How to Build Buy-in and Trust with Valorie Kondos-Field | Episode 1

In this Cultivate Your Culture article, Zoran is joined by Valorie Kondos-Field, often referred to as Miss Val. She is a retired American gymnastics coach. She was the head coach of the UCLA Bruins gymnastics team at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1991 to 2019, leading the Bruins to seven national championship titles.

This article is the transcript of a podcast done regularly by Zoran Stojković. Listen to Cultivate Your Culture. Please excuse any transcript errors in this article.

Zoran Stojković: Hello, I’m your host Zoran Stojković and welcome to Cultivate Your Culture. This podcast will be discussing how leaders can build connected high performing teams in business and sport using actionable tools, evidence-based systems, and simple processes.

Today on the show we have Valorie Condos Field. Who is the head coach and seven time NCAA champion of, of the seven time NCAA champion, 22 time regional and 18 time Pac 12 Champion UCLA Women’s gymnastics team. She was inducted into the UCLA Athletic Hall of Fame in 2010. The four-time national coach of the year was recently named West Region Coach.

Of the Pac 12 of the pac west Region, coach of the Year, PAC 12, coach of the Year, and coach of the century, with her solid track record as a preeminent coach crediting her mentor and legendary basketball coach. We all know about John Wooden and the Olympians and athletes with whom she’s worked with.

Ms. Val’s success is due to her extraordinary leadership and mentorship of young student athletes. And the way in which she uses gymnastics as an avenue through which to teach valuable life lessons. Ms. Val is a dynamic speaker and choreographer used to do ballet, and she lights up a crowd with her enthusiasm and zest for life and, and mesmerizes audiences with her spectacular ability to Entertain. Val, thank you so much for coming on to the show. [speaks something in Greek].

Valorie Kondos-Field: [Answers something in Greek]Oh gosh. You know Greek. I knew that you knew Greek because the way you introduced me. You said Valorie Condos. Yes. And it’s like, Most people say condos. Yeah. Once in a while they’ll, they’ll say, Valorie condom. And I’m like, no, that’s not my name. How do you know Greek?

Zoran Stojković: So I studied in Greece. I did my masters in, in in a Greek city, and I studied in Greece. And Finland is a masters in sports psych. So I got to spend a lot of time in a small city. Not everybody spoke Greek. Duolingo didn’t have Greek on it, so I basically sort of looked phrases up. We had some Greek lessons and then buddies from the program would teach me Greek.

And some of it, I’m not gonna say on the podcast here, but yeah, it’s a really great language. The alphabet was okay to learn because Serbian uses some similar letters. And then somewhere I have to go back to my physics and math textbook to, to remember.

Valorie Kondos-Field: Well, thank you for having me.

Zoran Stojković: Thanks so much for coming on and taking the time to share your knowledge and insights.

First of all, the way I found out about you was through your awesome TED Talk of why winning doesn’t always equal success. And I’ve passed that on to so many people. It’s informed me as a coach and, and as a mental performance coach. And maybe tell me a little bit about that. Is there a backstory to how You know how that happened and yeah.

Valorie Kondos-Field: Yes, there definitely is a backstory to how it happened. It was the summer of 2018 and it sadly was the year of that the victims came out against Larry Nassar, the team physician for the USA gymnastics team. And I was invited to go to Washington DC to speak with Senator Feinstein and a few of the members of the House of Representatives about culture.

And I remember being in Senator Feinstein’s office and I remember her saying, how do we change the culture of gymnastics? And at that moment it like, this light came on. It was like, it’s not gymnastics. Gymnastics is an amazing sport. Sport in itself is amazing. It’s anytime there is someone who has oversees the development of someone else, particularly a child, you’re going to see issue.

You’re gonna have issues. And whether it’s sport or in parenting or school or politics, business, whatever. And in that moment, as I’m telling her all this, I realized, you know, we have a. We have a crisis, and I say this in my TED Talk. We have a crisis in the win at all cost cultures in every avenue of life that we all have accepted.

And what really hit me, and the reason why I wanted to do my TED Talk on this was I started to do my research and there have been more reports of depression, stress, anxiety, and suicide, particularly amongst our youth. Than ever before in the history of man, and that’s not on them, that’s on us, on US adults.

And I just felt it was, it was really, it was something that hit my heart and I wanted to do more research about it, more thinking on it, and I wanted to bring it to a platform where I could encourage other people to answer the question. Is all winning success. Because I remember when I was talking to somebody about USA gymnastics and they said but we’ve been so successful.

I said, no, we’ve won a lot. There’s a difference.

Zoran Stojković: Yeah, that’s a really important point because there is, and it’s challenging because head coaches get fired for not having results. So if that’s how they’re measured, And, and that’s how success is measured at a pay. You know, depending on how much you get paid or what opportunities you have or how long you stay in a program, it is a system that would have to change and, and you know, the head coach would really have to be really dialed into their, into their values and have a different barometer and different measure of success than just results.

