I once heard Nick Saban talk about how everybody doing their job on the next play is the key to building a winning football team. Some consider Nick Saban the most successful football coach of all time. The teams he coached have won seven national titles and 12 conference championships. He is so successful most people don’t like him.
If you have read my blog before, you know that two of my hobbies are golf and pickleball.
One of the keys to golf is keeping in mind you can’t undo your last shot. (Unless you are OK with using Mulligans, but if you are, be careful when you tell others your score, or they will get the wrong idea about your game.) If you find yourself in the woods, your last shot was terrible. You have already lost a shot; hit the ball to the fairway and move on. Trying to hit it through a small opening between several trees will only land you more trouble. If you were good enough to hit it through the small opening you are now thinking about, you wouldn’t be in the situation you are now facing.
A couple of nights later, down by six points, my teammate grabbed the ball, and just before he served, he said we would have to come back one point at a time. (We didn’t.)
In life, it is true of so many things. You can’t go back and unsay or undo things. If you said the wrong thing or did something you wish you hadn’t, it’s too late.
As the saying goes, the cat is out of the bag. Now, you must deal with the issue at hand. In those cases, taking responsibility, apologizing without excuses, and moving on is important. This is a sign of maturity and growth. But that is a different blog topic for a different day.
Let’s return to Nick Saban’s idea of executing the play before you. This is true not just in sports but also in the business world. Entire books are written on the topic of execution, highlighting its crucial role in success. The best one by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan is titled Execution.
Remember that you have competition in business, as in pickleball and football, and they are actively working against you. This is not true in golf. It just feels like it. Your competitors are also trying to win. So, if you produce the perfect estimates, you likely won’t get all the projects. But you will get many of them, which will go well when you do the projects. Assuming the people on the projects are also executing well. For the people on the projects to execute well, the support personnel must get the items and information needed into place with the proper execution.
Saban said regardless of whether they won or lost, they would go back and see where specific things broke down and fix them. When did people run the wrong route, miss blocks, or use lousy techniques in tackling? They would fix those issues and move on. Throughout the season, wins would pile up because they worked on improving items at the individual level and not focusing only on the “if only” situation that was likely out of their control.
In pickleball, I can only control hitting the ball back over the net in a difficult position for my opponent; I can’t control what they do next. They may return the ball, and I won’t be able to hit it back.
In business, we can only control our estimates. Our competition might submit a lower number. We just get to go out and perform on the project we get. On those projects, we can only control ourselves, remembering that others rely on us to do our portion well so they can do theirs well.
To take the football analogy one step further, it is the lineman’s job to block the defenders so the quarterback can take the snap and pass the ball. While that is going on, it is the receiver’s job to run the route and get open so they can catch the pass once the ball is in the air. If a lineman misses a block, the quarterback throws a bad pass, the receiver runs the wrong route, or drops the ball, all while defenders try to stop each action from taking place, the play could fail. Everything is interconnected.
Music is the same. If a drummer is off a beat or the singer is off-key, the entire song will sound terrible.
Games are not lost when one play goes poorly, and concerts are not ruined by one bad song. When it happens, accept that the play or the song was terrible and move on, committing to doing it right the next time.
