Photo by David Sim

Recently, here in Dallas, TX, there was an enormous controversy over the firing of a basketball coach. This coach worked for The Convent School, a local Christian academy, and under his tenure, the team made its first “final four” appearance in its history.  You may have heard about it; the story went national after the Dallas Morning News reported on the 100-0 drubbing of the Dallas Academy’s girls basketball team.

According to most accounts, the coach left his first string in the game as the Convent School’s team ran the score up and up.  After the game, the administrators at the Convent School called the victory “shameful” and an “embarrassment” and apologized to the Dallas Academy.  They also wanted the coach to apologize to the Dallas Academy, and he refused.  Not only did he not apologize, he circulated an email and blog post defending his position and was summarily fired.

This ignited a firestorm of discussion on our local talk radio stations.   The tenor of the argument was and argument over values, mainly winning versus compassion.  Some felt the coach was hired to build a team that could win and that he was fired for doing the very thing he was hired to do.  Others felt that his team behaved without honor.

For those of you who think the coach should not have been fired, did you also know that the Dallas Academy, the school that didn’t score, is a school for the learning-disabled?  These girls are special education students who have not won a game in four years, who play as hard as they can and who play to the end.

The Dallas Academy uses basketball to improve skills, learn teamwork and to provide an opportunity to learn the life lessons team sports teach. It is a lesson for all of us in both persistence and finding the benefits and opportunities in the experience as opposed to the result. Frankly, my heart breaks for the humiliation these girls must have felt.

My two cents: the Convent School isn’t public and that parents send their children to a Christian School in part to learn their values. When it became clear that the coach didn’t share those values, the Convent School had every right to fire him. I applaud them for standing up publicly and saying with their actions that their values are more important to uphold that the results.

It’s rare that people can stand up for their values without a personal cost.  Many of us at times in our careers have felt that we had to compromise our values because we weren’t in a position to suffer the consequences if we were not to comply.  Has this happened to you?

When faced with a situation in your career or business which goes against your values, where is your line drawn?  At what point are your values more important than the consequences for standing up for them?

This conversation almost always starts with adversarial thinking (either values or results).  I believe that we can not only have both shared values and results, but that collaboratively we can achieve better results by creating environments of trust.  What do you think?

Please join in the discussion by leaving a comment below.

Cheers,

Carolann

p.s. – Today’s topic loosely ties in with principle-based leadership. I am on the cusp of announcing a new, year-long leadership program which embodies this and other leading edge concepts.   We’ll be announcing on the ezine first, and I invite you to sign up for the Brain-Based Coaching ezine today.