Valorie Kondos-Field: Absolutely. And you mentioned my mentor, John Wooden.  He was coaching in college for 15 years before he won a national championship. So in this day and age where you get basically three years to prove yourself in college or in the pros, we would’ve never had a coach Wooden, I mean, we had him, we wouldn’t have known.

He probably would’ve gone back to coaching English, I mean, to teaching English. And you know, I really feel that it’s, we’re at an impasse where, especially the high schools and the colleges, we need to measure success as, as more than winning. We need to measure. We need to be able to measure character as this conversation’s gonna evolve.

We need to be able to measure culture. We need to be able to measure academics community service. We need to be able to place a value on all those things in order to change this culture of when it all cost.

Zoran Stojković: Yeah, definitely. And so that leads me to a question for you.
How do you define team culture? I mean, this is a concept that gets thrown around so much and togetherness and connection and all these things, and, and there’s a lot of work being done on this, but how do you define it?

Valorie Kondos-Field: Okay, well, first of all, I wanna thank you for asking me to be on this podcast and for anybody who’s listening.

All of these questions that he’s gonna ask me, I encourage you to take notes and answer them for yourself. Because as I told Zoran, I was like, I talk about culture all the time, but I’ve never really thought about it. I’ve never broken it down. And so when you told me what we were gonna talk about and shifted me, sent me some questions.

My mind has just been going, you know, a hundred miles an hour and doing research and how do you develop culture? So the first thing you asked is how do you define culture? And I feel that culture is a common agreed upon system of vision, of values and behavior that are all shared by one team. And the word culture is interesting because when you talk about culture, you’re not just talking about good cultures, positive cultures.

There are plenty. I mean, a culture is anything, in my opinion that is a common vision, common values, and common behavior. And since we’re talking about sports, I taught a course at UCLA last year on The different philosophies of successful coaches, and we studied Bobby Knight, and I don’t know if your listeners will know who Bobby Knight is, but he was the head coach at Indiana Basketball and known for his volatile, verbal, physically abusive behavior, but he had athletes dying to go play for him.

And you know, he never was at a loss for talent on his teams. And so when I think about culture, and I think about someone like Bobby Knight, he had a clear vision of what was important. Winning. He had a clear value. His values were clear of how we’re gonna get there, and his behavior was clear. And sometimes it was gonna get volatile and verbal, verbally abusive.

But the players that signed up to play for him knew that. So there was. As I just said, there was a common shared belief and agreement to all of that, and that was a very strong culture that he created.

Zoran Stojković: Yeah. And, and so the vision, values and behaviors is how how you’ve defined culture. It’s a shared shared understanding and agreed upon vision, values and behavior.

And so, but then why is it important to cultivate the culture of a team? If you think about team in business or sports that has individual performers like your gymnastics program did, I mean, or a golf program or a sales company. That has individual performers who are measure measured individually on their performance.

Valorie Kondos-Field: Well, I think that even if you were training one-on-one, if I was a golf coach and I was training a golfer and that’s the only person I was training, I would still need to define how we’re going to get to our goal. And why is it important to cultivate a culture, whether it be with one person or with a team of people is to be able to move toward that common goal in sync and with unity.

It’s important to discern. What your culture is, what that culture is. Okay. My mind is going a hundred miles an hour right now. I feel like, okay. The best way to do that is if I’m, if you’re my athlete and I’m coaching you, Zoran, and we’re gonna go win the national championship in golf, I need to communicate to you aWhy? Why is it important that we do this? Why do I wanna coach you? Why do you wanna do it? What’s your why?

 And then discuss the how. How are we gonna get there?

And then I’m going to educate you and you’re gonna educate me, and there’s gonna be this symbiotic education going on of the best way to get there.

And we’re gonna communicate that over and over and over and over, over again daily so that there is continuous growth through our united goal, that will create this culture. So if I get upset with you about something, we can go back to why we’re doing this, how did we decide, agree to do this and talk about it.

And I do feel that in cultures, cultures are not static, cultures are fluid. And I feel like the best cultures allow for shifting as long as there’s an explanation of Why. why are we making the shift? Is it in the best interest of what we’re trying to achieve? Yeah.

Okay, then great. Then let’s make that shift.

Zoran Stojković: What I’m hearing you say is it’s important to cultivate the culture of teams and even individual teams because the members of the team get synchronicity. An alignment towards going towards the goals. So, that sense of vision, which you said has to keep the leaders of the team have to keep reminding people of that.

But you’re also mentioning that it’s a symbiotic dance where it’s not just this leader tells you what to do and you do it, it’s developing a relationship where the coach or the leader and the team understands the people who are on the team. And there’s a constant communication. I think you didn’t use that word, but that’s what I’m reading between the lines is constant communication of what’s going on.

Maybe a postmortem of when things go wrong and things like that.

Valorie Kondos-Field: Absolutely. And communication is key. And I think that I’ve been known for over communicating to my team over and over, and over, and over and over again. But I would rather error on that side than not. And you brought up something, I think that you used the word dictate, and this is something that I talk about my TED talk.

