2. Listen to your players (employees). I am not always a great listener. While coaching, I'd hear what girls were saying but I wasn't always listening and there is a big difference between hearing and listening. I thought I knew best, although often I didn't.

One of my biggest mistakes my first season was forcing a girl to practice who had just broken up with her boyfriend. My relationship with that young woman was fractured that day and it was never fixed. Having worked in the NFL, and for Bob Knight at Indiana University ("5 Life Lessons I Learned from Bob Knight."), I had never encountered a player missing practice because he had broken up with his girlfriend. "Uh, Coach Knight, I can't practice today because my girlfriend and I broke up" wasn't a declaration I had heard, or wanted to be in the same area code if it was uttered. But, this was high school softball and this young woman was crushed. I was insensitive and far less than compassionate than I needed to be. I "lost" this player for the rest of that season because I was worried about being perceived by others as being too flexible and accommodating. Instead, I know I "lost" several other players that day as well because they did see me as insensitive and uncompromising.

I have taken that lesson with me as a manager in business. If my team members are distracted and struggling with outside influences, I need to help guide them through those difficult times by being as supportive as possible. A short-term lack of production to deal with "off-the-field" issues can have positive results later on down the road if the manager effectively deals with these rough times.

During my second season, one in which we had a team that was much more competitive, we hit a wall halfway through the campaign. I was pushing every possible button to try to get us to perform better and nothing was working. I even went as far as naming two sophomores captains midway through the year. I think in some instances captains can be more trouble than they are worth but I was trying to light a fire under a great group of seniors. To their credit, the seniors responded, although they were furious about my decision. (Coincidentally, I just learned yesterday that this year's University of Tennessee softball team has two sophomore captains, although it's not necessarily something I'd advise).

While I blamed our seniors for a lack of leadership (I now know the leadership void was me), we just weren't performing to our potential. To try to get an answer to what was causing our struggles, I had all of our players fill out an anonymous questionnaire that asked the following three questions: 1) What can we do collectively to make our program better over the next three years? 2) What can we do to make this year's team better? 3) How can I improve as a coach?

I was shattered by the feedback. The girls unloaded on me. "Mean," "says one thing and does another," "inconsistent," "spending too much time situations and not focusing on fundamentals," and it went on and on. It was necessary feedback, regardless how much it hurt to hear. We made some immediate changes and finished the season playing very good softball. We all started to enjoy being around one another much more and we began performing at a much higher level.

I received letters from two of our seniors at the end of that season.

The first note read, in part, "I can't express in words how appreciative I am of you. Not gonna lie, there were some parts of this season that I absolutely hated, but in retrospect, I am glad you did most of the things that you did. The way this team played softball has transformed from lazy and embarrassing to proud and competitive."

The second letter read, also in part, "Even when some of us complained about your ways of going about things, no one could ever say that your heart wasn't in the exact right place, and that you didn't care immensely."

I don't believe that those letters would have been written had our staff not asked for honest feedback earlier in the season, and had we not acted on what I had been told, even as hard as it was to hear at the time.

Dr. Mark Rutland's

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