Summary: Lead Any Team to Win: Master the Essential Mindset to Motivate, Set Priorities, and Build Your Own Dynasty by Jason Selk, Tom Bartow and Matthew Rudy

• If you are interested in how to motivate, set priorities and lead any team to optimal achievement, you might want to read this book review of [Lead Any Team to Win: Master the Essential Mindset to Motivate, Set Priorities, and Build Your Own Dynasty by Jason Selk, Tom Bartow and Matthew Rudy].
• To learn more about the book and its insights and recommendations for team leadership, please continue reading the rest of the article. You will find a summary and review of the book, as well as some suggestions for further reading and resources.

Recommendation

Whether you work for a giant corporation or own a company with a dozen workers, you’re part of a team. The question is, can your team achieve its goals? If it’s hitting some roadblocks, authors Dr. Jason Selk and Tom Bartow (writing with journalist Matthew Rudy) can help. Selk is a performance coach for executives and professional athletes. Financial adviser Bartow is a former basketball coach. Together they offer information to help you better understand and manage the personalities on your team. The authors provide (along with great behind-the-scenes sports stories) a reliable nine-part strategy that – with work – will put your team on top.

Take-Aways

• Consistently winning teams share nine specific practices.
• 1. “Heed your channel capacity” – Set limits. Don’t overload your team.
• 2. Manage expectations – If your team tells others what to expect, it must deliver.
• 3. Emphasize self-evaluation – Teams don’t try to improve if they think they’re already perfect.
• 4. Turn “team chemistry into team cohesion” – Align your team members.
• 5. Disagree without being disagreeable – Learn to reach a consensus.
• 6. Maintain a “no-victim” attitude – Instead of feeling victimized, embrace your power.
• 7. Hire the right people – And then help them grow.
• 8. Operate with an “attack mentality” – Maintain a competitive mind-set.
• 9. Keep adapting – Successful teams can adjust to change.
• Resist trying every strategy all at once. Choose one and attack.

Summary

Consistently winning teams share nine specific practices.

You’ve heard it many times: A World Series MVP brags about his winning team, and so does the CEO whose company just had its best year. They all say, “It couldn’t have happened without the great team I have around me.” But how do these organizations routinely recruit, hire and develop the right people with diverse but complementary talents to form a consistently winning team?

“Team members come and go, but the framework and culture of the team stay in place, and they continue to produce championship results.”

The leaders of great teams also must manage big personalities despite their inevitable conflicts, secure high-level performances, and maintain the team’s momentum and quest for improvement even as people come and go. Such leaders consistently follow nine basic practices:

1. “Heed your channel capacity” – Set limits. Don’t overload your team.

Channel capacity is “the limited biological bandwidth of the human brain.” Recognizing your team’s capacity requires asking how much new information it can receive, absorb and transmit over time. Maintaining a reasonable team load includes not trying to change too much too fast. Overload is tempting: you see what you want to achieve, amass data and end up in a constant struggle. That doesn’t work. Instead, teams should focus on their main priority and three “must do” priorities, at any given time. More is never better. People who are saturated aren’t effective.

“Running your mental machinery at more than its capacity can work for short bursts of time, but when you make it a habit, over the long term you have the same issues you would with an engine – things begin to break down.”

To understand channel capacity, think of the pattern of failed New Year resolutions. Every new year, many people unrealistically promise to clean up their diet and hit the gym daily. But, throwing yourself abruptly into a new, severe routine rarely works. Generally, discouraged dieters and gym novices soon go back to their usual habits. They overloaded their channel instead of prioritizing new practices and adding them gradually.

2. Manage expectations – If your team tells others what to expect, it must deliver.

If you give others an over-optimistic message about what to expect from your team, you risk setting unrealistic expectations, having to break your promises and, thereby, endangering your relationships. Team leaders who make projections often feel forced to deliver on time, with no excuses despite unexpected roadblocks. They may set unrealistic expectations because they want buy-in and approval, which they later sacrifice with missed deliverables.

“Managing expectations means you tell people up front exactly what they should expect, and then you deliver what you said you would, and you deliver it on time.”

Leaders generally have positive expectations about deadlines, work to be done and budgets. That goes with the territory, but control it by stating honestly ahead of time what your team can and can’t do, by when and for how much. To build trust and accountability, explain the best and worst potential outcomes. Circumstances change, so think ahead. To keep expectations realistic, consistently repeat yourself about possible pitfalls because “managing expectations is a full-time job.”

