Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, it's Steve Vindigat's sport law. Leave me a message. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Hey, Steve, it's Dina. You aren't going to believe what just came across my desk. We need to chat. Give me a call.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Welcome to the latest episode of Sport Topia. We're so excited to share our knowledge and have conversation about healthy human sport.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: With so many leaders focusing more on the critical importance of naming and defining their organization's values, we thought we'd spend some time sharing our views on how best to engage your people in a conversation on the values they believe are mission critical. Thanks to the leaders who reached out for practical advice on how to do so. And if you're curious to learn more, we offer a step by step approach. In my book, values in action, igniting passion and purpose in canadian sport organization, which I wrote. Oh, gosh, Steve. Now that's taking us back a moment like 13 years ago. So before we get to that, Steve, what's coming across your desk this week?
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Usually I try to pick one particular topic to talk about. What's coming across my desk? And usually the best way of making that determination is just looking at my schedule and looking at it. For this week, I'm going to be quite generic. There's just a lot of legal issues that are still constantly and may never stop arising in sport. I'm looking at leases. I'm continuing to do an amplitude of bylaws, particularly here in Ontario, to comply with the new Ontario not for profit corporations Act. I have a settlement conference this afternoon on a complaint management issue, and someone's looking to file a trademark to secure the name of their national championship. So there's just unstoppable legal issues in sport.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: I love that. But you're smiling. It's kind of like variety is the spice of life.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I always like the variety of work, and that's always been a motivation of working with sport laws. You just never know what's going to come across your desk on an hourly, daily, weekly basis. But I still laugh, because when I started doing this 21 years ago, I truly, and I've said this before on other podcasts, believe that there would be never enough work in amateur sport to create a career. And I was wrong probably 1000 times over.
[00:02:31] Speaker B: I love that.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: Steve, what's new with you, Dina?
[00:02:34] Speaker B: What's new with me? Well, and I've said this before, but I think it feels different this year. Steve, we're getting a lot of uptake on the nova and the Nova, this psychometric tool, when, when done in accompaniment with a trained leadership coach, we kind of serve as a spotlight or a flashlight to help people understand their lived experience, understand their meaning making, understand why they're motivated to do certain things and why other things are hard for them. And I've been working alongside a national sport organization and there's probably about 15 of their national level coaches and ists that we've been working with for the last two months. And the word on the street, or the word on the ice is this is transformational.
The coaches are feeling so grateful that they now have a sense making document that helps them understand themselves and what they're, I think, moving towards is, wouldn't this be magic if we could also offer this to athletes? So our vision has always been, hey, athlete, welcome to the national team. Hey, coach, welcome to the national team. Here's your Nova profile alongside the jacket with a Maple leaf. I'm really hopeful, Steve, that as we continue to grant people this inner work, then I think we're going to see a reduction in the stress and the anxiety because people are going to get to know themselves first and own their stuff. And then when we do this work and we feel like we're building some leadership muscles, when some tension arises in us, we'll be better able to deal with this in a much more holistic and healthy way. So reducing unnecessary conflict. So that's some of the high hopes that I have, but also the great work that the leadership coaches and I are doing in this space. And it really brings me joy. Right. All this work that we're doing in.
[00:04:38] Speaker A: The shadows, it's always a good segue into the topic at hand. Dina, as we've discussed before and we've discussed on this podcast, I always like to joke that I'm at 5ft and you're at 30,000ft and we meet very well in the middle. But when we start talking about values and the management by values and the implementation of values, it becomes more of a subjective conversation and the implementation can be very difficult to do or to understand. So remind us, what does it mean to manage by values? How do we live our values? How do we make them integrated into our decision making, into our catch word culture?
