Creating a Championship-Ready Team

If we agree that small business is the lifeblood of the economy, then the success of small businesses everywhere should be our obsession. Creating a team that wins – and wins big – is derived from a combination of things that can be mastered with a little practice.

Championship-Ready Teams Do the Following:

They Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Instead, they’re always improving. To do it, they have clearly articulated policies and procedures for everything, which are accessible to everyone.

They Attract and Retain Top Talent

They are onboarding and training their people with state-of-the-art software but also with old-fashioned personal connections and mentoring. They are binding people not only to a paycheck or job but also to a vision.

They Drill on the Best Plays

And finally, they drill on their best plays over and over again until the team has developed muscle memory. This way, no matter how big they get, no matter how fast they go, they’re not losing team alignment.

What a Championship-Ready Team Looks Like

One of PlaybookBuilder’s customers is Bender Plumbing. They embody much of the vision for a Championship-Ready Team. They are a retail decorative plumbing, tile, and lighting company with several locations up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

Bender’s Integrator™, Mark Chirgwin, wanted a Followed By All Culture (they run on EOS®) and leveraged our platform to help them to do it. With several hundred employees across a spread-out geography, the challenge was considerable. But Mark had a vision, and it was his passion to see it through.

Here’s what they got right and what you can do too.

Capture

You’ll want to document policies, procedures, workflows, and the stories that bind your culture together. Since storytelling is the foundational learning tool for all tribal knowledge, it’s imperative that you capture and archive your team’s stories too.

We suggest a combination of TEXT and VIDEO. The text portion should be your process documented lightly and focused. Meanwhile, the video portion is the “how” and “why” expressed with stories.

At Bender, they encouraged team leaders, warehouse people, sales leaders, and management people to make videos. Even the CEO created a State of the Union Playbook, in which he regularly shares video updates with the team. They captured the HOW and the WHY and continued to do it.

Engage

Of course, the goal isn’t to merely capture. That’s just the beginning. The actual goal, the one with an ROI, is to drive measurable change. The key to your success is engagement. By connecting, measuring, incentivizing, and motivating your people toward engagement with your captured processes and training, you improve fluency and confidence. And you have a system you can test and perfect.

Since this is change management oriented, consider the following simple guidelines:

1. Lead with a clear vision of where you’re headed and how this part is critical
2. Get EVERYONE into whatever software you’re using for process
3. Stop using email and start sharing content through your process platform
4. Measure their use of the content

The Bender team became masters of posting weekly updates, sometimes through email and sometimes via text, from our platform to various teams. They kept their people coming back for training. They recognized that teaching through repetition meant the difference between another failed attempt and success.

Mark says, “Our ability to communicate and collaborate has taken us to a new level.”

REPEAT

Your organization is evolving. As the march of progress continues, each team must change with the world or be left behind. We see Championship-Ready Teams constantly drilling on their top plays – those critical processes that are tied to positive outcomes. But instead of running the old plays over and over with their heads down, smart teams are always improving. They are tireless in their efforts to tease out innovation.

Mark and the team at Bender embraced this. They constantly update and improve procedures to ensure the team is aligned with BEST practices. If someone in one location perfects an approach, it’s captured and shared with the rest of the team. This is the absolute hallmark of a Followed By All Culture.

A Championship-Ready Team is within your reach. The activities and processes are only a challenge if you and your team are looking for silver bullets. But if embraced, the chaos subsides, the scoreboard starts looking better each quarter, and top people will want to join you.

Jon LoDuca is the founder of PlaybookBuilder, a video-based training and onboarding platform for growth-minded teams.