Dr. Jason Selk Tom Bartow - Organize Your Team Today: The Mental Toughness Needed to Lead Highly Successful Teams

Y ouve seen the speech.

Maybe its 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 couldnt have happened without the great team I have around me, the players and the CEOs usually say.

Those words come so often because theyre 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 theyre 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 youre 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, were going to show you.

Weve 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 playersand 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 Baseballs 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.

If youre 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 dont come together in an effective wayboth through sure-handed leadership and through their own willingness to learn how to adapt and respond to changethe 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, youll hear about it when the board announces theyre 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 dont 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 Woodens 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 Patriotseven 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.