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on July 12, 2023 in Excellence

Whether you lead a church, business, athletic organization, or non-profit, one of the most frustrating things leaders face is when successful team members suddenly become unsuccessful.  It is a frustrating time for leaders because we work very hard to train and equip our teams for a consistent level of high performance.

So why do once-successful team members (and leaders) suddenly become average?

I once had a company president who was as reliable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.  Whenever you made a big sale, completed a major project, or received some level of notoriety for a job well done, the next day he would bring up the minutest of imperfections in something you were working on and endlessly harp on it.  He would deliver a “10 penalty” to a “1 offense.”  And when you were at your angriest, he would say one of his favorite axioms:

“You need to quit reading your newspaper clippings.”

So why did he do this?

I came across the following press conference from two-time national champion head coach Kirby Smart of the Georgia Bulldogs.  Coach Smart takes this same counter-intuitive approach and presents a compelling case for his reasoning.  Click the video below and then I will provide six leadership lessons from Coach Smart’s words.

Coach Smart said, “The future is only bright if those guys continue to work because there’s a disease that creeps in at Georgia where kids believe they’re better than they are and they read their own press clippings… When you start reading about yourself and believing your own press clippings is when you start to fall…  Those kids you mentioned are tremendous players but they’ll only be as good as they can be if they stay as hungry as they are.  When you’re not hungry, you become average.”

Six Leadership Lessons

The following are six leadership lessons I gleaned from the above quote:

  1. The best indicator of future success is past success but only if you continue to work.  Without work, nothing is guaranteed moving forward regardless of what you have previously accomplished.
  2. Entitlement, over-confidence, and complacency are diseases which can creep into your organization.  They must be diligently guarded against and immediately eradicated when they appear.
  3. It is possible to believe you are better than you really are.  It has happened to me?  How about you?
  4. Reading your press clippings, believing what people say about you on social media, and embracing the adulation of the crowd are the seeds of failure.
  5. The antidote for entitlement, over-confidence, and complacency is hunger.  Hungry people are grateful, humble, and focused on continual improvement.
  6. Once-successful people should be aware of the following equation – Entitlement + Over-Confidence + Complacency = Average Performance

I now understand the reason our company president would find the minutest of offenses to address after big victories was to protect us and the organization from our excellent performance being reduced to average.  I think he and Kirby Smart would have been great friends.

Warning

BTW, I had one of the best days in my career today.  Something tells me that tomorrow I am going to get a major talking to about a minor mistake I made on an expense report or presentation.  I can’t be reading my press clippings after all.

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