What can a professional football team teach you about business leadership?
"Taking Your Team to the Top: How to Build and Manage Great Teams Like the Pros" by Ted Sundquist, former general manager of the Denver Broncos, looks at the very core of the team unit, how to maximise its potential, and how to meet goals while overcoming the obstacles and challenges teams often face.
In his book, Sundquist examines three key ingredients of winning team dynamics:
1. The Talent. This means spotting the talent, looking at previous accomplishments, personality and moral traits, skill sets and leadership abilities.
2. The Placement. Where is your talent going to perform most optimally? A strong leader can evaluate the best possible spot to get the most from your talent.
3. The Execution. The talent has been secured, the mission is clear; now it's time to put the game plan into action. How to delegate, motivate, influence and create a positive environment for the team.
One question lingers: How do you, as a leader, push forward, reach higher, and handle all of the success your business has seen?
Standing on top is just as hard as getting there to begin with. The good news is that there are tried and true ways to maintain excellence and infuse you team with an understanding of how to handle success at the highest levels.
Performance coaching, is dialogue that recognises excellence and achieves business goals by specifying areas for improvement and learning. Managers who coach others do so to help them develop new skills, initiate a desired competency or goal, stretch performance to the next level or redirect behaviour to solve existing problems. Performance coaching must occur regularly and consistently, not just once or twice per year, (generally during a performance review).
People who receive performance coaching usually look forward to it, knowing that it has the power to make them even better at what they do, thus opening up opportunities. Unlike other processes, performance coaching focuses explicitly on business results. Performance coaches spend most of their time discussing high-impact behaviours and linking them to results. They aim not just at addressing performance problems per se but more often at achieving high performance and reaching a person's full potential.
Extensive research has found that employee life satisfaction is a direct contributor to productivity and performance; thus, training that conclusively enhances this quality could have far-reaching implications. Most importantly, this research indicates that training on 'positive psychology' will create a clear and long lasting ROI - an indication that it may be increasingly important for business to start training their employees on the skills of positive psychology.
Aristotle said, "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a habit."
Source: Ted Sundquist: "Taking Your Team to the Top: How to Build and Manage Great Teams like the Pros"
Business Tips
Taking Your Team to the Top
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- Category: Team Development
