Facebook entry: Coach Gelwix and Highland Rugby

Q&A With Anthony Cannon: Coach Gelwix Taught Us Never To Give Up

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 11:21am

Anthony Cannon played under coach Larry Gelwix on the Highland Rugby team for four years.

What motivated you to play for Coach Gelwix?

I was introduced to HR at an early age. My brother was playing for the team, while I was in Elementary school. He had such a good experience that it made me want to play. But something else happened while my brother was playing, our dad passed away, it was a tragic event. I remember that Larry came over to our house several times to meet with my brother to talk with him, and find out how he was doing. As I little boy I saw that, how he was coming to check in and take care of him, find out how things were going though a difficult time. While it meant a lot to my brother it also meant a lot to me. Someone was taking an interest, not just in my older brother, but in our family.

Larry treated me kindly and even gave me a t-shirt. He invited me to come play for them. When I wore that shirt to school, I felt important; I was being recruited at such an early age to come play Highland Rugby. So when I did reach high school, I was excited to go play for Larry, to play for the rugby team. I was excited to experience this team that I had heard about, and finally have my own experiences in.

What made Highland Rugby different than other sport teams you played with?

Larry had a way to teach principals to the players. I remember feeling there was a greater sense of unity for this team, compared to other teams I had played for. Larry’s leadership was different than I was used it. He would call on players at the end of practice to say how they thought the teams overall performance was. It wasn’t just team captains he would call on, he just wanted everyone to have the chance to stand up and speak to the team. It meant a lot to me, because I could see how boys would take ownership of the team when they had a chance to stand up and share their opinions.

Going to Nationals and your experience working as a team?

My junior year, I was captain on the team. We had a difficult time coming together that year. We were a small team. We didn’t have as many boys who were big and strong, as we had in years past. We had lost a lot of the talent from the previous year. We were having a difficult year coming together and playing well. And this was not typical for the Highland team, who has a reputation for having a good team with plenty of talent, who works hard and perform well on the field. We did make it to finals that year, struggling through the season, but made it to the finals. At our first game in the National Tournament, we struggled performance wise. We just couldn’t come together well. We made it though the game but it was ugly. Larry let us know that it was ugly, and that we needed to make a decision as a team. If we were going to come out and play as a team, because it was do or die. We were either going to be sent home ashamed or we were going to turn around and step up and meet the tradition that Highland has set. Larry encouraged us to work together on our own. We talked our problems out and tried to figure out what we were doing wrong. That was a turning point in our season; we came back for the next game, the semi-finals in the tournament and played as the Highland team should play. We turned it up; it was a great feeling. We felt like we were fighting for one another. Like we were playing for our brothers. We made it though that game, and then faced our archival in the Championship game. We came out and went head to head with them and it was one of the greatest matches I have ever participated in. The people from Rugby Today said it was one of the greatest games for High School rugby they have ever seen. We ended up winning that game, but more than that we found what we were missing that year. It was our brotherhood, our feeling of tradition and responsibility that was handed down through the years from past players. It was incredibly rewarding experience. I think about that often and reflect on being disciplined and committed to a common purpose, and developed to unity on the team.

What did you learn playing on Highland that helped you to serve a mission?

One thing I always remember Larry teaching us at practice was that it didn’t matter how tired we get; we still have a job to do. We aren’t going to give up till we finish what we are going to accomplish. That was a principal that helped me as I served a mission; I am going to work hard regardless of how I feel and I am going to not give up until I get the job done. One of the team motto’s is never give up, that stuck with me. One other thing that I learned was accountability; at times at practice, Larry would call on random players to give account of their personal running program. I remember being a freshman and being terrified to be called on to report. It taught me that I needed to be ready to give account for what my responsibilities are. At the time, we needed to be able to stand and tell the coach and team that they went out and did our running. Larry never would have yelled at you for not doing it. Rather he would have been disappointed in you, and that disappointment was worse than any kind of yelling or swearing storm he could have done. When I went on my mission, I knew I was accountable for my time and my efforts.

