing there are multiple ways to lead (militaristic, fear driven, soft spoken, calm)
  • Must be organized -- Have to set a plan to direct people.  How are we going to get where we want to go?
  • Must have a tremendous work ethic -- Ask the people you're leading to work extremely hard and you must be willing to work even harder
  • Have extremely high expectations, unwilling to ever waiver -- They don't lower expectations to feel good
  • Must have humility -- Can't be all about you
• A great coach can make a player feel invincible:
  • A great coach sees another level in you.  A level above where you think you can go.  And they push you to go there...
  • Doing things you never dreamed you could possibly do makes you think it's possible.
  • "We are in a era where mediocrity and average is okay."
    • "If you want to, you can lay in bed all day, have your iPad here, your TV with 250 stations, your phone, you can doordash leave your door unlocked...  you never have to do anything."
  • We need to strive to be elite and excellent
• Being grateful for the hard work -- What it leads to...
• X & O's are not the most important part of football:
  • "Young people will live up to your expectations or down to your expectations almost all the time."
  • "It's our job to place the level of those expectations."
  • The elite performers hit the level of expectations set and then keep going.
• The confidence a coach gives his/her players by exhibiting an incredible work ethic:
  • "It has everything to do with making sure I'm prepared.  I want to control what I can control.  I don't want to be the weak link."
  • "To prepare, I need to be in a quiet place.  I became a morning guy in college.  I was majoring in Math.  It was tough."
• Delayed gratification -- Voluntary hardship:
  • The ability to delay gratification is a super power
  • "Instant gratification is what everyone wants now." -- Foresight: People have less foresight now than they used to.  They have instant access to everything they want at all times
• "If you are unsuccessful, look in the mirror.  The competition is not real stiff.  If you have some foresight and a strong work ethic, you can do whatever you want. Most people don't have that foresight."
• The difference between winning teams and losing teams
  • Winning teams: The players were empowered, had ownership. and they (the players) held each other accountable.
  • "You can coach them as hard as you want and they will respond as long as they know you care about them."
    • "It's a lot harder when you care."
• Why stay as a high school coach?
  • "I love the high school atmosphere.  I love the age, I love everything about high school. I love the challenge.  You take whatever comes in the doors.  There's no recruiting.  You do the best you can with what you're given.  I love everything about these guys."
  • "In my 43 years of coaching, I've never felt like I've had a job."
• Why offensive line?
  • "It was the biggest learning off-season of my career."
  • "Offensive linemen is by far the hardest position to succeed at.  It's also the most impactful of winning games."
  • "They are the least athletic players on the field by far.  They do the most important job, yet they are the least athletic."
  • "It's a tremendous challenge.  And I love challenges.  I love seeing them succeed."
• How to earn respect:
  • Must exhibit leadership, mental toughness, and discipline -- "You can't ask anything of anyone else if you're not willing and already doing it yourself."
  • You have to care and it has to show how much you care about people.  You have to do more than other people.
• Advice to his son Brent Ullery (head coach of Centerville High School):
  • "You have to formulate things you believe in.  You have to have strong beliefs.  Formulate your beliefs not based on what you did when you played, but base them on what you've learned from all of your experiences.  Don't let the outside noise influence you."
• Framework for continuous improvement and ability adapt:
  • "Listen and learn.  I'm a better learner today than any year of my life.  When I started out coaching I thought I knew everything.  Then I realized I knew nothing."
  • Learning talks with Coach Gregg every morning -- "I would meet him every morning and we would talk about everything.  Some about football, but more about people.  He was a master about human nature and motivating young people."
  • The main idea with continual learning is "you've never arrived."
  • "You've never arrived, you're always becoming."
• How to effectively lead peers/friends:
  • As a leader, it becomes your responsibility to lift others up and expect more of them -- Sometimes when you have to make difficult choices to prioritize leadership over friendship
  • The moment that Kirk Herbstreit became a leader (he was a quarterback at Centerville High School)
• It's much easier to follow.  But far less fulfilling.  You have to make the choice to lead daily.
• The sacrifices made to be accountable to teammates -- Doing everything within your power to maximize your ability
• Laying the foundation for future generations
• Having the willingness to go get what you want -- Don't let anything get in your way
• Use the "Get To Know You Document"
• Why joining The Learning Leader Circle is a good idea

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Full Show Notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com

#324: Charles Fishman

Charles Fishman is the acclaimed author of One Giant Leap, A Curious Mind (with Brian Grazer), The Wal-Mart Effect, and The Big Thirst. He is a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious prize in business journalism.

