The brothers of Kappa Alpha usually start training for Rope Pull months before homecoming weekend. Lengthy practices are tough on the body, resulting in skin-busting blisters, bruised backs, and arms so sore that putting on a jacket can be painful. You'd expect these types of injuries from school's Rodeo team, but Rope Pull, really? Sure, the rope isn't a buckin' bull, but it can still cause a welt or two.

When I returned to UT Martin in September 2024 to continue my study on Rope Pull, I visited the Paul Meek Library to find more historical reports on the game. The university's archives are in a secured room that requires staff access, so I sought the help of senior library assistant Karen Elmore. I met Karen when I visited UT Martin in 2023. On that visit, she helped me to look through old yearbooks. This time, Karen gave me a stack of microfilm archives of the school newspaper, otherwise known as The Pacer. She taught me how to use the machine to scan through a few years of papers in a matter of minutes. I soon found that callouses and pulled muscles have been the sport's price of admission for decades.

Jennifer A. Walker was The Pacer's life and leisure editor in the late 1980s, and she published an article on September 29, 1988 which captured the experience of that year's participants. Two coaches, Phi Sigma Kappa's Allen Morris and Kappa Alpha's Doug Kennedy, gave Jennifer their perspectives for her article:

"In a rip or hit, the team tries to gain about six inches of rope by sliding up on the rope, arching their backs, throwing their heads back, and putting all force behind them.

If the words don't sound grueling enough, pulling rope can result in pulled muscles and ligaments. Some of the most common scars left by the pull are rope burns behind and underneath the arms and sometimes on the legs where the rope pulls against the skin, Morris said.

Also, calloused hands will get ripped and bleed from pulling. 'It's a painful sport,' Morris said. But he adds, 'They heal up after the pulls.'

Team members wear layers of old clothing and pad their arms and shoulders with towels to reduce the burns. 'The more padding, the better off you are,' Kennedy said."

Nearly 40 years after Jennifer's article, the same lesson applies to today's rope pull players: without the right preparation and proper equipment, you can't win the match, and you'll risk serious injury. Participants need layers of padding for injury protection and to endure the full match. They also need the right training so that practicing will give them the skill and toughness for competition.

Great teams, in sports or in the office, can achieve their goals and avoid painful mistakes with the proper training and tools. These two elements of teamwork work hand in hand.

Tools are Not One-Size-Fits-All

In my first article on the threads of thriving teams, I defined tools as a collection of the right equipment.

Your players are most effective when they have the tools of the trade that enable their best performance. I've led IT departments for small and midsized nonprofit organizations, and I've seen the frustration on an employee's face when we wouldn't supply them with the equipment they wanted. Office workers have very specific preferences when it comes to their technology, such as the type of monitor, keyboard, or mouse they use. While at the San Antonio Zoo, I learned that most of our staff preferred the flexibility of a laptop over a desktop computer. As my IT team purchased new machines, we gave our staff the option to choose the device that best suited them and their type of work. The cost of a laptop was slightly more expensive than a similarly equipped desktop model, but it was worth it to have a happier and more productive staff member.

Similarly, I once tried to gain adoption for a standardized project management platform across the organization. The problem I encountered is these platforms usually have features designed for certain uses cases. Our IT department relied on the workflows in Jira to manage requests to different tech experts, and the Facilities team preferred the features of ServiceChannel to process tickets and track routine maintenance. The Marketing department preferred the capabilities of Monday.com to collaborate on creative assignments. Forcing all of these departments to use the same platform might be cheaper and make IT compliance easier, but an IT department should empower staff with tools that provide the best value to the "client", within reason. Sometimes that means a higher cost and more effort to reduce security/compliance risks, but these compromises are necessary to equip the staff so they can perform at their best.

Commitment to Training

The right tools are most effective when teams have developed a discipline for training. In the context of teamwork, training occurs when there's an individual and corporate commitment to ongoing improvement.

Training shouldn't be viewed as a one-time event. You may complete your certification for operating heavy equipment or earn your CPR certification, but these skills must be regularly used or practiced in order to perform them with reliable excellence. The best training regimen is one that includes continual learning and skill development. Athletes at the top of their game stay at the top because of a commitment to constant training.