I feel like there are two types of leaders, those that dictate change and those that motivate change. When I first started, when I first became a head coach, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. I was a ballet dancer and. I hired. I could hire assistant coaches that knew the sport of gymnastics, the X’s and O’s, and how to train skills.

But I quickly realized, whoa, there’s this whole thing called team culture I knew nothing about because you don’t grow up with team culture on stage as I did. And I mimicked other coaches that have been successful and pretty much became a dictator because that’s what I thought. That was what, you know, I grew up in the seventies and the eighties, and it was coaches were these empirical dictators that, you know, everything landed on them.

The wins, they were hailed for the losses. They were, they as assumed as well. So why they should be the ones. To dictate how everybody’s gonna act in this, in this team. And it really was, back in those days, I sound so old, but back in those days when you’re a coach, it’s kind of like you’re given this armor and you’re given this this way of doing things that is going to be successful.

And so if you’re gonna coach, this is how you should do it. I did that and failed miserably. And I’m gonna take, just take this a little bit further, imagine. So imagine you’re an assistant coach and I’m the head coach and we’re coaching UCLA Gymnastics is one of the preeminent athletic programs in the United States, and you’re working for me.

And I don’t know the first thing about gymnastics, so I’m just kind of winging it and I am doing all this coach talk and coach speak and just, I honestly felt that it was more important that they did exactly what I told them to do. Rather than doing it the right way, that’s gonna get us to the common goal.

It was more important that I did not lose my position as a leader, than humbling myself to say, you know what? There’s probably a better way of doing this. Hmm. And so, I’m bumbling around and then I remember so clearly walking from the parking lot to the athletics department one day and looking up, and UCLA has 24 sports and I think at that time in the late eighties there were maybe our budget was maybe 50 million a year, something like that.

And in the UCLA athletics department, and I remember thinking: “oh my gosh, 50 million a year at UCLA is spent on what? Bragging rights. To be able to say we beat you.” And in that moment I was like, there has to be more to sport than, haha. We beat you. There has to be. And so I took, I don’t know how long, the next few days, weeks, I don’t know how long, but to figure out my why Simon Sinek would ask us all to do, figure out your why.

And my why absolutely was not about winning cuz I did not grow up. In this athletic culture at all. It was so weird to me. There had to be more to sport than just winning. And it became so clear. It was like sport is the greatest venue to learn really, really, really tough life lessons, but you don’t learn in the classroom.

And so at that moment I was like, I’m gonna develop champions in life through sport. And because I work at UCLA and I, and I can recruit some of the best talent in the world. If I did help develop these young women into becoming these superheroes in life, in all aspects of their life, that will translate to the competition floor, and that became my why.

Why was I gonna coach to develop superhumans through sport? Now, how am I gonna do that? And then that became the foundation of our culture.

Zoran Stojković: That’s really interesting. And I was just picturing the moment that you were walking from the parking lot to the building and, and kind of pondering that question of what is 50 mil get us, and is this actually important and why is this important?

And so what I’m hearing from your answer there, Val, is that. A, it’s important to question old systems regardless of what area somebody’s a leader, and to really update the systems to match what science has learned and what we learn about people. And the way that culture more globally has changed and the way that the people you work with have changed.

But also to clarify your leadership philosophy or coaching philosophy. And can you speak a little bit more about either one of those on maybe how you did that and what are some of the questions you asked yourself. Well here why don’t we, Maybe focus first on, on questioning the old system, because that can sometimes be a pretty hectic process, especially if whoever is like, whoever hired you, expects you to coach a certain way.

So did you have to, and your athletes are used to being coach in certain ways, so what are some ways that you, like, how did you get that buy-in from above and from your athletes and from your coaching staff to, to do things differently?

Valorie Kondos-Field: Well, I’m a firm believer in the combination of education and communication.

And so I, I believe in a growth mindset until the day we all die, I think we should continue to grow. And the more I learn, the more I wanna share. And that’s the same with my staff and with our student athletes. And so I actually enjoyed being challenged as to why. Why do I have these rules and regulations?

Why are we doing it this way? Why are we training these days and not these days? Why, why, why, why, why? And I think it’s so important because it forces you to take a pause and to figure out your why. You know, we went from an example, I prided myself on the fact that we never trained on the weekends. Cuz I felt it was really important for our student athletes to be normal student human beings and not be That have be an athlete seven days a week, 24 7.

And I’ve always believed in the well-rounded student athlete. And the more well-rounded they were, the better their gymnastics would be. Cuz that’s the type of dancer that I was. And then the last few years we went to training on Sundays and our athletes hated it.

And bucked the system and came in pissy and poopy and all that. And I was like, well, I need to explain why. Obviously I’ve not done a good enough job explaining my why. And so the why in this shift in our culture that I had established for 20 years of never training on a weekend, you were now gonna train on a weekend.

