Tips from the Titans
Tip: When you surrender your differences, you gain your
commonness
Duke Rohe drohe@pdq.net
Overview: To get teamwork, staff have to realize what they
have in common is greater than what is different about them.
Here’s a tool that shoes how diversity can strengthen you. If
you want it to.
Goal:
1. Grow commoness among a diverse group.
2. Establish a set of teamwork ground rules to stand behind.
Participants: members on a team or staff in a department.
Procedure:
1. Ask the group if they are serious about having teamwork.
2. Challenge them to rent and watch Remember the Titans, a movie about
teamwork WITH A PEN IN HAND and to write down insights about
teamwork.
3. Ask them to share their signature insights from the movie.
4. Ask them to look at the set of insights below and pick a few that they want
their area to be known for.
5. Ask them if they want to make a team agreement toward achieving.
6. Let what they agree upon become the new culture around teamwork.
7. When those work cross-grain with team agreement, the team and
leadership agree to address it quickly.
Remember the Titans is a recent video about one of the first integrated football
teams. The team and eventually the culture had to look past their differences in
order to discover their souls. Sitting with a pen, here are points I picked up.
1. Frozen mindsets are hard to give up. It takes time to surrender the past
and accept big change.
2. The new can look wrong, even when it is right.
3. People fear what they don’t understand.
4. Entitlement has a self-made title.
5. A team isn’t born. It is grown together.
6. Preferences are like shoes; some fit some don’t.
7. A good leader brings out the greatness of his followers.
8. You will never know another unless you study them.
9. Your assumptions drive your thinking.
10. If you are only looking out for number one, that is all you will ever get.
11. People tend to overlook what they have in common and pronounce what
is different. Until we can learn how much we are the same, we will never
understand where we are really different.
12. You will work harder when you know others are relying on you. You can
move mountains when you feel needed.
13. You don’t have to like someone in order to respect them.
14. If you are going to be strict, be strict with everyone.
15. It’s amazing how people are always trying to get someone else to change.
16. Reality has more meaning the more you understand about it.
17. You don’t win if you don’t earn it.
18. Pain places us all on a level playing field.
19. Trying is a first step.
20. When you have made a significant change, all those around you seem to
be at a different place.
21. If you can’t be best, then you can go after the next best thing.
22. Sometimes life is hard for no reason at all.
23. When you surrender your differences, you gain your commonness