Have you ever seen someone so in love with golf that they take practice golf swings with an imaginary club? When I'm training for a big race, I find that I'm constantly stretching, like when in line at the store, talking with a friend after church, or reheating leftovers. I'm always thinking about the next run. Lifting weights, watching game film, studying a play book - all of these activities prepare athletes for competition.

When you've developed a good training regimen, you'll find that you're ready for challenges bigger than you thought could handle. You've probably heard, "if you stay ready, you don't have to get ready." There's a similar saying that applies to the training and readiness mindset needed for advancement in the workplace: "dress for the job you want, not the job you have." In my opinion, this saying is more about having a growth mindset than the clothes you wear. You should be performing at the level of the position you want, not the one you have. This could include completing online courses to level up your skills, taking on projects outside your job description, and stepping into meetings where you feel out of your depth. All of this can feel uncomfortable. But no one grows while their comfortable.

When possible, I prefer to promote staff into leadership roles rather than recruiting outside the company. The people who I promoted weren't promoted because I thought the new title and extra pay would improve their performance or loyalty. They earned their promotion because they were already performing at the level required for that job.

I'm reminded of Melissa Ortiz, who was hired to be a Community Engagement Coordinator at CapMetro. Melissa demonstrated great skill, reliability, and adaptability in this role. She earned the trust and respect of her peers, and she showed care and leadership to interns in the department. When the manager position became open, the decision to elevate her to this role was a no-brainer. She had earned it. We witnessed her potential first hand, which is something you can't do with an outside candidate. What's more, her commitment to professional growth didn't stop with this one promotion. Melissa eventually earned another promotion to Director of the department.

Looking Ahead

Talent seems to come naturally for some, while for others it’s won only through great study and practice. For truly great team achievement, cultivating talent is essential. In the next article, I’ll explore the roles of coaches in identifying and growing talent on their team.

Key Takeaways

• Without the right preparation and proper equipment, you can't win the match and you'll risk serious injury.

• Great teams, in sports or in the office, can achieve their goals and avoid painful mistakes with the proper training and tools.

• Your players are most effective when they have the tools of the trade that enable their best performance.

• When you've developed a training mindset, you'll find that you're ready for challenges bigger than you thought you could handle.

It's 8 p.m., and I'm standing in the middle of farmland in far northwest Tennessee on a mild October evening. The brothers of Kappa Alpha fraternity are getting set for an evening Rope Pull practice. This is dark sky country, so the team uses their truck headlights to illuminate the practice area.

Players are dressed to get in the dirt and grind out a one-hour practice. There's no joking around or small talk tonight, just serious work to be done. The men begin prepping the area as soon as they arrive, ensuring the holes they've dug are still in proper shape. The team, led by head coach Jake Sorrells, huddles quickly to review the plan for the evening. They'll have two practice pulls with a 15-minute break between each pull to rest and discuss their performance. Their formidable opponent is a Ford F-250 owned by one of the team's coaches. The men will try their best to budge the truck from its parked position on the field.

Jake says the team spends three to four nights each week practicing for the Rope Pull tournament. All of the game's eligible participants are full-time students, and most of them have part-time jobs after school. Between work, Rope Pull practice, social activities, and schedule full of classwork, the men don't have much time for anything else in the months leading up to the competition.

Regulation play on a Rope Pull match is 20 minutes, but most contests last less than eight minutes. For contestants, every single second on the rope is excruciating. Jake told me that the game is mostly won by endurance - a blend of physical and mental strength that's required for teams to be successful.

As the old saying goes, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." I found that expressions like these are not only full of wisdom but also have become motivational in my own leadership and teamwork journey.

One step, One punch, One Round

Jon Acuff wrote a book titled Soundtracks in which he describes how we give power to particular phrases that play over and over again in our heads. These sayings are sentences that we've picked up from different places and people in our lives, such as teachers, friends, songs, and literature.

I've struggled with being overweight for my entire life. As I approached my 40th birthday, I was determined to improve my health and drop a pant size or two. I adopted the goal…

"Fit by 40.”