The why was because it got harder for them to take us to be able to sign up for classes outside of our training time. So we had more athletes missing training time, so we were not able to train as a team very often during the week. And I felt it was super important that we were all there together, at least for one day a week.

And to be able to be there on a day where they didn’t have to rush outta the gym to get to class. So, explaining all of this to them and then also explaining, so we’re gonna train on Sundays, but guess what? You’re gonna get Wednesdays off. And so that means you’re gonna be able to like go do things like normal people.

Do you get to go to the bank cuz banks aren’t open on Sundays and you get to go, you know, to the beach in the middle of the week when it’s not packed. How cool is that? So, explaining all of that, I found as I became a better and better and better leader and coach, that the more I explained, the more buy-in I had.

Even if they didn’t agree with me, they appreciated that I respected them enough. To explain ad nauseum to them why I did things

Zoran Stojković: Right. So you’re yeah. Explaining why certain changes are happening, why you do things certain ways, and you think you think it was good and it is good. You invited athletes to challenge you and a and to ask questions because it got you also to reflect on why you were doing certain things.

And another thing I picked up from what you just said is that it was important to be together. At least one day of the week, which wasn’t happening. Hence since you changed to practicing on Sundays in a turbulent, I mean, turbulence is a strong word, but in a, in a changing workplace where some companies have gone from in-person to remote culture has really been shifted because there isn’t that in-person time anymore.

And so I think, I think that’s really challenging as well. And, and a lot of companies are figuring that out. And teams as well, like I know national teams were, you know, for, for a while there weren’t training and athletes had to do at-home workouts and, and there was a lot of challenges with that. Regards to motivation and, and lack of connection and, and those kind of things.

And you’ve already touched up on some of this, but I’m wondering how can culture be cultivated? Like what’s the starting place? Who has to be in those conversations? Is it, you know, starting with a sit down at the start of a season set of team vision and a mission statements? Is it, have you used leadership groups?

I mean, what are some of those practical systems you’ve used to cultivate culture?

Valorie Kondos-Field: Exactly. You sit down at the beginning of season and you talk about the long term goal and then you break that down and. What was the last thing you said? Do you remember?

Zoran Stojković: Leadership groups?

Valorie Kondos-Field: Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Obvious. I look at this like a flow chart cuz I grew up in the era of flow chart. Do they teach flow charts anymore? I don’t think they do that. I grew up in the era of flow charts. So at the top is the leader. That would be the head coach, that was me. And then to discuss with our staff, what is our goal?

Okay, our goal is gonna win the national championship, let’s win the national championship. Second goal was always for me, I wanna leave the season with no regrets. I don’t wanna have any regrets. So can we as a coaching staff agree on that? And then let’s agree upon how we’re gonna do that, and then the flow chart comes down to.

Not the team yet, but explaining all of this to the people that have the most daily communication and engagement with the team. So that was having the meetings and explaining it to the staff, the athletic trainer, sports information director, the director of operations, the team managers, all of those people that the student athletes would gravitate towards to complain to, because that’s natural.

So then a team manager who was their exact age, Could say, you know, well this is what Ms. Val explained and this is why we’re gonna do this. And trusting and telling them, I’m gonna trust you to get my back on this and explain it in a way that is positive for us as a group. And not explain it in a way that, yeah, she’s just an old bitty that wants to do it her way.

And so having those conversations, and then you mentioned leadership groups and. I had team captains when I first started becoming head coach, because as I told you, I just did what everybody else did and all the teams that I knew had team captains. And it was a few years later where one of my student athletes was having a problem on vault, and one of our seniors was just watching her, but not saying anything to her and not helping her.

And I said, why aren’t you helping in this situation? And she said, because there’s a team captain that’s right there. I don’t wanna step on the team captain’s toes. And so I was like, oh, no, no, no. By having team captains, I was not allowing the space for all of the athletes to develop their own leadership styles and test their leadership skills and to hone their leadership skills.

So I did away with team captains and I went to, as you mentioned, a leadership group. And I had one person from each class, freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, and I always made a point to have the person that was the IT girl, the one that the team followed.

That not necessarily was like usually the bad girl, you know, that was getting in trouble all the time. I made a point of having her in these leadership groups Because I wanted her to hear one-on-one from me or want me with this small group over and over and over again, why we are doing things.

So that when he wanted to make a decision to go out at midnight on a, on a weeknight, that probably wasn’t the best for the team. She might think twice about it because I had explained myself so much.

Zoran Stojković: You started by talking about team vision, sitting down as a coaching staff and saying, what do we want to achieve this season?

Communicating that to the operations staff and, and coordinators and managers and whatnot. And then electing a leadership group, which you didn’t do initially. You did what everybody else did, but then you decided to go against against the mold a little bit and, and do something different. And you had this leadership group where you had Athletes from each year.

But you made sure that the girl who was you said the IT girl and didn’t, wasn’t always necessarily a good influence on the team, was in these groups. And then through that you would influence this person because this is a leader. This is like a natural leader in the team.