[00:05:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that, Steve. And I would say that since I did this work. So all this work is based on my master's dissertation that I did back in 2010. And then I wrote a research paper, several actually, that have been actually published in academic journals. So really proud of that, and then wrote this little handbook. So in preparation for today, I went back and I went, oh, a ton of gratitude for the ten national sport organizations that said yes to my research. And then this book that I wrote that has some really great processes and nuggets to help us demystify this thing called management by values. So management by values is based on the pioneering work from Simon Dolan and Salvador Garcia, along with Bonnie Richley, who are management experts. And they wrote this big book. And I remember 15 years ago going through it and thinking, wow. As I was trying to help organizations mitigate and manage risks, it just made so much sense, Steve, for us to go back to our why?
What are our values? How do we define it? And then how are we going to know we're successful in implementing maybe, you know, rather than talk about managing by values, let me read you this quote by this is by two other management gurus. I'm sure our listeners will know who they are. They're James Collins and Jerry Porris. And this particular quote comes from, I'd call it like a legacy book called Built Alas, which was published in 94. So people have a fundamental need for guiding values and a sense of purpose that gives their life and work meaning. More than any time in the past, employees will demand, employees will demand that the organizations they're connected to stand for something. So that's what values do. Values are it's language that describes belief statements that are mission critical to the organization.
And when we can find and orient around these values, Steve, it helps us a reduce risk. Immediately connect people to this mission and communicate this to both our internal community and our external community.
And when we can be guided by these values, we can better understand and relate to this dynamic system that we're in. So, a little crash course? Well, maybe I'll pause there and see if you have any specific questions because I want to make it really practical for people. Often they want to know, like, what's the difference between management by values and management by objective? So I can take us there. But before I do, kind of any comments on what I'm sharing?
[00:08:05] Speaker A: Well, we've talked about this offline before, Dina, and maybe on the podcast, too. I've always, like, I don't want to say struggled, but of course, I'm a thinker. And when someone comes to me with a query, I can map out the steps in my head to take us from point a to point b. And when we talk about values or changing culture or a subjective outcome, and maybe it's not so subjective, it becomes a bit challenging but where my mind goes is that if we don't know what our values are and we don't know where we're going, one of the questions I always love to ask directors, particularly in directors trainings, is to say, how do you know you've been successful in six months, twelve months, 18 months, and most of the time, unfortunately, a lot of people don't have an answer to that. They just try to keep the doors open and increase registration.
And I think sport in today's environment is far more than that. So understanding that our failure to identify what our values are and to implement them has really created an environment that maybe we have today with this so called culture crisis. So I love the fact, Dina, that if we fail to identify what we're doing, that it's going to have an impact on our decision making. And when we talk about some rules in sport, and, of course, majority of clubs and national and territorial and provincial bodies, their goals are, of course, to increase participation and to create a good experience within that environment. And when we start making decisions and we don't look at our values, I think it takes us one step forward, maybe three steps back, not necessarily two. And I look at rules like transfer rules or releases or mandating that a child, particularly a child, we get called by parents all the time, hey, I want to move my kid from club A to Club B, but club a won't give me release. And we feel they're being harassed and are not having a good experience within that club A, but they won't give me release, that's mind boggling to me. And sometimes we see it at the provincial or territorial level where you need permission to switch clubs. And I understand it from a competitive point of view. They don't want all the good players to go to one area and dominate. But that really, I don't think it happens. And if we look at our values to say we want kids to play and we want kids to participate and we want them to be active for life, when we start applying our values to that decision making, it seems very black and white. So how do we get sport to start doing that more?
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Dina well, first of all, I love that. It's exactly what you just shared, Steve. It's more about the how, it's not about the what. And what I would offer is it was so much easier back in the 1920s when we would manage by instruction, right. And a lot of, I've said it before, a lot of our management theories come from the military world, where the objective is to kill other people who don't align with our ideation, right? Our values, our ideology.