That phrase played on repeat in my brain as a motivating mantra that helped me tap into more will power and determination.

Another soundtrack that fueled my fitness goal comes from the film Creed, a spin-off sequel of Sylvester Stalone's Rocky franchise. In this movie, the retired boxer Rocky Balboa trains a new contender, Adonis Creed, who is a young, aspiring boxer and the son of Rocky's late friend and former boxing opponent Apollo Creed. During one of the training sequences, Rocky motivates Adonis with the line…

"One step at a time, one punch at a time, one round at a time."

That's how Rocky believes that boxing matches are won - a sustainable pace and a steady performance can provide a path to victory. This is the formula that Rocky used to become the world heavy-weight champion. He wasn't the strongest, the biggest, or the most talented boxer. As he describes it, the key to winning a boxing match and achieving success in general "ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done."

The phrase "one step at a time, one punch at a time, one round at a time" was a regular motivation in my fitness journey. I set my sights on completing a 10k race, which seemed like an incredible stretch goal for me. I never enjoyed running, but I believed that this was the type of workout that I could commit to with great regularity and without needing to know much about technique. I mean, isn't running just moving your feet faster for an extended period of time? Technically, yes, but you won't last long in distance running if you don't understand how to pace yourself, how to breathe from your nose, and how to use correct form in your stride.

Experienced runners know that the proper mechanics of running are important to reduce injury and maintain consistency in performance. In my experience though, long-distance running is 20 percent physical and 80 percent mental. On any given practice run or race, my mind is likely to call it quits 10 times faster than my body will. I continually push myself over mental walls during a run so that I can reach the finish line.

The Whole is More Than the Sum of Its Parts

While long-distance running is an individual sport, the lessons I've learned on time and toughness also apply to successful teams. Each player is capable of contributing a strong performance, but that power is multiplied when strong players come together to form a team.

According to Gestalt theory in psychology, "the whole is more than just the sum of its parts." Experts in organizational behavior say this idea also applies to teamwork.

Simply assembling strong players doesn't automatically amount to guaranteed success on teams. It’s the relationship between those parts that creates something greater, often referred to as synergy. When people work together, they can achieve much more than one or two individuals could on their own.

Time and toughness are interlinked elements of winning teams because they fuel one another. In my experience, you can't achieve success without a willingness to put in hard work, which takes time. And, you've got to be consistent in the level of effort and the length of commitment to reach your team's goals. Going the full distance requires sacrifice of the most valuable resource on the planet - your time. Time is non-renewable. You can quickly assess what you value most by where you spend your time and who you spend it with.

In fact, the very rope used for Rope Pull can be used as a physical metaphor to show the interconnectedness of time and toughness. The rope gains its toughness because the individual threads are tightly woven. The combination of the threads makes the threads stronger than they would be on their own. The combination of threads creates the physical integrity needed for the rope to sustain the duration of each match, and that same rope is used year after year. Strong ropes are made from the proper combination of threads, and a strong rope - like a strong team - can withstand the test of time and extreme tension.

Up Next: Training and Tools

Rope Pull victories are hard won, and you don't get to the championship pull without experienced coaches who ensure you have the equipment you need to be successful. The next entry in this series will focus on the impact that training and tools have on thriving teams.

Key Takeaways

• A sustainable pace and a steady performance can provide a path to victory.

• Each player is capable of contributing a strong performance, but that power is multiplied when strong players come together to form a team.

• Time is non-renewable. You can quickly assess what you value most by where you spend your time and who you spend it with.

• Strong ropes - like strong teams - can withstand the test of time and extreme tension.

Before each Rope Pull match, the brothers of Alpha Gamma Rho prepare the field for play, even if it's not their match.

Men march onto the field, carefully hoisting the rope on their shoulders. They quietly file in, four feet apart from one another until the entire 150-foot long rope is stretched across the yard. As the center of the rope reaches the middle of the field, they come to a slow stop. Their captain gives a signal, and the rope is lowered in unison to the ground. They closely inspect the 8-inch trenches that each player uses to keep their grip to the ground, and they use their trowels and shovels to level the dirt.

