John Bacon

Best-selling author and former hockey coach John Bacon offers lessons he learned turning the nation’s worst high school hockey team into one of its most celebrated.

John Bacon played four years in the high school hockey hotbed of Michigan and managed to graduate without scoring a single goal. He earned a letter at Huron High School for his hard work helping his teammates get the glory. As he shared, “I was one of those guys who the bus did not wait for, so I was always on time.”

John told himself that if he ever got the opportunity to coach a team, he would apply the same rules for everybody on the team and, even more important, go out of his way to celebrate the players who didn’t get as many goals and accolades. After graduating from the University of Michigan and starting his career in journalism, he accepted a job coaching his high school.

Huron was coming off a 0-22-3 record and was ranked dead last by USAhockey.com’s review of 1,256 hockey teams across the nation. Just three years later, under John’s leadership, the team was 17-4-5 and ranked fourth in the state and 53rd in the nation, “leapfrogging 95 percent of the teams in the nation,” in John’s words. He chronicled his experience in his best-selling book Let Them Lead: Unexpected Lessons in Leadership from America’s Worst High School Hockey Team.

Bacon also fulfilled his oath to himself and built his winning teams on two basic principles of working hard and supporting your teammates—including the unheralded players whose contributions are critical to a team’s success. In this episode, he offers leadership insights that are as fast-paced and hard-hitting as the game he loves.

“Put your values over victories. You are going to have ups and downs, an account lost or gained, a bad hit with government regulations or whatever,” Bacon averred. “But you should not have ups and downs with your values, you shouldn’t have ups and downs with your principles. I stole that from Rob Palmer, a Michigan All-American hockey player I skate with on Tuesday nights.” And John welcomes you to steal his lessons here so that you can build a great team.

You will learn:

•  5:00   Why a star system demotivates the entire team.
• 11:00  The best way to make your team “special.”
• 12:00  How to be patient with results, but not behavior.
• 14:30  Mentors are far more important than pay for your first job.
• 18:00  How to put values over victories.
• 22:00  How to measure statistics in business.
• 23:30  Why silos are death for team spirit.
• 24:45  How to break down the sales vs. service silo.
• 30:00  How to increase discretionary energy.
• 35:00  How to handle credit given to you and your team.
• 38:30  The heartwarming story of John’s player Scooter.

Resources:

• Get your copy of Let Them Lead: Unexpected Lessons in Leadership from America’s Worst High School Hockey Team.
• Listen to John’s podcast Let Them Lead.
• More about the Hawthorne Effect.