And if they’re not in this group, it just makes it less powerful, doesn’t it? So having them on the team you build more of that buy-in don’t you, with things when that person is on?

Valorie Kondos-Field: Well, I think also people, everybody wants to feel valued. Anything, you know, if you’re an IT girl and you’re making poor decisions and all that you’re probably one of the best competitors.

And okay, I’m just gonna tell you it was Katelyn Ohashi. Everybody followed her and I can’t say, you know Kate, you’re a leader. Everybody’s like going out Thursday nights cuz you went out Thursday nights. She’s like, I’m not a leader, I don’t wanna be a leader. And I was like, you are naturally a leader.

So I want you to be on this team so you can understand and have buy-in as to why being a part of something great is greater than doing it on your own. And she learned, thankfully she learned that lesson very quickly. She had a very open mind. I wanna get back to something else that you’ve kind of danced around, but it keeps ping in my head and or ping in my brain, I should say.

And that is, I feel that one of the common. Mistakes that leaders make, especially young leaders, is they feel they need to have all the answers. And I did. That was a big mistake that I made, that I had have all the answers. And what happens with that is there’s no authenticity because you’re not explaining your why.

Because if I’m just barking orders and you ask me why I’m not gonna be able to explain it 90% of the time, you know, it’s just, I don’t know because that’s what I’m supposed to do. That’s what head coaches do. So just do it. And I feel like. What I learned, thankfully, was it was so much more important to model the behavior of how I wanted our staff and our student athletes to act than to have all the answers.

That’s why I said when we started this conversation is with culture, there’s quite oftentimes that through discussion and communication, you need to make a shift in how you do things, and it’s important for the leader. To be able to stand in front of the team and say, okay, I know this is how we’ve always done things.

Like, you know, when I said they never trained on weekends, but I’m gonna make a change and this is the reason how I’m gonna make the change. Or if something goes wrong and you make a huge mistake as a leader, things just didn’t turn out well to be able to model humility and vulnerability and how to sincerely apologize.

And I feel like we’re in this culture shift in our world, we’re, there’s so much research coming out on the power of vulnerability. Thank you, Brene Brown! That we’re realizing that vulnerability and humility and compassion, those are not weaknesses, they’re actually strengths. And to be able to model that behavior for those people whom you are leading is one of the most powerful things you can do as a leader.

To develop this buy-in to develop trust, huge word trust, able to have grace and to model what grace looks like to be able to move forward. But when you do that, you give your staff and you give your those people whom you’re leading the safe space to themselves, make mistakes and not have to cover them up or feel badly about them.

Zoran Stojković: That’s, I think that’s huge. And this is something I was discussing I was actually discussing with somebody a couple days ago about leaders, just a leader in their organization, being very open to sharing when they’ve failed, and something I’ve used as a coach in teams is having the senior athletes of the team share stories of when they failed and seeing what I mean like the oldest athletes of the team, I guess, so that the others can learn from them.

So I think that’s really powerful and especially if the leaders do it as well. And, and if it’s just something that’s normal and not trying to cover it up, for me, that speaks to authenticity and that speaks to vulnerability, which you’ve mentioned, and also to that openness to communicate. I heard there’s a college basketball coach here in Canada and one of her philosophies is five for the next 50, and she tries to prepare the girls on her team in the five years that they’re with her for the next 50 years of their lives.

And I think that’s one of the things that that does that is getting people, creating that space where people can explore and be vulnerable and share, and that leads to definitely to, to enhance connection. You’ve touched a little bit on mistakes that leaders can make. What are some toxic behaviors in team culture and how have you dealt with them either in the leadership team, in the team, and the staff from yourself even?

Valorie Kondos-Field: I think that one of the toxic, toxic environment in a team culture is not having trust. And so I mentioned Katelyn ohashi before, so I’ll mention her again. She literally, and I talk about this in the TED Talk, so it’s no big secret. She literally came in. She was one of the best gymnasts in the world.

She’s the last gymnast to ever beat Simone Biles actually. And she came in just burnt out and angry and defiant in the whole bit. And her freshman year, she was just, Defiant and we were having a team meeting mid-year, and she just told the team and the staff, I just don’t wanna be great again.

And I literally wanted to say, then, what the hell am I paying you $60,000 a year for? You know, thankfully I didn’t say that. And I thought, why doesn’t she wanna be great again? She’s says, great athlete. And then she went on to explain, because everything is, she associated with being great. It was hurtful and, and didn’t bring her joy, and why would she wanna go back to that?

She just, let’s just be mediocre so I can have fun. And at that moment I was like, okay. It’s not that she hates gymnastics, she hates everything she associates with it. So I have to earn her trust that I actually care about her more as a human being than as just an a great athlete that can get me another championship.

And as we all know, trust takes time and it takes time to build. It was super, super important and, dang it, I forgot your question.

Zoran Stojković: No, no. You were off a good start. It was what are toxic behaviors in a team and how have you dealt with them?