As I watched them prepare the field, I thought to myself: why do the other fraternities allow AGR to control how the game is set?

The AGRs deliver the rope used for every match. They dig the footholds on the playing field, and they own the official measuring stick to ensure the accurate depth of each hole. It's odd to me that one team is granted this much ownership over the game.

After decades of consistency in character, the AGRs have earned the trust of the university and each competitor in Rope Pull. They have become the unofficial stewards of the game. There are no objections to the ownership that AGRs have on the elements of the game or the preparation of the site. There are no whispers of concern about the integrity of the rope and no suspicion of an ulterior motive. Other teams trust AGRs because they consistently demonstrate excellent sportsmanship.

Their reverence for sportsmanship affects their language, their actions, and their attitudes (i.e. their culture). They don't come to the matches smeared in war paint. They don't play loud hype music or practice showy displays of toughness. They show respect to other student organizations, dutifully honor the rules of the game, and demonstrate reliability both on and off the field. Excellence in sportsmanship is an intentional behavior that has become a guiding principle for the AGR team.

Clear guiding principles are foundational to building trust, and trust is essential for healthy, thriving teams.

Guiding Principles: The Building Blocks of Trust

The Oxford Dictionary defines trust as “the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.” Successful organizations are intentional with establishing trust, and the fastest way to build trust on a team is to have clear guiding principles.

These principles will guide how the team operates, and they are the first elements used to establish the team's identity. If your team's "why" is your goal, then your principles are your team's "how." They define the manner in which your team approaches their work and each other. Your principles are how your values come to life.

Not only that, but the team must hold members accountable to these principles. Team members start learning the team's guiding principles from day one. They should be taught in orientation, and they should be demonstrated by members at every level of the organization - especially by those in top leadership positions. And ideally, your top leaders attend new member orientation and publicly commit to those principles with newcomers.

Each person on the team (from the CEO to the intern) must be committed and accountable to holding those principles in order to create consistency. I'll say it again: consistency is key. Without it, the credibility of your principles crumble, and the trust between members and outsiders begins to tumble.

Defining & Displaying Your Principles

Luke Austenfeld spent the majority of his career leading YMCA camps. From 1983 until his retirement in 2017, Luke led teams of directors, counselors, and staff who operated summer camp and seasonal programming for children in kindergarten through grade 12. He spent the majority of his career at Sherman Lake YMCA Outdoor Center, located in southeast Michigan. Luke led me on a tour of the beautiful 365-acre camp when I visited him there in 2022.

Before a kid jumps on a tire swing or hops in a kayak, they are introduced to the camp's core principles: Honesty, Caring, Respect, and Responsibility. The principles are printed on banners that hang around the camp, and they are recited by counselors during orientation. They're also prominently listed on the camp's website so that prospective campers and their parents know what to expect before registering for programming.

Luke shared with me that these principles were carefully chosen as a part of a research effort produced by the YMCA's national office in partnership with Aspen Institute in Colorado and Micheal Josephson, founder of Character Counts. The group concluded that these four principles (honesty, caring, respect, responsibility) are universally valued by thriving and healthy cultures all across the world. In 1994, Luke's camp was chosen to be one of the first YMCAs in the country to begin integrating these values to its curriculum and programming. After the values proved to create a positive impact in character development and camper overall satisfaction, the values were later rolled out across the country to other YMCAs.

As Luke and his staff grew and improved the camp operation, they used those principles to guide all decisions, not only in youth programming but also in how the property was developed. Each decision was based on operationalizing the core values. For example, "how can we show caring and respect to our youngest campers with how high we install the water drinking fountains or light switches" and "what are ways we can practice respect and responsibility in how we construct and operate our dining hall." They took those principles and operationalized them, creating a social contract that everyone lived by.

Motivated by Trust

When former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski ended the 2021-22 season and retired from college basketball, he claimed 1,202 victories, making him the all-time winningest coach in DI men's basketball history. In his book Leading with Heart, Coach K shared his thoughts on the importance of trust: "Trust is the greatest motivator of any team. Trust for each other, trust in the process, trust in their leader."