If we can remember that, we can also remember that the systems and structures that were designed in a very different era are not the ones that we need to guide us through the level of complexity that we're now facing every day. So management by instruction, I would argue, is still needed. So think of your kid running across the street. You're not going to manage by values and engage them in a conversation around whether or not what's the merit of running across the street to get the ball. You're going to, in that moment, manage by instruction. You're going to pick that child up right away and bring them back to safety. Or parent by instruction, or coach by instruction, for that matter. Here's what I need you to do. Go do it. Coaching by instruction. Coaching and managing and parenting by objective is we set fixed objectives. What are the goals that we want to achieve, and then be very determined in achieving those. And I would say that that's where sport now is really swirling around the limitations of a 20th century management by objective model. And so everything that we did to orient around management by objective, I referenced strategic plans and operational plans and financial plans. These are all examples of management by objective processes to help us get to a certain destination. Management by values allows for the lower level, if you will, management philosophies, but gives us a reason to believe in what we are doing. And then the how. How are we going to know we're successful in alignment with our values is a missing piece, because just focusing, for instance, on the podium as one singular measure of success is insufficient, as we now know, and have known for a long time. It's counterintuitive to hold owning the podium, for instance, and not doing so in a healthy, humanistic, holistic way. So I'm heartened because I have seen a dramatic shift by leaders inside the sport ecosystem, acknowledging that many of the ways in which we designed our processes were limited. And the intention was never to hold these constructs as binary, for instance, winning and health. But the ways in which the systems were swirling were focusing a choice often between one or the other. You're either winning or you're healthy. You can't be both. So management by values at its core holds how are we going to do something right as opposed to what we're going to do exclusively? And planning and strategy and productivity, and focusing on results, top down accountancy. Those are all management by objective kind of processes. Management by values is engagement and communication and creativity and whole system and true accountability. So there's a real blended approach here, Steve, that has us connecting and engaging with our people in a shared conversation around their lived experience inside this culture and wanting to not compete with either. I'm going to focus on doing my best and being at my best at the expense of how I achieve that end. Right? So it's a blended approach that is much more holistic and healthy than the singular approach to focusing on outcome. Does that make sense?
[00:15:02] Speaker A: My mind goes to the word you just use of experience. And we can always look at our own experiences. And when I look at mine as an athlete, as a coach, I had a lot of success on the playing field, for sure. I have a big box of trophies and lots of newspaper articles and great success. But when I look back at my career, I think about the experiences, and it's not necessarily about the winning or the point scored or the number of medals. It's about, wow. I created such great relationships with people and had fun times and laughed. And I think that's where my mind's going, is that if we can implement that values based system into the way we make decisions and the experience that we provide, that's what keeps me, won't say my age. Playing and participating and wanting to still be involved as a professional in sport is because of those positive.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: Because most of the clients that come to you, Steve, are coming to you either because they're immersed in a problem, a wicked problem, or they're anticipating something bad is going to happen. So they usually come to you from a place of often fear or frustration, right? That's where you're meeting them. I'm wondering, what are the risks to sport leaders and the system when we fail to identify, define and measure how well our values are being lived?
[00:16:33] Speaker A: Well, I think that's just the risk overall, Dina, is that people leave. People leave with a bad experience, people leave with a bad taste in their mouth. Reputation is so significant. There's so many options in sport. There's the single individual sports, there's the team sports, there's the hybrid sports. How do we pick? And a lot of times we pick on reputation. So when we start implementing what our philosophies are and how we want that experience to play out, that's going to have a huge impact, I think, on the way a sport is perceived. And again, I'll speak about my own experiences. My son and daughter, for that matter, are both gifted. I'm biased, but gifted athletes. And I remember at the age of six, a coach saw my son play baseball and offered him a spot on AA team at six, which I thought was crazy. And the coach said, well, aren't you happy about being made this offer? And I said, I'm not sure yet, because I want to understand the experience that he's going to be subject to within your system. And how does that look like? So I think the risk of not knowing your values, not having the ability to implement and explain to the end user, athletes and parents and coaches and everybody else, for that matter, you don't want to volunteer your time and have a negative experience. So I really think all of those factors are key to creating a successful environment.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And I love what you're saying, because it is about proactivity, and there's also the honoring and integrity. Right. If we say that we care about achieving and accomplishing this experience, what management by values invites us to do, and I would actually say is compelling us to do now, is to also pay equal attention to how we're going to achieve this experience. So, Steve, often people ask, you know, Miss Sportopia, make it practical for me. Right. Like, what are the steps that you would say will help us identify and define these values? So would it be helpful if I kind of took people through the steps?
