Building a High Performance Team

This week, I had the honor to participate in a charity event held in Phoenix. An amazing man, named Randy Demeno, has built a program that pairs his love for hockey and his passion for helping children, creating Hockey Helping Kids. In the ten years since its founding, it's raised over $750,000 mostly for children's charities. The concept is simple. He works with NHL arenas, getting afternoon or late-evening ice time, where the team he's formed, of which I'm an honorary member, faces off against a local team, many times made up of ex-NHL skaters, Olympians, celebrities and local fans.

The event provides for a "JV" game that lets kids and "never-ever" adults a chance to skate on the big ice. The event hosts a dinner afterwards, during which raffle tickets are sold and items are auctioned for the charity. Once dinner is finished, we all watch the pros play. As I said, it's simple and effective.

During this week's event, we had a chance to skate against the Arizona Coyotes Alumni group, headed by Wayne McBean, and featuring many Stanley Cup winning players including Greg Adams, Tim Watters and Chris Joseph. I sat down with Chris Joseph after the game and the two of us spoke. He's an incredible guy. Not only did he spend 19 seasons in the NHL, playing for Edmonton, where they won three Cups, Tampa, Long Island and others, but he's now a firefighter and youth hockey coach in Edmonton.

We spoke of many things, but when the subject of teams came up, he had this to say.

Teams make everyone better. They look out for each other. When someone on a highly-functional team is down, his mates lift him up. When someone gets too high, too full of himself, his team brings him back to earth.

If we've ever been on that kind of team and lost it, you'll always be searching for it again. If you're lucky enough to be part of that kind of team, do everything you can to hold onto it. Work hard to continue to be a part of your high-performance team and contribute to its success.