Healthy, thriving teams place a high value on establishing and maintaining trust, whether in sports or in the workplace.

Looking Ahead

Building trust takes intentionality and it takes time. Time to clearly define your principles, time to teach them and model them with your team, and time to hold yourself and others accountable by monitoring performance and coaching when needed.

In the next article in this series of 10 Threads of Thriving Teams, I'll explain how public transit operations helped me see how two of the threads - Time and Trust - are closely connected.

Key Takeaways:

• Healthy, thriving teams place a high value on establishing and maintaining trust.

• The fastest way to build trust on a team is to establish guiding principles and put them into practice.

• Your team's principles should be used as a guide for decision making.

• Applying your principles with consistency is key to building and maintaining trust.

• Each person on the team must be committed and accountable to holding those principles in order to create consistency.

• Building trust takes intentionality, and it takes time.

One team consistently wins first place in UT Martin's annual Rope Pull event - the brothers of Alpha Gamma Rho (AGR) fraternity. They absolutely dominate the men's bracket, and it's rare for AGR to lose a match. In fact, they've won the tournament every year since 2014.

Rope Pull is one of several events that's used to determine which organization receives UT Martin's Homecoming Participation Award. The more events that you win, the better your chances are for taking the top award. The organization that wins the homecoming prize gets a big boost of pride and campus popularity, but it also can inspire big donations from your alumni.

Most teams compete in Rope Pull to earn points toward winning the Homecoming Participation Award. But that's not why AGR competes. They have a more compelling objective.

First Things First: What's Your Target?

In this series on the 10 Threads of Thriving Teams, I'm highlighting similar attributes of winning teams that I've encountered in my career. I chose Targets as my first topic because I strongly believe that a teams are healthier and happier when they have clarity on the precise outcomes they are trying to achieve.

A Target is a compelling objective that is easily understood and ambitious, and I argue that Targets are the most defining elements of a team. Targets shape the decisions you make when forming the other Threads of Thriving Teams that I'll cover in this series.

Targets will determine what type of Talent you need to recruit to your team. The effort it takes to hit your Targets will dictate your most valuable resources: Time and Tools (aka resources, which includes money). Plus, you'll need the right Training to reach your Target, and the courage to continue, or Toughness, as you approach challenges along the way.

Most importantly, the Target should pull the whole team together. To attract that team and draw their full commitment, your Target must be appealing to others. It must inspire the team to show up and give their best. Moreover, the leader or coach must have an obsession-level, infectious desire to achieve it.

I spoke with Mike Johnson, an AGR alumnus who graduated from UT Martin in 1987. Mike lives a few miles from the university and has remained involved with the AGR chapter, occasionally attending their Rope Pull practices to offer encouragement. Mike motivates the team with wisdom earned from decades of experience with the event. He tells them, “get your head right, and your heart right, and the rope will follow. And I remind them that in any close contest, the team that wins is most always the one that wants it the most. Don’t let anybody want it more.” He shared with me that winning the tournament is important, but there's more at stake than a trophy.

Their Target is to protect and promote the strength of their brotherhood. They take winning seriously because it's more than a game; it's a means by which they demonstrate their excellence, character, and perseverance. They found an inspiring goal, and each year they fight like hell to achieve their objective.

In the framework for goal setting and progress reports called Objectives and Key Results (OKR), an objective is your target and the key results are the outcomes that show your progress to reaching the target. For the men of AGR, the objective that hangs in the balance is a strong brotherhood. The key result is a Rope Pull win.

While other teams are striving to touch the tape at the center of the rope to win the match, AGR is at war to defend the survival of a culture they’ve worked hard to earn.

Make Targets Clear

My first experience with using OKRs was at CapMetro, the public transit authority for the Austin, Texas metro area. In 2018, I had the privilege of helping shape two new company-wide objectives set by a new President and CEO, Randy Clarke. Randy wanted CapMetro to win the top transit agency of the year, which is a national industry award. The second objective was even bigger: develop a system expansion plan that voters would approve to fund through their property taxes. That plan was estimated at $7.1 billion - the single largest investment in public infrastructure in Austin’s history.