[00:18:49] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. I think, you know, I struggle with this, too, Dina. So how do we take this objective idea and make it a reality?
[00:18:56] Speaker B: So I'm going to go back to what's in my book, and I do want to, again, honor the ten sport organizations and all the research and wisdom that I did in preparation for my master's dissertation. So I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, right? In terms of this framework that I developed that's actually been written about by other academics. Now, it's called the four eye framework, and it really helps situate people to understand if you don't have values that are defined, it doesn't mean they're not there, because our values are systems of belief, so they're inactive. And then if my invitation then is, and I'll take you through this, is how do I move from inactive to something that's more intuitive? And so what I noticed when I was looking at these ten sport organization is some of them were inactive, so the values were floating around, but they just didn't have language to describe them. And here's what I would share, Steve. In the absence of having something stated, language to describe the lived experience, people are very unsettled because they're longing for that language to give them that orienting framework in some of the organizations and see if our listeners will connect to this. The language is intuitive.
It's not maybe defined clearly, but the leaders are. They're clear on their values, right? And so when that leader leaves, that whole kind of culture starts to crumble because the leader was the one propping up the values. So I would say that's insufficient to really lead with purpose in today's world. And in the last century, we could stand with having intuitive led leadership because the leaders were sticking around long enough to really shift the culture and be with the culture in a particular way. But today's world, that's not true, right? Leaders are longing for more stability. So the third level is institutional, where these values are embedded in the policies, procedures, programs, right? And the people are hired and, yes, fired in alignment with values. So institutional level means that these values. And we come in and do an audit against stated values, for instance. And then finally, when we've earned the right, we move into this level four, if you will, and that's inspirational, where we can speak about our values externally as a reflection of what's being lived internally. What can happen, though, is people prop up these values like stewardship and empathy and delivery. But in meanwhile, back at the ranch, people aren't feeling those values. They're being lived. So that's the organizing framework. Any comments on that, steve, before I take us through the step by step.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: Process again, I may have said this already. I think it's great, Dina, that these things exist and that they've spent three or 4 hours in a room to come up with their three or four key values. But the implementation of it is so important, and having it present and having it become. You'd mentioned putting into policy, putting into procedure, which I agree, but it's actually also utilizing it to make decisions. And one of the simple recommendations I always use is to say, have your values on your board agenda. Have them in the room in which you're sitting or on a screen saver behind you when you're on Zoom. So when you say, I don't know, it doesn't matter what the decision is, how does this align with those four key words, with those four key values? And that, for me, is probably the most simplistic way of saying, particularly at a board level or a staffing level, where decisions are made, that we know we're utilizing that thought process.
