After He Posted That

I’m going to address the thing everyone in this room is thinking about but nobody has said out loud in here yet.

Something happened. It was public. You all saw it, or saw the reaction to it, or got the texts about it. And right now there are probably two conversations happening — the one happening out there, which we can’t control, and the one that needs to happen in here, which we can.

I’m not going to say what it was or who it involved, because that’s not my place. What I am going to do is talk about what I’ve seen teams do in this situation and what I’ve seen teams do well.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Restore that person gently. That’s the instruction. Not pile on. Not distance yourself from them so the association doesn’t affect you. Not perform public disappointment so people know you have higher standards. Restore them. Gently.

I want to be real with you about something. When a teammate does something publicly embarrassing, the social pressure in a locker room can be brutal. People start figuring out where they stand in relation to what happened. Who’s on the right side of it, who’s going to catch some of the damage by proximity, how to position themselves. And the person who actually needs the most from this room — the teammate who is probably mortified right now, who knows everyone has seen it, who is wondering what this building thinks of them — that person often gets the least.

Paul says restore them. And then he says something I think is really important: but watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted. He’s not talking about temptation to do the same thing necessarily. He’s talking about the temptation to respond badly. To be unkind. To use someone else’s failure as an opportunity to look better by comparison.

Watch yourselves.

I coached high school for twelve years before I got into this work. And the moments I remember most clearly are not the wins. They’re the moments where a team either came together around a player who failed or fractured because of it. The teams that came together — that protected their guy, that told him he was still theirs, that didn’t let the outside noise change what happened inside the locker room — those teams got stronger from it. The ones that fractured never fully recovered.

What this team does in the next 48 hours with the person who needs it most is a character test. Not a test of whether you’re perfect — you’re not, and neither am I. A test of whether you actually believe what the word team means.

Go find your teammate. Not to talk about what happened. Just to let them know they’re still in this room.

Push for the concrete and specific. General answers about being supportive are less useful than naming a specific action the team will take.