Valorie Kondos-Field: Yeah, so it was trust and so yeah, you know, people don’t change overnight. None of us do. And for the next few months, actually her sophomore year, the whole year, she would still screw up and do things she shouldn’t do as a student athlete.

That was help trying to help her team win a national championship. And but there was the trust that she would call me and she’d say, okay, I know you’re gonna find out. I’m not proud of this, but yeah, I did this and especially because she had the vulnerability and the trust to tell me, I then accepted that responsibility to respond, to choose my response in a way that was not going to break down our relationship and the trust that she and I had and also that was gonna help her not want to do that like we talked before, motivate her to want to make better decisions, not make better decisions, and just become, cuz become compliant because I’m telling her to.

And You know, there’s, I don’t know if you or your listeners have read Man’s Search for Meaning Victor Frankl’s book, and it’s the whole book talks about it’s a fabulous, short, short little book.

He was a prisoner of war in World War II. He was a psychologist and he talks about how he got through Auschwitz and, and lived and how his. His mental choices and got him through and allowed him to live. And he’s, I think he coed the phrase that between every stimulus there is a response. And the more time we take between that stimulus and the response, the better response we’re gonna have.

Otherwise it’s just gonna be a reaction. And I feel like that’s what so many leaders I know that I would be, I was very reactive. Like if you said something or did something, I would like, I would react. Without really thinking through the repercussions and going back to modeling behavior.

There was an athlete, an Olympian, Jamie Dantzscher, that came in in 2000 and phenomenal athlete and remind, I mean, I’m an Olympian and I still had never done a cartwheel. And I’m coaching her on floor and I’m asking her to do this leap combination on floor. And she’s very respectfully but defiantly saying it won’t work.

And I’m getting pissed and I’m like, well just try it. And she’s like, I’m telling you Ms. Val, it’s not gonna work. And I remember to this day, me like having this angst of wanting to just pull out my leadership head coaching hat and say, I’m the head coach. I’m telling you, just try it. And she took a deep breath and she explained to me why it wasn’t gonna work.

And it was all based on the mechanics of she was landing on her right leg and she had to take off on her right leg for the next leap. When she couldn’t do it, she had to take off on her left leg and that wasn’t the right leg for the leak. And I was like, oh, I’m sorry. You’re right. It’s not gonna work.

And she was dumbfounded. And I was thinking, now what did I say? You know, I, gosh, I apologize. And she said, I’ve never heard those words come out of a coach’s mouth. I said, what words? She goes, I’m sorry. And to be able to model that behavior without even knowing I was modeling the behavior for it was really, really powerful.

Something I really remember and something that she speaks about quite often.

Zoran Stojković: And that’s huge. And it seems like in that moment you did pause between the stimulus and the response. And that’s a really important skill for coaches. I mean, that’s something that athletes that I work on with athletes, but it’s important for coaches and leaders as well, for anybody really to take a pause, process, use that emotional regulation and just let the mind quiet down.
And then, and sometimes we have a couple seconds, and sometimes that pause can be longer for bigger decisions. But that’s really, I mean the thought that keeps coming to mind for me, Val, is how did you get buy-in if you never did gymnastics at the level that they did.

Valorie Kondos-Field: It really was because I was not afraid to show my vulnerability. And so one of the greatest gifts that I was given in that scenario was I couldn’t pretend to know anything about gymnastics. So I had to ask a thousand questions. And you know, as an athlete that when the coach asks you to figure it out or to help become a part of the process to figure it out.

You learn it better. It’s, I mean, there is, every single study that’s ever been done on coaching in leadership has the same results in the study. That you will have a far better result if you allow the athlete to become a part of the process of figuring out. How to achieve something instead of dictating to them what to do.

Another part that I learned early on in my coaching career that you know, coaches that will give you a correction, every single time you do something. That’s not a good way to get a result at all. You’re supposed to give correction and then let the athlete take 5, 6, 7 turns and let them have that space.

To figure it out. And a hundred percent of the time you have a better result

Zoran Stojković: Because it does take trial and error. You, most athletes can’t implement a new, a new technical change right away. That’s really interesting that you’re mentioning that one of the most toxic behaviors or elements. Of bad team culture is a lack of trust.

It’s the strongest element of team culture and it’s definitely a starting place. And you mentioned a couple of different ways to generate that buy-in and trust as well through, through showing vulnerability and through involving the people you’re working with in the process. And through that transparency culture is sometimes this airy fairy thing that is really hard to pinpoint.

And it’s hard to put a finger on. How have you measured an assessed team culture? I mean, is it through talking to athletes? Is it through giving them a survey? Is it through your own observations? Is it through other tools and means?

Valorie Kondos-Field: Yeah, I think that it would be interesting if I was, I think it would be interesting to go back to UCLA in order to take one of our teams that we had and ask them to write down what they felt the team culture was.

And I guarantee you that they’re not all gonna have the same answer and they’re not gonna have the same answer that I would put down. And Ben as a leader to try to, you know, figure out, okay, maybe somebody brought something up in the team culture that was really good that I didn’t realize was part of our team culture.

