Increasing Your Capacity and Slump Proofing Your Leadership Part 8

After you have prepared, practiced self leadership, and helped raise the levels of those around you, it is time for the execution of your task or assignment. It is then that you must ask "The Confidence Question" in order to continue increasing your capacity and slump proof your leadership. "The Confidence Question" asks "Do I Trust My Preparation?"

Peyton Manning is the most prepared athlete I've ever seen, but he also trusts his preparation more than any athlete I've ever seen.

While reviewing 65 snaps by Peyton Manning , Mike Shanahan made the following observations:

• Austin Collie spent the whole off-season and training camp running a particular play.
• He's probably run it several hundred times.
• Peyton Manning has played the Tennessee Titans multiple times and knows their tendencies.
• Collie knew exactly when to change his route during the play.
• Collie also has a natural feel for the game.
• They ran the play at the right time and scored a touchdown.

These are all signs that Peyton trusts his teammates, his experience, and their extensive preparation. Because of the level of trust he has, Peyton did not hesitate on any throw that Shanahan reviewed.

Trust is the foundation needed for any relational team dynamic to fulfill its purpose. If trust does not exist, leaders and team members will default to becoming self-serving and begin making decisions that benefit themselves only. If trust does exist, you go to another level as a team because of the compounding nature of your preparation.

Trusting your preparation provides the following advantages:

1. It gives you confidence to feel you can accomplish more than you ever have.
2. It allows you to build a high-performance team that accentuates your strengths and compliments your weaknesses.
3. You don't micro-manage which creates greater loyalty and continuity from your teammates. You trust them that they will make good decisions and perform.
4. Though you always make game day adjustments, you trust your gameplan and continually play to your strengths.
5. Your able to make immediate on-going decisions allowing you to avoid costly mistakes, lost time, and missed opportunities.
6. You create a culture of preparation and personal growth in your organization.
7. Because you have proven success, the type of people joining your team are more easily identifiable because you are looking for "system fits".
8. A prepared team allows you to utilize all team members providing you more options as a leader.
9. A prepared team gives you a deeper bench so if a team member is out or leaves, the organization continues to move forward effectively. You can also take time off yourself and know everything is covered.
10. When tough times come, and they always do, you wrap yourself in the warm blanket of preparation and know you've built a sustainable system or organization.

On the other hand, we've all seen leaders who lacked the skills, information, experience, work ethic, or simply not prepared to lead their teams through a task. This results in indecision and bad judgement leading to poor customer service, loss of respect and trust, disunity, constant employee turnover, and in a competitive environment, a shrinking market share or getting beat by the opposing team.

Please join me for my next post when I ask the "The Coaching Question" which asks "Do we evaluate our performance as a team?"