Leadership Lessons from Sports

While the NFL Super Bowl Championship game on this past Sunday night is still fresh in our minds, let us look at how we can apply some of the lessons from sports to our life, in general.

Achieving something very important to you and your business requires:

1. 1.    Documenting your strategy and breaking it down to the level of detail necessary to drive execution. DON’T BLOW THIS OFF - keeping it in your head never works. Big achievements require plans with milestones and metrics. These will not only allow you to monitor the performance of your team against the strategy, but they’ll also help you invest growth capital efficiently.
2. 2.    Getting crystal clear about what you want to achieve with your business. I am not talking about generalities (increase profit margin to 12 percent, increase revenue to $60 million, etc.). I am talking about something you can really be passionate about that will naturally and easily focus your efforts.
3. 3.    Getting the 'buy-in' from your team. If the goal is important enough to you, replace those who won’t support you with people who will.
4. 4.    Realizing that hope is not a strategy. Hoping that a number of good things will happen is not good enough to accomplish something great. You must have a plan designed specifically to help you achieve your goal.
5. 5.    Acting like a honey badger when it comes to your goal and never giving up. Being passionate and relentless. If it’s that important to you, how could you possibly quit?

What are your thoughts about achieving big goals? Anything that we can add to the list?