My wife works for UCLA, and we go to a lot of their sporting events.
Although the school is most famous for its basketball and football programs, my favorite sport to attend is women’s gymnastics.
If you have only watched gymnastics during the Olympics, you would be surprised by how different the sport is at the college level. In one way it is very similar: the athletes fly through the air in seemingly impossible ways.
But in many other ways it is very different. Unlike the staid Olympic version, college gymnastics is raucous, both on the mat and in the stands. Music is blaring constantly, not just during the floor exercises. The audience cheers and screams throughout. The stands contain many, many little girls with vivid gymnastic dreams and great passion for their favorite competitors.
A Division I college team averages 18 athletes versus just five in the Olympics, and even though there is only one person on a given apparatus at a time, the entire team and coaching staff are loudly and demonstrably behind her. On the uneven parallel bars, they shout encouragement and cheer with every release move or frozen upside down moment on the bar. Every dismount is met with high fives and groups hugs, whether the routine was flawless or marred by a fall.
During the floor exercises, the team lines up along the mat to sway to the music and echo the dance moves of the student athlete on the floor. Even the student spectators, many of whom are regulars, join in.
It is most definitely a competition, but it is also an exercise in love of the sport, comradery and joy.
In addition to all that, it is a lesson in teamwork that all of us in compliance, in fact all of us in business, could and should learn from.
Just because a colleague is about to go into a meeting alone, she should never feel alone. She needs to walk in that door know that her colleagues are behind her.
Everyone on the team should know what the other’s moves are and be there to support them. We need to anticipate what each other will say, and be prepared to back it up.
And when a colleague comes out of a meeting, no matter what the result, he should still feel that the team is glad he’s there.
Compliance is often described as a lonely job, but so too is standing on a beam or flying between the uneven parallel bars. That doesn’t mean we have to feel alone.