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There isn’t a manager alive who doesn’t need to learn how to have fun with fundamentals!
“Gentlemen, this is a football. This is how you hold the football.” What professional football players, the greatest players in the world, would expect to hear that at the beginning of each season? Wouldn’t you hire an employee who understands the basics? Yet, great managers and leaders understand that every job has its own fundamentals to achieving success. Listen to this episode of the Manager Mojo podcast if you want to understand how to have fun with fundamentals and turn your team into championship success.
TRANSCRIPT OF FUN WITH FUNDAMENTALS
Focus on the Fundamentals
Our topic today is Focus on the Fundamentals. Now, I know that may sound a little boring, but it’s not going to be a boring topic at all. We want to talk about why it’s not only a good thing, it actually can be a fun thing when you learn the importance of fundamentals.
We all know that fundamentals are important in everything, and I think our best example of where fundamentals are talked about – and people don’t get bored – is in the world of sports. But even in sports, sometimes fundamentals can be boring. People get tired of working on them. But we should be having fun with fundamentals.
Well, the great Vince Lombardi – now deceased, former head coach of the Green Bay Packers and the benefactor of the Lombardi trophy in the NFL – used to do some very unusual things. Let me tell you about what Vince would do every year. Lombardi was one of the most successful coaches in the history of the NFL and to begin every season he had an almost maniacal focus on the fundamentals. He would start every season the exact same way, by standing up in front of his group and saying: “Gentlemen, this is a football.”
He would proceed to talk about the football for several minutes. These are the laces. This is the way you hold it. This is what you do with it. His players would oftentimes react like, “Are you kidding me? We’re professionals! We’re paid to be here! Of course we know it’s a football.”
He didn’t stop with the football. He would talk about how you tied your shoes. This is the way we tie our shoes. This is the way that we pull up our socks. This is the way we put on our pads.
He would go into incredible detail about how important the fundamentals were. His players actually came to expect it, but they also understood that it was important. One of his players is quoted in one particular season as saying: “Hey, coach, can you slow down just a little bit? Some of us are having a hard time keeping up.” Isn’t that great? Everybody’s making a joke out it, having fun and saying, “Slow down just a little bit! What’s that football thing again? What are those laces?”
What were they doing? Why would they even want to make a joke about it? It wasn’t because they were insulted. It was because they had grown to understand that fundamentals were the key for them to be successful. When they focused on fundamentals they could do things better than other people could.
It’s not enough to have talent. It’s not enough to have a good plan. We have to be able to execute our plan. We have to understand what fundamentals are necessary.
It’s been my experience in business that most managers truly don’t understand what fundamentals are important in their business. They often forget about fundamentals. They make an assumption and assume that people understand what they have to do to be successful. I must tell you, nothing could be further from the truth.
I’ll give you an example in the sales world. In the sales world, they talk about how many calls you make and whether or not they’re phone calls or live calls. They track how many they do, how many presentations they make and how many closes they have. Oftentimes, even in the world of sales, people will understand their sales ratio or closing ratio, but often the problem is that people don’t understand why they even track it. They do it because “that’s what everybody else does” and they assume that everybody understands the importance of it, but if you look at the fundamentals – the only reason you’re tracking those metrics in the first place is because you’ve identified that certain levels of metrics are common to people that are being successful in a particular job.
All of us should really understand what the metrics are that are required for each job on our team for that person to be successful. We have to make those metrics not only public, but we’ve got to hold people accountable to them and we’ve got to remind people of them every single day.
The fundamentals, really and truly, don’t have to be complicated. After all, they’re called fundamentals. The word fundamentals implies that they are the basic building blocks of success, but I’m convinced after many years of being in business and watching people, that they don’t track them because they think it’s below them. They think, “I’ve done this for a long time, I’m really good at it, there’s no reason for me to track what I’m doing,” and, so they have a natural aversion to tracking. It’s not because they’re being lazy.
What really is going on is that they’re looking at the end result and saying, “Well, I’m doing okay,” and they’re holding themselves to a standard of okay instead of excellence. On the other hand, I’ve never met anybody that was outstanding or excellent that didn’t want to track metrics. They love tracking their metrics. They wanted to know how they could improve. If I made twenty calls last week and I got X dollars, what would happen if I made twenty-five calls this week? Would I make more money? Would I make the same percentage increase? They’re constantly challenging themselves because they understand that metrics, fundamentals and analytics are important measurements that they’re looking at to determine if they succeeding.
Now, the problem that most managers have, other than just ignoring them altogether or assuming that people understand it, is the way they approach metrics. Many managers use metrics to be critical of people. Instead of holding them accountable in a proper way, they’ll make an unhealthy statement such as, “You know, you’re just not committed.” They make it a negative encounter when they say, “You’re just not doing this well or that well.” It becomes a ‘what you are not doing’ conversation.and I promise you, if you’re couching fundamental discussions in that negative manner people are going to respond negatively and reject whatever good comes out of your mouth after that. You can’t do that.