I helped Randy craft these goals into simple statements that our staff could remember and recite. My communications team put the statements on large banners that were hung in each of the company's buildings across the city. We put these goals into each staff newsletter and included them in the talking points that Randy used for staff meetings. We incorporated these into objectives into our executives' annual performance goals, which cascaded through the organization so that everyone was connected and contributing to these targets.

Along the way to these objectives, the agency achieved amazing key results. We grew ridership for 18 months straight, a streak that was disrupted in March 2020 when the Covid-19 virus swept through the city. As devastating as the pandemic was for our city and our nation, public transit was one of the few operations that didn't miss a beat. CapMetro's Net Promoter Scores rose higher than ever because of our customer’s appreciation for our brave and tireless staff who provided essential trips for frontline workers.

The community gave its support to CapMetro in November 2020 to fund the transit expansion plan. This objective took two years and thousands of labor hours to achieve, but the outcome will be a system expansion with new train and bus lines that will serve communities for generations. The company continues its efforts to be named the nation's best transit agency, which remains a compelling and inspiring goal for staff.

Make Targets Compelling

My wife Kendall and I worked at the Memphis Zoo for more than five years. We started our careers at the zoo only a few weeks apart in 2003. I worked on the marketing and communications team, but she had the more exciting job as a zookeeper. Kendall cared for all sorts of animals, from giant pandas and jaguars to polar bears and white-naped cranes.

Zookeepers also have an inspiring objective. Their annual plans may include things like renovating an animal's exhibit or creating a new educational opportunity for guests, but that's not what gets them out of bed before dawn each day. They are motivated by the strong bond they create with their animals, and they are energized by the role they play in educating guests and inspiring them to care about conservation. It's a pursuit that's bigger than themselves. Zookeepers realize they have a generational impact for wildlife management inside and outside the zoo.

A Lack of Clarity Leads to Languish

When I was working for SeaWorld as a Communications Director for their San Antonio location, we regularly distributed staff surveys to understand how park leadership could improve employee satisfaction. In 2012, we heard loud and clear that staff couldn't trace back their work to the strategic objectives of the park. What's more, they weren't clear on what those strategic objectives were.

I had failed to share the bigger picture of the park's goals with my managers and their direct reports, which left them frustrated and disengaged. My teams experienced more turnover that year than any other year since I started managing the team.

The park president, the VP of human resources, and I collaborated on a new communications matrix structure to ensure that messages were flowing through the organization. We outlined how messages would be filtered through in-person meetings, e-mails, and daily operation bulletins. On any given day during the summer, we were issuing communications to more than 2,000 staff members through standup meetings, PA announcements, and TV screens in break areas. It was imperative that we kept our frontline team engaged as they had the most influence over the guest/customer experience.

We created intentional overlap in the structure so that messages were heard more than once and weren't bottlenecked by a single layer of management in the organization. The new model for communication helped to improve our employee engagement scores. I still have a copy of that communications matrix near my desk to remind me of the importance of a multi-layered internal communication plan.

If your frontline doesn’t know the Targets and understand how they help the organization achieve them, you’ll be frustrated with performance and they’ll be out the door.

Looking Ahead

My primary goal in this series is to inspire others to identify and improve the attributes that make teams perform better and win more often. This is my Target, my objective.

So, how do you achieve Targets? Simply put, you start with a plan. If the Target is the center thread of the Teamwork rope, then the 9 topics I'll cover next are the supporting elements that give that rope, or team, the strength to complete its purpose.

Next, I'll focus on building Trust. Pack your compass and your bug spray, and get ready to sing kumbaya. Let’s learn about Trust with a trip to summer camp.

Key Takeaways

• The Target is the most defining element of your team. It will affect the way you direct your resources, who you recruit, and your overall culture.

• Great Targets are compelling. They ignite and sustain passion and commitment from both you and your team.

• The entire team must understand the Target and how they contribute to achieving it.

• The team that wins is most always the one that wants it the most. Don’t let anybody want it more.

• You and your team will struggle with Targets that are not clear or compelling, which can damage team morale and lead to staff turnover.

