Lead Any Team to Win

Introduction

WHAT MAKES TEAMS GREAT

You’ve seen the speech.

Maybe it’s the World Series MVP, covered in champagne, talking about the dramatic victory his team just earned. Or it could be a CEO at an annual shareholders’ meeting, talking about how proud she is that the organization crushed its financial goals.

“It couldn’t have happened without the great team I have around me,” the players and the CEOs usually say.

Those words come so often because they’re anchored in the truth. Teams are a fundamental part of sports and business. Teams can only survive and thrive if they have the right composition, the right leadership, and the right metrics by which they’re measured. And the teams that become dynasties? They operate at an even higher level.

The million-dollar question (or billion, depending on your team) is the same whether you’re a part of a 10,000-employee Fortune 500 company or a small mom-and-pop outfit.

How?

How do you bring individuals with different talents and motivations together to form a team that consistently outperforms the competition? How do you avoid all of the standard pitfalls teams face? How do you align goals, inspire productivity, and measure performance?

How do you lead a team, and not just manage it?

How do you make yourself an essential part of your new team as quickly as possible?

In Organize Your Team Today, we’re going to show you.

WHY US?

We’ve been fortunate to work with some of the highest-performing organizations in the worlds of sports and business over the past thirty years. Clients ask us to help them create cultures where every contributor can get the most out of his or her skills and talents. Part of that job involves finding the right players—and part of it comes from helping teams understand how to work with the players they have.

The two of us have a combined total of almost fifty years of experience in developing and teaching the information we bring to you in this book. Jason Selk is one of the premier performance coaches in the United States, with hundreds of professional athletes and Fortune 500 executives as his clients. As the director of mental training for Major League Baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, Jason helped the team win two World Series championships, in 2006 and 2011.

Coauthor Tom Bartow left a successful career as a college basketball coach to join Edward Jones. He became a general partner in six years and then reached similar stature at the Capital Group, parent company of American Funds. He is the only person in the financial services industry to achieve this distinction. After starting his own coaching business in 2009, he has become one of the most creative and sought-after business coaches in the nation.

Together we have merged psychology with business acumen to create a simple, usable methodology for teams and individuals. Our first book, Organize Tomorrow Today, was recognized by 800-CEO-READ as one of the top fifteen business books for 2016.

WHY TEAMS?

If you’re familiar with Organize Tomorrow Today, you know that the tools to take control of your life and your performance are within your grasp. If you make a series of basic, step-by-step commitments to improve incrementally, over time you can get much more out of yourself than you ever thought possible.

Of course, teams bring a different dynamic into play. You can populate a team with a collection of A-players who all have their own ideas about what “high performance,” “communication,” and “setting goals” mean. But if those achievers don’t come together in an effective way—both through sure-handed leadership and through their own willingness to learn how to adapt and respond to change—the team fails.

Instead of gaining exponential growth by combining the talents of different players, you get something less than the sum of the assembled parts.

When that happens in sports, you often hear whispers about “bad chemistry,” or how the manager or coach “lost the locker room.” In business, you’ll hear about it when the board announces they’re replacing the CEO and undertaking a reorganization. All that time, effort, and expertise that went into putting talented people in position to win under the old strategy?

Tossed.

Yet you don’t have to look very far to find sports and business teams that create those dynasties. They consistently produce more than the sum of their parts. Team members come and go, but the framework and culture of the team stay in place, and they continue to produce championship results.

Coach John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins won ten national championships in a twelve-year stretch with a variety of different players. Bill Belichick has won five Super Bowls in seventeen years with the New England Patriots—even though the NFL salary cap is designed to make it hard to keep teams together for more than a few years, and despite losing an almost constant stream of assistants and front-office executives to other teams. In business, Apple lost its founder and inspirational leader, Steve Jobs, to an extended leave for cancer treatment in 2009 and reported its best-ever quarter. When Jobs passed away in 2011, the company was prepared to move forward with Tim Cook, and has since reinforced its position as the strongest international brand in the world. In 2016, it generated almost $250 billion in revenue.

A basketball team from fifty years ago might not seem like it has a lot in common with a global tech giant, but the philosophies and strategies for team building and optimization they use are strikingly similar.

Don’t just take our word for it.

Andy Hill played for three of Coach Wooden’s national championship teams in the early 1970s, a time when some of the greatest players in basketball history, such as Bill Walton and Jamaal Wilkes, were also Bruins; he was a freshman when the legendary Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a senior. After graduating from UCLA, Andy entered the television business, eventually becoming the head of CBS Productions—the team that introduced shows like Touched by an Angel; Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; and Walker, Texas Ranger to the viewing public. Later, he would reconnect with Coach Wooden to write the best seller Be Quick—But Don’t Hurry: Finding Success in the Teachings of a Lifetime. Andy was a part of a bona fide dynasty at UCLA, then created his own at CBS. His insights have helped Jason and Tom develop the team-based programming they use when they work with corporate clients. They have all been friends for years.