Notes: 

• Leaders who sustain excellence =
  • They insist on excellence. "The work needs to be as good as it can be."
  • Getting to the moon was the largest project in the history of civilization
  • Clarity of the mission - Everyone must know the goal
  • Must keep people motivated
  • Standards must be clear - And the reasoning behind each action (intentional)
• President Kennedy was frustrated with how the U.S. was doing versus the Russians in space.  He needed to make a bold statement.  When it was made, the administration felt there was a 50/50 shot that it could happen.
  • It was important to announce broad goal and the reason behind it
• "Take the stairs" - Think of it as a blessing. "I get to do this."
  • Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
  • "A master stroke of leadership because it was a stretch goal, but it wasn't insanity."  It must be balanced.
• There are tapes of JFK talking scientific discovery where it was obvious he had little understanding of it.  -->  It's important to have people you have confidence in leading areas where you're lacking knowledge.
  • "If JFK wasn't assassinated, we may not have gone to the moon.  He was starting to get cold feet about the cost."
• The space program created a culture of learning from failure:
  • "Every single failure had to be investigated, understood, and resolved."
  • "No Random Failures" was the motto.
  • "Every failure is a gift." -- There were 14,000 recorded failures in testing.
• Collaboration -- How to keep so many people aligned?  There were 400,000 people from 20,000 companies working on the Apollo missions!
  • NASA's management style:
    • Clearly defined roles - What are your solutions to the problems?
    • Gave assignments and qualities that needed to be met
• NASA had a culture where they brought everyone together for in person meetings.  "Every minute of a mission would be walked through."
  • There was transparency and decisions got made.
  • Get people together in person and do something important.  This built camaraderie among the dispirit teams.
• Bill Tindall -- A mission planning genius on space navigation.  He was also gracious, self-effacing, and had a great sense of humor.
  • Bill respected what others had done, had respect for the mission.  He had the confidence to be calm.  A different person who used a different manner would have been a disaster working with the leaders at MIT.
  • People have to be persuaded to follow you.
• Both Gene Kranz and Bill Tindall were unafraid to hear input.  They were confident enough to find the right answer (wherever it came from).
• We are entering the most exciting time in space travel (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos)

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

Full show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com

Text LEARNERS to 44222

#322: Ian Leslie

Ian Leslie is a London-based journalist and author of critically acclaimed books about human behavior. He is currently writing a new book on “productive disagreement”, which will be published in 2020. Ian also created, wrote and performed in the BBC radio comedy Before They Were Famous.

Notes: 

• Leaders who sustain excellence =
  • Have the ability to think about their own thinking -- Step outside and reflect
  • Know that you'll say "I don't know" frequently
  • Breadth -- A range of interests
  • Interested in building knowledge and an awareness that it might not pay off (and being ok with that)
• Ian built his life around curiosity -- He was a strategist for ad agencies.  He needed to deeply understand his clients.  That is a job built on curiosity.
  • "I am a curiosity driven writer."
• Children are born curious... "People are born with habits/knowledge to survive."  And then they stop.  There's no evolutionary impulse to keep going.
  • It becomes a conscious choice to cognitive resources and time
• The two types of curiosity
  • Diversive: Hunger for new information.  It comes from an information gap.  Agatha Christie understands how to create an information gap to keep you turning the page
  • Epistemic: Desire to acquire knowledge/build/assimilate into networks in your brain.  It requires discipline.  It's engendered.  It's diversive curiosity grown up.
• "There is a rising premium on people with a high need for cognition."  NFC (need for cognition) is a scientific measure of intellectual curiosity
• "Taking action.  Doing... is a form of learning.  They are intertwined."
• Reflecting on own habits -- use self as a lab experiment... Then talk with others.
• Empathically curious -- Being curious about what's inside of other person's head.  How they think and feel.
• "You're going to be come a better communicator being a better listener."
• Atul Gawande -- Ask the unscripted question.  Make a human connection.
• Have 10% of your brain switched on to "Am I talking too much?"
• How to have productive disagreements:
  • Don't avoid it
  • Have disagreements we both can live with
  • "You'll have more productive disagreement if you're curious about the other person."
• People who have a higher level of scientific curiosity... They don't rush to judgement.  Think, "Oh, I wonder why I think that?"
• "Nobody has trained us in how to disagree with each other."
• "You have this choice in judgement and curiosity."
• Life/Career advice: "Be interested in everything.  Go deep in one area."
  • Have core people in your life and foster the weak ties.
• Everyone is born curious. But only some retain the habits of exploring, learning and discovering as they grow older. Which side of the “curiosity divide” are you on?

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

#322 with Julie Zhuo

Julie Zhuo is the VP of Product Design for Facebook.  She was the first-ever intern for the company.  She leads the team responsible for the Facebook App.  Julie is known as one of Silicon Valley's top product design executives, she leads the teams behind some of the most popular web and mobile services used by billions of people around the world. Julie writes about technology, great user experiences, and leadership on her popular blog "The Year of the Looking Glass" as well as publications like the New York Times and Fast Company.  She is the best-selling author of, The Making Of A Manager.