3. Emphasize self-evaluation – Teams don’t try to improve if they think they’re already perfect.

Team improvement requires self-evaluation and a major shared effort. To improve, team members must understand what is working and what is not.

“Great teams understand that self-evaluation, when done correctly, is the actual training mechanism for developing mental toughness.”

Self-evaluation creates conviction, which encourages action. Encourage team members to ask themselves specific questions that spur them to think about their efforts and how to get better. Emphasize getting better over being perfect, getting results over managing processes, and positivity over negativity. For continuous self-evaluation, have team members ask themselves three diagnostic questions every day, starting with something positive:

1. What three examples show how I did a good job today?
2. How would I grade myself, one-to-ten, on how I handled my biggest priority and my three subsequent, most crucial tasks today?
3. “What is the single factor I can improve tomorrow?”

4. Turn “team chemistry into team cohesion” – Align your team members.

In sports, you often hear about the great chemistry among a team’s players. But quality teams have a characteristic that counts even more: cohesion, including a shared sense of purpose. In sports or business, the members of the best teams are aligned with one another and in sync with the team’s goals.

“Why do organizations build teams in the first place? Because they’re interested in increasing the performance they could expect if they just relied on each team member to do his or her thing independently. The sum is greater than the individual parts.”

Team cohesion requires clearly understood shared goals – including an overarching long-range goal – as well as group and individual self-confidence. As on a sports team, players have to know their job and execute it well, so the team has no gaps or weaknesses in covering its responsibilities. To help people get into the “flow” of their work, emphasize focusing on their main priority for blocks of uninterrupted time. When a team member does something well, even something small, recognize that achievement to build a culture that values everyone’s contribution. To deepen relationships with your team members – or clients – follow the 2-1-1 formula: give two real compliments, offer a bit of teaching and suggest one positive action the person can take.

5. Disagree without being disagreeable – Learn to reach a consensus.

Being human beings, team members eventually will disagree. They must accept this contingency without becoming disagreeable. To avoid conflict, leaders should respect each person, listen carefully, keep emotions off the table and eliminate sources of disagreement before they get out of hand. Handled well, disagreements can be valuable, since being challenged with new or different viewpoints helps people grow and become more open-minded.

“To build a great team, you need people to think differently, and you need different people to fill different roles. To fully grow, individuals must be challenged with opposing viewpoints.”

To resolve conflicts, disagreeing parties must keep an open mind, maintain respect and trust, and differentiate facts from opinions. They should ask what part of the opposing opinion makes the most sense and, if they can, take the best parts of both views and combine them for a better overall analysis. Once they answer these queries, they may have the basis for a viable solution.

Steps for building trust with others include being endorsed by those who already trust you, contributing reliable value, being honest, respecting their time, keeping your word and being accountable.

6. Maintain a “no-victim” attitude – Instead of feeling victimized, embrace your power.

People who feel victimized blame others, lack accountability and make excuses. They feel that their situation is out of control and works against them. They must be spurred to work on solving their problems.

“In the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are taken away. What alone remains is the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.” (Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning)

Negativity is contagious, so act promptly to defuse victimization. Offer three ideas to help a team member feel more empowered and resilient:

1. Address the victimization mentality – Teach those who feel victimized that they can overcome adversity. To prove they aren’t powerless, help them address issues they can control.
2. “Recognize it” – When negative emotions take over, push back to avoid the victim mentality. Help the person feeling victimized identify one thing, even something small, he or she can do to improve the situation.
3. “Pick one thing to attack” – Figure out a viable solution to the problem at hand and work to implement it.

7. Hire the right people – And then help them grow.

Teams need people with the right talents who fit their requirements and their culture. Without specialized talent, teams can’t achieve their best results. Locating and hiring the right people requires astute recruiting, but don’t neglect following through by developing the talent of those you hire.

“When mentally tough people experience success, they figure out the number one most important reason for the success, and then they attack just a little bit more on that one thing. That is the single biggest difference between people who win occasionally and those who win consistently.”

Hire slowly and carefully. Hiring can be parallel to dating: the more interactions you have, the more you will know about the person. Generally, four interviews in four settings will help you gain a good understanding. Seek people who have learned about your firm and know their own strengths and weaknesses. Provide the resources for new hires to develop and grow.

