Lessons in Sports, Life & Business (Part 2)
Be Quick – But Don’t Hurry: Finding Success in the Teachings of a Lifetime is another book that’s been on Edoc’c reading list. In the book, author Andrew Hill details some of the top lessons he learned from one of (UCLA) basketball’s most well-known coaches, Coach John Wooden.
Here are two more points from the book that resonated with me right now.
1. Avoid over-coaching
Another major point from the book is one of the most common errors we can all make as leaders: over-coaching. As Hill points out, we’ve all faced a manager (or two) like this.
It’s not always “micromanaging” straight out of a Dilbert comic, either. It might be too many meetings, or simply meetings that last hours on end. As leaders, we all have good intentions, but sometimes we get off course.
“The strong leader who is secure enough to give simple instructions and trust his followers’ ability to implement them will almost always come out ahead,” writes Hill. Of course there is inherent risk in that idea of “letting go” and trusting those around us, but you have to be willing to let go of your insecurities, face your fear, and take on that risk as a leader.
4. Use mistakes to your advantage
How does your company respond to people making mistakes? While your reasoning or rationale for making a decision may need to be explained, at Edoc, we emphasis an atmosphere where people learn from mistakes—truly. “The team that makes the most mistakes may not always win, but a team that tries to make no mistakes hardly ever will,” says Hill.
Hill writes that this type of mentality isn’t always the case for organizations. “Too many people in business situations are not engaged in trying to do their task the best way they possibly can; they’re simply trying to execute what they presume the boss’ vision is for them,” he says.
He suggests that these people become more worried about trying to please someone else, or just give someone else what they are looking for, rather than coming up with their own ideas, or using their own creativity to further the company.
But this kind of environment is stifling for most people, at least in the long-run. Most people (at least the team members you want to retain!) crave involvement, they crave contribution to the company, and they crave an environment where they are able to use their own judgment to solve problems. And, simply put, sometimes this kind of environment means that mistakes or failures will occur. But those mistakes are what help us learn and grow.
Hill says that Wooden always had a mentality that mistakes are inevitable. “But many coaches inculcate such a fear of mistakes in their players that they play like automatons. To play freely and quickly, you have to embrace initiative and risk-taking, so long as they’re within the prescribed general framework.”
It’s an important point for leaders: we must learn to accept mistakes, but we also must be able to provide a framework for mistakes to occur within. We also must set up the mentality that we need to learn from all our mistakes.
When someone does something that didn’t go as we hoped, we trust that they used their judgment, but we’re also able to ask that why they made a certain decision. (And, we may be pleasantly surprised when we hear their thought behind the decision.)
We lead with trust, but there’s a framework or “checks and balance” type of system in place to help guide people, too. This is a similar mindset to what Coach Wooden talked about.
The only kind of mistake that Coach didn’t tolerate? The kind that players made when they were still upset from their first mistake—and therefore caused another mistake in the process. It’s a powerful lesson on being able to calibrate your own emotions.
