*Last month we looked at the first part of the Law of Building a Winning Team: Who Could Do What I am Doing?
“In the end, a great leader is only known by the impact he or she has on others.”
-Jim Stovall
The Law of Building a Winning Team: Great leaders know how to find people who possess the skills they don’t and have the ability to position, empower and send them out. A team of skilled people can never succeed beyond the abilities of the leader to allow them to do so. We raise the team by raising the expectations of each player, equipping them and setting them free to succeed on their own.
Modeling Trains
My favorite hobby is model trains. I belong to a model train club that has the largest N scale layout in the area. I have made many friends in the group. We take the layouts to shows and have an operations night once a month at our clubhouse, where we run our trains like the actual (prototype) railroads with conductors, engineers and dispatchers.
Also, part of the fun aside from the friends I’ve made is modeling scenery and trying to get everything looking like real trains and locations. We study the prototypes and do our best to make everything look authentic. I’ve learned a lot about railroads just doing the hobby.
Did you know that a fully loaded freight train going 50 miles an hour can plow through a 5-foot steel reinforced concrete wall? It has momentum and can move through the obstacle as if it weren’t there. However, that same train sitting still can be stopped by placing a one-inch block directly in front of the drive wheel. With that block in place the locomotive won’t budge. Why? It has no momentum.
The Mighty MO
Momentum will motivate a winning team like nothing else. In fact, momentum will make us look like better leaders than we may be. It exaggerates the talents of everyone on the team. It makes our problems seem like speed bumps and will often solve more problems than wasting time worrying about them does.
Momentum is the Great Exaggerator
A leader with momentum can get more out of his/her team than a leader who has a track record of success. The team with momentum is always the one that wins championships in any sport. Often it isn’t the team with the best record going in; it’s the team who peaks and gets “hot” in the divisional and conference playoffs.
The Florida (Miami) Marlins have only won two World Series championships, but both times they weren’t the best teams with winning records. Both times they were the Wild Card team whose record couldn’t match the divisional leaders, but they got “hot” and generated momentum in the playoffs… and won more than all the other teams they went up against.
You’ll notice that often championship teams rarely repeat the next year. Have you ever wondered why? They celebrate, go on a victory tour, eat at grand buffets, demand more money and often lose some of their key players who feel they are now worth more. They have lost the momentum they had in the championship and can’t repeat in the next season.
A well-coached team can win season after season if the leader knows how to generate and retain momentum in the off-season. Ask Nick Saban of the University of Alabama, or any repetitive winning coach. These leaders are motivated and create momentum keeping attitudes and morale high.
John Maxwell says in the 15 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork, “Talent is not enough to win, it takes a bunch of players with both talent and good attitudes to achieve something great. Good attitudes guarantee a team’s success, but bad attitudes guarantee its failure.”
Here are three truths about Attitudes that Maxwell identifies and how they affect teamwork:
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