Not Preparing to Succeed is Preparing to Fail

I once heard Urban Meyer, a fantastically successful football coach, say something that has stuck with me. He said, “I have yet to be in a game where the most prepared team didn’t win.”

That statement challenges me, because I readily fall into the trap that most leaders do: I work my team, I don’t prepare it. I think that the best use of today’s time is to do today’s work. I don’t like to pull them away from productive tasks to train them.

When we prepare our teams, we usually do it for disasters or audits. We practice fire drills and emergency response actions, we brush up paperwork. How much resource do we allocate to getting our co-workers ready to exploit success, to innovate instead of react to change?

Preparation requires anticipation. What will my team need to do in the future? What skills will keep us effective as customer needs change? How can I get them ready for hard times?

Here’s my challenge: Find out what your organization’s near-term and long-term goals are. Then evaluate what capabilities your team will need to meet those goals, and to do business once they’re met. A simple gap analysis will show you where you need to start preparing them now.

Then boil it down to concrete skills. For example, if the goal is to support twice the sales volume through your warehouse, team members will need velocity and flow management techniques.

If Urban Meyer is right, not preparing to succeed is just preparing to fail.

Those Ordinary Days

There are a lot of great leadership lessons to be drawn from the military, and from athletics. Here’s one that’s true in both of those arenas that I have to remind myself of daily: I become a leader when nothing’s going on; I prove I’m a leader when the crisis hits.

The ordinary days are when we develop our habits and train our skills. In his seminars and books John Maxwell often says, “The secret of success is in your daily schedule.” By that he means that what you habitually do, every day, determines what you become as a leader.

Here’s how your calendar can help you: it can reinforce daily habits. It can provide the framework to develop discipline. It can ensure you don’t forget things. And it can prompt you to take time for your own development. So if you don’t already use one, you should start. I’ll write later about how I use mine.

Here’s the bottom line: train as you’ll fight; train the way you’ll actually play the game. Use those ordinary days to develop and reinforce the habits of coaching, communication, planning and vision-setting that you’ll need on the bad days.