Do you coast to the win?

Photo courtesy of Elvert Barnes (Creative Commons)

My beloved Alabama Crimson Tide took to the college football field this weekend in the season opener against Michigan and came away with a very big win. Roll Tide!

But the thing that I noticed toward the end of the game, when we were up by something like nearly 30 points, was that Coach Nick Saban did not let up. He was just as focused and intense with his guys as at the start of the game.  He could have let his team just run out the time and coast through the last 5-10 minutes of game time, but that’s not what winners do.

So my question is “do you coast?”

In your business projects, do you start out with intensity and then wind down slowly, having lost interest?

Do you celebrate too early, before you’ve actually finished the project or closed the sale? We’ve all laughed at the players who start their victory dance before the end zone and then get tackled from behind before actually making the touchdown. We’ve seen the race car driver who is in the lead at the finish but runs out of fuel in the final stretch, only to watch everyone zoom past him.

I’m guilty of coasting through the end of a couple of projects. Sometimes I have trouble finishing one because I’m pulled in a different direction and it gets put on a back burner. Yet it still needs to be finished – and I still need to aim for a wildly successful outcome. If it was important enough to start, then I need to finish strong.

One thing that I think will help keep me focused was introduced by Bill Hybels at the Global Leadership Summit last month. He recommends practicing 4×4 initiatives (he suggested 6×6 but I’m scaling it down a bit for manageability).

Pick 4 areas of your work or personal life that you will move forward in the next 4 weeks. Write them down on an index card so you can refer to it often. Communicate it to someone else to make yourself accountable. Schedule time each week to spend on each of these areas. As Hybels describes it, use “energy bursts” to make progress on your initiatives.

By the end of the 4 weeks, you should have completed, or at least moved ahead on each of those areas. So then what?

You guessed it, pick 4 more initiatives for the next 4 weeks.

Imagine what you could accomplish by staying intense and focused on your initiatives in this way throughout the year. It is much easier to stay focused and not coast for blocks of 4 weeks at a time. Your productivity will soar!

How do you finish strong? What would your 4×4 initiatives be?

 

Communication can make your team soar!

As a leader, do you inflate or deflate your team?

In his opening presentation at this year’s Global Leadership Summit at Willow Creek Church, Bill Hybels proclaimed that the “most important asset of a leader is energy and the ability to energize other people.”

Envision a hot air balloon, soaring high in the sky. If that is your team, as a leader, you:
·  Share your organization’s vision and core values with your team
·  Communicate initiatives and progress so your team feels informed and valued
·  Empower your team with training
·  Encourage and praise your team when they do things well
·  Correct a team member gently and privately if they make a mistake
·  Teach each team member to become a better leader him or herself

Now think about the pitiful bunch of deflated balloons that are shrunken and hanging down toward the ground. If that is your team, as a leader, you:
·  Lack communication skills to teach your team why what they are doing is important
·  Fail to share important information so your team feels ill-informed, confused and undervalued
·  Expect your team to excel with little or no training
·  Forget to praise your team but call them out (publicly) on any and all mistakes
·  Consider your team just worker bees there to help you be more important

Communication breeds energy. The energy and passion of your team hinges on good communication. Your team needs to understand what the goal is, and how they play a role in accomplishing that goal. Your team must also know that you value them by sharing information with them regularly – even bad news.

I work at a nonprofit, and find that when staff and volunteers understand what we are trying to accomplish, they have a different perspective on their jobs or tasks. Instead of just putting canned food on the shelf, they are making it possible for a family with an empty pantry and growling stomachs to have food for the week. Now they make sure that the shelves are stocked and the grocery carts stay full.

Instead of just putting price tags on clothing, they are making it possible, through those sales in the thrift store, to keep a family’s electricity on or provide gasoline for that doctor visit they would otherwise have to miss.

Better ideas and decisions can be made when the proper communication channels are in place and everyone is on the same page. I’ve had leaders so aloof they hardly knew what I did and failed to share even basic information consistently. That does not energize me and leads to frustration and negativity.

My best leaders were there sharing, explaining, and cheerleading – and that made me work harder, with more loyalty. Even if the news was bad – sales or donations are down or there had to be layoffs – if my leaders were honest and upfront all along, I respected and supported them and kicked it up a notch to compensate.

How do you energize your team?