Insightful NFL Coaches and some Radio Program Directors will admit that across any given season a leader can only inspire their team to its optimum intensity at best, a third of the time. So the balance of their compensation is really earned across the rest of the season where managing the team’s performance-margin makes all the difference.
Inside your building it’s easy to make this observation and to get buy-in from your department heads. But it’s yet another thing to elevate your motivational climate to inspire your staff to stretch their potential far beyond their self concept.
In a psychological sense it’s not important WHY a morning team is lit up, or why a seller suddenly begins to break records. Yet the coaching cliché “in the zone” is a reasonable parallel. And the best way to energize your staff lies in pushing your own leadership, engaging your imagination and intensity because good enough just isn’t “good enough.”
So instead of benchmarking your cluster against the competitor you love to hate, measure performance against our industry standards, aiming for a higher elevation. Confidence is contagious; a series of wins takes on inertia of its own; suddenly you find members of your staff generating their own stream of conquests.
And even through a dark tunnel like the Covid era, when endowed with a taste of success, your talent staff can generate a stream of conquests.
These are the things that elevate “promising talent” to icon, and probably why it’s really not crowded at the top. It’s not how good we are…it’s how good we want to be!