What do ou personally think of Coach, and his character?

Larry is a tremendous guy. I was impressed with him from the get go. And playing on the team allowed me to get to know him personally everyday. He valued other people’s opinion. He said that you can tell the value of a person by how he treats others he doesn’t need. He compared this to a senior on the team, how he would treat a freshman, or someone he didn’t need. Larry practiced this by asking the team how we were doing, it didn’t matter their position. He asked what he thought we could do better as a team and that he could do better as a coach. I remember being taken back at the question. I didn’t think he needed to do better, but I was impressed that he would have that idea to ask my opinion of how he was doing as a coach.

Tell us about the interaction with your grandfather, Elder Worthlin, and playing for a World Championship in South Africa?

In 1998 Highland Rugby went to South Africa. I had an older brother and a cousin playing that year, so I went to the airport to see them off. My grandfather, Elder Worthlin, went as well. That meant a lot to Larry and the boys. It meant a lot that he showed support for the Highland Rugby team. My grandfather, Elder Worthlin, became a supporter of the Highland Rugby team because he had four grandsons who played for Coach Gelwix. I remember when my grandfather would come to my games; it was a special thing, that he was showing that much support for us. Larry adopted the practice of the having the boys coming up after to shake my grandfathers hand. I know the boys enjoyed it, and my grandfather felt privileged to have some part in the Highland Rugby program. My grandfather would often tell me that it was a great experience to be associated with that team. I remember whether I was in season or not, he would ask how the rugby team was doing. I said, that were doing well and starting practice in a month. He would do his characteristic head nod and say, “It’s a great program and that’s a great coach. He has done some amazing things”. I remember thinking that it was an amazing thing that my grandfather was aware of what I was doing, but he was endorsing my involvement with Highland Rugby.

I remember even after my time at Highland Rugby was finished, in 2007, I attended the National championship as a spectator watching Highland Rugby play in the championship. I remember looking over in the stand and seeing my grandfather there with my aunt. I was impressed that he was not just showing his support while I was there, but was showing his support even now when he didn’t have a grandson on the team. I still remember Larry bringing my grandfather down on the field after Highland had won and the boys coming up one by one shaking his hand. I remember thinking this was a great thing that he could be part of this story and give the boys this memory as well.

Every season, Larry would get a group of boys together and take them up to my grandfather’s office down town. That was a special visit for all of us as we got to sit in the office, shake his hand, and listen to the council and experiences he shared with us. He would share lessons that he learned from playing football for the University of Utah, and how those later helped him on his mission to Germany and Switzerland. Then he would tell us that we needed to believe in the lessons that Coach Gelwix was teaching us. He instructed that there was no better way to prepare than for working hard and being dedicated to the Highland Rugby team.

What was it like being a team captain for two years?

When I was a junior, I was elected to be captain. It was a frightening experience for me because usually it was the seniors who were captains on the team. I remember being uncertain if I could live up to both the culture and tradition of Highland Rugby. I remember Coach taking me under his wing and teaching me how to be a captain. It was basically pretty simple; you have to be the part. Larry taught me that I needed to be a “doer” and that was the best way to be a captain on the team. That year was a hard time coming together as a team. And it was a difficult time for us as a team, so we had to fight together as a group of boys to live up to what we had been given by previous players for the Highland Rugby team.

I think the best experience I had being captain, was not just one experience but rather the culmination of lessons being there taught by coach Coach. He taught me the principals of discipline, hard work, honesty, commitment, and not doing anything to embarrass yourself, your family, or our church. These are principals that I was able to carry on my mission, that have helped me since that time. I think about them often as I am placed in positions of influence or when I am placed in organizations where I have influence.

Tell us an experience where you used these leadership skills?

