Most of the successful coaches I have known subscribe to this philosophy.
Let’s start with the first part: playing your best players. There are a lot of different opinions on this. Some coaches in the NCAA basketball tournament, for example, might choose to rest their best players for the first few games, especially if they are a top-seeded team. They figure even their second string guys will be good enough to beat the lower-seed teams they will face in the later rounds, and they want to minimize the risk that their best players might get injured before the more important games. However, that strategy has a lot of risk – if the second string players can’t get it done in the early rounds, there won’t be any later rounds in which to use your stars.
The bottom line is this: playing your best players gives you the greatest chance to win. There are only so many people on any team who really have the talent to get the win. The same is true in business. If you looked at the average sales numbers in most companies, I would bet that something like 80% of the company’s sales are generated by 20% of the salespeople.
The best coaches know this and will find a way to keep their best players on the court or the field for as long as possible. In some sports this requires a little more strategy than in others. Frank Beamer, the legendary Virginia Tech football coach, is best known for having excellent special teams units on all of his teams (a strategy known as “Beamerball”). How did he elevate his special teams units so much? He had his stars from the offense and the defense also play on the special teams unit. This created a great advantage for his team because most other coaches choose to rest their starters and use some of their less-talented players on special teams. Coach Beamer also personally coached the special teams unit, which added additional motivation and focus for those players.
In business, why not use this same philosophy by supporting and rewarding your best employees by giving them opportunities to be successful? As they increase the growth of your company, recognize their achievements and always reward production. This will encourage the other employees to want to work harder to join the elite group and see their own production recognized and rewarded.
This culture of excellence may seem a bit harsh, since it will inevitably end up excluding some employees from the elite group. But it’s a tough world out there, and if you’re trying to grow sales in this climate you know that you need the best people working for you with the right incentives to keep up their excellent performance. In a tough economy, most businesses can’t afford the luxury of mediocrity.
Which brings us to the next part of the philosophy: playing to win. Any company that really wants to grow has no choice except to play to win every day. But in this tough economic climate, it can be a hard choice for companies and employees to decide if they really want to try pushing beyond the status quo. That generally involves risk and hard work that might not pay off. But if you don’t go out there playing to win, you greatly reduce the odds that you will find success. All of the so-called “Cinderella” teams in the NCAA tournament are told that they aren’t good enough to beat the top seeds. If they don’t go out and play like they think they can win, and play with the specific goal that they will win, they don’t stand a chance. It’s hard to keep going with that mindset, day in and day out, especially if at first you don’t see the results you’re looking for. But if you keep trying I believe you’ll find that your “playing to win” attitude makes a huge difference.
You can never go wrong by playing your best players, striving for excellence and playing to win.
Have a great weekend,
Ro