You have to take fundamentals at the core. Look at the root word of fundamentals. It starts with three letters that are the key — fun — F-U-N. You must make fundamentals fun. Great managers, great leaders understand how to make the fundamentals of measuring and celebrating them actually fun.
What they have come to understand is that if you have people on your team that are not interested in becoming a success, then you’ve got the wrong people. When you have people on your team that really want to be successful, they’re invested in the job and they’re trying to do their best, they want know what does it takes to day in and day out to be a success. It’s up to us as leaders to help them understand what fundamentals are going to make them a success.
So, let’s go back to the sales example just for a second. If we know it takes ten calls a day to be successful –make sure they’re ten good calls – and we have somebody that’s only doing five, we know they’re not going to get to success. It’s going to take twice as long for them, if they ever get there.
Make it fun and challenge them. Make it a game, “Hey, you did five, but I bet you could do eight today. If you do eight today, let’s celebrate.” It’s not about being mean and critical of them because they made five when they should have made ten. It’s about challenging them to get to the level of performance that they need.
The fact is, there aren’t any analytics we track that can’t be made into a fun experience for your employees and team members. You can have a contest. You can have celebrations. You can simply have shout outs, meaning somebody does something on your team and you walk up to their desk and say, “Hey, everybody, this is awesome! Look at what so-and-so did!”
If they’re the type of person who gains energy from celebrating their successes with everybody else, then celebrate it with everybody else. Make sure when you do that the individual likes public recognition. If they’re a private, reserved person that prefers their praise in private, do that. Pull them off to the side and give them a high five and say, “That was awesome, great job!” They’re going to look at you like you’ve lost your mind because it was a small fundamental of their job, but you know what? It’s the celebration of those small things, those fundamentals, that actually gets people engaged and makes people want to put in more effort, energy and focus into their personal success.
If they’re being successful, doesn’t that mean you’re being successful as a leader?
So many leaders miss this point. They miss the point that your job is to make your people successful. If they don’t know the fundamentals needed to practice day in and day out to achieve success, they’re going to get discouraged. They’re going to say, “I can’t do this, it’s not working for me,” and you don’t have anything that will keep them in your company when that type of thinking begins to happen. Our job in leadership is to make fundamentals fun, and we do that by helping them understand how valuable every metric is.
I’ve never met a person who didn’t want to know how to reach success in their life. I have never met anybody who didn’t want to be successful. I have never had anyone come up to me in the workplace and say, “Steve, I’m here today just for a check, and I’ve got to tell you, I’m looking forward to the day I get fired.”
That’s not what happens. They want to know how they can succeed. How can they prosper? How can they do better? Way too many leaders don’t understand that this journey of success requires all of us pulling together. It requires all of us executing fundamentals every single day in an outstanding way in order for us to achieve.
What we want to do is identify those metrics, make them fun, then begin to educate people on why they work. When you see them beginning to work, other people will begin to celebrate that together. You don’t even have to lead it, they’ll do it. They’ll look at the report – the analytics – and they’ll congratulate one another and say, “Gee, I can’t believe you did that yesterday. That was awesome. Tell me, how did you do it?” You’ll hear them begin to coach one another and begin to celebrate each other. They’ll actually begin saying, “This stuff works, because all I had to do was just do it a little bit more.”
I liken this to the old story of: how do you eat an elephant? Well, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. Success is about eating that elephant one bit at a time.
We have to be able to move forward in a deliberate way. If I don’t know the way, if I don’t have a road map to get to the success that I want, if I don’t have metrics that I’m following, then what happens? I wonder off on my own.
That’s what we do to people. We let them wander off on their own, and then the only time they hear from us is when we criticize them and say, “What are you doing? What are you thinking?” That’s not what we want, and the employee rightfully looks at you and says, “Where the heck have you been? Why have you not given me this information before?” In my view they’re entitled to be upset about that, because our job as a leader is to prevent that type of thinking.
Fundamentals are all about understanding what’s important, sharing what’s important and celebrating what’s important. When you do those three things you will begin to understand that a focus on the fundamentals is the key to all success.
Everybody would love to hit a home run. Everybody wants to be the guy that has, what I call the blue bird of happiness fly over you and drop loads of success on your head. I’ve got to tell you, there aren’t a lot of blue birds of happiness flying around. The people who are the most successful are hard working, they focus on fundamentals, they celebrate every small metric, and they keep working to improve those metrics every day.
I hope that now you understand why the focus on fundamentals is so incredibly important, both to your success and the success of your team.
I wish you the most success.