[00:22:51] Speaker B: Yeah, brilliant, Steve. And it's going to help us fill out what we, as leadership coaches, we talk about vertical growth, right? And that's us moving up the ladder, if you will, as individuals from coordinator to CEO, if that's our path. But then there's something called horizontal health. How healthy am I inside this kind of level of where I am right now? And I think that that's the work for sport system. The sport system right now really has to own its horizontal health. So I'm going to walk us through these kind of ten ways, if you will, that organizations can manage by values. And if people are curious about, listen, Dina, I haven't done this in a moment. I might be a new leader or I think our values need a refresh in the appendices. There's all kinds of practical practices and approaches that clients can turn to and reference. Right. The book, I think, is $20. So it's basically the cost of a couple of Starbucks coffees. So see if that's available to you. All right, so the first little step here, or practice that we say organizations should embed as a management by values philosophy, and you just said it, incorporate values into the organization's decision making processes at all levels. So when the coordinator is doing a project, have them stop and reflect. How is this project reflecting our values? And it's a bit of a risk management check as well. Right. If the board is considering a selection policy change, how does this reflect our values? So that's the first one. The second one is communicate the organization's commitment to managing by values. This becomes know. And I can share this story because one of our clients, I wrote a blog on this. So Dustin Heiss, who's a dear friend and colleague and the CEO of Snowboard Canada, came to me about three years ago and said, I want to become the leading sport snowboard nation, the leading in the world. And so I said, okay, great. What are you thinking? And he said, well, I want to make the management by values philosophy one of the indicators that's going to help us get there. So really embedding this at all levels and communicating that attention is a sign of stewardship, I would believe. Number three is use the values to recruit people. And we do a lot of recruiting, Steve, so. Right. Embedded in our questions often is to get to know the people. You can't fake your commitment to live your values. Right. So I think that's a beautiful one because it helps us ensure alignment as much for us as for the people that we're recruiting. Number four is embed values within policies and procedures, and we have lots of ways that we can do that. So I won't expand on that. Number five is promote the organization's values, and that comes with a caveat, Steve, because if we aren't doing the hard work to ensure those values are being lived by our people, right, the ones that are in our ecosystem, we run the risk of disenfranchising our people and, like, talking out of the two corners of our mouth. So we say we care about those values, but meanwhile, they're not being lived back at the ranch. Number six is incorporate values during planning sessions. And I always come back to this. So as someone who's done, I don't know, upwards of 50 strategic plans in my career. Even though organizations may have just renewed the commitment to their values in their next strategic planning cycle, I always have them come back to be nourished by how are they going to know, right? And how is this language being owned by me, who may not have been there when these statements were developed by other people? So it creates that legacy between past and current, right and present, so we can better achieve our future. Number seven is educate people. Educate the board. As you said, steve, educate staff, educate our community. And notice I'm not using the word stakeholders. Stakeholders has some remnants right to colonialism. So it's so important for us to, as we start to engage more and more and want to be, for example, committed to living our values in alignment with the principles of equity and diversity and inclusivity. So important for us to be mindful of the language we use.
[00:27:17] Speaker A: I think you want to share, like, what I like about that, Dina, is that I say this all the know, we're not everything for everybody. It's not practical. It's not possible. And one of the expectations of maybe parents or participants or athletes or coaches or all people involved in sport. But one of the simple answers to why we may not be doing something is it doesn't align with our values. And I think, again, it's okay to say that.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: Yeah, that's so helpful, Steve, because choosing what we don't want to do, for instance, as consultants and coaches and lawyers, is really important. It's a reflection of the energy that we're bringing to the project. Right. And we all know what it's like to be in the grind of something, like the efforting energy as opposed to activating energy. So thanks for illuminating that. Number eight is use values when managing risk. And I have to say, that is so uplifting. If you're dealing with a high level risk and you pause and you go back to your values, you will find gold. There's always a gem, there's always a settling in. And even if you find nothing, for instance, maybe it validates your decision. It increases our confidence to be able to articulate the rationale behind the decision. So it's always, always so important for us to do the work, pause and assess risks in alignment with our values. Number nine. And this is where we are, I think, really grappling with, as a system, measure the organization's performance in alignment with values. And this is where we're so excited because of the tool that we're using, right. The sport culture index that's been pioneered by inner logic. And when we go in and we measure the holistic, lived experience of people according to these ten factors of health in an organization, we expand our capacity to be able to measure towards a triple bottom line, right. Of money, medals, and morals. And when we can do that, we can kind of not turn away. We don't avert our gaze. We actually grapple with the lived experience and the gap between where we are now and where we want to be. Right. It's not rocket science, but we also have to have a system of reward collectively as an ecosystem, to say we are going to stand for something greater than just fiscal responsibility and performance on the field of play. We also want to stand for the morals, the ways in which we achieve these outcomes. And finally, number ten, is renew the organization's, our commitment to these values. This is an ongoing conversation. It's leadership development and design. It's the way we. I've been hired by organizations to be part of the firing process. So when people are fired, sometimes that includes three leadership sessions with a sport law leadership coach. Right. As a signal of the organization's commitment. So those are some of the observations and ways in which we can turn something that kind of feels like 50 shades of gray into something very, very tangible. So, Steve, for you, as we kind of round down the conversation, I want to learn from you and see how have we used our values of empathy, delivery, and stewardship at sport law? What's surfacing for you?