• The value of high quality internal communications cannot be overstated.

• Post your Targets for staff to see on a regular basis. If you’re REALLY gutsy, post your Targets for your customers to see, too.

There's an unusual competition at my college alma mater that has been going on for decades. It's a homecoming tradition called Rope Pull. I often start explaining Rope Pull to others by comparing it to a game of tug of war. But over the years, Rope Pull has evolved into a rare spectacle of sport in which young students have risked life and limb to claim victory.

Since I suck at playing sports, you might guess that I have no interest in them. On the contrary, I'm fascinated by sports. Specifically, team sports. What intrigues me the most is what you can learn about teamwork from both watching and participating in these competitions.

Rope Pull: A Quick Overview

So, what makes Rope Pull different from a typical tug of war? For starters, how many tug-of-war teams do you know that practice all year round? How many tug-of-war games rival the on-campus popularity a college homecoming football game? Or, could you imagine a team's tugging practice includes pulling against a Ford F-250.

Unless you attended the University of Tennessee at Martin or lived in the far northwest corner of the Volunteer State, it's likely that you've never heard of Rope Pull until now.  From what I can tell, tug-of-war competitions like the one at UT Martin (aka UTM) are rarely this tough and serious. Hope College in Holland, Michigan has a similar game called The Pull that's been a tradition since 1989. Though the number of teams, players, and rules are different at Hope College, the level of fanfare and athletic intensity are the same at UTM. At Northern Illinois University, their event is called Tugs. Their game features a similar team structure to the one held at UTM, though players in Illinois have the luxury of using gloves and sturdy wooden footholds.

Rope Pull at UTM has a women’s bracket and a men’s bracket. Eight players pull from a reclined position on the ground with their feet dug into 8-inch deep foot holds, and two anchors hold tension on the end of the rope. A win is declared when a team’s first position player has touched the rope’s center tape or if a team has pulled the center tape into their territory by the end of the match.

The game is brutal on a player’s legs, back, sides, and feet, but the real pain is felt in your hands. Gloves aren’t allowed, so your grip on the rope is constantly slipping because of sweat and tension. Blisters are almost guaranteed, but typically your hands have already been calloused from the weeks (or months) of practices for the tournament.

Lessons on Teamwork

Great teamwork in a Rope Pull match isn't much different than great teamwork in the office.

Sports analogies, terminology, and stories, when applied appropriately, can provide easy-to-understand illustrations and lessons on what's needed to build healthy organizational culture. For instance, I find that the word “Coach” is a more inspiring and aspirational term than the word “Boss” - both as a noun and a verb. Nobody likes being bossed around, but being coached carries a different connotation. Coaches, by definition, help players and teams win, but a Boss is often thought to value their own goals ahead of others. Wouldn’t you rather work for Coach than a Boss?

The students who tug their hearts out in Rope Pull each fall receive literal hands-on lessons in teamwork, and spectators like me can watch the competition to see how winning teams function. I've been a member of many workplace teams throughout my 20-year career as both player and player-coach. I've worked in for-profit, non-profit and public agency, and I've found that winning teams on the field and in the office have similar traits.

Strive to Thrive

A rope gains its strength from a collection of threads tightly bound together. Similarly, high-performing teams are connected and committed to shared values. These 10 Threads of Thriving Teams, when working in tandem, make it possible for groups at work or at play to achieve greatness.

In this series, I'll take a closer look at Rope Pull to see what we can learn about these 10 Threads of Thriving Teams.

Whether you’re a player, coach, or a player-coach, this series is designed to inspire you to identify the traits of your teams and equip you with ideas to improve the teams you’re in.

I'll weave in stories from my former teams and workplaces, including zoos, theme parks, a public transit agency. My hope is that sharing my wins and losses in teamwork will help illustrate how each player on the team plays a role in team health.

Looking Ahead

In my next article, I’ll explain how Rope Pull’s clear TARGET (Thread #1) unifies the team’s energy. Plus, did you catch that I used to work in a zoo?? I’ll also explore how compelling objectives are as vital to teams in the animal kingdom as they are on the playing field or in the office.