Throughout the college football season, we can glean many valuable leadership behaviour lessons that are so applicable to the work we do at The Frisina Group and The Center for Influential Leadership.
Thinking of behaviour and its critical link to excellence and performance, we have case studies from The Ohio State University and the University of Maryland football programs. When thinking of college football, or any great successful organization, the thought that comes to mind is a playbook.
The great and successful college football coaches do not step out on the field unprepared for their games. In fact they go through weeks and months of studying their opponents. They have graduate assistants pouring over old games, sometimes studying for hour’s single plays or formations. They compile this data into playbooks, which they then present to the skill position coaches, who in turn review game footage with players before games. All the top teams are prepared physically and mentally for the game, and without this level of preparation they wouldn’t win. Without a “winning mentality” you will not be as successful either.
What is the leader’s playbook for your organization? Not just rules and guidelines that every employee gets at onboarding through your HR departments. The reality is you need a standard operating procedures playbook that team members can review on a regular basis. When the stress comes, and when the demands of the work show up, ‘lower brain fear’ response can inhibit high level performance.
The playbook allows you to step back, assess the problem, see the solution and start again. You create your playbook simply by starting to catalog your successes and your failures, doing an analysis, what went right, what went wrong, and what can be improved upon. That way when these problems appear again, which they will, you can refer to your playbook, and chart a path to success.
A playbook helps guide your people to attend to what is really important, inhibit distractors, and create a working memory of success. This behaviour links to the brain’s need for goal achievement and interpersonal relationships.
In sum, you need a systematic, programmatic, and science based approach to performance management. The playbook is essential to creating team unity, cohesion, and clarity to execution. If you have been struggling to get the results you desire from the highly talented and smart people you have hired, work on creating clarity of focus through a playbook and include in your playbook the skill of Positive Presence — a new and deliberate way of thinking and being that makes the connection between emotional energy and the behaviour necessary for success.
If you are a senior leader, you have to ask yourself, how committed am I to real change in my organization and what am I doing to create that change? Senior leaders create strategic vision and objectives for the organization. Leadership development is most effective when the efforts of its leaders are connected to those strategic objectives that indicate the business priorities of the organization.
Go online, stroll through a bookstore, attend another training workshop or seminar and you will see that the topic of leadership is everywhere. We talk about it in political terms, business, sports, and tax-exempt organizations. People are captivated and confused at the same time by the concept of leadership and the essential elements that produce a high performance leader.
One of the key characteristics of influential leaders is their ability to stimulate volition in themselves and among their followers. They do this by creating a sense of urgency, living a life with purpose, and pursuing excellence. When you choose to take this step in your leadership behaviour, you will see profound impact on your resulting outcomes, goals, and objectives.
Influential leaders almost always are highly dissatisfied with ‘status quo’. They are unwilling to allow preventable pain and suffering to continue needlessly. They are unwilling to waste precious resources and to settle for second-rate productivity and financial performance. Volition enables dissatisfied leaders to make a choice to bring back emotional meaning and purpose to their work.
What makes people, who possess knowledge about what they need to do to actually improve their performance, alter and change their behaviour? The answer is volition- a purposeful, intentional choice.
Relationships, by their nature, require constant and consistent tending. The quality of care you put into these relationships translates into either a negative or a positive experience. That is, the other person perceives every one of your interpersonal exchanges and interactions as good or bad, supportive or unsupportive, trusting or untrusting, positive or negative, safe or unsafe, and so on. If you behave poorly during an interpersonal exchange with an employee, that experience is considered negative and the other person’s brain registers that encounter in experiential emotional memory (EEM); conversely, if you conduct yourself well, that experience is counted as a positive EEM.
The greatest of all leaders understand that methods, tools, technologies, protocols, and systems do not achieve results. People do. Therefore, it is people not processes, with whom organizational leaders must form a long-lasting, positive, emotional connection. This connection is actually a physical connection in people’s brains and is what ultimately determines the success or failure of the leader specifically and the organization as a whole.
People do not quit their jobs. They quit their leader – the boss. Ineffective leaders breed ineffective followers, and performance and productivity suffer as a result. With a positive, emotional connection with your people you send a clear message that you are interested and invested in what your people experience on a daily basis. People in general do not follow just anyone, nor do they follow out of the goodness of their heart. They need good reasons—a motivation – to follow.
In today’s professional world, people are craving effective leadership. What maybe misattributed as generational gaps is that everywhere, middle level managers and their team members are overburdened and uninspired by individuals holding titled positions of leadership providing neither effective leadership nor effective management. The issue is not change resistance. Peter Senge said it well, “People do not resist change. They resist being changed.” Knowledge based workers desire true leadership that capitalizes on collaboration, communication and connection to accomplish their work related goals and objectives.