Case study: MyDrives on the (ice hockey) field

On the last day of August 2016 the MyDrives team is in Tilburg to run an interactive MyDrives workshop for the Destil Trappers. For anyone who does not yet know this ice hockey club: because they are too good for the Dutch league, the Destil Trappers have played in the German Oberliga Nord since the 2015-2016 season. They immediately became champions. How can they add even more colour to their success? That does not simply happen by itself, because the German competition is of course not standing still either.

Let's stick together

The aim of the MyDrives workshop in Tilburg: how can the Destil Trappers gain even more understanding of one another? How do you create an even better atmosphere? And how can that in turn lead to even better performances in the future? Theo van Gerwen, technical director of the Dutch Ice Hockey Association, is also present during the workshop. He embraced MyDrives straight away. His explanation: you do not become champions with the best players alone. Just look at the football club Leicester City. That team became champions of the Premier League last season, while a club such as Manchester City genuinely has more individual quality at its disposal. Back to the Destil Trappers, and Theo is certain: the Trappers became champions above all on the basis of togetherness, their will to win together. Translated into the world of ice hockey: let's stick together. In his view the added value of MyDrives in reaching that goal is unmistakably large. Because MyDrives creates extra trust in your team-mates as people and extra trust in their knowledge and ability. How important is that? A lack of trust or, worse still, its complete absence is an outright killer for top performance.

MyDrives

Using an iceberg model, MyDrives analyses the hidden human drivers below the water's surface. In this case the drivers of the ice hockey players, but also of the coach, the masseur and the equipment manager. Because they are all inextricably part of the team. These drivers come together in the question: what do you want? Above the water's surface, the fixed habits of the individual Destil Trappers become visible. The central question here is: what do you do? To arrive at a balanced analysis, the Destil Trappers completed the MyDrives questionnaire online in the weeks before the workshop. The answers have since been processed, so that all participants receive a tailored report after the workshop. It shows in a graph which colour or colours are decisive for each person's personality, based on the seven colours MyDrives uses. Is red the deciding colour, for instance? Then you are a decisive individual who is not easily stopped by anyone or anything. Does green predominate? Then you are an empathetic and harmonious person, a real people person. Blue, in turn, stands for structure, fixed rules and discipline. The report also contains a personal energy balance (which colours give you energy and which take energy away from you?). An extensive substantive explanation of the seven colours has also been added, as well as an overview showing how differently coloured people think about you, and the other way round.

Improvements in the technical side of the game

The MyDrives analysis of the Destil Trappers shows, among other things, that as a team, alongside performance-oriented orange, they have relatively a lot of purple in their profile. Here the colour purple stands for club feeling, for mutual connection, sense of honour and loyalty. MyDrives not only ensures that this purple is preserved, but that it can become even more purple. How does that work? Theo van Gerwen explains that the players will first of all compare their personal colour profiles so that they learn even more about each other's personalities. In addition he will look, in consultation with Bo Subr, the coach of the Destil Trappers, at how the outcomes of the MyDrives analysis can be implemented at the technical level of the game. An example: the right combination of the different colour profiles of a line of players can mean that a power-play situation is played out even better. Marc Stijfs and Jos Crijns, the founders of MyDrives, MyHabits and MyMatch, point out that MyHabits can be a follow-up step to MyDrives. Through a series of practical assignments, MyHabits ensures that fixed thinking patterns and actions are broken. MyMatch in turn can be of added value when the Destil Trappers go looking for a new player. To that end MyMatch provides twenty specific behavioural types for creating the perfect match. Or, put differently: MyMatch shows that a happy match has nothing to do with luck.

Wanting is more important than being able

Following on from the comparison between Leicester City and Manchester City, Marc Stijfs points to the importance of drivers. If you want to achieve above-average results, they matter even more than your competencies. Wanting is therefore more important than being able, because a strong will to achieve something can partly compensate for a weaker competency. Conversely, a strong competency can never compensate for a lack of motivation. Take the example of the Canadian Wayne Gretzky, the best ice hockey player ever. Alongside his extraordinary talent, his will to achieve something was enormous. You can see it in a film his father made in November 1963. Wayne is two years old and slides and tumbles in all directions on his first skates on the frozen Nith River in Brantford, Ontario. At that point he uses his stick mainly to avoid falling. Yet fall he does. Time after time. But after a thousand bruises he stops falling, and in the years that follow Wayne Gretzky grows into the absolute star of the National Hockey League. By then he uses his stick as a conductor's baton and a lethal goal-scoring weapon.