As we head into the NFL preseason (y’all know my passion for football…) and we start to analyze the various teams’ strengths and weaknesses, I think about something The Colonel said, “You’ll know your team is weak when they work against each other, for themselves or to curry your favor. You’ll know your team is strong when they work with each other, for each other.”
When I was in high school, Dad and I lived by ourselves for a year—just the two of us. Every day there would be a list of chores that needed to be done. As a teenager, I had plenty of the natural, surly sloth many teenagers have during those years. I didn’t have much motivation to get work done in Dad’s timeframe. I had the natural surly sloth many teenagers have during those years. I know it must have made him crazy. Dad often used our favorite sport, football, as a teaching tool for me. “We are a team,” he’d say, “like a football team. If the quarterback can’t count on his offensive line to do their job when they need to do their job, then he’s going to get sacked every time. The offensive line doesn’t have the luxury of saying, ‘I know. I need to block for you. It’s on the list. I’ll get to it… eventually.’ The same goes for the defense. Defensive tackles can’t say, ‘Yeah, I see him. I’ll get over there and bring him down at some point…. Get off my back about it.’”No. Every player on the team needs to do what he needs to do when he needs to do it, or the team falls apart. “If we are going to be a team,” Dad said, “I need you blocking for me. More importantly, I need you blocking for me when you are supposed to be blocking for me, not in your own time in your own way.”
Just like a football team, any successful work team has to be more than just a bunch of people working side by side in the same place, with each person focused on getting their own work done. A truly cohesive team is accountable to themselves and each other, working with each other and for each other so that the whole achieves more than the sum of the individual parts.
Read Lauren’s Whitepaper on The Nine Essentials of Significant Leadership.
