The Invisible Code of Honor That Takes Ordinary People and Turns Them into a Championship Team

The Invisible Code of Honor That Takes Ordinary People and Turns Them into a Championship Team
An excerpt from a book in the Rich Dad's Advisors® series...
The ABC’s of Building a Business Team that Wins
By Blair Singer

From Chapter One…
In the absence of rules, people make up their own rules. And some of the biggest collisions in finance, business and relationships occur because well-meaning people are simply playing by different sets of rules. By the same token, the most miraculous results come from “like-minded” folks who band together under some invisible bond to achieve greatness.

By experience and default we all formulate our own sets of guidelines, rules and assumptions. That’s natural. But when we start coming together with other people, organizations and cultures, we sometimes have a tough time figuring out why “those guys” don’t understand or how they could so blatantly turn their backs on our feelings, our way of doing things and our rules. In most respects, “those guys” feel the same way about us. Why? Because we assume that certain basic rules are the same. Bad assumption.

This book is about revealing the process for eliminating one of the biggest causes for financial loss, frustration and heartbreak. It is about surrounding yourself with folks who subscribe to the same set of rules and how to establish them so that you can ensure peak performance, fun and incredible results in all you do.

Why Do You Need a Code of Honor?
For about twelve years now, I’ve actively studied teams, looking at what makes them successful and how they are able to operate at peak performance. And after all this time, I can tell you this: You cannot have a championship team, in any facet of your life, without a Code of Honor.

If you are interested in building a great relationship, whether it’s with your business, your community, your family or even yourself, there have to be rules and standards for the behavior that will ultimately achieve your goals. A Code of Honor is the physical manifestation of the team’s values, extended into behavior. It’s not enough to have values, because we all do. What’s so crucial is knowing how to put physical behavior into practice to reflect those values.

Let me illustrate what I mean. When I was in high school in Ohio, I was on the cross-country running team. Typically, any human being of the male sex living in the state of Ohio was expected to play football, but if you could see my size you’d realize that I was just not built to go up against a two-hundred-pound linebacker, even though I love the game. Cross-country was more my style.

What a lot of people don’t know about cross-country is that there are typically about five to seven runners per team racing at the same time. Usually there are several other teams running at the same time. The only way your team can win is if the whole team finishes relatively close together close to the front of the pack of runners. In other words, having a superstar who runs ahead of the pack and places first doesn’t do the team any good if everyone else is all spread out across the field. Cross-country is a low-scoring sport, meaning that first place receives a point, second receives two points and so on. The idea is to get the whole team to finish near the front, so that your team gets the lowest score possible. If we could get fourth-, sixth-, seventh- and ninth-place finishes, then even if another team got a first, second, twelfth and eighteenth we would still win the meet.

So for the entire two-and-a-half-mile race, each of us would push the others on, encouraging, threatening, supporting, yelling with each gasping breath for air. With muscles burning and body strength faltering, it was as much a race of emotional endurance as it was physical. We pushed each other on and off the course. If someone was slacking, you can rest assured the rest of the team would be on him quickly to pick it up. It took ALL that each of us had for us to win. Whatever it took for us to cross that finish line close together, that was what we did. In other words, part of our code was to do whatever it took to support everyone to win.

We won most of our cross-country meets, or placed very high, even though we had very few superstar runners. We were a championship team. It was my first experience with teams, at the most basic, physical, gut-wrenching level, but the lessons it taught me remain the same today. I have always surrounded myself with people who would push me that way and who would allow me to push as well. It serves them and it serves me. As a result, I have always been blessed with incredibly great friendships, success and wealth.>

Team Tip: A Code of Honor brings out the best in every person who subscribes to it.
I have also observed that it is in times of pressure, when the stakes are high, that people are transformed. I’ve NEVER seen a great team that didn’t come together without some type of pressure. It could be from competition, from outside influences, or it could be self-induced. We knew in those cross-country meets that every person, every second, every step counted toward a win for our team, and it bound us together. We knew that the success of the team took precedence over our individual goals. No one wanted to let the others down. It drove you as hard as the desire to win. We had a code that said we stuck together no matter what. And in those really important moments, we came together and did what we needed to do to be successful.

But when pressure increases, sometimes so do emotions. When that happens, intelligence has a tendency to drop. People revert to their base instincts in times of stress, and that’s when their true colors come out. Sometimes that’s not such a pretty sight. Have you ever said something to someone when you were upset that you wished you had not said a few minutes later? I thought so. That’s what I mean about high emotion and low intelligence.

I’ve seen teams that work well together day to day, but when things get tough, they revert to ‘every man for himself.’ A crisis came along and everyone ran for cover, because there was no set of rules to help them see their way through it. Judgments based upon heightened emotions became their guide, which may not turn out to be the best choice for all concerned.

For example, more than half of all marriages end in divorce. In times of stress, the people involved are unable to negotiate their differences. No common code of honor or set of rules holds them together. It is the same issue in the case of a business partnership dispute that has no rules or guidelines. Both situations can get nasty.

It isn’t that people don’t want to work out their differences. The problem is that without rules and expectations mutually agreed upon up front, they act on instinct, particularly when emotions are running high. Each does what he or she thinks is best, based upon his or her feelings at the time. Decisions made in that kind of setting may not be the best ones.

Now I know you’ve never been under any kind of stress, right?

Of course you have. You know that when you’re upset, when you’re on deadline, when you’re angry at a family member or a coworker, it’s impossible to try to negotiate terms. Why? Because you aren’t in your right mind! THAT’S why you need a Code of Honor…
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