Jamail - The Leadership Playbook

M y sons Little League team lost its first game so bad that the umpires called the game under the mercy rule. This rule, also known as the slaughter rule, is invoked when one team has an insurmountable lead; it protects the emotional stability of the children, parents, and coach of the team getting skunked.

I was the coach.

The second game, we got a couple of runs but still lost. We won the third game. After our win, I got the kids together outside the dugout. With their parents looking on, I asked them if they felt better this week when we won than the previous weeks when we lost. They all said yes. See, it does matter if you win or lose, I told them.

In sports, winning and losing matters. It matters. It doesnt matter if you are dealing with kids or colleagues: No team, period, can go onto a field expecting to lose the game. And it is a coachs job to instill this mind-set in the teama mind-set that makes the team believe it can win every game and thus play every game to win. But as I told my Little League kids, Winning is not just about results; their desire to win as a team was much more important than the result of the game. After all, sometimes teams win just for showing up, and lose even though they do everything right. The important thing is to have a winning attitudeto lose with confidence and win with modesty.

Everything I said to my sons Little League team has the essential ingredients for success for any coach:

• Making the team members believe in themselves
• Mandating that the entire team work together
• Pushing the team to achieve success
• Encouraging a winning attitude
• Creating a team culture that supports all these things

Think about it: The people who helped make you successful in sports, school, or any part of your life that required your best performance were the ones who constantly challenged you, inspired you, drove you, and didnt take less than the best you could beand they were right to do so. Our goal as business leaders should be to do the same with our people. But most times, we just dont.

Thats because most businesses dont have coaching cultures and leaders who are coaches; they have management cultures and leaders who are managers. Coaches cannot thrive in management cultures that expect its leaders to pay attention to individuals more than to the team, handle problems reactively, focus on reforming the poorest performers, avoid conflict, and mostly just step back and let people do their jobs. A coaching culture expects the exact opposite of its leaders: to believe the team is more important than the results of an individual, get involved before action is needed, focus on the top performers who deserve their attention, embrace conflict, and always get on the field and practice with the team.

These are the missing elements in business and business leadership today: cultures that support a transformation of managers into coaches and help them develop the skills to do so. What if I told my Little League boys to work as a team and play with a winning attitude but didnt practice during the week or scrimmage game situations? We might never have won a game. Its not enough to talk about it. The same is true in business: We cant simply say we want our leaders to coach their teams; we need to show them how to be coaches. But for too long, the business world has lacked a clear and effective instruction on the skills, disciplines, and executable tasks necessary to turn leaders into coaches. Thats no different from saying, I want my accountant to be an engineer, but Im not going to teach her how to become one. This is why the first parts of my book focus on understanding the differences between managing and coaching and then developing the fundamental skillsfrom practicing to making tough decisions to motivationthat leaders need to create and coach dynamic, motivated, high-functioning teams. Once I cover those skills, the last part of the book shows leaders what they need to do to change the culture of their department or business for supporting and sustaining their transformation from manager to coach.

Sounds great, right? So why arent there more coaches and coaching cultures in business? Is it just the absence of a book like this? No. Its because coaching is hard. Coaching doesnt just happen. Coaching takes time and constant effort to make it the core of a businesss leadership principles. Coaching does not work if it is optional. These lessons must be implemented and made mandatory. We cant simply try and fit coaching into our days. It never fits. Consider the first coaching activities we will cover in this book: practicing and scrimmaging. Professional business teams, unlike any professional sports teams, rarely practice. Why? Its not because we dont know that practice is essential to a teams success. But practicing takes time to set up and weeks and months of constant work to achieve great results. How can we possibly squeeze it into a list already overflowing with high-priority tasks? Theres just no time! But everyone says that. We may be busy, but are we being productive?

Coaching makes us productive, but that productivity can be hard to wait for when we always feel we need some results now, now, NOW! Thats another big obstacle to creating coaches and coaching cultures: There is little instant gratification in coaching. Gratification comes in achieving better results months down the road. When I show business leaders how to practice and scrimmage, they never leave the room saying, Genius! But while the overall results take time, the change in the teams morale just from paying attention to them and instilling a winning attitude happens much, much faster.