Whether you’re working with us to implement new systems and processes in your academy, or you're working on changes on your own, the greatest barrier to making meaningful change in your academy is alignment.

How do you get everyone walking on the same path?

Whether it’s members, or staff and coaches, people are generally resistant to change.

The way things have been done are what folks are comfortable with.

Even though you realize that you need to improve your academy’s systems and processes to be successful, some people are going to push back.

This has happened at Easton every step of our journey.

When we implemented the 2-stripe system in Boulder, which made it so that new students couldn’t live train until reaching 2 stripes on their white belt, tenured staff and students threatened to riot.

Slowly, as everyone sees the change implemented and actually working, they start to come around. Things that were riot-worthy last year become appreciated as the norm.

Still, when you start to change things, even if you know they’re for the better, you’re going to face push back.

More than anyone else in the academy, you need your team to be aligned with the shift you're trying to make.

Without the support of the people responsible for making the academy operate each day, you’re going to run into obstacle after obstacle. Eventually even initiatives that would be great for your school end up failing.

How do you get your team on the same page?

Start with trust

If there’s no trust, it’s hard to get all boats rowing in the same direction.

If your staff is constantly trying to undermine you, or badmouthing initiatives to other staff or students, no one is going to buy in.

This can be one of the hardest hurdles to get over. We’ve seen how lack of trust can destroy the foundations of everything you’re trying to build.

In the early days of Easton as Amal started bringing more people into the fold, trust was at an all time low.

It was so bad that meetings would quickly devolve into shouting matches and before long everyone ended up in the parking lot ready to fight.

For us to truly start making the shift we had to bring in Larry Dressler, a business consultant who helped us nail down our main issues and establish a common language to approach those issues.

That language was our core values. As we worked as a team to home in and sanctify our core values, we knew that Trust had to be on the list.

Our value of trust states that we freely give and receive trust, assuming the best intentions in all of our interactions.

We realized that If trust doesn’t exist, no progress can be made. And as soon as we codified our core values trust became the cornerstone of all of our internal interactions.

If you’re working with a team like we had in the beginning where trust is almost non-existent, you have two options: part ways with the staff members who can’t or won’t work from a place of trust, or start to rebuild trust.

For a lot of us, we can’t just fire all of our staff and start again.

At Easton we had GMs running the schools and our owners, Amal and Eliot, working to make decisions.

Obviously Amal and Eliot couldn’t get fired, but they also weren’t looking to fire our academy GMs and start running the schools themselves (again).

You could be in the same boat if you have a business partner or work for a school owner. If parting ways isn’t an option, then re-establishing and building trust is your only path forward.

How do you start to build trust? For us, thanks to Larry’s direction, everything started in the meetings.

Building Trust Through Meetings

Meetings would more often than not devolve into screaming, cursing, and near fights in the early days at Easton. Before a meeting would start everyone was on pins and needles, tense, and anxious for what was to come.

Getting our values in place alleviated a lot of the tension, but to get to our core values we had to have more meetings.

So we started making agreements before the meetings. To keep the agreements fresh and present, we’d write them on a whiteboard to start the meetings.

The agreements were basic and everyone had to follow them: we assume good intent, we try to see others points of view, we must find something good to say about an idea before we offer disagreement, and we lead with empathy.

Meetings quickly transformed and productivity from those meetings skyrocketed due to the agreements.

We also started using meeting software to manage tasks and issues. When an action item came from a meeting we would create a “to-do” and assign it to someone with a due date.

When the item was due we’d see that in a future meeting.

If it was completed, we marked it “done”, and if not, we asked for an explanation for the delay.

Because people knew what they needed to do, when it needed to be done, and that they would be held accountable, meetings became transformational for Easton.

The final thing we did to help build trust in meetings was to add more people to the meetings.

At first, meetings were with Amal, Eliot, Mike (Easton’s current CEO, but GM of the Boulder school at the time), and Ian (Easton’s current VP and GM of Denver at the time).

The problem with these small meetings besides the lack of trust was that Amal and Eliot held all the power, but they weren’t responsible for actually implementing anything within the academies.

Mike and Ian’s perspective was shaped by the daily reality of operating the academies.

The result: most decisions would be split down the middle, with the owners on one side and the GMs on the other.

So we added another person to the meeting. At the time, Boulder’s Academy Operations Director was someone that everyone in the meeting trusted already.

Bringing her into the meetings helped to create a neutral bystander with an informed perspective.

She didn’t hold any of the ill-will towards people in the meeting that was often present with the original 4.

This additional team member helped to break ties and also give perspective that the owners and GMs might miss.

If you’re not holding meetings now, start doing so. Not only will meetings help to build trust, but they will also help shape the changes you’re trying to implement.

If you’re already doing meetings, but they’re an unproductive mess like when they were at Easton, implement agreements. Every meeting starts with a review of the agreements and everyone agreeing to follow them.

Eventually, the agreements become internalized and are no longer necessary to state at the beginning of each meeting.

After agreements, it can help to bring on people who are deeply involved in your school but may offer a different and neutral perspective. Too many voices in the room can be a bad thing, but so can not enough.

Meetings are a great way to build trust if they’re done correctly.

Once that trust is built, everyone will start rowing in the same direction and you can actually begin to make the changes you need to get your academy to where it needs to be.