FULL TRANSCRIPT

00:00 – Show Opening

Are you a professional who wants to become a more effective leader? Then get ready for daily tips from the coach with the experience and inspiration to help you succeed in any leadership situation. You’re listening to The Meeting Leadership Podcast with Gordon Sheppard.

0:27 – Start Here – Podcast content starts here!

Welcome to another episode of The Meeting Leadership Podcast. Now, the premise that I’ve based this podcast on is the fact that if you want to be a leader, you have to know how to run outstanding meetings. In this podcast, we’re giving you the tips, fairly practical things that you can take forward to your next meeting to put into action, to make it better, and ultimately grow your leadership skills. Now, in this episode, we’re going to talk about how Coach Carter inspires leaders to be accountable.

0:57 – Coach Carter – Learn about signing a contract with your team can be an opportunity

Basically, here’s the idea. One of my favorite accountability movies is called Coach Carter. It’s based on the real life story of basketball coach, Ken Carter. Here’s what happens. In the film, a high school basketball coach helps his players get to college because he asks them to change their behavior in a really positive way.Here’s how he does it. He gets the entire team to sign a contract if they want to be on the team. Keep that in mind for your meeting team right now, and I’m going to try and build a case for why this might be the approach that helps you improve accountability, especially after the meetings that you have. In this contract in the movie, it lays out how the kids are going to behave, and then Coach Carter, he does a really important thing. He makes them stick to it. The contract, well, it states that these young basketball players should maintain good grades. They should wear a tie on game day, and they should sit in the front row during every high school class, and there’s a few other things in there, as well.

2:02 – When Things Go Wrong – Leaders don’t buckle under pressure

Inevitably, of course, because it’s a movie, the kids break the contract. They win basketball games, but they stop going to class, and a whole bunch of them are not pulling that 2.3 that was in the contract that the coach made them sign. What ends up happening is Coach Carter carries out the consequences, and he starts to cancel regular season basketball games, even though they’re winning. He cancels them, and the community goes crazy. The parents, they go crazy. The staff from the school, they go nuts, and they put all this pressure on him, but he doesn’t budge because he understands that, for these kids in this school, maintaining basic grades along with playing great basketball, is a really great combo to get them out of really tough circumstances.Eventually, of course, everybody realizes that Coach Carter is being fair and he’s really acting in the best interest of the community and the kids, and then the kids eventually come together as a team, and the community supports them, and he pulls that off, but the big piece there is he didn’t waiver from that basic premise that he set out.

3:10 – How We Behave – A contract can be a great way to get everyone working together in meeting

What would happen if you brought this idea of a contract into your meetings. This is the how we behave, almost maybe the ground rules, if you want to call it, a little bit simpler, or if you want to get really complex, we call it a Team Charter. This is our values, the way we act, what we want to do and where we want to go. If this idea was brought in, would it make it more accountable, especially after the meetings. We see such lousy uptake on followup after meetings so often. Would this be the way, the contract, the agreement stated out loud by everybody that was there, signed by everybody, and then for you, as the leader, backed up by you, so when somebody steps out of bounds, the consequences have been laid out in that contract and people know that the consequences are going to be enacted.

3:58 – Be More Productive – Watch the movie ‘Coach Carter’

Can you imagine what would happen if you put in the work and actually pulled this off? How much more productive and profitable would every meeting be that you were in? How much would you grow as a leader to be the one who actually had the teeth to enforce the contract? I think it’s really worthwhile. I think if you need some inspiration, check out Coach Carter. You’ll probably catch it on Netflix or wherever you watch your movies. I really, really recommend it.

4:24 – Meeting Leadership Academy – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/academy

I also want to let you know that this episode of The Meeting Leadership Podcast is brought to you by The Meeting Leadership Academy. If you want great options for learning how to become a more effective leader who runs outstanding meetings, then visit meetingleadershipinc.com/academy to learn more.

4:42 – Shout Out! – Marilyn Mucha

I just want to say thanks so much to every one of you who’s taken the time to send in comments for the show, and, of course, if you send one in, I’d be happy to read it out, like this one from Marilyn Mucha, a listener who said this.

 “Just listened to episode three. You make it so easy for a busy person to just listen to get one great idea, then download if they wish to see the outline for the salient points. Nicely done.” Thanks, Marilyn, and thanks to you for listening, and we’ll see you tomorrow on The Meeting Leadership Podcast.

05:12 – Podcast Outro

Thanks for listening to The Meeting Leadership Podcast. Be sure to subscribe for more strategies to help you become an outstanding leader, and don’t forget to rate and review so we can bring you fresh content every day. We’ll see you tomorrow right here on The Meeting Leadership Podcast.