That’s cool. But the way that I assessed our team culture and the success of it every year was as soon as the athletes started taking ownership of themselves. And of their teammates that magic happened. And another, another, what’s it called? Where what’s it called? Where you, you talk about something, but it really means something else.

Oh my gosh. Okay. A pun I’m trying to find.

Zoran Stojković: Huh? A pun. No,

Valorie Kondos-Field: no, no, no. Starts on an M. Okay. I’ll think of it.

Zoran Stojković: Acronym?

Valorie Kondos-Field: No. But like that. Okay. Oh my gosh. I talk about it when I talk about my book. Life is short, don’t to Dance. And dance is obviously a metaphor. It’s metaphor.

Another metaphor for this culture and when I know that it’s working is the flywheel. And you know, I never knew what a flywheel was until I read the amazing book, good to Great that Jim Collins wrote. It’s like Bible out there, but when you have a flywheel, there’s this massive piece of steel wheel that is gonna create energy and it takes a massive amount of inertia to move this thing the slightest bit.

But consistent force on this wheel will get it to start to move. And once it moves it continues to flow on its own. And that is what a team, a good team culture is. And so I always knew that when I could take my hands off the wheel and put it the ownership on our student athletes, and they would take responsibility for their actions and their teammates actions.

That’s when the culture was thriving and we talk about, that’s when we had one heartbeat. You know, we would talk about going into competitions and let’s get to the point in our season where we literally have one heartbeat as a team.

Zoran Stojković: Wow. That’s huge. And it, that is a great book that you, you mentioned good to great.

And, and and the flywheel and the one heartbeat. That’s a powerful, cuz it makes it feel like more like a system. Like an organism, which you essentially are, that’s what a culture is. We just, it’s not always so obvious on the surface. Cuz if you choose to look at people individually, you can do that.

But there’s this symbiotic relationship and that’s really, really awesome and interesting. I’m wondering if there’s a book or resource that you would suggest to our listeners that has shaped your leadership style? And you’ve mentioned a bunch in here as well. You’ve mentioned start with why, you mentioned growth mindsets by Carol Dweck. Good to great. You’ve mentioned man’s Search for Meaning.

Valorie Kondos-Field: Yes. As I mentioned, I’m, I’m teaching this class at UCLA on the philosophies of coaching. Fascinating and love it cuz every single week we study a different coach and we started with Phil Jackson and then we went to Bobby Knight and then we go Pat Summit and Coach Wooden and on and on.

But the underlying book that I used throughout the entire quarter was Dare to Lead bene Brown and. There were, every single student in this class was either a fifth year student athlete at UCLA or a graduate assistant with football. And at the end of the course, I asked them just to give me a debrief and tell me what they learned.
You know? What’s the, like one of the two or three things that you learned in this class? Every single one of them, especially the male athletes that were football players, said they never thought of vulnerability and humility as characteristics of strength. They grew up as tough boy.

Like when we say man up to a kid. Not that doesn’t mean be more vulnerable, you know?

Zoran Stojković: And they were and mean shut down.

Valorie Kondos-Field: Right, exactly. And so that was really cool. So Dare to Lead is kind of leadership bible as viral as I’m concerned, and I’m actually reading this book right now, Lincoln on Leadership.

And it’s fascinating because it goes into Abraham Lincoln’s leadership and it’s a very small little book, but oh my gosh, it’s, it literally is speaking to exactly what leaders go through in this day and age, including the haters. I didn’t know this. He had a ton of haters and adversaries and people that were just trying to tear him down and, and spewing lies and libel about him.

And I was like, honest Abe. Seriously. So I’m really enjoying, I’m enjoying this book a lot right now.

Zoran Stojković: Sweet. Those are, those are really good suggestions. I’ve not heard of the the, the Lincoln one, but I’ve heard of Brene Brown, of course Dare to lead. And last one of my last questions here is what’s, and we had a lot of these kind of weaved in throughout the conversation, but what’s one practical tool leaders can use tomorrow to cultivate the culture of their team?

Valorie Kondos-Field: Oh, that’s a good one. I think I would go back to what I mentioned a little bit ago, a practical tool if I was a leader, would be to ask. A series of questions to the people whom I’m leading and have them write down the answers to get back as to what do you see a healthy culture for this team and this and this group of people that we’re all gonna be with for this next year?

What do you see that looking like? What do you see some of the snags coming where, what do you feel if you were leading the team, what do you think should be our negotiables and our non-negotiables? And have them write all that down and then look it all over and then reconvene and talk about what they’d written and what you, the commonalities and such.

And I feel like immediately as a leader, you would have buy-in from your team because you’re asking their opinions, you’re giving them a voice and you’re making them feel that their opinions. And their discussion is valuable. And so I think whenever you give someone a voice and make them feel of value, you’ve already started the buy-in of them.

And then you gotta follow through. You can’t just throw it all out the window and do whatever the heck you wanna do.