The words Andy uses to describe his time with Coach Wooden will sound very familiar as you work your way through the nine concepts we introduce in Organize Your Team Today:

The essence of Andy Hill’s takeaway from his decades of experience both with Coach Wooden and using the Coach’s principles in his own business? Getting better is hard, and it takes work. And sometimes that work doesn’t feel good. But if you focus on what you can control, select the right talent for the right role, keep it simple, and prepare fully and thoughtfully, you can thrive.

Straightforward concepts, but they have profound consequences in the business world.

Focusing on what you can control and keeping things simple means respecting and embracing channel capacity—the hard-wired limit we all have in regard to how we can apply our attention. Dynasties in sports and business respect this dynamic more than any other single factor. They put great effort into not overloading their teams with blizzards of tasks and responsibilities.

Selecting the right talent for the role busts the “star player” fallacies that have become so imbedded in corporate culture. Peak performers are great to have, but the best teams have the ideal mix of stars, support players, and leaders. Every job gets done—not just the glamorous ones. Teams respond to leaders who set clear goals and establish the steps to achieve those goals. This kind of leadership creates a level of respect between the leader and the team—and among the team members—that is a catalyst for peak achievement.

In Organize Your Team Today, we’ll take you into the trenches with some of the most successful leaders. We’ll go beyond offering a laundry list of “best practices,” showing you concrete and proven strategies for joining and building a team that you can put in place on day one—with no specialized training or lengthy run-up period. You’ll be able to learn from the successes (and missteps) of those who have come before—and avoid the most common team traps—whether you’re a relative newcomer who is joining a team or a leader looking to drive peak performance.

When Andy was installed at the helm of CBS Productions, he spent his first year getting his management team in place. In hindsight, he says, he could have moved faster, but didn’t because some of the changes he had to make involved removing contributors he personally liked but weren’t a good fit for the reconfigured team. A limited budget stopped him from hiring the most prominent writers. He could have used this as an excuse, and he and his team could have become victims of circumstance. Instead, Andy focused on developing the writers he had, and in doing so, he led them to higher levels of performance.

Andy built a dynasty at CBS because he figured out the metric that mattered the most—and trained his team to be relentless in attacking that metric every day. In the years before he took the role, Andy had noticed that all the television studios measured their success by the number of shows they picked up for the fall schedule. In a dramatic departure, he decided he would measure his team’s success by how many pilots—or introductory episodes—he delivered that the creator of that show truly loved. It was a major adjustment from traditional “network thinking.”

The reality is that most new shows fail. If a show makes it onto the schedule and sticks into its second and third and fourth seasons (and so on), that’s when everybody starts to make serious money. Andy’s goal was to increase the odds of getting his shows to stick on the schedule—by focusing on compelling, high-quality shows—even if that meant pitching a smaller roster of shows each fall.

As we said in Organize Tomorrow Today, we’re not offering some kind of magic bullet that takes the work out of high-level success. We have called that book an “Owner’s Manual for Doers,” and that’s really appropriate here, too. If you have an important goal to achieve or problem to solve, knowing what steps to take and what mistakes to avoid can give you clarity and make you more likely to succeed—but you still have to pound the nails and put in the sweat.

To some people, the idea that there isn’t a hack or a shortcut might be discouraging. If that’s you, you can put this book down right now. But if you’re like most people we see week to week in our visits around the country, you’re excited by the idea that there are guideposts left by the people and the teams who came before you. And you know how great it feels to combine hard work with good guidance and produce great results.

The book is divided into three parts:

All the tools work together as a performance improvement plan for both work and life—but you don’t even have to master them all to get a benefit. In fact, Jason and Tom don’t want you to tackle them all.

Channel capacity is the key. One of the biggest mistakes people make in business and in life is that that they try to change too many things too quickly. You see it on New Year’s Day, when so many people resolve to change everything they eat and go to the gym five times a week. After a burst of early enthusiasm for the new goals, reality sets in, and it gets harder and harder to cope with all the wrenching changes. At that point, it takes only a few days of “failure” to get discouraged and ditch the whole plan.

Instead, as you read this book, think about which of the nine concepts address some of the issues you’re having in your professional or personal life. If you are the leader or a member of a team, think especially about the issues the team is having. Pick the one that resonates the most. Start with that, and commit to following the step-by-step guidelines. The key to high-level success is to pick one thing to change—yes, just one—and master it. If all you take from this book is a single, concrete change from one of the nine concepts, it’s enough for you to make a true breakthrough to the next level of success—however you define it. Over time, you can build on them, one concept at a time.

Let’s get on the path.