Today at BTL Band practice, we mused how frustrated leaders & coaches get when their teams are not meeting their standards. “Their-in” is both the dilemma and the solution.
Reminder, leaders are believers and leaders are connectors. Take five, look in the mirror, and sit with this. Attack your curse of knowledge. Your team can only stand for standards they deeply understand.
High standards require clear understanding first. Only then can your team make them their own. Only then can your team truly own them.
Reminder, the role of the leader is to do for the team what it cannot yet do for itself (thank you, Blanchard) before making the team do for themselves what they can (thank you, Emerson). While your team is forming, sit with them for seven good minutes and walk them through what the high standards are and why. Remember, most humans must hear something seven times before they start to become clear.
While your team is storming, remember they are not yet in the clear. This is the worst time for you to get frustrated. Walk alongside and draw near. Do not emotionally detach. Practice being with. Like Job, your job is to practice patience — not just seven times but seven x seventy.
Your team is norming when they can accurately play back their understanding of the standards and begin to perform. In this stage your role shifts from clear leader to cheerleader. Catch them doing something right. High five. They are starting to believe, and they are starting to perform.
Now, make them do what they can. Make them stand for the standards they understand.
Sit. Walk. Stand.
Get it? Got it.
Gu’d.
BUILT TO LEAD 