8. Operate with an “attack mentality” – Maintain a competitive mind-set.

In business, team leaders must be like General George S. Patton, the US infantry commander during World War II. Patton had a single focus: Attack the enemy. As a leader of a competitive business team, you need the same intense mind-set. This attitude directly counters the victim mentality. If it creeps in, shift into the “attack mind-set” by assertively attacking a single goal, even briefly. That puts you in active control, the opposite of being powerless and passive.

“Whatever natural advantages the best of the best have, they bring with them one other critical trait…internal fire, this desire for “winning”—however that is defined for them.”

An attack mind-set requires obsessing over getting better. To achieve this level of improvement, stick to one team function at a time. Improve it and move on to something else. Build your team’s work ethic and perseverance. Inculcate passion by helping people focus on what they enjoy at work, what they excel at and what they expect of themselves.

9. Keep adapting – Successful teams can adjust to change.

Inflexible people with a fixed mind-set find it harder to adapt. You want to be able to change two ways: altering your methods with a “strategic adjustment” and altering your thinking with a “mental adjustment.”

“If you have an important goal to achieve or problem to solve, knowing what steps to take and what mistakes to avoid can give you clarity and make you more likely to succeed — but you still have to pound the nails and put in the sweat.”

Successful teams routinely adjust their goals, plans and activities as required. They always have a Plan B. When you must decide whether to make a change, consider immediate events in your market, shifts among your team members, and the timing of your work, among other factors. Try to take an overall view, measure your progress, and remember quick small fixes can make a big difference if you execute them in time.

Resist trying every strategy all at once. Choose one and attack.

When you decide to apply these nine strategies to your operations, implement only one at a time. Select a single improvement to execute first, and commit to it as part of your team’s routine for at least 30 days. Get it working well before you institute your second improvement. Stay on the attack. Be serious and focused about team upgrades. Meet with your team daily for a few minutes to focus exclusively on the single new improvement you’re implementing. These collaborations can generate significant progress.

“The key to high-level success is to pick one thing to change — yes, just one — and master it. If all you take from this book is a single, concrete change from one of the nine concepts, it’s enough for you to make a true breakthrough to the next level of success — however you define it. Over time, you can build on them, one concept at a time.”

A winning approach to improvement unites Coach John Wooden’s UCLA basketball Bruins of the 1960s and 1970s, today’s New England Patriots and Apple – they each consciously nurture every business factor in their control. Wooden’s Bruins won ten national championships in 12 years. Coach Bill Belichick’s NFL Patriots won five Super Bowls. Players came and went, but both teams stayed on top. Though Apple’s inspirational founder, Steve Jobs, died in 2011, his successor, Tim Cook, has kept the company on top. What do these organizations share? They focus on continual improvement, prepare for contingencies, choose and develop the right people, and pursue clear, realistic goals with focus and purpose.

About the Authors

Jason Selk is a performance coach for Fortune 500 executives and professional athletes in major league sports and NASCAR. Tom Bartow is a financial advisor and former college basketball coach. Golf Digest senior writer Matthew Rudy has authored or co-authored 23 golf, business and travel books.

Genres

leadership, management, business, psychology, sports, self-help, motivation, productivity, performance, teamwork

Review

The book is a guide for leaders who want to motivate, set priorities and lead any team to optimal achievement. The authors, Jason Selk and Tom Bartow, are experts in building, managing and advising teams in both the business and sports worlds. They reveal the common DNA that links the highest performing teams, which is collective mental toughness. They explain how to develop mental toughness in yourself and your team members, through a clear understanding of the goals, limitations, roles and personalities on your team.

They also show how to avoid common pitfalls that can undermine team performance, such as overloading the team with tasks, focusing on the wrong things, and neglecting the expectations and relationships within the team. They offer practical ideas and strategies for implementing their model of team leadership, and they illustrate their points with examples and case studies from various contexts and industries.

The book is a useful and insightful resource for anyone who wants to improve their team leadership skills and results. The authors write with clarity, authority and enthusiasm, and they draw from their extensive experience and research in the field of team performance. They provide a balance of theory and practice, and they present their concepts and methods in a simple and accessible way.

They also challenge the readers to rethink their assumptions and habits, and to adopt a new mindset and approach to team leadership. The book is not only informative, but also inspiring and motivating, as it shows how to lead any team to win, regardless of the circumstances and challenges.