I am having a wonderful experience this fall in being an assistant coach to my 6 year old son’s football team. I have been truly amazed at just how much they can learn and do at such a young age. While I’ve coached many different sports teams with my sons, this was my first exposure to coaching football.
On a parallel track, I’ve taken on a new position at work as the PMO Director for CDC/NCPHI. Once again this is another new experience. The same week I started my new position the leadership of our organization completely changed. In the process the new director was asking for a landslide of information about the projects within the organization. This request became a significant challenge within the organization, one that would end up falling on my plate.
So how does coaching a 6 year old football team and taking a new position with organizational change relate to one another? It all falls in the category of “what works and what doesn’t”.
Let go back to the football team. If you take 18 6 year old boys and put them on a grassy lawn what do they do? PLAY, not too bad when your 6. (or 40 for that matter). How do you get them to play football? Repetition! Everything our head coach teaches our team is done over and over and over again. He created a standard repeatable process and continuously repeated it, allowing time for process adjustments and continuous improvement. Wow, that sounds familiar!
Back to my new position, when the data call when out to our organization five different groups started to collect the data, organize, and format it in five different ways. By the time I got a handle on the request everyone was upset with all the different messages they wanted to turn in their own work and be done with it. My group stepped in and started to apply a process to the data collection, developing a standard repeatable process to the data and worked with the data owners and in less than a day, we took all the scattered data and formatted it in an easy to understand format that was useful to our new director.
Whether it’s football (any age) or business the principles are the same, develop a standard repeatable process, allow for performance adjustments with a component of continuous improvement. It is a formula that works.
