Jeff Janssen, Janssen Sports Leadership Center

More Lessons from A.B. Combs Elementary School

4. Take Your Team on a Virtual Field Trip

With challenging budgets, some Combs teachers have started taking virtual field trips with their students. They take advantage of technology and link up to existing websites - or conduct video conferences with experts in whatever field they are studying.

I loved this idea so much that we are working with the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to try to arrange a virtual field trip with the leaders from our Leadership Academies with the cadets. Instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars to travel to learn from each other, we can benefit from their insights through the magic of technology.

Think about some of the coaching connections you have across the country and around the world to see if you can set up a virtual field trip for your team.

5. "This is not a model for the mediocre, it is a model for the outstanding."

High standards permeate A.B. Combs. Principal Summers expects a lot of herself, her teachers, her staff, and her students. Look at any successful coach and you will also see a very high, uncompromising set of standards in place. If you expect the best you very often get it.

St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa practiced this principal in getting the best assistant coaches. In the book, Man On a Mission, Rob Rains writes, "Reinsdorf and Einhorn asked La Russa to rate his coaching staff on a scale from 1 to 10. Until all of the coaches received a 10 rating, they would set out to make changes.

"In the end, it's the players who win games, but our coaches make a big enough difference in enough games to justify their expense," La Russa said. "Actually, all they have to do is make a difference in a few games, and that can help you distance yourself from the rest of the league."

Think about the standards you establish, accept, and enforce within your team. Do they support mediocrity or excellence? Do your players and staff rate at 10s?

6. "Would I want my child in that classroom?"

This is the practical question and standard that Principal Summers uses to evaluate her teachers. If the answer is not a definitive yes - she works to train the teacher, reassign the teacher to a place he or she can excel, or remove the teacher. As she says, "There is too much at stake to tolerate bad teachers."

Similarly, when taking on assistant coaches think about whether you would want your own children to be coached by perspective staff members. Or when putting together a team, would you want your own children to have certain athletes as teammates? Using this criteria personalizes the selection and evaluation process a great deal.

Just as we can learn from top leaders in the sports field, we can also learn much from exemplary leaders in education like Principal Summers at A.B. Combs Elementary School. To learn more, pick up a copy of The Leader in Me by Stephen Covey.