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All of the captains with their angels after the race! What a blast![/caption]
My Team Triumph - Canada
You probably haven't heard of it, but I can assure you that will change. Today I was fortunate enough to participate in the first My Team Triumph race in Canada. My Team Triumph is a program that allows people of all ages with disabilities to participate in endurance events. With a great volunteer staff, a few angels, and all of the amazing captains, this was made possible.
My Team Triumph takes their inspiration from Team Hoyt, whom you've probably heard of. Now I can't do the Hoyt story any justice, so I suggest you head over to their site to get the full details. Team Hoyt is a father-son team that has competed in over a thousand races; however, their team is slightly different than your average racer in these events. Dick Hoyt, the father, pushes his quadriplegic son, Rick, in a wheelchair during these events. It started in 1977 when Rick told his father that we wanted to be able to participate in a benefit race for a paralyzed rugby player. Dick agreed to it, and they finished their 5 mile race. That night, Rick told his father that it felt like all of his disabilities went away when they were running together. Honestly, you need to read the story.
So today at the My Team Triumph race, I was grouped up with Captain Vernon of "Vernon's Maple Leafs" and two angels Nadine and Blair. It was exciting to get to meet the team, and Vernon was incredibly enthusiastic about the whole thing. For anyone who knows me personally, I'm not a runner at all. People actually joke around with me about any time I have to run (because we all know those calories could be put towards squatting, obviously). When we were sharing our running experiences with each other, I had to let the team know that I had never actually ran a 5 km race. That didn't discourage Vernon though. He told me he was going to make me run, and he wasn't lying. In the end, we were the second chair team to cross the finish line, which is absolutely amazing in terms of where my expectations were.
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Steph Hicks-Uzun and I bright and early before the run! I'm all smiles here because my lungs and legs haven't yet endured the 5 km![/caption]
Once it was all said and done, my lungs and legs were on fire, but it was an incredible experience. Wes Harding has done an amazing job in putting My Team Triumph Canada together, and everyone at the race was incredibly supportive. Please check out their site to read about their inspirational stories. Way to go, team!
Articles
It's a pretty short list this week, but it doesn't mean there's a lack of quality!
- I like, I wish, I wonder: A teammate of mine, Christine, brought this to my attention on LinkedIn. In this post, Akshay Kothari talks about a different approach to what our typical sprint retrospectives look like. For some background, in our development life cycle we work in "sprints". Sprints are typically one or two week units of time where we claim we can get X units of work done. These units of work are often "stories" or "tickets" that we're essentially taking full responsibility for getting done by the end of the iteration. At the end of the sprint, we do a retrospective where we discuss what went good, what went bad, and how we can improve them. More often than not, there's less than ideal amounts of input and it seems pretty forced. This article suggests taking a slightly different approach where people can make a statement that starts with "I wish", "I like", or "I wonder". I'm hoping to try this out at our next retrospective and see if it's the little switch-up that we need.
- The 17 Qualities And Views Of Great Leaders: Andreas von der Heydt put together this awesome list of 17 qualities that great leaders possess. Among them is the idea of failure (and doing it early and often), which you've probably seen my write plenty about now. There's nothing wrong with failure as long as you're learning and moving forward. Over communicating and keeping a positive attitude are also right up there on my top picks from that list.
- How To Uncover Your Company's True Culture: When I shared this on LinkedIn, I had a lot of positive attention from it. I'll assume that means that it hit home with a lot of people! I this post, Dharmesh Shah, the founder of HubSpot, discusses what company culture really is. Some key take away points are that it's really easy to say "this is what we think our ideal culture is, so this will be our culture", but that means close to nothing. Your real culture is not what you say you want it to be, it's what your company lives and breathes every day. You can say you want your culture to be anything, but it means nothing unless you're all living it out at work. There are some great points in the article with specific cases to what you might say your culture values. For example, if you value customer service highest of all things, then when you have an opportunity to improve ease of use for your customer(s), what's your first reaction? "That's going to be a lot of work?" or "Let's get it done for the customer". Neither is wrong, but those answers are the ones that define your culture, NOT what you think you want the answer to be.
- Forget a Mentor, Build a Team: In this article by Jim Whitehurst, he talks about an alternative to the mentor approach. It's becoming increasingly more common for professionals to try and set themselves up with a mentor who has been there, done that, and has a lot of insight to offer. This is great, and there's nothing really wrong with it. However, Jim proposes an alternative where instead of setting yourself up with a mentor, why not surround yourself with team members who all bring something to the table? It's a great idea, really. I'm sure we all have close friends, old classmates, or old colleagues who would be great to bounce ideas off of, share our hard times with, and share our victories with. They'll keep you grounded and hopefully bring some of their own personal insights to the table.
- 5 Things Super Successful People Do Before 8 AM: I thought this article by Jennifer Cohen was great. Some things I definitely want to start doing are mapping out my day and visualizing what's ahead. I'm already pretty good for eating well, and I favour exercising at night once my body and nervous system has had time to wake up, so those ones aren't at the top of my personal list. Another great tip from Jennifer: Get that one big ugly thing off your list as soon as possible in your week. Awesome.
- Scrappiness = Happiness: This article really hit home with me. The company where I work, Magnet Forensics, is still considered a startup but we're making the transition into small business. The rate at which we're developing and growing all aspects of the business makes it hard to remain in a complete "startup mode". In his article, Tim Cadogan talks about a meetup between "originals" of the company where he worked. The key take away points are that the initial years of your company where you're facing hard times and dealing with less than ideal circumstances are going to be the times you remember later on. This is where the memories are made. Being able to share these stories with each other (and new people you bring onto the team, for that matter) is what lets your company culture continue on.
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