Zoran Stojković: Right. So the one tool you would suggest is questions and really good questions. And you’ve mentioned some really solid open-ended questions that can give a coach a lot of information and, and really build that relationship with the athlete as well because you’re putting it on them to co-create.

The culture with you to help you and not, not even to help you, but to be part of the process that cultivates the culture.

Valorie Kondos-Field: Okay. Then let’s take this one step further and let’s play out this scenario and let’s say then the next week you meet again as a team and I say, okay, the first question I asked you was, what is, give me three.

Non-negotiables that you feel would help us create some unity with this team as we move forward. So Zoran, you wrote some really impressive things down here. Would you explain them? And so to then have the teammates explain their responses. You just took, you just empowered them a hundred times.

Zoran Stojković: Yes. And then constantly reminding people of what those non-negotiables are, having that common blueprint of vision values, behaviors.
And that that all feeds into it. That’s a really solid suggestion and actually doing something about it and not just asking questions for the sake of asking questions. Val, tell me about tell me about your book. Life is Short. Don’t Wait to Dance.

Valorie Kondos-Field: The book is about how I figured out this world of athletics and the things that I did that didn’t work and the things that I did that were very unorthodox as a head coach to do that did work.

And just my journey along the way. It’s a really fast read, so holidays are coming up, people, it’s gonna be a really great holiday gift. And as I was writing the book, I was trying to come up with the title of the book and I was writing the part the chapters, the coach Wooden, my relationship with him.

I had a very, very, very close relationship with John Wooden and he lived at me 99 and nine months old, and the last few years of his life. Whenever I was with him, somebody would say, you know, coach, you’ve lived an impeccable life. Do you have any regrets? And he would always reply the same way. And his little eyes, blue eyes would start to glisten with tears and he would say you know, my wife Nelly loved dance and he outlived his wife by I think 30 years.

And he said, and I grew up very shy and I was never a very good dancer. And so I never danced with my wife. And I realize now that had I danced with my wife, people wouldn’t have made fun of me. They would’ve seen a couple deeply in love dancing together. So if I have one regret, I would go back and dance with my wife.
And so my title of the book is An Homage to Coach Wooden Life is Short. Don’t Wait to Dance.

Zoran Stojković: Wow. The things you wouldn’t know. That’s,

Valorie Kondos-Field: Yeah. And I can’t tell you how many times I, in my speaking engagements, if I’m, when I’m done or I’m signing books or autographs or something, I will get elderly men come up to me with tears in their eyes and saying, thank you.

I’m gonna go home and dance with my wife. Yay.

Zoran Stojković: That’s a really powerful message. Val, tell me about what you’re up to right now and what, tell me about official Miss Val and, and where people can find you.

Valorie Kondos-Field: Okay. You can, I honestly, I’ve kind of gotten off social media when Covid started. I just wanted to take a break and kind of refresh my whole being and what I wanted to do moving forward.

I am still doing a lot of speaking engagements and like you, most people find me through the TED Talk. People can find me on my website official miss val.com. You can go to my Instagram and Twitter, but I don’t post anything. I just don’t like social media for a lot of reasons and what I’m doing besides speaking, I’m super excited to produce an urban Nutcracker.

Because I danced Nutcracker for 15 years and I want to bring the classics of Tchaikovsky and this beautiful tale to the streets. And so like the street performance arts, like parkour and kata and skateboarding.

Zoran Stojković: Whoa, right. Whoa. That’s gonna be a cool mix.

Valorie Kondos-Field: I know. So I’m really excited to do that.
And I want to develop a theater production or a film, or even an animated film about the environment called trash. And so if you or any of your listeners are environmentalists, I need a storyline. And I want it to be like, I’ve recently been thinking about having it be animated, kind of like Toy Story and following, you know, this lead character that maybe the lead character is a plastic bottle.

I don’t know. I want the whole message to be: People, we need to wake up and start really on an individual basis taking care of our climate and this beautiful planet that we live on. And so trash, isn’t that a great name? I mean a mess. What’s a great name? Imagine if it was like a theater production, you say, let’s go get trashed.

Like, oh my gosh. The market value of that is just, and I do have it copyrighted. So yeah, trash. Good for trash and Urban Nutcracker. And I also wanna do a film on our last 2018 national championship, which was literally one of the greatest comebacks. In all sport. It is like a miracle and ice story and it needs to be told in a film.

And so I’m actually working on all these three projects as I’m speaking all around the world. So that’s what’s going on.

Zoran Stojković: That is awesome. Seems like you’re up to some quite different things and, and so thanks so much for taking the time to, to speak to me today and to, to share your insights and, and your stories and hope we can do this again in the future.

Valorie Kondos-Field: Absolutely. And thank you for all you’re doing to, to get us all to think in a much more powerful way. Have a great day. Thank you.

Zoran Stojković: Hey, thanks for tuning in to Cultivate Your Culture Rate and Reviewer podcast on iTunes. Any websites and resources mentioned in the podcast as well as the guest information can be found on the show notes at www.kizo.ca/podcast