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C-Level Coaches and Players Need to Be A-Level Performers

“Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile…If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score….Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” –- Vince Lombardi

C-Level Coaches and Players Need to Be A-Level Performers

CEO, CFO, CIO, CMO, CRO, CTO. The list goes on and on.

I remember one of the night watchmen/evening janitors at a public company I worked for referred to himself as the CEO (Chief Evening Officer) and CJO (Chief Janitorial Officer). Truth be told, he was one of the brightest employees in the company and if you wanted to know what was happening, he was the source. (He confessed that executives often didn’t think twice about what they left in their trash and recycle bins.) As I recall, he was one of the first people to know we were about to announce our acquisition. New meaning of the phrase “trash talking.” He was also a stockholder and observed that our CEO at the time needed to get the management team together and lead us through a period of change. The industry was changing and we needed to embrace change as well, and run different plays as a corporation. The image that came to mind was Lombardi leading his football team (as CFO Chief Football Officer) scratching out plays on the board and drilling and shouting. This man had high expectations of his players and of himself, as did our CEO.

Yes, there is a C-level “Chief” for just about every corporate function these days, and rightfully so. Business is “plains warfare,” and like a great spaghetti western, or a football game, up there on the horizon, past the acres of wide open field or the line of scrimmage there is the opposing team, mounted and armed, ready to tangle with your side’s chiefs and subordinates. Whether they be on horseback or wearing helmets, they came to fight. To engage in competitive conflict – driven by survival, the end zone, a new product launch or westward expansion, there will need to be tools, resources and tactical strategies to win small victories as well as large battles. Just like Lombardi’s Packers.

Let’s take the second letter out for a moment, and just call any senior management professional a CXO. The “X” doesn’t matter. It could apply just as easily to Revenue, Safety, Transportation, Logistics, or one of the most important functions in a company, Coffee. (Yes, the CCO. Chief Coffee Officer. Without him or her showing up in the morning, not much gets done.) Let’s examine the common A-level dynamics necessary for these C-Blank-O’s to be successful.

Lead. Lead the strategy. Company or department, office or warehouse, domestic or international, plinkers or widgets, doesn’t matter. Lead. Lead, follow or get out of the way. Have a strategic plan, or at the very least, an agenda, communicate the course to be followed, and engage and involve your team members. Enable them to share in the rewards as well as the workload. We’re going this way…

Plan. Plan to succeed, grow, hire, develop, research, sell, invest, whatever. Plan to work every day and be engaged and “around” in all aspects of your product and/or service delivery. Take the input from your team and consider all of the potential success and failure factors.

Ensure vs. insure. Ensure you have the right resources and people, the right strategy. Insure your people, assets and liabilities from the unknown and unforeseen.

Budget. Operating budget, capital budget, departmental budget, there should be meaningful, well-conceived, and not guesswork-driven “blue sky” backlog and pipeline reports. Your sales and business development people need to understand that forecasts, backlogs, pipelines, drive the organization – they are “Column A” in the business. Your finance and accounting people need to understand the meaning of the numbers and how the figures relate to the expectations of customers.

Assess. Yes, assess what you do, how you do it, how competitors do it, what customers want, how well you are structured and organized, the people in your organization. Be objective. Whether you are the CEO or the “CJO” there are people working hard every day to help you achieve organizational, departmental and individual goals.

Control. Control quality, results, information, success factors, not people. Micromanagement of people doesn’t benefit anyone. Yes, there needs to be accountability, structure, clear expectations, results and work parameters. Teach them to control their own destiny and to practice self-control. And, A-level talent focuses on the variables that can be controlled and not on the ones beyond our individual or collective grasp. For example, if your company manufactures a product with parts held together with silver solder, you can’t control the commodities and metals market, but you can control sensitivity to price by putting a commodities price adjustment in place to protect margins. Managing price elasticity means your profits are less elastic. (And who said you’d never apply anything from Economics 101).

Report. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Managers at many levels need accurate, timely information to do their jobs. You can’t score an A for the course if you have done D-level homework. Your systems, even in a small department, need to capture essential data to provide a dashboard of the metrics of the business. Even a nine year old with a lemonade stand has metrics – cars driven by, cars stopped, pitchers prepared, glasses served, money collected, time spent, rate of ice melting, risk of insects, average temperature, precipitation, lemonade consumed by the CLO (chief lemonade officer).

Motivate. Your people want to work hard, they want you to give them direction and to lead them. Most of them are there because they care about doing great work and making an impact on something – improving sales, quality, satisfying customers, developing new products and services, finding new and innovative ways to help the company grow, e.g. If you are the coach, come to work ready to get mud on your cleats and swelter in the August sun alongside the tackles and guards.

Manage stakeholders. Who are the stakeholders? Sure, there is the low hanging fruit – customers, employees, e.g. Stop and think about all of the stakeholders your company or department interacts with. What about the complete “wheel” of stakeholders? Vendors? Regulators? Tax authority? Licensing and permits? Competitors? Future employees? Merger and acquisition targets? Potential financing sources? Existing bank? Landlord? Tenant? Neighbors? Abutters? What about other departments internal to the organization? Legal, sales, safety, HR, manufacturing, purchasing, project management, warehousing, logistics, compliance, estimating, e.g.

Sell. Everyone in the organization needs to understand they are all selling in some way, shape or form, or, at least they need to be. Everyone should be an ambassador for their department, brand, function, and most importantly, their employer. They should confidently sell their solutions to other departments and listen carefully to all of the collective points which can be interpreted and understood, and put into action in the form of winning plays.

And, perhaps the most important one…

Execute. Yes, executives must execute – they must expect, communicate, drive, provide, support, motivate, listen, deliver, evaluate, trust, adapt, change and do their jobs. They need to get the players to follow the plays and get to the end zone.

Just like the fans in the stands, much of what happens in the workplace is extraneous noise. Focusing on what’s downfield – the competitive landscape, the economy, the business model, the success factors, measuring what matters to the customer – those are the things that matter. Profit matters. Happiness matters. Quality matters. Satisfaction matters. And to quote Mr. Lombardi, arguably one of the best executives in American history, winning matters (which is another way of saying results matter which is in turn another way of saying you and your team members matter) To win games and the playoffs and the big game, the C-Level coaches and players need to give A level commitment and run A-level plays.

In life, and in business, as in football, the game is about gaining ground with the people you admire and trust the most.