7 Ways football is like business

After moving to Louisiana, the heart of football country, I became a fan of college football, specifically LSU where my son attends.  Being a student of business, I was amazed at how similar football is to business and now I frequently use football examples to coach business. Here are 7 ways your football knowledge can increase your business success.

#1 Huddle

Leaders must communicate the company’s vision, goals, and what it will take to achieve them making communication one of the most important skills to succeed in business. People also need critical feedback regarding what’s going right and wrong in order to improve. 

 In football, communication is key to winning and achieved through countless meetings. Football teams have full-team meetings, special-teams meetings, pre-game meetings, and even half-time meetings to adjust for an effective 2nd half. The teams most visual meeting is the huddle before every single play. The huddle was implemented a long time ago when teams realized that if you don’t review the plan before every play that there is a good chance of failure.

 You don’t win unless everyone is executing the plan; how can a business team execute a plan unless everyone knows the plays and who does what and when? 

·        Does your business team “huddle” before each play?

·        Do you have company and department meetings where everyone understands the “next play” and their role in executing the play? 

·        Does your company’s meeting schedule reflect football’s successful meeting cadence?

 I teach teams to set up a clear meeting rhythms that include:

1.       Daily huddle

2.       Weekly department meeting (including the leadership team ‘department’)

3.       Monthly leadership meeting to review and adjust company goals

4.       Quarterly meeting to set goals and review strategy

5.       2-day off-site leadership meeting to put together the year’s playbook. 

Good communication causes companies have a clear plan that everyone knows and understands, and when people know their role in making the plan work the company gets things done and wins.

The best football teams communicate better than the rest to win; the best companies will also grow and win with better communication.

 #2 Stats

In your company, you need to establish clear goals that everyone can see and understand.  How can you “win the game” if nobody knows what a win looks like?

Every football team knows the goal; win the game and ultimately the championship. 

·        What are your company’s goals?

·        Does every employee know them? 

This is one of the most missed opportunities I see in companies I coach. I train teams to create a 3HAG (3 year highly achievable goal) and to break it into annual, quarterly, and monthly goals that align to achieve the 3HAG. Then everyone on the team is assigned the goals in their area of responsibility with clearly defined metrics to track progress.

If every team member knows their role and the metrics that they need to accomplish towards the company goals, they will know if they are winning or not.  Do all your employees know if they are winning every day?

In football statistics are everything.  Statistics are another word for metrics, measurable actions that tell the rest of the team if they are performing at the highest level.  If your numbers don’t measure up then someone else gets to take your place.  Does everyone have a clear metric that they own that moves the company to win?  Does everyone know if they had a winning day, week, month, or year?  If every employee knows the overall company goals and what part of it they own there is a lot better chance for those goals to be realized.  If you are the owner of the company and you have clear goals but you don’t let everyone know what they are then you are keeping your team in the dark and they can’t help you get there.  Everyone should know their role, which is measured by their results that help achieve the company goals which leads to success.

 #3 Blackboard

In football blackboard x’s and o’s are a visual way to communicate who needs to do what and where. People are visual and we learn faster when we see something instead of only hearing it.

In business, we create strategic plans that outline what the play should be and what people need to do; but it often falls flat because we’re not making it visual to help the team understand.

·        How are you showing your team the plan?

·        Are you expecting your team to be clear without pictures?

I help companies create a visual picture so they can visualize their companies actions and performance in a very clear and simple way.  One of the best strategic pictures is called KFFM (key function flow map); which shows how each company function leads to profit and how each of those functions is doing right now. 

Another example of a strategic picture is the “market map” which shows the company, competitors, vendors, and associations in a way that visually helps connect and understand opportunities in the market. 

Use pictures to create digestible information & improve execution of great strategy.

 #4 Playbook

Winning football teams obsess over their playbook and ensure every player knows the playbook and understand how the team executes each play. 

·        Does your company have a playbook that all employees follow?

·        Does every employee know the weekly outcomes they produce that lead to a team win?

I coach teams to break their long-term vision into steps, down to each employee’s weekly responsibility to achieve the company’s goals.  Record these goals in the team playbook, make sure each team member knows theirs, and use weekly meetings to ensure everyone follows the plan.

Winning teams are individuals taking the right steps at the right time, all the time.

 #5 Use The Rules

Football games can be won or lost based on penalties & football teams win because they know, follow and exploit the rules and have less penalties vs the other team.

There are two rules groups that I want to touch on.  There are external industry rules and internal company rules.

Industry rules are pretty straight forward.  You have to play by the rules that are expected by your regulatory requirements and customers expectations. Are you meeting and exceeding expectations of the customers in your industry?

The second set of rules are way more important but most companies do not create these rules and if they do they don’t follow them.

Every company should create and live core  values; these rules should capture the culture of a company and reflect internal key rules all team members should know and follow.  Core values are principles that guide the team through every scenario and decision. You can’t teach every employee how to handle every situation they are going to come across.  Company culture, which includes very clearly stated core values, are the rules of the game that employees can use to decide how they should handle the situations they find themselves in. Just like in football if team members break the rules too many times you lose the game. A Company’s core values are their employee rules which need to be followed so the team and company can win. The best companies in the world have amazing core values that they live by every day.  Think about Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, and Disney.  They make sure all their people know the cultural rules so they outperform every other business in their industry. Create an amazing culture and make sure it is part of everything you do. 

 #6 Recruit

A critical factor in winning games doesn’t happen on the field, in fact, it usually happens in the off-season: recruiting. 

The start to any successful team is to surround A-players with more A-players.  You don’t win football games unless your recruiting A-players and the same applies to your business.

·        Do you have a recruiting plan for your company?

·        Do you know each and every role in the company and where you might have a weak spot that needs to be improved by recruiting an A-player?

·        Are you putting the right effort into targeting and hiring the A players you need to win? 

Invest more time into recruiting A-players.

 #7 Scorecard

Every football game has a scoreboard letting everyone know who is winning and by how much.  Imagine the impact on football if no one was keeping score, or worse if the teams playing didn’t know the score.

What’s the score in your business, who’s winning and by how much? Does your team know?

·        Does your company have a scoreboard?

·        Who can’t see it?

A good company scoreboard shows the results needed for a period of time and whether you are hitting your results or not.  Creating a scorecard with the right numbers and a solid system to track progress on those numbers will change your teams impact dramatically.

Measure what matters, create & update your scoreboard, and put it front and center in your company.

It is amazing what your team can accomplish if you just put up a scoreboard and tell them what they need to do to win!

These 7 steps will increase your business success by creating a successful team in a winning company.  Are you doing what it takes to follow these 7 steps and lead your team to victory?