The American spirit strives to win whether it is in our personal or professional lives. In these trying times, companies will feel the need to step up initiatives to bring back jobs, production, and sales. Winning does not just pertain to coming out on top regardless of how our teams are treated.
Mark Miller is one of my favorite authors. I have read every one of his books and he just published his fifth installment of books in his High-Performance series. His latest book Win Every Day – Proven Practices for Extraordinary Results focuses on execution to create a remarkable organization. Mark’s books are business parables where the reader becomes a part of the story and engages with teams every day as they identify and tackle organizational problems.
Our business parable focuses on CEO Blake Brown who learns how to consistently cheer his team on to excel at execution after identifying some internal customer service issues. Coincidently, he receives ideas and leadership from an unexpected source, his son’s new high school coach who is working with the team to bring up their performance and teaching them how to win every day in one form or another. The coach uses a variety of approaches and field trips to teach valuable lessons to the team that brings results where everyone wins. Blake takes these same strategies and applies them to his company to win every day in a variety of areas, not just increasing profits.
High performing organizations do four things that create excellence:
1. Bet on leadership
2. Act as one
3. Win the heart
4. Excel at execution
Obviously, every organization must agree that they aim to be great, excel, and unique. Moreover, leaders need to be sincere in doing their best, encourage others to be the best for families, customers, vendors, and ultimately the world. Teams need to sincerely buy-in. Teams should pursue mastery, own the numbers, and help others to win. On the other hand, leaders should coach for life, focus on processes, and communicate.
Mark offers some key takeaways from Blake’s journey. Most importantly, Black acknowledges that he is the root cause of how the company experienced some failures and he is the key to encouraging everyone to win.
1. The past does not determine the future
2. Communication is the oxygen of execution
3. Our competition is our own arrogance and complacency
4. When you win every day, you can live a life with no regrets
5. Execution is not one more thing – it is THE thing
6. We cannot win every day without everyone
7. If I do not make the right choices, my team never will
8. We want to measure activities that actually help us win more “games”
9. If we own the numbers, we can hold each other accountable. More importantly, we can hold ourselves accountable
10. Mastery is a level of skill in which three things are true: the desired behavior is consistent, execution is flawless, and the behavior is second nature.
I love nothing more than a good story and Mark Miller is a master parable writer. I learned lessons that “stuck” in my mind because I was learning from a story and the ideas flowed in order and made sense. In particular, I was fascinated by how Blake learned so much from his son and his son’s coach. They learned how to teach teams new ways of growing, supporting each other, and how everyone could win. So often we see how sports analogies and business strategies are the same, we just use different terms.
If you love easy reading stories that teach you lessons as you grow in your career and influence your teams then Win Every Day is a must-read. You will find yourself lost in the book eager to see how the lessons from a high school sports team and those of a successful company seeking a new status are entwined.