Moron

Chapter Ten

“You make a living, by what you get.
You make a life by what you give.”

- (attributed to) Winston Churchill

I was sitting in a very large conference room at the Hockey Alberta Annual General Meeting while individuals were voted into various positions. My lot in life is that I was about to be voted in as the new president of the world’s largest hockey association, Hockey Calgary.

As I sat at my table, a colleague of mine looked across at me and said, “You're about to become the most powerful man in hockey.”

At the time my colleague said those words to me, I thought to myself, “Really? Could this role really be labeled the ‘most powerful man in hockey?’ And, if so, is this something that I'm really interested in in being part of?”

Initially, I kind of sloughed off the comment, thinking what he had said was a bit embarrassing, and overly arrogant, and quite frankly, not what I'm all about or what I wanted anything to do with.”

Years before, I had been at the top of the world in business, when I was involved in the largest single transactional sale in Bain Capital’s history (the sale of my company made Bain a profit of $700 million dollars in the period of less than a year). And, as I describe in my book, Boardroom to Base Camp, I made a decision to get out of that world. A fellow businessman told me, “It’s never enough.” I made a decision that I had enough – and I certainly didn’t want to be the “most powerful man” anytime soon again, in any capacity.

The reality is, I was entering a position of great influence that might be interpreted as one of great power as well. I had the ability to influence the game of hockey in many ways, both positive and negative, but what I found most important was not to exercise the power I had been given, but to keep it in check, and remember that this game was all about the 13,500 children of Hockey Calgary, playing a game they loved. It was my job not to be powerful, but to be balanced and humble.

Let’s think for a moment about a motion that was put on the floor of a meeting that called for creating a safer environment for children within the game of hockey. At that meeting, the Board agreed to establish a body checking committee, and a dozen volunteers would commit to reviewing all of the facts on the issue, and come back with a report that would influence our decision on how to move forwards.

That committee would prove to teach us a powerful message about influence. As much as we thought we did a careful screening of the individuals that were going to be in that room, we had some bullying going on. We had one individual in the room that was pretty adamant about his particular views, and he was going to try to bully the room into his way of thinking. We had another individual in the room that was pretty adamant on the other side of the fence – with a compassionate, motherly plea against body checking.

We also lacked leadership in the group; the kind of neutral and impartial leadership we required. As a matter of fact, the leader of the group was discovered to be pretty one-sided, as we discovered after the fact.

Problems became more and more evident as the time elapsed, and several times I had to step in and have conversations with the team to try to get them back on track. Again, here was the issue of volunteers signing up for important jobs, yet not stepping up to the plate when the time came, based on skills, competencies, and allocation of time.

There is no easy solution, and there's no easy fix. There is no, “pop this, take two of these pills in the morning, everything's going to be okay,” answer. And in minor hockey, which is 99 years old, it’s hard to make change.

What is most interesting to me in a volunteer environment versus a for-profit environment, I have found, is that it takes about three times as long to invoke change in the non-profit world of minor hockey. In a corporate environment, I would be confident that I could lay out a change plan, and in three years I could fully execute virtually any plan, from a complete overhaul of any organization, from the mailroom all the way to the executive suite.

In a volunteer environment, that same type of thinking, and that same type of significant change, in terms of hierarchy, governments, modeling and all the changes that we've been talking about in this book, would take you upwards to nine years inside this same environment. It's a long journey.

Even though it will take a lot of momentum and energy, the only real solution is an executive or corporate solution to the problems of minor hockey.

We need to take a very systematic approach of laying out a business plan, laying out exactly what the goals and objectives are, and having a strategic plan around where we want to be inside the next three years. Tackling that with renewed recruitment efforts to having the right people in the right positions.

When I think about a business planning exercise, it really comes down to asking four critical questions. I’ve attempted to do that for minor hockey in a very cursory way below.

Question 1. What do you do? What services do you provide? What are the offerings?

Question 2. How do you do it? How do you provide the service that you offer? How do you get your message out? How do you market yourself? Do we do it with all volunteers? Do we have some paid staff? Do we need facilities? Do we rent facilities?

Question 3. Who do we do it for? You know, who cares? Who wants our volunteer service? Or who wants our product, in this case, the game of hockey? Again, you have to go through the details of who is it? It's children, and in what age groups? Who are these children? Are they across the city? Are they just in a particular area in the city? You get great demographic profiling from that kind of data.

Question 4. Why do you do it? Why does anybody even care about this particular service that you provide? And inside of that there will be a financial aspect. It’s a not-for-profit environment in the context that you're not expected to make money, but you are expected to balance the books.

So ultimately if you're asking yourself those four questions and setting up your business plan for your volunteer environment, in this case, the game of minor hockey, what is it that we do? How do we do it? How do we provide this particular service that we're interested in doing? Who cares? Who wants it? Who wants the service? And the bigger question at the end is: why do we do it?

The problems in minor hockey are growing every year. As I mentioned earlier, scan YouTube, or visit my blog, and you will see countless posts of morons yelling, fighting, and worse.

At this point, problems only make up five percent of the whole – and 95 percent of hockey is problem-free. Many volunteers have told me through the years, “Let’s all focus on the positive.” While I am an optimist by nature, I believe that in this situation, you need to keep absolute focus on the positive attributes of anything we’re involved with, but we still need to make sure not to ignore the three to five percent that we’ve identified in previous chapters.

I would take this one step further and suggest that, if we don't embrace this type of approach, the problem is going to continue to grow. The numbers of participants in Hockey Canada are going to continue to drop. Whether that will be due to bullying, because of the wrong volunteers doing the wrong jobs, a safety issue, a cost issue, or availability of facilities, we need to acknowledge that trend, and make a move to feed the plant.

A three to five percent problem will then soon become a ten percent problem, and that is ultimately going to lead towards the demise of hockey in Canada as it is today.