I think the number one principal that stands out in my mind, was the principal of not giving up. It was demonstrated on the team when I played by just working our tails off. That was something I took into the mission field - where you are working hard every day and sometimes feel like you want to go in and call it a day. But remembering what my experiences were on the rugby team, helped me to work hard and be Forever Strong. And that was a way that I was able to apply those into my mission experience.

Coach Gelwix and Highland Rugby: "Build Quality Boys"

Rugby Forever Strong: "Build Quality Boys"

Coach Gelwix 30 year tradition of leadership was dramatized in the movie, "Forever Strong". As a leader of boys highschool Rugby team in Highland Utah, Coach Gelwix used the opportunity to make a difference in boys lives.

Quality is on the inside. Strength from the team comes from each persons commitment to honor and listen to what is right, live clean, and never do anything to embarrass oneself, one's team, or one's family. Honor, Spirit, and Tradition (BYU Football, no?) provide a sense of duty to do one's best and honor those who have gone before.

The boy in the movie, "Rick Penny" is raised in a pretty heartless fashion by his father who blames his old Rugby coach for an ACL injury his senior year. The boy gets in trouble with the law, and ends up in Juvenile Detention where he can be released early if he plays well for the Highland Rugby team. Along the way he learns true friendship, putting the team first, that one cannot truly win without honesty, honor, clean living, and doing one's best.

Coach Gelwix wants each boy to do his personal best. When they lose, they did not play their best and he focuses on their efforts to improve themselves. He cares deeply about each one of the boys, and knows a quality rugby team will naturally result when quality comes from the inside of each of the boys.

This movie taught me that leadership is about also caring for your team members and wanting their success; realizing they can only attain it by not cheating themselves, and committing themselves to the highest principles possible. "Never embarass yourself, your team, or your family" is a key lesson for each player. "I am not building a quality team, I build quality boys" is the leaders lesson. This applies to my organizational efforts at work by caring about the person on the team first.

Peter Drucker: Managing Knowledge

Managing Knowledge Means Managing Oneself

by Peter F. Drucker

Leader To Leader, No.16, Spring 2000

In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time -- literally -- substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.

Throughout history, practically nobody had choices. Until about 1900, even in the most highly developed countries, the overwhelming majority followed their father's line of work -- if they were lucky. If your father was a peasant farmer, you were a peasant farmer. If he was a craftsman, you were a craftsman. There was only downward mobility; there was no upward mobility.

Now suddenly a large number of people have choices. What is more, they will have more than one career, because the working life span of people is now close to 60 years -- three times what it was in 1900. People in my executive management program (who are 45 years old on average and very successful) tell me, to a person, "I do not expect to end my career where I am working now."

Abundance of Choices

Knowledge gives choice. It also explains why we suddenly have women in the same jobs as men. Historically, men and women have always had equal participation in the labor force -- the idea of the idle housewife is a 19th-century delusion. Men and women simply did different jobs. There's no civilization in which the two genders did the same work. However, knowledge work knows no gender; men and women do the same jobs. This, too, is a major change in the human condition.

To succeed in this new world, we will have to learn, first, who we are. Few people, even highly successful people, can answer the questions, Do you know what you're good at? Do you know what you need to learn so that you get the full benefit of your strengths? Few have even asked themselves these questions.

On the contrary, most are proud of their ignorance. There are human resource people who are proud of the fact that they can't read a balance sheet. Yet if you want to be effective today, you have to be able to read one. On the other hand, there are accountants who are equally proud of the fact that they cannot get along with people! That, of course, is nothing to be proud of, because anyone can learn to work smoothly with others. It is not hard, after all, to learn manners -- and manners are what allow people to get along.

Knowing Yourself

Throughout human history, it was the super achievers -- and only the super achievers -- who knew when to say "No." They always knew what to reach for. They knew where to place themselves. Now all of us will have to learn that. It's not very difficult. The key to it -- what Leonardo da Vinci and Mozart did -- is to record the results of our decisions.

Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen. The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, "If we assign this general to lead this base, what do we expect him to accomplish?" Three years later they look back at what they had written. They have now reached a point where 40 percent of their decisions work out.

The Roman Catholic Church is just beginning to ask the same question about bishops. "Why do we put the bishop into the diocese? What do we expect?" And the Church finds that a great majority of appointments do not fulfill expectations, because they get no feedback on their performance.

Building on Strengths

It's easy to understand our strengths by tracking our results. Yet most of us underestimate our own strengths. We take them for granted. What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can't be very good. As a result, we don't know our strengths, and we don't know how we can build on them.

We also seldom know what gifts we are not endowed with. We will have to learn where we belong, what we have to learn to get the full benefit from our strengths, where our weaknesses lie, what our values are. We also have to know ourselves temperamentally: "Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? What am I committed to? And what is my contribution?" Unfortunately, nobody teaches us these things. In the next 30 years most educated people will have to learn to place themselves, in work and in life.

Improving Productivity

Understanding

our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong -- these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of knowledge workers. The productivity of teachers, for instance, has not improved, and may in fact have shrunk, in the past 70 years. (Of course teachers in the 1920s enjoyed the advantage of not having faculty meetings to attend.) And nurses and sales workers are only two-thirds as productive as their counterparts 70 years ago.

Yet we know that hospitals can improve productivity by asking their nurses two simple questions: What are you being paid for, and how much time do you spend doing that? Typically, nurses say they are paid to provide patient care, or to keep the doctors happy. Both are good answers; the problem is that they have no time to do either job. One hospital more than doubled its nurses' productivity simply by asking them these two questions, and then hiring clerks to do the paperwork that prevented nurses from doing their real job.

Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people -- and allow people to place themselves -- according to their strengths.

The historic shift to self-management offers organizations four ways to best develop and motivate knowledge workers:

• Know people's strengths.
• Place them where they can make the greatest contributions.
• Treat them as associates.
• Expose them to challenges.

The greatest competitive advantage of the United States is that it attracts top knowledge workers from around the world -- not just because they earn more money but because they are treated as colleagues, not as subordinates. Knowledge workers don't believe they are paid to work 9 to 5; they believe they're paid to be effective. Organizations that understand this -- and strip away everything that gets in their knowledge workers' way -- will be able to attract, hold, and motivate the best performers. That will be the single biggest factor for competitive advantage in the next 25 years.

Role of the Social Sector

I take a dim view of most of the programs companies create to develop their people. The real development I've seen of people in organizations, especially in big ones, comes from their being volunteers in a nonprofit organization -- where you have responsibility, you see results, and you quickly learn what your values are. There is no better way to understand your strengths and discover where you belong than to volunteer in a nonprofit. That is probably the great opportunity for the social sector -- and especially in its relationship to business.

We talk today of the social responsibilities of business. I hope we will soon begin to talk about the nonprofit organization as the great social opportunity for business. It is the opportunity for business to develop managers far more effectively than any company or university can. It is one of the unique benefits that the social sector can offer -- to provide a place where the knowledge worker can actually discover who he or she is and can actually learn to manage him- or herself.

Forbes Article on Peter Drucker, Manageing Oneself: Sept 2009

A vital milestone in becoming an effective leader is the ability to manage oneself. It is on this subject we come upon one of Drucker's classic pieces, "Managing Oneself."

http://academy.clevelandclinic.org/Portals/40/managingoneself.pdf

The piece, originally published in 1999, was republished in the January 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review. Drucker died in November that year, eight days short of his 96th birthday. (The essay was also part of a Drucker book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century.)

In his characteristically crisp style, Drucker poses a number questions as the starting point for reflection. Among them:

What Are My Strengths?

How Do I Perform?

What Are My Values?

Where Do I Belong?

What Should I Contribute?

His conclusion puts the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of each and every one of us: "The challenges of managing oneself may seem obvious, if not elementary. And the answers may seem self-evident to the point of appearing naive. But managing oneself requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker."