Basketball Final Four - The NBA Playoffs - Football's Superbowl - BCS games - Golf and so much more seems to fill our lives these days. ESPN and a long list of competition network are all kicking and screaming their way into our living rooms and iPads just to keep us eating potato chips and ice cream and lethargic. Seriously, don't you love watching those perfect athletes perform and do things you wish you were capable of doing? Not just the competition but the ability and command these athletes seem to have over their arena.
What if we were to follow some of their routines to get ready for a leadership moment. So what are five things we can do to achieve excellence in our next opportunity?
1) Construct an Outcome
If you are at COTHA around the end of business some day, just sit in the south parking lot facing away from the building for a few minutes. You will see a group of aspiring athletes running and caring kettle bells and an a sundry of other activities and they strive to gain control of they bodies. Paul argues this example in 1 Cor. 9:27.
But [like a boxer] I buffet my body [handle it roughly, discipline it by hardships] and subdue it, for fear that after proclaiming to others the Gospel and things pertaining to it, I myself should become unfit [not stand the test, be unapproved and rejected as a counterfeit]. (Amplified)
If we are to be leaders or even a pre-school Sunday Morning teacher we must Construct and Outcome long before we enter the building. Year ago I coached a High School Lacrosse Team and we adopted a team philosophy "One More." what the meant for Defense was stop the other team just this once and for offense all we need is one more score to win. The team went deep in to the playoffs agains better athletes and much better coached teams but we all believed in our strategy and we won despite ourselves. So what if you were to always define the win - prior to even talking to your team.
2) Communicate to our team the Win
Like my Lacrosse team the Constructed Outcome would have never been successful if the Coaching staff had never Communicated and defined exactly what a win looked like to the players. We designed a system of creating this DNA or culture into the team by fist getting buy-in from the team Captains and then that championed the philosophy to the players in small groups amongst the positions and ultimately I talked about the One More philosophy in team meetings and in pre game pep-talks. This is exactly how we can design and build culture into our areas of Leadership influence.
Talk with the influencers in your team let them take ownership of the ideas and then they will spread the ideals and culture to others much more effectively that you can alone. A team shift that feels organic and grassroots can be contagious and spread quickly.
2) Create an easy to follow Checklist
Checklists are an amazing tool. In the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Dan and Chip Heath researched the effectiveness of checklist. They discovered that people avoid and push back against checklist for many reasons including the thought that "if it is really that simply why do you need me to do it?" They continued to discover in their research that checklist actually reduce critical sometimes life saving errors. For example: when I teach I make all kinds of things: Slides - Notes - mark up my bible and last but most importantly I build a lesson checklist. This is usually on the stage with me and if I were to loose everything else the checklists are simple and easy enough to follow that I would be able to complete the teaching without any apparent failings.
The checklist allows me to relax and not worry about the things that distract me and also brings me back onto track when I get off the path of a lesson. In the past few years I have been fortunate to become a Referee in Football. My crew has a two page checklist for every game that is incredibly detailed and demanding. If we work together and efficiently we can do our jobs and get a field and two teams ready to play a game in about two hours. If we are sloppy and disregard the checklist there is almost always an event that would have been prevented had we just stuck to the checklist.
Simply Put Checklist allow us to be the best we can be by scripting ourselves and our team toward success.
4) Conduct ourselves Accordingly
If you are going to lead, you need to "be the change." By this I mean you have to model the things you are proposing to your leaders and they will be able to then model these things as well. Conducting yourself as the leader you aspire to be build confidence and trust in those around you. Behavior is by its very nature contagious. Research has shown that obesity (see Switch by Heath) as well as other behavioral issues are contagious. So what if we chose to lead by physically doing the things we are leading other to do. As a High School Wrestler, I was always being challenged to compete into he lowest weight class possible. This is a difficult task for the most motivated individual but much more difficult to combat the growing nature of a teenagers body. We would all do some silly things to ourselves to get the weight off and most of us accomplished the task. One season my coach mandated that we as a team would all move down one weight class…… And then he did something amazing. The coach joined us in the placed a commitment to winning by dropping his weight accordingly. It is very motivating to finish practice and see you coach in a rubber sweat suit running in front of the heat vents in the gym and sweating profusely. At first it was just him… then the influencers and captains joined him and after a week or two we were all sweating another hour or so after practice to get the weight down.
If you as a leader are willing to do and practice what you say others will flock to follow your leadership.
5) Carry out the Plan
Execution is essential. On performance night, a good conductor of a symphony has the best seat in the house. When they have planned accordingly they should be able to enjoy the music with minimal if any real direction. We need to be the kind of leaders that are have a plan and execute it to the success of our community and those we influence.
Notice the coaches in the NFL that always have that laminated card that looks like a spreadsheet. That is the plan for that day. Don't you think that those coaches have planned and planned and planned every week just for that one moment. The thousands of collective player and staff research, planning and practice are distilled to one laminated page and when the game is over they start making a new one for next week. Plans are rarely replaceable but a great deal of learning can be passed on from one plan to the next.
So a challenge for all of us when we have our next leadership opportunity: Construct the Outcome - Communicate the Win - Create a Checklist - Conduct ourselves Accordingly and Carry out out the Plan. Five little things that just might make our next leadership moment a game changer.
©2013 KBE Creative