[00:30:53] Speaker A: I think those values for us here at sport law, Dina, have evolved. It's almost like the way we started to work created our values. When I started doing this, I was coming out of working in a law firm, and suit and tie, suit and tie, suit and tie. And when I first started doing amateur sport work, I would show up at meetings in a suit and tie, and everybody else in the room was either in tracksuits, golf shirts, or jeans. And I felt like that dressed me out of the room. And I didn't want that to be the case. I wanted people to feel that they could talk to us. I don't want to say more as friends, because we're not friends, but just a relaxed environment and knowing that we would listen and that people could feel comfortable talking to us about whatever they want to talk about. So that really was the empathy part, was that we're approachable, we care, we listen, our delivery is flexible. I think we can work within the context of the budget of a client or sport. The timelines in sport, and last part is stewardship. Yeah, we try to be on top of what's happening in the market and trying to point sport in the right direction. So it's funny looking at the three values that we have here.
I feel really confident and good, Dina, about seeing them, because I'm confident that we're living those values in the way we deliver the services to sport in the community. So we're running out of time. Any parting words, Dina, on management by values?
[00:32:31] Speaker B: Well, thank you, Steve. I really enjoyed hearing you speak about the three values in this way. And I would argue those values also have know give us the incentive, if you will, maybe the nudge to orient us towards two big projects. Right. One was this, know, we're not getting paid to do the podcast. And we feel, in a humble way, I think that this is our way of contributing to a more holistic dialogue on the way forward. So there's the value of stewardship alongside empathy and delivery. For me, it's really a reflection of what galvanized us to do the hope on the horizon, right. To connect with humans, upwards of like, 800 now across the country, and we still have some sessions to do in 2024. It really is about living into these values to help restore health and hope in a very fractured system.
So thank you, Steve, for being such a wonderful partner as we kind of do our part in the system. I would say I'm going to leave the last word to Rosabeth Moss Cantor, who wrote this great book called Supercorp in 2009, because I think it's going to help restore a little bit of hope and also give people perspective that this transition that sport is in is necessary, needed, and healthy, even as it's hard. Right. So here's what she says. All companies must respond to uncertainty, complexity, diversity, and responsibility with new business models and new ways of working. For vanguard companies, that model starts with values and principles, which provide a guidance system that helps them make strategic choices. With an eye on long term institution building, I would actually, with permission to Rosa Beth, say, I think it's not enough for us to have long term institution building. I think we need long term systemic like systems building. Right. So thank you, Steve. This is, as you know is part of my life work and it feels like the system now is going to orient more. We're getting more people coming, more people are studying, more people are researching management by values. So that is fantastic in the context of sport. In the episode notes below you're going to find some sport law blogs where you can find more information related to our conversation today and a link to my book values in action. Thank you so much to our listeners. We are really grateful to share our vision of Sportopia with you as we look to elevate sport.
[00:35:09] Speaker A: As always, to have your say in Sportopia, email us at hello at Sportlaw, CA or on social media at Sportlaw, CA to let us know what you want to hear about next. Stay tuned for our next episode.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: Yeah, until then, be well.
