On Motivation: Alex Cora's Wall of Wins

This week, I was invited to give a talk at the Baseball Winter Meetings in Las Vegas, where several of our Libris clients throughout Major League Baseball gathered for networking, professional development and to exchange ideas on becoming better (and faster) visual storytellers. This was an exceptional treat for me, merging a few of my greatest passions — photography and baseball — into one singular experience.

I spent the day immersed in discussions with true innovators in how the story of baseball is told. Amidst all the sharing, I was truly inspired by a presentation from Billie Weiss, the team photographer of the Boston Red Sox. Billie and his colleagues at the Red Sox organization are still riding high from their historic season (best record in franchise history) and World Series win.

Their impressive season provided *many* creative and groundbreaking ways to share powerful visuals to engage their fans along the way. But, part of Billie’s presentation hit me in unexpected ways, because I saw a new way for leaders to embrace visual storytelling inside their organizations — through a video about Red Sox manager Alex Cora's "Wall of Wins".

Upon starting his new gig as manager, Cora entered his new office inside Fenway Park and removed the old portraits of prior Red Sox managers to make way for the Wall of Wins — where he would ask Billie to post a single printed photo representing the best play (or player) from every Red Sox win, one at a time, throughout the season. Of course, this collection of photos grew and grew and grew from April through October. By season’s end, the result was 108 individual celebrations of achievement and collectively, a massive visual representation of the team’s successful season -- plus space for 11 more wins that represented the path to World Series victory. 

The Wall of Wins concept is a brilliant vehicle for delivering recognition and providing motivation to a team for a few reasons:

• It’s highly visible to the team. It’s easy to imagine any player on the roster aspiring to make it to the wall in the manager’s office.
• It reinforces the way individual excellence contributes to team success. This is really important across a large team of various role players -- people need to understand how their efforts fit into the big vision.
• It measures progress. For a long haul effort (ie. 162 games) it celebrates the ground that’s been covered via each individual win, providing visual evidence of the momentum that’s been created over time, while also showing there’s more left to achieve.
• It’s a different type of “reward” that makes individual contributors feel respected and valued. I’m sure it’s motivating across the Red Sox organization to see the pride that Alex Cora takes in celebrating his team members.

At PhotoShelter’s monthly all staff meeting, we’ve done “shoutouts” for a long time — the team submits one liners which are read aloud at the meeting, mostly kudos for recent achievements or expressions of gratitude for help. Cora’s Wall of Wins prompts me to want to create a more permanent, visual way to applaud my team’s milestones and achievements throughout the year.

What’s your version of the Wall of Wins? How do you celebrate team achievements, and how well does it work?